Battle of Maldon, no COW and bad backs

In a shock development I'm posting this outside my normal two month backlog. Regular readers will be wondering where my Conference of Wargamers (COW) report is, but sadly I couldn't go this year as I injured my back the week before I was due to attend and I'm unable to travel at the moment.

 In fact I've not been able to do much gaming, painting, running, gardening or anything at all for a few weeks as I have a trapped nerve and struggle to sit down and spent a fair bit of time in a drug induced haze. It is all very tedious, particularly wrangling with the insurance company about a holiday cancellation, which is a real Alice in Wonderland experience. Various sessions of spine crunching are slowly improving things, but it is a way to go yet. 

So, it was a nice to have the opportunity to actually play something. 

One of our standby games is "The Battle of Maldon", and after the post COW chat and quiz session the previous week, we didn't have anything lined up, so Battle of Maldon it was.

I think Battle of Maldon is a postcard game? I'm not sure, but the map, rules and counters fit on two sides (as above). John has converted it into electronic format on PowerPoint so we can play remotely. 

I'm pretty sure I've covered this before, but the game is a representation of the battle which took place in 991 as described in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. English on the left, Danes on the right, with a river and inevitable bridge in between. 

The Danes win if they take Maldon (top left), the English if they capture the Danish king. I'm deliberately calling our guys English as this battle took place after Aethelread had finally unified England after th Battle of Brunaburgh. 

I recently read an interesting analysis of the Anglo Saxons Chronicles account of the battle in terms of themes of loyalty, cowardice, bravery, treachery etc but can't for the life of me remember where. A Folk History of Great Britain perhaps? I'm not sure. A shame as it was a very interesting analysis of the Anglo Saxon world view. 

There were only three of us to play at first, so Tim and  took the Brits and Jim the Danes. Tom arrived later. 

I very cleverly forgot to take a picture of our setup. The forces are somewhat asymmetrical, and represented by lovely Noggin the Nog styl drawings. Both sides have infantry (move 1, combat value 1) three English and four Danes respectively. The Danes also have two Berserker infantry CV2 delightfully shown biting their shields, while the English have to cavalry (move 2, CV 1). Both sides also have a +1 leader who can stack. 

The river is passable but at a significant combat penalty. 

The Danes massed their Berserkers to rush the bridge, flanked by regular infantry. I had a dim memory of great success in a previous game slipping the cavalry around a flank, so we put our I fantry opposite the bridge, and the cavalry on the extreme left flank. 

Sadly we had rather miscalculated and the Danes got to the bridge before we did, while our cavalry was a bit tardy advancing  which gave time for the Danes to defend the river line. 

You can only make two actions a turn and we vacillated and managed to cock it up monumentally. The battle for the bridge did no go well for our outclassed infantry. 

We did manage to get our cavalry over the river, but the slaughter continued in the fields southeast of Maldon as the Berserkers pressed on. 

The cavalry flank attack failed. 

And it was all over soon after that. A thumping Danish victory, and thoroughly deserved. Jim had a sound planand stuck with it, while we were all over the place. Well done Jim. 

Tom had joined us by now, so he joined  Jim and we swapped sides. 

Tim and I just replicated the Danish setup from before. The cunning British however put all their infantry around Maldon and massed their cavalry to rush the bridge!

Tbis worked swimmigly well for them, and by the time our rather arrogant Berserkers straggled up to the river, they were faced with conducting an opposed river assault against poor odds. How did we manage to cock it up again? 

Fortune favours the lucky however, and against the odds we beat one of the British cavalry. 

And then the other one. We were really lucky to get away with that. The English leader rode north to join the infantry who were fanning out from Maldon. Somehow we lost an Infantry unit along the way, I cant recall how. 

The British made a desperate counterattack against the isolated Danish  Spearhead in the hopes of capturing the Danish leader. Now their best chance of winning. 

It was a low odds attack though, and instead it was the English leader who perished. With him perished the English hopes and we called it at that point. 

We were very lucky to win that, but once we were over the river, there wasn't much to stop us. 

I really enjoyed that, it was great to actually play something again after a few weeks of forced inactivity, a real morale booster, even if I did keep having to change position, stand up, kneel on the floor etc. It is also a clever and thought provoking game as the limited number of units and activations means you need to have a very clear idea of what you are planning to achieve. Something Jim did and we didn't. 

Many thanks to my regular gaming pals for being so supportive over the last few weeks of my relatively minor, but quite painful, ailment. It does make a big difference. Thanks. 

Normal posting backlog will be resumed shortly and hopefully I'll be up to running a game myself in a few weeks.