Whinging for France

Battlelore - Topless.jpg (Photo credit: HiddenJester)

Tuesday games saw a long-awaited return to a Richard Borg-designed card-driven wargame. We played a few games of Memoir '44 a while ago but longed to return to the total absorption that Crabro and I experienced in our Commands and Colors: Ancients period when we played over seventy games of scenarios in the base and expansions.

Crabro acquired a copy of its successor "Battlelore" and expansions a while ago and we have been playing a few other things in the meantime only because we felt that once we started on Battlelore nothing else would get a look in for some time.

A game of BattleLore in progress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, it was with a great deal of excitement that we set up our first Battlelore scenario this morning: Agincourt. There's a name to set English pulses racing anyway. On St Crispin's Day (as Shakespeare's Harry reminds us) 1415, the flower of French chivalry were mowed down by a far smaller bunch of English plebs with state of the art weaponry. There were probably over 35,000 of the French and only about 6,000 English but in those days a stout arm drawing a mighty English yew longbow could do incredible damage in the right circumstances.

The board and miniatures that we were using looked very attractive but you would have to have quite a lot of imagination to see it as thousands of men. Nevertheless the balance of cards and types of unit had been carefully chosen to reflect the nature of the battle.

The first play saw me as Harry's stout English soldiery against Crabro's French nobility. From the outset I tried to use the range of my bowmen to whittle down his medium and heavy foot-soldiers and cavalry but the cards didn't always favour this. In fact, I was sorely in need of a little touch of Harry and the game reached a point where it looked as though it was a foregone conclusion that the French had carried the field. I tried a desperate attack thinking it would be my last throw. It failed but Crabro's luck had run out and he no longer had the cards to inflict heavy damage on my desperately weak right flank. I was eventually surprised to find myself the winner albeit by the smallest possible margin of four banners to three.

GenCon 2008 - Richard Borg (Photo credit: Will Merydith)

After lunch our second Agincourt, with me as the French this time, played out much more like the real thing. It was at least satisfying in that respect but was otherwise a bit frustrating. In the first game the cards favouring the archers had only appeared at the end of the game but this time "Darken the Sky" came out early and just as history foretells the French slowly slogged forward into a rain of arrows and the game was almost over before it started. I did manage to get a couple of units across the killing field and inflict enough damage to gain a consolation banner, an error of judgement in picking targest robbing me of a second. Crabro's gallant English bowman had done their work well though and the scenario came out as French-humiliating four banners to one.

It was marvellous fun to get back into this Borg style of wargame, especially as the board, cards and miniatures look so good. I'm practically jumping up and down in anticipation of a lot more Battlelore...and we haven't even got into the lore and fantasy side of the game yet.

That was a hard act to follow but we finished the afternoon with three games of Cribbage. Both of us have a history of enjoying traditional card games behind us and are always happy to play such games. Crabro won the first, I won the second and the decider went to Crabro by a mere two points making this another satisfying battle.

Hard to imagine two more happy boys with their toys...