A tale of three Henrys.

One time MNG member, the other Richard L, ran a game this weekend to try his Wars of the Roses rules out for a slightly earlier period. Back when we played his "Ward Commander" rules a lot he talked about how far they might stretch, and so we tried them for a refight of Shrewsbury in 1403.

We had six players: Chris, Tim, Steve and me from the MNG, plus Andy and Neil from the Market Harborough club. The first three played the Royalists, the latter the Percy rebels. I got the Earl of Worcester on the rebel right wing, facing off against the future Henry V.

We were sat on a hill and waited for them to attack us.

They duly obliged. The figures were Neil's professionally painted collection. Neil is newish to wargaming and admitted that when he started he was unaware that there was any figure size other than 28mm. As they advanced we shot at them. They periodically paused or moved slower to shoot back. Since we last played the rules Richard has tightened up the game management. The little tray of dice at the back represents the fighting strength of the various components of your battle. The blue dice records how many volleys you've shot. The face down brown square is an order chit. 

Here's a close up of the order "Control panel" from later in the game. You have 10 choices of various things you can do as a ward commander to micro manage your troops, like swapping ranks, bolstering morale and so on. These are on magnetic paper to keep them from getting lost.

The game becomes fairly mechanistic. It's probably a good simulation of how combat worked at the time, and the role of commanders is well thought through. What is different as well is that you only shoot and fight in your own turn, applying hits before your opponent can reply. That means that charging home generally offers a significant advantage, doubly so if you get lucky on your dice.

We stood on our hill and shot, relying upon our archery to break them up. This wasn't massively successful. The hits are absorbed by your opponent's archers. It's great to "distress" and force these to retreat, but you really want to get at the main melee troops. Richard has an interesting way of reflecting differing strengths. In addition to the dice behind the wards you get a number of poker chips you cash in to cancel out hits representing greater numbers before reducing your fighting dice. It's very neat.

They eventually contacted us and the slogging match began. Our archery had reduced their bowmen, but their melee troops had more poker chips than ours, and they were better armoured. We needed to get very lucky two or three turns in a row to get ahead. We didn't. The "Hail Mary" was trying to kill their leaders, but that reduces your melee dice in total, and we failed completely to lay a glove on any of their commanders.

There is an inevitability of your defeat as the weaker side, a point I have made about the system before. If you don't get ahead early on as the weaker side - and that is really hard - then you will lose, no matter how clever you are with the orders you give. Tactical manoeuvrability is heavily restricted (see below) so you are unlikely to do anything clever with your bodies of men to pull out a victory unless you are playing someone who is very dumb and just lets you run around them. We played for about an hour after it was clear who was going to win. This is realistic but not necessarily the greatest amount of fun. Richard needs to speed up the final phases in some way.

Here's the final move of the game. Henry Hotspur in the centre has broken and fled. Henry IV has taken two turns to wheel round and hit me in the flank, causing me to break at the end of this turn.

The result was close to the original one. On our side we all did slightly better than historically, with most of us getting away and not being killed or captured. But we still lost the battle.

But it's a pleasant enough way to spend a Saturday afternoon in good company.