Musings on my wargaming experiences, normally along the lines of blah, blah, blah, and then I rolled a 1…
Ink some WW2 Russian Zis-3 artillery and staff for Wednesday night’s game of Flames of War against Graham.
Paint up the last of the Old Glory 15mm Gothic archers to give me all 16 Irr Bw(I) for an Ostrogothic or Later Visigothic army.
Assemble the rest of the Conquest plastic Norman 28mm knights for a Norman Saga warband.
As promised, a photo of the ridge for Chalons, taken on some 3′ x 2′ boards for scale. As you can see, it will stretch past the centre line of the table and dominate the northern half of the battlefield. Controlling it will, I think, be critical to the flow of the battle.
There will be a total of nine commanders involved in the battle, divided between the two sides.
The Romans and their allies:
The Huns and their subjects:
It seems strange to refer to this as the battle of Chalons now, since we are re-fighting it on a battlefield outside Troyes, but this is the more detailed view of the battlefield that we will be fighting on, i.e. the chunk of it that fits on a 8′ x 4′ wargaming table, which (by my calculations) comes to around 4 km by 2 km.
As can be seen, the main feature is the ridge on the north side. The next post will show what this is currently looking like.
Tried two more games of Saga while on holiday up in Wales (my second and third) and really enjoying it as a skirmish game that really fits with its period. Bit worried about the forthcoming Byzantine list and also the heroes of the Viking age – would Athelstan have really trolled around with a 40 strong army? And certainly you shouldn’t be trying to model an Imperial Byzantine army with it. But it looks and feels right as a European Dark Age skirmish game for a period where many of the battles were just skirmishes. Hopefully they extend it bsck to the Volksvanderung era and Arthur, because it would fit that perfectly.
Anyway, I decided that trying to use normal dice as Saga dice wss adding another level of confusion to my overloaded brain, so I made some myself with the symbols from the Saga forum and some blank dice from blankdice.co.uk. 32 Saga dice for about a tenner in total. And they don’t look too bad?
