War of the Roses Game Report

Sometimes, you just need to get all the figures out of the box and give them a bit of exercise. That was my motivation for the War of the Roses game with Cpt Arjun yesterday. He'd just taken delivery of a whole bunch of figures, and I hadn't played with mine for a while, so we had a quick battle.

The picture above shows the initial set up. I had the defending army, at the bottom of the picture - larger than Arjun's by a ratio of 6 to 5, but with a command penalty of minus 1 (playing Warmaster Ancient's rules, of course).


I opened the game with a move on my right flank, pushing 4 units of bow and 4 of billmen in echelon, with the intention of turning his flank, as well as protecting myself from a similar action on my right. Arjun deployed his right and centre to face the approaching troops.

The middle phase of the battle consisted of jostling back and forth on the right and centre. Both Arjun and I failed to bring our reserves fully into the battle, but it was worse for me as mine had further to go to reach the fight.

At this point, Arjun sprang an ambush with one unit of cavalry on the right, which proceeded to roll up all the bowmen and billmen on that flank. Faced with impending collapse on that flank, I managed to push 3 units of bill, and the retinue, forward into the centre, to try and end the game quickly. In the final turn, I was 1 unit from breakpoint, and he was 2, and the final combats in the centre ended with my army breaking first. All in all, a fun game, and an interesting one with good maneuver as well