Ancient and Medieval Wargaming playtest

Hello again; it's been quite a while between posts...  I recently picked up Neil Thomas' Ancient and Medieval Wargaming off the shelf for something to read while backpacking the boy to sleep, and in so doing reminded myself that I still had it!  I'd played it once before with a few drinking buddies, and once or twice with Luke, but had not revisited it since then so decided to give it a shove.

I did not set up any terrain; just a Polybian Roman force (5 x hastati/principes, 1 x triarii, 1 x velites, 1 x cav) against a bunch of Gauls ( 4 x warriors, 1 x fanatics, 1 x skirmishers, 2 x cav) in the open to see how it would go.

The game lasted four turns, with the Gauls having the better of it on the wings but the Romans cleaning up in the centre.  A&MW seems to be quite a limited game, but was fun nonetheless.  The cavalry combats take a lot longer to resolve relative to the infantry ones, so it's difficult to see there being much scope for envelopments of the Hannibalic variety unless the onset of the infantry clash is delayed.  There is clearly room for tactics, but light infantry are in for a bit of a tough time as they cannot evade (though they can break off after a turn of combat if they are faster than the enemy).  The Gauls need a bit of terrain to give them a fighting chance, so perhaps I'll give it a run through again with some woods on the battlefield.

Anyway, here's a shot of the board at battle's end, with the Roman centre having disposed of its opponents and marched a heavy infantry unit off the board to complete the victory...

Nice to get a wee battle in again after a while...