Hoplite - the Portable Pelepponnesian Wars

 The ever fertile mega brain of Mark Cordone has come up with a design for the entire Pelepponnesian Wars in a box. The entire rules and copies of his hand drawn maps are on the Portable Wargames Facebook Group.

The whole thing is pretty compact, campaign map, battle map and eight elements for each side plus some dice etc.

The campaign map is a simple point-point movement map including Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc plus offtable boxes for Sicily and Ionia. Each side has three armies and a fleet to start with. The Spartans are grey and the Athenians brown (these are spare Command and Colours blocks). I made this out of blue card with the land masses cut from light green card on top. 

The battle area is a 3x3 grid. It is so small that I just used a spare bit of tan coloured felt, and didn't bother marking the corners, it is obvious where units are. Each side has a force pool of five hoplites, two peltasts and a cavalry unit, but for each battle the forces are semi randomly detemined and comprise six elements.

The Athenians are at the top and the Spartans at the bottomw.

Each contingent is a mix of allied types, but the Spartans do have some proper Spartan figures too (you can just see their lambdas) . These are mainly my 20mm plastic Ancients, although the Athenian hoplites are some metal figures I acquired from Tim.

Move one (each turn is 2 years). Plague breaks out in Corinth and the Spartans die horribly. The Athenians take advantage of the disaster to sail an army from Delos to occupy Corinth, while Chalkis attacks Thebes and the Athenian army moves over the sea to Chalkis.

The Battle of Chalkis! Both sides roll up identical forces, 4 x hoplites and 2 x peltasts each. I don't really know what the optimum deployment is, so we'll just line them up. The Spartans split their peltasts but the Athenians concentrate theirs on their left.

Things don't go too well for Sparta. The massed Athenian peltasts wipe out the Spartan right wing! One hit kills in these simple battle rules, and the Athenians rolled a 5 and a 6. Ouch. 

The Spartans however kill off two Athenian hoplites in the melee, and sidestep one unit to fill the gap. One unit in each square fights, but the presence of the other gives a +1 support bonus. Combats are resolved by opposed dice, modified by unit type - rather like a simple form of DBA.

The Spartans are in fact incredibly lucky and destroy most of the Athenian army, however at the end of the Athenian turn one plucky surviving hoplite has made it to the Spartan baseline, so the Spartans lose. Victory is either by routing all the enemy units are having a unit on the enemy baseline at the end of the turn.

The following turn, the Spartan Army sallies forth to retake Corinth from the Delosians.

The Battle of Corinth is a bit more asymmetrical. Both sides have some cavalry and the Spartans have two peltasts to the Athenians one.

This time the Spartans rush forwards. It is very hard to attack at an advantage early on as in melee the hoplite units take precendence, but once the front starts to break up, you can get advantageous matchups.

The Spartans managed to smash open the Athenian centre.

But fail to hold the breakthrough open and their army is completely annihilated!

Things aren't looking too good for Spartan with all armies eliminated, however they get lucky and roll a 6 on the strategic initiative dice, which allows them to rebuild an army. Naturally they place one in Sparta.

The Delosians follow up their earlier success and attack Sparta.

After a few turns of pounding the Spartans are down to three hoplites.

Then there was just one, bravely advancing on the right...

But Athens prevails.

And Sparta falls!

Well that was all over very quickly. It turns out that you are only supposed to move ONE army at a time in the strategic movement phase, not all of them, which explains why it all went a bit too fast.

The combat was a bit brutal too, with losing units immediately removed. Mark suggested some simple additions to make it more like the 3x3 Ancients with 2 steps per unit and some simple battlefield terrain to introduce some tactical nuance to the battles. So having done it once, I've a better idea how it is supposed to work and I'll give it another go.

I set up again the next day - this time I've marked the corners of the grid with stones.

One of the early battles, this one featured a river and ford, which certainly added something from a tactical pov. I'd found the (very) evenly matched battles in the previous iteration just to be a bit of a dice fest. The units cane take two hits as well, so the battles take a bit longer and there are more decisions on how to rotate units etc.

This one has a hill, but as I don't have a hill small enough, I used a field piece instead. 

At this point, there still seemed to be too much going on in each strategic turn and the battles were actually taking much longer to play than just twice as long. More decisions to make perhaps? Mark C responded to a couple of my queries and I packed up at that point as I've got a much better idea of how it is all supposed to work now. I'll give it another in the light of my new understanding.