A fine afternoon's gaming.

I enjoyed another fine afternoon of wargaming today with a game of 6mm Hail Caesar chased down by a great playtest of the 2nd edition of Irregular Wars: Conflict at the World's End.

In the first game I took an overwhelmingly superior Seleukid army (superior in both numbers and, for the most part, quality) against some Hellenistic Spartans. The Spartans were tasked with defending a fordable river while my boys were required to force a crossing.

We were playing on a very narrow front so my numbers were somewhat obsolete. In the shot above you can see Conor's Spartans moving up to defend the river. 

He made a bit of a gaff by sending his lighter thureophoroi to take control of the hill and left some of his heavy ex-helot and Periokoi pike units to hold the wood on his right.

I pushed a light division of infantry towards the  wood and some light cavalry towards  my extreme right, to head around the hill.

Sending my light infantry across the river to secure a beachhead in the woods, and my light cavalry across the river on the far right, I hit the thureophoroi with my trio of scythed chariot goodness. Their pointy wrath was enough to weaken the Spartan's mercenaries before I sent my heavy cavalry across the extinguish their pitiful existence.

With the Spartan left wing completely destroyed the Seleukid cavalry surged down on the Spartan centre. In a desperate and misguided dash, the Spartan centre tried to take the offensive and plunged into the river - going into open order to try to get across.

As the light infantry held on doggedly in the woods, the open order Spartan phalangites in the river proved to be easy pickings for the Seleukid heavy horse and the battle was more or less over. The river could have proved a real obstacle to my lads, but in the end it caused the destruction of the Spartan centre. 

The second game, playtesting Irregular Wars (2nd ed.) saw Conor take the Colonial Spanish against my Miskito Indians. As Conor hadn't played the game before, I was at a distinct advantage and I suspect that my narrow victory might have been much narrower had he been more familiar with the rules.

Without giving too much away - hence the sneaky shot through the palm grove - the new phase sequence  of shot, 'action' and melee certainly streamlined the game. The revised version of the core mechanics are working well and shooting now has the potential to be much nastier and the lord has more decision to make regarding his own role during the action phase. Companies outside of the lord's command radius are still troublesome but much less likely to go running off like bad 90s computer game AI. 

My thank's to Conor and his gracious acceptance of a double defeat.