Towton - a Billhooks extravaganza

Back last Autumn I'd posted several reports of the Wars of the Roses games that we'd been playing through, hosted by Eric the Shed.

Last year our idea for a WotR campaign had morphed into a plan to play through each major battles in turn using the excellent Never Mind the Billhooks rules.  There's lots of background info on Eric's blog and my posts can be found here and here

As with so many things, Covid put the games on hold but now we're allowed to get back together so we've resumed the sequence.   We picked up where we'd left off with the Battle of Wakefield: there are posts about it on Eric's blog here and here.

Our next game is a bit out of sequence however: we always knew that Towton was going to be too big to play out in an evening so we had to find time for an all-day extravaganza.  This battle let all 5 of the regular players combine our figures, bringing over 1500 miniatures onto the 15' long table for a 6 hour marathon (with a brief pause for pizza!)

I'll leave it to Eric to post all the details of the refight on his blog in due course... it only seems fair since he did all the work in bringing it all together and hosting the game.  I won't provide spoilers for the result but I can say that it really went down to the wire with the battle being decided on what was effectively the last throw of the dice.  We used Never Mind the Billhooks with a few house rules including a mechanism for determining wind speed and direction and snowfall.  The wind at Towton played a significant factor in affecting the effectiveness of each sides arrow-fire and this proved the case in our game with the Lancastrians being severely hampered by firing into a strong wind.  The heavy snow also affected the arrow fire but also limited the effectiveness of commanders who struggled to be seen in the wintry conditions.

I'll post a link to Eric's blog post when it eventually gets published but in the meantime here are a selection of photos from the Lancastrian side of the table..