We haven't done that for ages

The rule set that turned me on to ancients was Art Conliffe's "Armati".  We played it a lot, back in the day, but the last game in SHQ was 5 years ago. After last week's NQM someone asked why we hadn't played it for a while, so I offered to set it up for this week's entertainment.

We were much reduced in numbers. Chris K had to be somewhere else, and Tim was trapped at work. Just the three of usthen, so I faced off against Phil & Steve.

I'd got out my El Cid period armies. I've got the Spanish, on the left, Phil & Steve the Almoravids. Whilst the Spanish have more units the Almoravids have more Divisions. As they have five light divisions (I get three) and have five light units they are set up to cause havoc on the flanks. That's the sort of stuff Phil likes, so I thought it would be fun for him. The set up as you see it is sort of right. When I measured my first move Phil had set up in front of and slightly across his deployment zones. I'd marked them with black dots (see bottom left for one of mine) but he hadn't noticed. So we had to push them back a bit. Which didn't actually work in my favour, as he was now out of range of my crossbows.

I won the initiative, turn one, and headed off to attack the enemy. We'd both offset deployed, luckily to the same end of the table. In addition to the three light divisions I got three heavy (as did they). That wasn't really enough for the type of army I had, so I left my Caballeros Villanos at the back on the left as an uncontrolled division.

Phil was his typical cagey self on my left, but Steve came a bit close with his lights and was forced to evade in the next turn.

On the other end I got in a bit of a tangle with my heavies and my lights. My plan to shoot up Phil's heavy cavalry with my crossbows was misfiring in typical Armati fashion.

Regardless of my inability to shoot off or weaken Phil's overlapping cavalry unit I decided there was nothing for it but to get stuck in. Luckily for me my cavalry were not panicked by the camels.  However, I didn't do well in the combats and Phil's spare cavalry unit would be splitting from its division to attack my flank. Top left I had a couple of light cavalry units facing off against one light cavalry and one light infantry, and I'd taken javelin hits already. As you can see I'd completely misjudged the positioning of my skirmishers and my uncontrolled division who were going to struggle to get involved.

The centre went better. Steve didn't opt for the evade for a second time- I'd nudged him the first time, but felt it was up to Phil after that, and he didn't want to surrender the initiative for the rest of the turn - which meant I destroyed a couple of light cavalry units (which are key units in this period). My cavalry was seriously threatened by his light infantry on the flank, but otherwise it was looking okay. My main aim was to get a 2:1 at the end of the infantry combat line where my troops were slightly better.

My left has gone a bit squishy, to put it mildly. However, the exchange wasn't that bad. I'd lost three key units and Phil a couple more. Alas my memory has gone a bit hazy, and as I was playing the photos are fewer than I'd prefer, but we were now even on four broken units each, but my army Break Point as 6 and theirs was 5. Phil really needed the initiative to determine melee direction, but I'd won it, so we'd be fighting melees where I had an advantage, before the other way round.

So my concerns over that light infantry were unfounded. I went on to kill that end infantry unit of theirs and so won out 6:4.

Typically with Armati if you don't faff about, it's normally all over in about 90 minutes, and this game made it to about 75. Most of the key decisions are in the deployment phase, after that it should mostly run according to plan. It works best with cavalry armies, but I have really fond memories of playing it with my first "2nd generation" soft plastic armies, being Republican Romans and Carthaginians from Hat.

Still a fun game.