Wargaming as Therapy

I have on a number of occasions had cause to visit a friend or two in hospital following serious illness. I have made a point of taking my foldable DBA board and a couple of armies with me, as you can play the game on a hospital bed table with little inconvenience, and nothing cheers up a wargamer more than wargaming, in my experience.

I extended the principal of DBA as a form of therapy this week. My brother Richard has been a bit down recently, following the unexpected death of his wife late last year. When you've spent 30 years with someone, regardless of how many other friends you have, I think life can suddenly become very lonely. I've been up to see him a few of times, but only for half a day. This week I took a couple of days to go and help him with some sorting out of odds and ends. That first step of donating a loved one's things to a charity shop, for example, can be a bit daunting, what with making the "Am I going to keep this?" sort of decision. After all of that sort of thing there was time to clear some space and sit down with the DBA board and a pair of armies.

I'd meant to take a whole load of my recent stuff, but in the end I left a box at home and took my South East Asian armies and the Hussites/Germans. I took a couple of QRS' with me, but luckily he had a rule book too, although he remarked that he hadn't played them for ages, and possibly never played DBA 3.0 at all.

You'll be pleased to hear sibling rivalry did kick in, and I decided to show him no mercy.

Given a completely free choice of all the armies he took the Burmese, so I went for the Khmer.

This is after the first turn. Richard was defending, and unsurprisingly was a little unsure of what to do.

The green templates are woods, so I went for a heavy right wing, using my psiloi to pass quickly through them in order to get me some overlaps. Don't forget that third elephant on the end of my infantry line is actually a Bolt Shooter (Art).

This has worked out quite well. I shot an elephant with my Bolt Shooter, and killed a couple of infantry bases, so I was 3:0 up at this point. Annoyingly I had failed to kill the element in front of my General with the white umbrella, getting a draw result. 

Richard then turned his elephant General in to the flank of my left hand beast. I killed the element in front of my General, but lost the elephant v elephant combat. The fleeing elephant therefore killed my general...

...making it a 4:3 win to me. Phew. That was close.

Undaunted, we reset and had another go. I think I defended this time.

With the woods appearing in opposite corners it meant we'd have to do some wheeling to get at each other. 

We managed to get to grips with each other in the centre of the table. I'd sent my cavalry and Fast Auxilia off to worry his rear. Otherwise in the centre Richard had let his line break up, so I was able to get an overlap on his right hand elephant facing my general.

It all fell apart quite quickly for him. The overlap did the trick on the elephant, I shot another one and my Solid Auxilia killed the archers they were facing. 4:0 win to me.

Having had enough of all of this, we switched to Hussites & Medieval Germans. Again I gave Richard first pick, and he took the Hussites ("I think I have a Hussite Army upstairs").

I was attacking again, and I have to say that I wasn't sure what to do. He took the "houfnice" (Art), and split his blades as flank guards.

I took the dangerous decision to divide into two groups, and try to encircle the line to takeout the blades, and hopefully the gun. I realised this could have a serious PIP cost, as I was also using Hordes.

I put my left hand Knights in a column to give me greater flexibility in the first move.

First turn, I've sent the Psiloi out wide, to create a gap for the knights.

Inexplicably Richard moved his Light Horse into the centre of the table.

This enabled me to pounce on them with my Hordes. If that's a thing Hordes do.

It's funny how these things work out. My knights on the left succeeded in killing both the blades they faced, whilst on the right my Knight General on better odds got doubled and killed. My crossbows lost the archery duel with the War Wagons, and his general killed one of my Pikes. My regular knights killed another Blade units, so we ended up a 4:4 draw.

All in all an odd little game. If the Light Horse hadn't sacrificed themselves in the centre I'd have been on the end of a 3:4 defeat.

Anyway, Richard said it was the most fun he'd had in ages, so another win for DBA therapy.