Other people's wargames - an Ilipa scenario for Spartans and Successors

[Thanks to Nick Hurbud who took Spartans and Successors to the Society of Ancients battle day when the featured battle was Ilipa, which isn't in the original scenarios. Nick's kindly sent me his write up, and allowed me to reproduce it here]

Romans & Rivals - Using Spartans & Successors for Ilipa 206 BC

As you might guess from the name, Spartans & Successors might not be the most appropriate ruleset to wargame battles of the Punic Wars.  Nevertheless, encouraged by a willing opponent, Richard Lockwood, and some discussions with the author, Graham Evans, I set about adapting the rules for Scipio’s battle at Ilipa, which was the subject of the 2024 Society of Ancients Battle Day.  

First, a summary of the key concepts relevant to constructing a Punic Wars scenario.  Spartans & Successors games are always played on grid that is 10 squares wide and 7 squares deep.  Most battles utilise 12 units per side, giving it a similar scale and degree of abstraction to DBA, Strength & Honour, and similar rulesets.  However, unlike some other rules, the numbers of units can be varied to suit the particular scenario.  At Ilipa, there were something like 50,000 Romans and up to 70,000 Carthaginians present.  Therefore, we should expect the Carthaginians to have a couple more units than the Romans.  Each unit in the scenario will be equivalent to approximately 5,000 men.  That is, a Roman legionary unit represents a complete legion.

There are no dice.  Each player has a deck of ordinary playing cards from which they deal a hand of 13 cards that are then used for all actions within the game.  Typically, a player places 1 or 2 cards against each unit that is required to move or engage in combat. There are a limited number of circumstances where a third card may be added to a combat, whilst attacking a unit in flank causes it to lose a card. 

Of course, for Ilipa there is no suitable army list available in the Spartans & Successors list of scenarios. However, from the descriptions of the battle, it is possible to identify the following troop types.

• Roman legionaries.

• African spearmen, the solid core of the Carthaginian army.

• Spanish infantry forming large allied contingents on both sides.

• Roman, Carthaginian and allied cavalry contingents.

• Carthaginian elephants.

• Velites and other light skirmishing types on both sides.

Roman legionaries do not exist in Spartans & Successors and it is necessary to consider how they should behave.  A fairly obvious starting point is the Heavy Infantry Hoplite (HIH) class.  However, legionaries differed from hoplites in a number of ways including:

• A volley of pila that disrupts an opponent at first contact.

• A more flexible tactical doctrine than the hoplite phalanx.

• In-line replacement of the front rank with fresh troops from the rear.

We decided against introducing special rules for the effects of pila or other heavy throwing weapons as anything that benefited the legionaries would also need to be applied to the Spanish.  This could result in such troops becoming unbeatable, which they definitely were not. Similarly, I decided against any special rules for manipular tactical flexibility as this could be more simply achieved by classifying them as Medium Infantry, which would again make them identical to Spanish.  Therefore, our Heavy Infantry Legionaries (HIL) units would be distinguished by a rule tweak reflecting the legion’s ability to outlast its opponents by bringing fresh troops into a combat.  The mechanism we settled on was to allow the Roman player to replace one of a legion’s combat cards with another from his hand.

African spearmen are armed and trained pretty much the same as Greek hoplites and formed up in close order.  Therefore, we saw no reason to change the standard HIH troop type. 

Spanish allies were utilised by both sides.  They wore little, if any armour and fought in a looser formation than the Africans or legionaries.  Therefore, we classified them as Medium Infantry (MI).  However, both sides regarded them as unreliable.  It therefore seemed appropriate to downgrade them to Poor, which means that they lose any drawn combats.  

Elephants (EL) and all the Light Infantry (LI) types are all identical to the earlier troop classes defined in Spartans & Successors.  However, to reflect the disruptive effect that routing elephants had on their own infantry, we added a rule that any Spanish directly behind a destroyed Elephant unit will also be destroyed. 

Only around 3,000 cavalry were present on each side at Ilipa.  They were a mixture of javelin-armed loose order types and lighter Numidian cavalry.  There were no hard-charging horsemen present.  So overall, the most appropriate classification appeared to be Medium Cavalry (MC).

Fortunately, the battlefield is a largely featureless plain sitting between the opposing camps.  The initial deployment taken from historical accounts is shown below.

Finally, to reflect Scipio’s control of the battle’s pace, we started the scenario with the Romans automatically possessing Initiative.  In Spartans & Successors, Initiative has a very important part to play.  First, if your side has Initiative, it receives a bonus move for all its units.  Normally all moves require at least one card to be allocated to a unit.  The Initiative bonus move does have some limitations, such as you cannot contact an enemy. 

In addition, the player with Initiative decides who becomes the 1^st Player, which is important.  You must place cards from your hand against units in order to move and fight with them.  The 1^st Player starts by placing one card from his hand against his chosen units, followed by his opponent who does the same with his cards.  Then the 1^st Player (followed by his opponent) may add a second card to any unit for which a card has placed already.  Thus the 2^nd Player tends to be forced to react to the 1^st Player’s actions – units in combat without any cards tend to die quickly. 

Possessing Initiative really gives an opportunity to control the battle’s direction and, as might be expected, acquiring it costs.  At the start of every turn, each player bids for Initiative by using a card from his hand.  The higher card wins the bid and is discarded, whereas the loser returns the card to his hand. 

That is the entire scenario setup.  Before I describe how things went on Battle Day, I will just outline some of the key rule mechanisms relating to movement, combat resolution and victory.  As noted above, the whole game is driven by the 13 cards that a player has in a hand dealt from a dedicated deck.  The effects of different cards can be quite subtle.  For example, Heavy Infantry require red cards to move or turn, whereas Medium Infantry need black ones and can get a free change of face.  In resolving combats, it is generally the side with the highest value of cards that wins.  However, court cards can have a decisive effect on combats, causing losers to be destroyed rather than simply pushed back.  Whilst many combats are decided by simply totalling the face values of cards, in some of them, the value of the higher (or lower) card is scored twice.  Extra cards may be allocated to a unit following up a previous successful combat or if the General is accompanying it.  Conversely, attacks in flank or rear can cause cards to be discarded.

Victory is determined by one of three mechanisms.  Once a side has lost six units, its owner turns over the card on the top of his deck – if the face value is less than the number of units lost, his army breaks.  Death of a General involves a similar test, but the army breaks if the card’s value is greater than the number of his units left on the table.  Finally, if a player has no more cards left (having cycled through his deck twice) his army is deemed to be exhausted and immediately quits the field.

So how did this all work out on Battle Day?

Game 1 – The experienced players

For the first game Richard Lockwood took on Scipio whilst I played Hasdrubal.  There is a wise old wargaming saying that goes something along the lines of “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, whereas those who do will find all sorts of new ones to commit.”  Historically, Scipio hammered forward with columns of legionaries on both flanks.  His idea was to flatten the opposing Spanish to his front, whilst using his rear units to threaten the flanks of any Carthaginians trying to do the same thing against his own Spanish who he left safely in the rear.  However, Richard decided that the best plan would be to advance his Spanish, whilst redeploying his legions side by side, this manoeuvre taking him 2 turns during which I seized the Initiative and advanced boldly on his centre. 

In the meantime, all the cavalry got stuck in and the velites squared off against the elephants on the battle’s flanks.  These combats assumed an importance out of all proportion to the units involved, with prodigious expenditure of court cards on both sides until, with one elephant and some Roman cavalry destroyed, more important matters intervened.

Now, putting everyone into a single line and charging them simultaneously works well in many games, such as DBA.  However, in Spartans & Successors what tends to happen is you run out of cards and have nothing left in your hand to swing decisive combats.  Richard discovered this in a combat when one of his legions went up against Hasdrubal’s unit of Africans whilst some sneaky Spanish charged them in the flank, leaving Hasdrubal with a single card for the forthcoming combat.  Due to all the other combats around the board, Richard could only allocate a single card to his legion, but hoped that in combination with a card from his supporting Spanish it would be more than enough to kill Hasdrubal and finish the battle.  At this point, I added the general’s card from my hand to the combat and it was a joker, the highest card in the game.  This blew away the legion, tipping Scipio’s losses to more than 6 units and precipitating his defeat.

1-0 to the Carthaginians.  Scipio probably never becomes Africanus.

Game 2 – The novices

After lunch, a couple of Spartans & Successors novices, Adrian and Tim, took the controls, being handicapped by friendly advice from Richard and myself.  Adrian, as Scipio, once again decided that the legions’ deployment should be side by side and spent his cards on demonstrating just how long it can take a highly disciplined Roman legion to manoeuvre around the battlefield. 

In the meantime, Tim grabbed the Initiative and piled forwards, destroying the Roman left-wing cavalry and velites, whilst giving the Roman allies a good thumping.  Just when it seemed that all was lost for Scipio, Fortuna intervened.  Hasdrubal’s African bodyguard destroyed their opponents, but it was discovered by turn of card that the great man had perished in his moment of glory.  As news spread of his demise, Tim tested the morale of his surviving 10 units.  Unfortunately, he came up with a jack, counting as 11.  Omnes discedunt.

Scipio dashes off a report of his triumph to the Senate and goes on to be known as Africanus.

Finally

So, can you use Spartans & Successors for Punic Wars scenarios?  Certainly, it worked for this battle, which was very balanced.  It demonstrated the importance of keeping hold of the Initiative, as well as retaining cards in hand for those really important combats.  As experienced players, Richard and I found the scenario challenging.  Indeed, passers-by commented upon the pained looks of concentration on our faces.  Our novice players thought it an enjoyable game whilst being relatively easy to pick up the rules.

The special rules for legionaries were never seriously tested during either game due to the Roman player having no cards left in his hand.  I need to find more frugal Roman players.

The routing elephant rules encouraged the Carthaginian player to advance his elephants forward into the velites, whilst leaving the Spanish on the baseline. Thus, they indirectly proved to be something of a hindrance to their own side.

I encourage everyone to try these rules, devise their own scenarios and make any reasonable rule adjustments to bring out the character of the troops or the battle.

[ End note: This is all very gratifying for me as the designer. I like S&S as a design, but it doesn't work well for our normal multi-player evenings, so it is good to see Nick making the running with it for the SoA battleday. I'm pleased to read that the decision making gave the players pause for thought.  It was never intended to be a game system where you could just push the figures around and hope for the best. "Romans and Rivals" as a publication is on the list of projects, and the solution Nick used for legionaries works for me, and I will probably run with it when the time comes. ]