Wargaming alfresco in a pandemic

My family commitments make it difficult for me to game at a club regularly at the moment, but I am lucky enough to have a rather nice garden, which includes this rather substantial gazebo.

So, when my good friend Chris Kirk insisted that we ought to find a way to have a game, despite the current unpleasantness, it did occur to me to wonder whether we could actually fit a 6x4 table in the gazebo and still allow ourselves room to move around without falling into the goldfish pond. A brief survey with the trusty steel rule suggested that there was, and my friends at Amazon.co.uk were able to supply me with a couple of picnic tables of the right size.

Chris, being a mental health nurse like myself, was very happy to consider the alfresco option as being a good way for us to still be able to meet up over the summer of 2020 whilst still maintaining a good degree of social distancing. Although both of us have now retired from our time together in the NHS we have remained active in healthcare - Chris works for a GP surgery as a mental health nurse / counsellor, and I'm well into my second career as a university lecturer in mental health nursing. So we were perhaps more aware than most of the potential hazards of indoor gaming during a pandemic. Outside allowed us to keep apart the required 2m distance, enjoy the outside air (and ambience!), and by only touching our own figures we weren't likely to fall foul of any infection control issues!  We managed to meet a couple of times over the summer, and the arrangements worked well, Chris commenting that our gazebo has a'colonial' air to it, so maybe an element of gentlemanly gaming was what we were able to create.

BACKGROUND

Chris is a much better painter than I am, as you will see form the pictures below, but I have much more experience as a historical gamer - Chris comes from a GW background, and is much more familiar with Warhammer Fantasy Battles - indeed he made me collect Ogres a while ago and then complained because they just stomped over his army in an unsubtle but very Ogre-like manner. You will know WHFB made it to the 8th edition before GW decided to concentrate on 'Age of Sigmar' instead.

We'd agreed, therefore, to play Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB), which I had played a lot of in the past, but that also led to some discussion. I had mostly played the original version, but there was an updated version, with all the amendments that had developed over the years, generally known as WAB 1.5, and also a quite changed version, known as WAB 2.0.

Much as I loved my battered version of WAB 1.0 we agreed to go with WAB 1.5 as the version that is mostly still used by players, regarded by some as 'peak WAB', before the proper second edition changed a lot of rules to match the then version of WHFB (probably v5 or 6). Chris had chosen to paint Numidians, mostly because someone had given him a couple of great Elephants, and then he had to build the rest of the army around that, based on the list in the Hannibal supplement.

This led us to a bit of an anachronism, as my Romans are Foundry Early Imperial Romans, so a bit later than the republican Romans that the Numidians ought to be fighting, but I wasn't about to start a new army, so we agreed to live with that... 1000point armies were used for this first game whilst we got to grips with the rules, in my case remembering, in Chris' case trying not to get confused with WHFB rules which are similar but differ in some key areas!

THE GAME

We did set up with the WAB guidelines, alternate units placed on the table, with smaller armies this was relatively predictable, my legionaries in the centre and auxiliaries to guard the flanks, skirmishers to harry the elephants and anyone else who got too close.

Chris put his elephants pretty centrally, aiming to crush my legions, but had a surprise up his sleeve, as my cursory reading of the Hannibal supplement meant that I had forgotten that Numidians get an ambush move on setup, which meant one of his cavalry units suddenly appeared to my rear.

This meant I had to turn the auxiliary unit on the right flank to contain them, effectively taking both units out of the game as the melee bogged down with no clear advantage and a standing fight throughout the rest of the game.

This did open a gap to the right, which left a unit of archers desperately holding off his other cavalry unit whilst the elephants closed with the legionaries, whilst the auxiliaries on the left flank also tried to fend off the other cavalry unit.

This meant that it was time for the elephants to advance - see what I mean about Chris being a great painter...

For reasons best known to himself (or maybe a failed morale test, I forget!) the elephants advanced singly, and easily saw off my skirmishing archers. The second elephant's arrival turned the tide, with both the engaged legionary units failing to do too much damage to the elephants themselves, although the crews took some casualties, and the legionary morale eventually failing.

This obviously led to a series of failed morale tests, and the Romans desperately retreated to their baseline, to learn the lessons for another day.

Overall, a good game to get started with, and a good refresher on the rles. Still not sure we got everything right - I forgot that having a Centurion in your legionary unit adds 1 to leadership, but I don't think that would have saved them from the rampaging elephants.

We resolved to up our points to 1500 for the next game, of which more later.

Laurence