An Irregular Wargaming Blog

Still smarting from my defeat at the hands of the sneaky Numidians in game one of our alfresco adventure we met a couple of weeks later, this time increasing our forces to 1500pts. Time for the Romans to seek revenge. Increasing the points put us up to a more typical WAB type list, the first game, at 1000 points had been designed to get us back into the rules, so was deliberately restrictive as it didn't allow us too much variety, and therefore we could concentrate on the core rules. So technically I could have had the Scorpio bolt throwers and some cavalry in the 1000pt list, but I was definitely having them in this enlarged force. If anything is calculated to scare Elephants it is bolt throwers, because there's no save once they're hit! To make up the army I also added some auxiliary cavalry and another unit of archers. Chris added in more cavalry and warband units to his Numidians and we were good to go. Slightly more open terrain on my 6x4 table to allow for a bit more ...

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...