Behind the Scenes (Updated)

With a forecast of cool and cloudy for Saturday morning it still looks good for  an early game. Even if I weren't hot and tired from working outside on a muggy afternoon my upstairs game room is like a sweat box today so this opportunity is not to be lost.

Still available as an inexpensive pdf from Henry's site:
henrys-wargaming.co.uk

The rules I'll be using are a slight modification of Medieval Mayhem, a quick, simple set of medieval skirmish rules by Rob Dean (Sharp End of the Brush Blog) with a little input from myself. They were written for multi-player convention games and have proved themselves over and over. Not bad for a set hammered out in a restaurant and jotted down on a napkin during a power outage fifteen years ago. In 2007 they were printed in Battlegames Issue 6 and are still available as an inexpensive pdf from Henry Hyde's blog.

However, they were written for a Hundred Years War game and for the Accurate 54mm figures that Rob had and as such they aren't always a perfect match for my Elastolin Prince Valiant figures.   I had to redefine what constitutes light, medium and heavy armour and needed to add two morale classes (veterans and civilians) but have been very restrained about other changes.

These are as follows:

1) Groups have been redefined as having less than a base width between figures rather than physically touching. This was done largely to counter the sharp practice discovered by some of deploying figures as individuals with a mere mm or so between them so that they need not take morale checks for losses and would never all run away if charged but were still quite massed. This worked best with high morale troops or if an average group had no high morale leaders. This tweak fixes that and is easy to implement and enforce.
Update. During the game, this worked up until I discovered it was not only possible to form unintentional groups but very hard to avoid accidentally forming super groups. I think a better solution might be to maintain the groups are touching rule but add a rule saying that an individual may not move to within a base width of another figure unless forming a group.

2) Groups will only test morale for losses if they take at least 10% hits.

3) If a group fails morale, individuals will test and be removed if they fail the secondary test but any remaining figures will retreat as a group (or groups if routers create a big gap).

Ye Olde Cloth at Huzzah 2014.
Made for Cold Wars 1998 it has seen many games, not bad value for a remnant.

The scenario was going to be the ambush scenario from CS Grant's Scenarios for Wargames (very similar to the original Tabletop Teaser version) but I decided that I wanted to do the cloth over hills thing and it was only when I laid out the cloth that I remembered that the river half still had the converging painted roads on it from my 2014 Huzzah game. I decided to modify the scenario rather than fuss too much with the cloth at this time.

There are several ways to handle solo ambushes but I've decided to repeat the method used in a Gathering of Hosts game in 2015 which keeps the player in suspense. Each turn I roll two dice to see if one, two or no ambushing units arrive then dice for each to see if they appear in the nearest, uncleared cover and shoot or charge or in the player's choice of uncleared cover.