Day of Battle 4 - Playtest Game

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving (11/27), Dave, Ryan, Leo and I got together to push some figures around. Our intent was to spend some time working through some of Chris Parker's draft rules and ideas for a new version of Day of Battle. This post isn't going to be a review of those ideas, but is just an excuse to post some pictures from our game with a minimum of verbage. At this point the game was three weeks ago, and I doubt I could write a detailed battle report, seeing as how my main memory of it at this point is being unceremoniously driven from the field. Oh well. It happens...

For this game we used figs from my Hundred Years War collection to set up a French-ish medieval force and an English-ish force, but set in the decades prior to the full-fledged ascendency of the longbow. To be able to get a feel for our impressions of some of the core parts of the new rules, we went light on missile troops and hoped to concentrate on the melee and morale sections, which contain a lot of new material.

The set up: French on the left and English on the right. Three battles (commands) per side. Mixed infantry and cavalry in the center and far flank. Infantry near the town.


French and English cavalry mixing it up in the center. The English (me) held on for a while, but the tide would turn against me...


Infantry advancing into the village. This bogged down into an inconclusive pushing and shoving match.


The cavalry battle turns against the English. French weight of numbers grinds down my horsemen.


Oops. The French are in front of me... beside me... and behind me. The "behind" part is especially bad. At this point, the new battle line morale rules that Chris is proposing really came into effect and had the English battleline begin to fade away.


A good game, a fun evening, and a solid run-through of Chris' new ideas. After a few months of very little in the way of gaming other than the occasional bit of painting, it was very refreshing to get a few friends and family together to push some figures around.