The Marshal Petain Gentleman's Club: A Birthday on the Grid

Well it's that time of year again and, whilst it's nice to have a special day, they seem to come around at a depressingly fast rate these days.

Normally, I take a day off work to get in some birthday gaming. Last year we were still in lockdown, so I had to resort to a solo game of Bloody Barons. This year, my birthday fell on a club day, so arranging a game seemed a bit superfluous. I still took the day off and played a solo game though. This year, it was another grid based game and another classic; Lost Battles to be precise.

I set up the Magnesia scenario, from the book, and, as I was playing solo, commenced from turn two, using the historic deployment. I'd played this scenario before, using Lost Battles predecessor Strategos. That game had been a walk over for the Romans but this time around it was far different. It was a tense game and could have gone either way - possibly helped by both sides repeatedly rolling 6 for morale at numerous critical stages.

Initial Deployment

The might of the Seleucids

Rome looking a tad outnumbered

Dahae envelop Roman left flank

The scythed chariots trundle forward, promising so much and delivering so little.

I was so engrossed in the battle that I forgot to take any midgame photos but essentially both centres ground themselves to a halt whilst the action was decided on the flanks. The Roman right flank, consisting of Eumenes and the allies, defeated their opposite number despite being heavily outnumbered. However, the Roman left was surrounded and massacred, prompting a general collapse in morale.

Eumenes successful in the far distance, but the Roman centre is surrounded.

So, all in all, a great game that I'm keen to play again sometime. A nice way to spend the day on ones birthday.

In the evening it was off to the club, for our first go at 'The Age of Penda' - another grid based game. I used my venerable 25mm early Saxons for this. A mix of manufactures, but Minifigs and Irregular featured prominently. There are some distinctly dodgy figure designs in there but they are of their time and older than one of the players! The core of the armies were based for Dux Bellorum but I supplemented these with figures from my Longships collection. Two Longships bases are close enough to one Dux Bellorum base and as it's a grid based game the exact frontage of a unit doesn't really matter.

Before we commenced there was a surprise appearance of family and friends proffering cake and booze. A nice interlude, in which I got to show off my birthday present - seemed appropriate for the game!

Sutton Who - why me of course.

After a slight delay, we got down to the game with 2 Saxon armies facing off on a standard off set grid. It didn't take long for the players to pick things up and a great game was had.

Gridded cloth showing the offset grid.

Despite a late start and demoing a new game, we still had time to play a second game. This time we went large, with four players each commanding a standard sized force. For this we also used a standard 'square' grid and allowed diagonal movement to approximate the original off set system.

A 6 ft by 4ft table gave us a playing area of 6 rows and 8 columns - or 48 'squares'. This is actually quite versatile as we only needed 6 markers to mark out 12 large squares. Each of the larger squares consisted of 4 smaller unmarked squares. It was relatively simple to envisage which square troops were in by imagining the 4 quarters of the larger square.

The virtual grid.

All in all the game was a success and the players were keen to give it another go the following week.

Once again we played 'doubles' on a virtual grid.

This time around, I came up with a simple system to generate armies of differing sizes and abilities.

Hence, we saw the Mercians, under Pidla son of Panda, allied with the high king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. Opposing them were Earwig of Bernicia and Tarmac McAlpin of the Scots.

Bran Mak morn had an average sized army but was heavy on skirmishers, whilst Tarmac also had an average sized army. Earwig had the smallest army but had 5 tactics tokens. Conversely, Pidla had the largest army but only 3 tactics tokens.

We generated the terrain, from the rulebook terrain chart and ended up, fighting across a stream amongst hills, woods and marshes.