Rediscovering 'Lost Battles'

At the moment we're having a bit of an 'ancients' resurgence at the club. After our jousting diversion I offered to put on an ancients game and dug out my 'Lost Battles' set up.

This has long been my favourite set of ancients rules but has languished unused for several years now. Not that there is anything wrong with them, it's just that nowadays we're spoiled for choice and there are just so many great game systems out there. That said, it was great to reconnect with an old favourite. As none of the players has played LB before (and one was a complete ancients newbie) I put on 4 historical battles straight from the book, designed to gradually introduce new concepts until all players were reasonably confident with the rules. It must be said that, in my experience, 'Lost Battles' is a 'Marmite' set of rules in that players either love or hate them. Luckily our new players took to the system straight away and I was encouraged enough to suggest a campaign.

I say campaign but it's actually more of a tournament but .......shh.......we don't use the 't' word.
The campaign rules are very simple and are designed to produce a number of battles with random terrain and everyone plays everyone else once, in a sort of league set up. All armies are about the same fighting value (ca. FV 66) with average troops and sprinkling of veterans. I provided six armies for the campaign, namely; Rome, Carthage, Macedon, Syracuse, Gallia and Numidia. We drew cards with the highest card getting first choice of army and working down to the lowest card. Once armies were chosen, players keep the same army for the whole campaign.

Each round there is a bit of a pregame that involves everyone being dealt 3 cards (inspired by the Blood and Plunder pirate rules). Cards are ranked as follows:

The first step each round is to generate 3 battlefields. These are  not only taken from the 'Lost Battles' rule book but also it's predecessors, 'Strategos' and 'Strategos II'. There are 36 possible battlefields but each battlefield can only be used once.

Possible battlefields - shaded battlefields are on a plain

Players then play a card from their hand and choose one of that round's three battlefields, in initiative order.
Similarly, the second card decides who gets the choice of deployment table edge and the third card determines who gets choice of deploying first or second.
Finally, each tabletop encounter checks for weather.

As all armies are about the same fighting value, the handicap system is not used. The winner is the side that holds the battlefield at the end. Battles are all 10 rounds and the attack limit is set at 4 for all battles.

This week we fought round 3 with the following match ups:

Rome vs Macedon (Bibracte)
Syracuse vs Gallia (Crimisus)
Carthage vs Numidia (Leuctra)

Macedonians advance over the stream whilst Romans struggle to deploy

Gauls struggle to cross the River Crimisus

Carthage begins to deploy

Numidians swarm across the plain

So with two rounds yet to play, the scores look like this: