Table Battles - Bosworth

 Tim put on a game using an interesting card game called 'Table Battles' which lets you recreate biggish engagements ranging from Ancients right up to late nineteenth century.

To my mind the rules have something of a heritage of Waterloo 1815 in that the forces are represented by cards, which then describe what the units can and can't do. These include not only the obvious 'attack' type options,  but also things like screening, bombardment etc. There are restrictions on which cards can attack other cards, and unit skill and resilience is modelled by varying the number of hits they can take and the loss ratio they inflict in combat.

Here is the Yorkist battle line for Bosworth. The number in the top right corner is how many hits they can take. The key thing is the number in the squiggly line. This is what dice scores can be used to activate the cards. C3 is modelled by the players throwing half a dozen dice and allocated them to a card based on the scores. In Richards case. Norfolk can take 5s and 6s, Richard himself can only take 5s and Northumberland can only take 4s.  So if you throw a bunch of 1s and 2s, you are stuck.

What is nice is that you can build dice up on a card, so e.g. Norfolk could build up a pile of e.g. 6 dice over a few turns. This would allow him to make a much stronger attack (inflicting one hit per dice, but only suffering one hit overall) at the cost of time.

In this scenario, Northumberland is in reserve, and can only be activated by Richard who needs to build up a whopping five dice to carry out that action.  Richards strategic choice is then essentially to try and fight with the cards he has got at a force disadvantage, or play a longer game and hope he can hang on until Northumberland activates. He only needs to rout one Lancastrian unit to win.

The Tudor army is a real contrast. Oxford  is similar to Norfolk, able to use 5 or 6, ad attacks in a similar manner - losing one hit and inflicting one per dice used. With a strength of eight though, Oxford is a tough nut to crack, and he has to be attacked first by Richards Army. Richmond can use 3 or 4 dice, and has the huge advantage that he can inflict one hit for no loss in combat, even though he only has two strength points. Essentially he is launching short, sharp attacks screened by Oxford, which can chip away at Norfolk and Richard. As he can use 3s and 4s, the Lancastrian Army will also have an advantage in C3 rolls over Richard. The Stanleys, like Northumberland, are lurking in reserve and need to be activated by Richmond.

The Lancastrian strategy is far more straight forward, attack Norfolk as soon as possible. If Norfolk is routed, the Lancastrians gain a morale chip and only need to rout Richard to win (Richards morale is two, the Lancastrians only one).

We ran this game twice over two successive nights and it went really well, although both were Lancastrian victories. Tim even managed to arrange things so multiple players took part (despite each side only having three cards!). Bosworth is just an introductory scenario, and the series includes cards to cover some pretty big historical battles, including e.g. Gettysburg. For the larger battles the armies are divided into wings, with the dice allocated across the wings. It is an interesting take on warfare up until the end of the nineteenth century, and well worth a look.

The boardgame geek entry is here: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230650/table-battles if you want some more info, video reviews etc.

Board Game Geek entry https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230650/table-battles