Portland Little Wars: Marston Moor (or less)

Monday, March 26, 2018

Marston Moor (or less)

On Saturday, Saint Patrick's Day, we got together to play a mega game of Pikeman's Lament. The scenario was Marston Moor, with all of my and Gabe's ECW collections (which is over 325 figures and about 44 units on the table). The Parliamentarian and Scottish Covenanter allies had a few more units but included a few Raw units, while the Royalist forces were slightly outnumbered butt had more Elite units.

The Allies were deployed on a ridge or immediate at the base of it, representing the slightly higher ground they had in the historical battle. The Royalists were deployed behind a hedge, representing the ditch present at the historical scene. The goal of my setting up this game was not just to have a mega game, putting all available figures on a table, and to eat pickled eggs and drink beer with good company, but also to test the limits of the Pikeman's Lament ruleset, a game whose stated purpose to be a skirmish ruleset with perhaps 4 to 6 units per side. As written elsewhere, I am planning to run and Italian Wars scenario at Enfilade in May for up to six players, and since I am still painting all the necessary units, I figured I could experiment now using ECW collections.

All I'll really say about the game is that while he Allies carried the day, while the Royalist left did succeed in routing the Allied right, during which Prince Rupert and Oliver Cromwell engaged in personal combat (Rupert won)! But the Royalist offense ran out of horses and men, and their center and right were fairly depleted while the rest of the Allied line had not sustained many losses at all.

Game play was a fast three hours, and with six players instead of five it probably would have gone even faster, we think. For my Italian Wars game (or any other Pikeman's Lament convention game), I would drop all officer special attributes as players kept forgetting to use them, and I would drop the "special things happen on a snake-eyes or box-cars roll of the dice", but otherwise I think the rules can be run as is and learned quite quickly by the players on the spot (we had two players who were familiar with, but had never played the other Rampant titles).

Anyway, on to the good part: the photos of over 300 figures!

Unless otherwise noted, pics are by me.