Roundway Down chez Andrew Brentnall

Yesterday I travelled to the deepest wilds of Suffolk for a chat and game with FK&P stealth co-author Andrew Brentnall. He has a lovely dedicated gaming area and set up Roundway Down in a corner of it. I volunteered to play Sir William Waller's Parliamentarians at the top of the hill, and Andrew led Wilmot's plucky, outnumbered (but well-hard) Royalists at the bottom. All the minis are 10/12mm from his collection, and we used Andrew's variant of the scenario for the deployment, as opposed to my variant which has the Parliamentarian horse a little further forward. The unit cards were designed by chum Ian Notter. 

Here's a shot early in the game. Wilmot's own command piled into Heselrig and the other two commands are inclining towards the Parliamentarian left.

Above, brave Sir Arthur led his London Lobsters into one of Wilmot's units. I played a nine for the first activation, attempted a general's replay to get a lower chit and pulled a ten! Don't you just hate it when that happens? Still, I got to watch Andrew's jaw drop as I pulled two further tens to activate it twice more (3 tens in a row, the odds of that are rather to the north of 100 to 1, as there are only 8 in the bag), and managed to ride down a unit of cavalier horse before being slaughtered by a flurry of flank attacks. Those are some of the new yellow and white activation chits, by the way, very classy.

Here's the situation late in the game- the roundheads had closed on the left of my line, which I had held back so that I could support it with my foot. In the ensuing melees the leftmost "Dutch" unit broke through the Royalist line, and pursued the survivors down the hill, pursued in turn by Crawford's two units of reserve Royalist cavalry. Luckily for me my Dutch outran their Royalist pursuers, because I only had three medals left! But Andrew, by this stage, only had two himself.

And here was the last decisive melee. Requiring two medals to win, I managed to activate this disordered and exhausted unit of horse no fewer than four times. On the final activation I hit and the cavaliers failed their final save, giving me the last two medals that I needed.  It was a very narrow victory, indeed!

It was a great day out and a great delight to see Andrew again. Glorious weather, to boot. We had a sensible chat about the Thirty Years War in general and Lutzen in particular, and I feel a new scenario is coming along.