First Try of Baroque and DBA Sumerians

At the club meet last week Michael B ran an introduction to 'Baroque', Dadi&Piombo's rule set for Renaissance wargaming. He supplied two ~600 point English Civil War armies and walked me through the rules.

I have never played their more popular 'Impetus' ruleset, but it was all pretty easy to pick up.

The game flowed pretty well considering it was an introductory game. While I probably will play a few more games to see if this will suit me for Renaissance wargaming, it felt right - with all situations and combat ending as it probably should. There was a little more influence of chance, but that could be down to poor tactical choices on my part. Rolling of combat dice felt sensible, usually between 3 and 10 D6.

Photos of the game are below, with three main phases - Michael's cavalry army destroying mine, my right flank destroying Michael's understrength left flank and then Michael winning the race to destroy enough units in the centre of the table before I did the same. Having cavalry helped in achieving this. A close fought game.

After the game I booked in a full ~800 point game with Michael next month. The rules can be found here:

http://www.dadiepiombo.it/english-baroque.html

My three afternoon games took me back a few thousand years with some newly painted Sumerians. 

Damian P has organised another DBA campaign for the year, with this year's theme being GTA: Biblical. I had picked up some of Eureka Miniatures' lovely Alan March-sculpted 15mm Sumerians (based off the 28mm range) last year, so I elected to field a Great Sumerian Revolt army (I/1c). 

I had managed (even with work recently being pretty busy) to paint the minimum to field the army, with 1 x HCh (gen), 1 x LCh, 6 x Pk, and 4 x Ps. I still have the other half to paint (much needed Bw and Hd elements), so some more detailed photos will hopefully follow next month.

Both Damian with his Mitanni (I/19) and Lyle (two games) with his Middle-Assyrians (I/25) had way more light chariots than I was able to deal with effectively. Definitely need those two elements of bow! Needless to say I lost all three games, but was happy to field a newly painted army.

Finally, while going through my 15mm Renaissance miniature boxes when I got home, I found these poor lost Dark Age archers, that were left behind one League meet last year. If they're yours, let me know.

Looking forward to more Renaissance wargaming and more effective Sumerians next month.

Cup Eve DBA Tournament

Every year the Monday Knights host a DBA tournament. It's a lot of fun and gives people an opportunity to paint and field ancient and medieval armies relatively easily. Version 2.2 was my introduction to the period 10+ years ago (where I had only played Games Workshop games and Flames of War up until then).

I love the game for its simplicity (but not the simplicity of the language the rules are written in!), and the ability to field interesting armies from history. The open book tournament used version 3 of the rules, including normal terrain set up. I decided to field IV/12e Maori as I painted them 3-4 years ago and never fielded them in a game.

The miniatures are from Battleline Miniatures in New Zealand. The sculpts are okay, needed a lot of cleaning up, but there's next to no choice out there, but I'm happy enough with them (as I'm slowly collecting Pacific armies or ones that adjoin it).

Anyway, onto the games. In the first game my 12 Blade army faced Ed with an army of Elephants (Burmese or Tamil I think). Was a nightmare. Lost 10-2.

Game two was against  Django and his Ptolemaic (II/20c) army with a little bit of everything. Struggled to take down the pike in difficult terrain, but managed to survive longer than I should have in the open against Knights, lost 9-3 (there's a pattern forming).

Game three saw me face  Steve and Italian Condotta (IV/61). I thought a littoral landing would be cool and I hadn't done one in years. Cool doesn't win you battle kids (particularly if your opponent does it better than you), lost 8-4 (I lost 5 elements, mostly to the Knights).

Fourth and finally game saw me face off against Gareth and New-Kingdom Egyptian (I/22a). At this stage I was regretting my poor choice of army in an open tournament; no mounted and no bad going troop types, lost 11-1 I think.

All in all was good to finally play version 3 after not playing DBA for a few years. I plan to play at Cancon in January next year - so time to paint and play with something with more flexibility. Tibetans maybe, or Malays. Not sure yet.