The Scots charge over the bridge before too many English archers deploy.
As part of my exploration of the possible direction for my Ancient and Medieval games and of the options for evening games on an old card table in a corner of the Wreck room, I divided up the Medieval Scots that I had rebased for Impetus as well as what English I could scare up and set up a game this afternoon. Alas for the Scots when flipping through Asquith & Grant's Scenarios for All Ages (aka the Red Book), my eye fell on a game with 4 columns converging on a bridge. It wasn't until the Scots charged over the bridge that I got a sense of Deja Vue, my Scots having had to charge over a bridge in their last outing against Ron's English earlier this year. Oddly when I played through the Red Book in 2009 I also ended up playing. this with English vs Scots albeit in the 16thC. (Well damme! I forgot that the river was fordable away from the bridge!)
Briefly, the 2nd English column arrived early and the flanking Scots column ended up forming schiltron under a hail of arrows. A Scottish charge over the bridge eventually pushed the English back but suffered heavy casualties and when the flanking schiltron broke, it was all over.
The Scots break.
The most important result of the test is that it has confirmed that this size of force in this period with this scale of shooting and movement will do quite nicely for Teasers on this size of table.
The existing bases don't precisely fit the square grid but they are close enough that they could be used as possible and the grid could always be ignored anyway and a ruler used at 1/2 or 2/3 scale. I'm not saying that 10mm figures wouldn't allow me more figure per base and thus "fit" the terrain better but I'd rather use what I have and would rather paint a few more 25's than start all over again. I didn't really want to paint up 200 or more English for bigger battles with the same tactical options but I haven't known quite what else to do. Anyway, this works for me so painting up and basing my English and Scots reinforcements will be moved up the priority list to provide some winter campaigning. Those figures on 3" and 80mm bases will serve but I want to go for 1.5" so that I can show units in march column and adapt to terrain.
I'll need to get going on more hills too. I'm not quite sure what to do about built up areas. Luckily a table suitable for street fighting isn't a huge issue for Medieval Anglo-Scottish wars but a tower might be handy for some scenarios and I could do a town base or 2 with low perimeter wall and removable building to represent a small town.Might have to make it a bit over size to hold the occupants. Damn. Or maybe a town base with 2d row houses on either side of a road wide enough to hold a unit. It'll take some thought.
The next question is, do I want to look at adapting some of my Persian/Samarkand forces to play on the small table as well as the larger one. For now I think not and the Persian Host will stay upstairs. I may try it out though, just to see and just to keep it active. In particular, since many of the pikemen and other Greeks may be sent off to Botany Bay this winter, I have been thinking more about vague plans to use PA molds to produce some form of hill tribe army down the road. This would allow me to do some skirmishes in hilly terrain (once I make it). There's a limit to what I can get painted these days and to how many games I can play in the score of periods I dabble in so that might be best left for next winter.
