Roman in the Gloamin'

(Apologies for the terrible pun in the title... I blame Tradgardland)

 So, after much snipping and gluing, my Romans and Ancient Britons finally faced off for an inaugural game of Strength and Honour this week.

The squares on the mat looked ok (as long as you didn't look too closely) and we decided to go for the full effect and stick to paper terrain as well.  To be fair we didn't get far enough in to reach a conclusion so this is very much my initial impressions.

The game is designed for 2mm figures although it can be stretched to larger ones without difficulty, and we were using 10mm giants.  It took us a while as, despite careful pre-reading of the rules and watching a playthrough in YouTube, there was still a bit of flicking back and forth to check things.  I think we'd be a lot quicker next time round.

Once we'd sorted the terrain (generally open... partly because I'd forgotten to bring hills) with a village and a wood being the only features) we began deploying.  This is the first interesting feature of the game.  Units have to deploy adjacent to the most recently placed unit (imagine them all gradually marching on from a long column) and manoeuvring isn't easy in S&H so getting your deployment right is tricky but important.  You can place units elsewhere on the table but at the cost of a valuable Strategy Point.

Each player has a number of points to use to aid Combat, Defence, Movement etc...these let you re-roll dice, remove bad stuff etc.  As you'd expect the Romans have more of these than the Britons.  Roman troops are also significantly better quality but the Britons get a lot more points to play with.

This was more of an issue for the Romans than the Britons (who get rear support while Romans don't) so Anthony had to spend a lot of time trying to reorganise his lines once we started.  I actually quite like this... I've always felt Ancient games shouldn't allow too much fancy manoeuvring and shuffling about as the command and control wasn't sophisticated enough to allow this.

The battle opened with the Roman cavalry charging at the flying column of British Light Cavalry and Chariots on my right flank (I'd used a point to reposition them off to one side in the hope that might be able to turn a flank).  It quickly became obvious that my Light Cavalry was very outclassed by the superior Roman horse but they managed to hold on for a turn which allowed me to bring up supporting units and even the odds.  This tussle went on for the rest of the game.

The British flying column of cavalry and chariots

In the centre the Roman Auxilia unit had advanced bravely and looked like a sitting duck for my Warbands but I failed a Manoeuvre roll and play passed back to Romans (failing certain tests for movement etc or a bad combat result is classed as a Reversal of Fortune and play switches).  This meant the Roman Legions could march up in the centre, with some difficult manoeuvres, and support them. A series of clashes in the centre then saw a Warband pushed back but the Auxilia forced to turn away and Retire.

When bad stuff like this happens the loser takes a Setback or a Disaster card without looking at them...each card has a value ranging from 0-3 for setbacks and up to 7 for Disasters.  The opposing player can challenge and ask for the values to be counted which, if it has reached a high enough score, can lead to the army becoming fatigued or routing.  Of course if you challenge and the score isn't high enough then the challenger has to take their own card so timing this is important 

So we'd both taken a number of cards... Anthony, being a wily Roman, had used some of his points to cancel these.  Even so, the game was finely balanced... and then we ran out of time...

We'd been quite slow to get going, faffing about with the terrain placement and working our way through how deployment works, so it wasn't surprising that we wouldn't reach a conclusion  So what's the verdict...?

Based on this I liked the rules.  Plusses for me were the importance of deployment and manoeuvring, the hidden Setback cards and the back and forth of combat.  The Minuses were, I think, mainly down to us being slow and having to check the rules a lot.  The rules do have a decent index though which is always a good thing (and is often missing from rules).  Combat was less bloody than I expected (again this may also be a good thing) and it felt like it was going to take us a long time to get to a resolution but I think this may have been my fault in being too ambitious for a first game and having too much on the table.  It's always tempting to get all the toys out when fewer would have been better for a first attempt.  Next time we'll cut it down a bit and see how it goes.

 Overall though a big thumbs up (or summitatibus manuum) for the rules.  The paper armies looked the part too... en masse and in this scale they look really effective.