First Game of Archon 2

It was over to Tim's again to try out another of the Piquet stable. Archon covers the period up to 500 AD and requires the Piquet master rules to play.  Our battle pitted Ancient Britons against Early Imperial romans.  Crudely the Britons had the advantage of numbers and the Romans the advantage of armour.


Peter ran the Ancient Britons.  Like myself he is happy to live with the frustrations and lack of control inherent in Piquet rules to enjoy the ebb and flow of battle that the system is so good in portraying.  This being our first game we both pretty much lined them up and set tem off against each other.  Peter had a very mixed bag of luck.  He won the vast majority of the activation rolls enabling him to do more things.  However when it came to combat his rolling was absolutely abysmal.


The first combat illustrated the above very well.  My army included two light war engines and I pulled the 'move war engines card' early on.  Realising that I might not get a chance to move them again for some time I advanced them in march formation ahead of the army.  The Britons were a long way away and I expected to be able to move up infantry in support before two long.  Peter, utilising multiple activations, was able to quickly move up a unit of light cavalry to take out one of the engines.  The light cavalry is not particularly powerful in melee but were still throwing a D12 against my D4.  However Peter managed to throw a 1 against my 3.  Initially we moved the cavalry away in rout but after a bit of head scratching and reading of the rules we realised that the war engine could not defeat the cavalry, it just had not lost.  The cavalry were reinstated into contact and awaited a later opportunity to draw a melee card and have another card.  However before that could happen Peter drew a 'courage' card which obliged him to do a test on his units in contact with the enemy.  Another roll of a 1 and the cavalry failed and this time routed away for good!


The game proceeded in similar vein and despite the Britons having some success on one flank with chariots the Romans were able to grind out a typical Roman style victory.


I did a fair bit of rebasing work on my Celts as we are looking to run a 2nd Punic War campaign that will use them.  It was fun working on figures that were among the first I ever purchased with some of them being 40+ years old and still going strong.  Thanks to Tim for hosting and Peter for remaining a great opponent evenin the face of such appalling luck

Games 10

 Rules played 10 New 7
Places played 3 New 0