To the strife of mail-clad warriors *

Monthly Saga group game night saw the Lombards deployed for fourth time and getting their first win.  The opponent was Adam's Carolingians, which was interesting to see how that faction/board played in person, as opposed to trying to parse it from the text. Adam fielded four points hearthguard (as 6-6-4 units), a warrior bow unit, and a javelin levy unit.  I took 1.5 hearthguards, 2.5 points warriors (as 10-10 units), 1 point levy bow, and 1 point Bulgar mercenaries.  I'm not quite sure how to use the Bulgars, yet.  Their 'Retreat' is pretty great and it totally bailed them out when they were charged by the 4-figure Carolingian HG unit towards the end of the game. But the two 10-figure mounted warrior units were able to destroy both 6-figure Carolingian HG units by using variations of combinations of Attack / Immunity / Cuneus / Gratia while "only" losing 4 and 5 figures respectively.  Bulgar rangey-ness maybe makes them most useful as a distraction to the opponent and as potential exploiter of advantageous situations, such as mopping up already weak units.  Anyway, here's all the pics...

Initial set-up, Carolingians on left, Lombards on right.

Lombard warriors in two units of 10.

Lombard initial set-up, Bulgar mercenaries on left flank.

Carolingian initial set-up. Two hearthguard units of 6-figure each at upper left.

Bulgar mercenaries get to throw dice in anger for first time, taking out some Carolingian javelin levy.

Bulgars vs. Carolingian levy.

Carolingian javelins extract heavy payback, however...

Lombard warriors complete routing of both Carolingian 6-figure hearthguard units.

Carolingians.

Casualty situation by bottom of turn 5.

I probably dang near lost the game by letting my 6-figure hearthguard get whittled down to 3 figures by bow and javelin attacks, and then the Bulgars losing half of their unit to javelins and then getting wiped out by the Carolingian hearthguard at the end of the game. But the hearthguard were probably too tempting a target and probably diverted a lot of actions away from responding to the Lombard warriors on the other side of table who were doing so well.

*Y Gododin. LIX.