One of the benefits of being retired is a bit more time for gaming, and now I've given up Airsoft, I've been trying to get to some more gaming events. I was a member of the Society of Ancients for some years, but I let my membership lapse as I just didn't have time to read The Slingshot, which is a pretty dense monthly publication.
A few people I knew from Wargames Developments planned to attend the SoA conference (a different beast to the SoA Battle Day) and I was intrigued and decided to give it a go. This is much more like the Conference of Wargamers, a full residential weekend with a mixture of games and talks.
The venue is Madingly Hall, the University of Cambridge Continuing Education Centre on the outskirts of Cambridge. A rather grand Jacobean (?) building in grounds designed by Capability Brown.
It really is rather grand! There was a University do on when I arrived, so it was quite busy.
The Dons eventually packed up and we largely had the place to ourselves. The conference rooms we used were centered around the main lecture/talk space on the first floor. There were 45 attendees, but only 40 were there on Friday night.
Unlike COW, the SoA conference has a number of plenary talks/lectures throughout the weekend, interspersed with breakout gaming sessions. We kicked off with a talk on 3D Printing, particularly the different material types and their health and safety implications for home use. It isn't something I'd particularly considered doing, but now I'm even less inclined, although with the correct precautions it is safe enough.
After that there some After Dinner Games (ADGs).
Although I'd seen Graham Evans' Edgcote game at Partisan I hadn't actually played this iteration, so I gave it a go.
We were the goodies, the bad guys under Robin of Redesdale were over the valley. They very unfairly sent some archers into the valley to pepper our camp with arrows. We didn't have any archers of our own...
But we did have horses, so mounted up some Men-at-Arms and went galloping off into the valley to drive them off.
This prompted the rebels to order a general advance and much unpleasant hacking and a shoving took place in the valley. Hits/disorder were recorded with these rather nice 'Dance of Death' skeletons on sabot bases behind the units.
The rebels retired to a hedgerow along a stream, which disadvantaged us, and even worse, rebel reinforcements were now arriving on the hill.
Before they could get organised, we had one more big push and managed to capture Robin in the melee. Combined with their earlier losses, this put the rebels to flight. Hurrah! In the real battle the rebels won, but this was still a pretty close run thing.
The conference proper started on Saturday morning. COW style sign up sheets were used for the games for the first time this year, and they attracted the inevitable crowd of would be players. The game slots at SoAC are quite generous at three hours (or more) each, interspersed with lectures.
Graham kicked off with a morning lecture on Warwicks rebellion in 1469/70 and covered the battle of Empingham/Losecoat. Very interesting it was too, particularly as it featured everyones favourite White Queen, Elizabeth Woodville.
After that I spent some time watching the Battle of Nemea (394 BC) hosted by Richard Speedman using some Hoplite specific modifications to the commercial Strength and Honour rules.
It featured massed 2mm armies, a mixture of Irregular and Antonine figures, plus some very clever deep phalanxes made with strips of figures at the edge and filled in with modelling putty. It is a grid based game, as evidenced by the corner dots.
I was mainly interested in what Richard thought the specific characteristics of Hoplites were, as I'm still hacking around the One Hour Ancients rules and I was after some ideas to differentiate them from other Heavy Infantry types.
The battle did eventually develop into a classic 'rotating door' Hoplite battle with the Spartans pushing bravely forwards on the enemy right, but the Thebans kept fluffing their movement rolls so the Athenian right was rather more sluggish.
There were some interesting ideas in the rules, but overall the mechanisms seemed far too fiddly with a lot of moving parts and despite the low unit count, they didn't produce the sort of game experience I need for a fast and small remote game. I did however glean plenty of information about modelling Hoplites for wargaming in general from Richards very helpful Slingshot article which was available alongside the game.
The other set of rules I wanted to see played as 'To the Strongest'. I've got a copy and I've read them but I've struggled to see how to make an actual game out of it as it seems very oriented to points based games, and I have a real aversion to Army Lists etc. However it does have grids, and grids are good.
Anyway, this was a To the Strongest adaptation for trireme naval warfare, specifically Salamis, which was an entertaining game to watch and gave me a reasonable idea of how it all worked, although obviously it was using ships not soldiers.
There was also a big Hail Caeser game on, which I watched for a bit, but I'm rather off ruler/geometry type massed army rules for various reasons. It was interesting that many of the games presented featured commerial rules, and generally of the 6x4 table and lots of wall-wall figures variety. Neither game was for people who don't like clutter on the tabletop.
After lunch Matthew Bennett gave a very interesting talk on the historiography of the Battle of Maldon (991AD), which is also this years Society Battle Day theme. Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos as it was very engrossing, many apologies Matthew.
After that I headed off for another naval game. I've become more interested in the naval aspects of Ancient warfare recently.
This was a home penned set called Aegaeon by Kim Salkeld. Trireme warfare on a square grid with rather nice reversible squadron markers showing lines on one side and columns on the other.
This was a fictional Persians vs Greeks encounter, and although I'd only intended to watch I got roped in to play. Each squadron had a detailed record card which showed the number of ships, how many marines they carried and an overall rating for 'agility' based on crew skill, hull type etc. Naturally I ended up with two of the worst squadrons, but that is fine.
This had a CRT based on the relative posture and formation of each participant, as well as obvious tactical factors, ship numbers etc. It also had simultaneous movement, implemented by issuing order chits. I like that, it reminded me of the old SPI naval games which used move plots, and meant there were some genuine decisions to make and attempts to second guess the enemy, as opposed to relying on activation points or whatever.
That was a lot of fun and had some really smart ideas. The various markers and things weren't very obtrusive and the squadron record cards worked really well - they are a bit like the old Seastrike cards with various things to tick off. It occurred to me that the squadron ship numbers are just strength points, and bore an uncanny resemblance to the SPs used in John As naval adaptation of One Hour Wargames.
Later on I popped along to watch 'Watling Street AD61' - Boudiccas revolt played using the standard version of To the Strongest. Like Salamis, it was a useful guide to how the game is actually played, and interestingly in this one the various markers etc were very unobtrusive indeed. With each unit needing to activate every time it wanted to do anything, card draws to fight, save etc, there seemed to be an awful lot of moving parts, but I gather these are quite a popular set. I can re-read my copy with more informed insight.
There was also this huge 'Gangs of Rome' game, a sort of skirmish RPG, with lovely terrain and lots of skulduggery going on.
The evening keynote talk was given by John B, this time covering the Decline of the Roman Republic, what brought him to wargame it and how. It also include various interesting, and unclassified, anecdotes from his time 'at the rougher end' of the Foreign Office. Great stuff. This was followed by the Society Convention Dinner, for which many people made quite an effort dressing up. There were more ADGs, but I'd had enough by then.
Sunday dawned bright and sunny, and thankfully the clocks had gone back so an extra hour in bed and still time for breakfast and good walk around the grounds.
We kicked off at 0845 with Ian Pipers presentation on Masinissa, King of Numidia. Lots of fascinating stuff about the Numidians and a potted history of Masinissas involvement in varioius of the Punic Wars (he lived to the ripe age of 90!). The inevitable questions arose about if the Numidians were such great cavalry, why are they (usually) so rubbish in wargames - generally being modelled as a bunch of raggedy light horsemen. I have a few thoughts on that.
After that it was off to play John Bs 'Wolves in the Forum', a political/military game covering the jostling for position between the the Senate, the Caesarians and various neutrals/hangers on in the year after Caesers assassination (43BC). The map was a modern tourist map overlaid with Roman cities and the principal routes between them. Each turn is a month and included diplomacy, raising and manouvering military forces, and action in the Senate.
This was a big multi-player game. I think there were at least a dozen participants with room for more. I was cast as Octavian, so nothing the live up to there then!
The general situation was that Mark Anthony and Octavian had had a falling out, Marcus had run north to claim the governership of Cisalpine Gaul and was besieging the Senate appointed governer (Decimus) who was also one of Caesers assassins, the rest having left for Greece. Octavian had been granted Imperium by the Senate to sort out the situation and was leading several Legions north while the Consuls raised more in Rome. Mark Anthony had also run off with my inheritance (Caesers fortune), and I was quite keen to get that back. Lots of other people were floating around with various aims of their own.
Two things greatly enlivened proceedings, one was that each turns initiative was determined by the faction which gave the best speech praising Rome and the Gods and damning their enemies, and the other was the goings on the Senate. Various players had blocks of tame Senators for voting, and we also had various 'scandal' cards which could influence votes one way or another. The Consuls did themselves no favours at all blocking perfectly legitimate motions. Ahem. It was very funny, very atmospheric and the scandals were all based on real incidents, although 'having an overly ornate fish pond' seems quite tame by modern standards.
We started in January 43BC and by April 43BC things were going rather well for the Caesarian faction judging by the size of the very tall stack of Legions under Octavian parked outside Rome. Mark Anthony, Octavian and Lepidus had come to a joint understanding, I had my fortune back, Decimus was in chains awaiting trial for the murder of Caeser and Cicero was en route to exile in Sicily. The Consuls apparently still thought they had some say in things, but their stack of Legions was rather smaller than ours. We'd also managed the entire thing without any fighting, just a lot of manouvering, posturing and discussion! An excellent game, and I look forward to playing more.
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