Saturday Night Book Of War

The last few Saturday nights, the girlfriend and I have stayed in and played Book of War (the lightweight mass-combat game I've been tooling on for some time that statistically recreates D&D results at 1:10 scale). Here's a quick recap of the most recent game.

Setup -- We play on a smallish 3x3 foot table, so a 200-point game works well for us (think: about 2,000 gp per side as per standard D&D men-at-arms costs), which works out to around 20-30 figures per side (or about one medieval battalion). On my side I've got infantry in chain, regular archers, and heavy cavalry (blue color); the opposition has several units of horse archers and pikes (red color). You can see the random terrain that we generated for this game (notably, she placed a hill near the center that would be advantageous for her horse archers; I responded by trying to block her approach with a bunch of heavy terrain I was rolling). You can also see our cat, Yowly, who generally sits on the "neutral party" ottoman and watches the proceedings:



Turn 2 -- Actually 1.5 turns in, at this point my girlfriend (acting first) has had 2 turns of movement, and managed to get her light forces all the way across the stream, and also up the hill in the center. With only one turn myself, my heavier forces are bogged down, only halfway across the stream, and I've got fairly cruddy options at this point. I really don't want to take my heavy cavalry into the middle, surrounded by archers & pikes, but I can't turn around & get out of the stream in one move.



Turn 4 -- At this point my heavy cavalry have fought their way back out of the river, taking casualties from archers & taking a rear attack from the pikes. My archers drove off the pikes, but were themselves then routed by the hill-top horse archers (note "routed" arrow markers on fleeing units). Look closely and you'll see how my medium infantry have moved under cover of the woods to the edge of the hill, while her second pike unit is coming up through the marsh.



Turn 6 -- My demise. My girlfriend's horse archers came off the hill, and managed to rout the rest of my heavy cavalry off the table. Her pikes ascended the hill and took a brave assault by my medium infantry, but kept morale even after having the whole hill showered by their horse-archer allies; note her 1 figure of pikes left and my infantry routing back through the woods.



Turn 7 -- The End. My already-broken infantry are surrounded in the woods by the fast-moving horses and eliminated on the next attack.



So in this case, my girlfriend beat me. (Which -- ahem -- doesn't usually happen.) Total playing time including army selection & setup was 1 hour, 40 minutes. I think this is also the first time in a few weeks where there wasn't a rules debate that caused me to edit something afterward, so that's probably a good sign for the shape things are in.