Twilight of the Britons – A Battle Report 2

Chris and Adam played tested Twilight of the Britons – a version of Twilight of the Sun King for the early medieval period in Britain.

Summary: Much better game. The shield wall clash was realistic but took too long to resolve. Battles on the wings were interesting and had an impact in the centre

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The Armies

Last time we had identical armies and Adam insisted the armies be different this time. I went for Romano-British and English.

Chris had the Romano-British army, with a lot of Roman trained troops.

I use the term “English” to cover the Angles (Ængle), Saxons (Sahson) and Jutes (Kentings) from Hengist and Horsa’s arrival in Kent (about 429), through their amalgamation as the English, until Norman subjugation. In this case, it was Saxons rebelling against their nominal Romano-British overlords. The English had a bigger army with more infantry.

Note: I still don’t have the figures for most of the heroes, so we used blank stands for the missing ones.

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Table

I used terrain cards which gave a relatively clear table with a hill, rough area and village.

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The Battle

The English advanced straightforward. Perhaps the first play test convinced Adam that simple moves pay off under the rules.

Adam had Brave (+1) Heavy Infantry in the rear rank and a variety of troops in the front.

The English / Saxon magicians (pagan priests) launched some potent curses and force the opposing Briton Noble Cavalry to recoil.

Both warlords were keen to close to the battle lines quickly approached each other.

The rules feature impetuous advances and the Briton Noble Cavalry showed how it is done. The flanking English heavy infantry recoiled and the Briton nobles followed them up.

On the other flank the War dogs recoiled through the archers following behind them.

The Romano-British light infantry didn’t fancy being charged and evaded.

The Saxon mounted Hird bounced the more numerous Roman cavalry.

After those skirmishes on the flanks, the battle lines were about to clash together.

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Observations and conclusions

Vincent Tsao (the co-author) and I are still working on the rules and they evolved a bit between the first play test and this one. This game was much better. The troops behaved more like they should and the game got a conclusion. Chris and Adam appreciated the new army lists, creating slightly different armies.

But there were still some things to improve.

The game took 2 hours and 15 minutes and we felt that was too long. I guess we are comparing to DBA where games take 1 hour. In fact DBA is our benchmark and Chris’s assessment was “Good game, but is DBA still better?” Probably, so Vincent and I will tweak some more.

Two many heroes died. Vincent had play tested a version where heroes died on 2-4 and that was far too lethal. So for this game I had heroes dying on a 2-3 on 2d6. This happened too much. Both sides lost three heroes. We were also playing resurrecting heroes so they’d die, come back and die again. In one instance Chris lost a hero, the hero’s son and then the hero’s granddaughter all in one player turn, as the hero died, got resurrected and died again. Chris said, “Heroes should stay dead.” Good suggestion.

Adam again asked for cascading morale i.e. seeing friends rout should hurt. That would speed up the game. Something to think about.

We also found the 50% breakpoint made the game too long. We’ll try 33% instead.

Chris liked the curses as a missile weapon. However, I’d given the “curses” missile weapon a range of 5 BW. Much further than foot bows (2 BW) and slings, javelins and horse bows (1 BW). That was too generous and made the priests a super troop. Chris suggested, “Make them like archers”, i.e. I cut their range back to that of foot bows.