Oathmark

Because it is miniatures neutral, and has an early Dark Ages vibe, I decided to give the Oathmark fantasy battle rules a try.  This way, I can get my late Roman era Goths, Franks, and Saxons, as well as Romano-British stuff, on the table a little more often, and meet other players who may not be historically-oriented.  So I set a game up with Nellie (who I met through Saga club, so there you go), against their LOTR Elves.

My Gothic infantry in their starting position.

Oathmark uses d10s and a I-activate-a-unit-you-activate-a-unit system, which seems to be emerging as the new trending thing in games design. You make an activation roll for that unit, but you roll two dice and only need one to beat the target number. You frequently get a third die because a commander is nearby. If the activation is successful you get two actions for that unit (so move-and-turn, or shoot-and-move, or cast-a-spell-and-move). If you fail the activation, you still get one action, usually with limitations. 

Gothic infantry advances across the open ground.

As you can guess, fail-an-activation-but-still-get-to-do-something-just-not-as-good keeps the game moving at decent clip. In our game, I tried sending my cavalry on a flank march around wooded areas, while my infantry came up the center to keep the Elves occupied. Elves are good archers and quickly started picking off 3 figures here and 3 figures there. Gothic archers didn't shoot as well and I kept putting my wizard in the wrong place so he could not be as effective as he could be (you need line of sight to cast spells - most of which give boosts or minuses to units).

Gothic infantry, led by a champion, closes in on Elvish infantry.

After picking off a lot of Gothic infantry with archery, the Goths were able to pull off a flank attack that seemed very underwhelming at first, until it triggered a chain reaction of pushbacks amongst three separate Elvish units, which gave the flank attack a nice chaotic result.

Goth infantry making flank attack.

Then, finally, the Gothic cavalry landed its punch on some Elvish archers, and showed why they cost twice as much as infantry, almost completely destroying an Elvish archer unit in one combat.

Gothic cavalry.

Unfortunately for me, by this time the Goth infantry was fairing quite poorly, so it was too little, too late for the Gothic cavalry.

Disordered Gothic infantry.

The champion-led Goth infantry broke, the infantry with a captain was quickly reduced. The cavalry became disordered and was then decimated by archery.

"Run away! Run away!"

So, a convincing Elvish win, and I can not blame the dice, which is always a plus. I probably could have been more crafty, letting my cavalry get into better position on the flank before advancing the infantry, and tried to time both closing into melee at about the same time, whereas instead I basically split my forces and allowed Nellie to beat each in turn. I also ran my infantry units on the big side: 18-19 figures each, which is fine for infantry but archers can probably be in smaller 10 (or even less) figure units, as the most dice a unit can ever generate for shooting or melee is 5 (which is the troops in the front rank).  Nellie's elves were in smaller archer units, which gave them more shooting attacks/options in a round, versus my single shot by an oversized unit.

Will play again, and look forward to hopefully a quicker game as the learning curve diminishes.