TTS AAR: Chalgrove World's: Game Three
/Those following recent posts will know that I went into game three with two outright victories under my cingulum militare.
That was great, but what was not so great is that the World Championships work on a modified Swiss Chess system, which means that after each round the two people with the top two scores fight each other, the people in third and fourth place fight each other etc. There are tweaks such as the fact that you don’t fight anyone who you’ve fought before, but the salient point here is that the better you do, the stronger opposition you face.
My third opponent was therefore one of the big beasts of the tournament scene: Peter R, fielding his Timurids. Peter has won many, many tournaments and would, in anyone’s books, be considered as the first seed if we were playing at Wimbledon. Gulp! My only consolation was the fact that I had actually beaten his Timurids before, in one of our semi-regular friendly games, although not with the Romans.
As mentioned in my previous post, this battle had an even more extraordinary start than the last one, where I went 8-0 up after only pulling about five cards…
I had set up my three camps in the bottom left hand corner of the field, guarded by the usual unit of light infantry. I had a couple of legionary units nearby for added security, but they are obviously usually needed elsewhere on the field. The lights (veteran auxilia sagittarrii) are, however, usually sufficient.
Not today.
In his first action of the game, Peter swept two units of light cavalry towards my camps, and with an extraordinary run of cards, killed the auxilia sagittarrii and took all three of my camps, meaning I was 0-10 down (losing 13 loses me the game) without having drawn more than one card - an Ace!
Disaster after one card!
Things were looking so appalling for me that Peter, with extraordinary generosity, even offered (twice) to re-start the game, but I turned down the offers: rules are rules and, if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting!
First things first: take back the camps…and take back the camps before losing another three coins (the equivalent of 1.5 units/generals).
As the Timurids only had two units of light cavalry there, it was actually fairly easy to do. One legionary unit marched backwards into one camp, one withdrew from the centre of the field and marched into another. That left one unit of enemy lights sandwiched between the two, and then destroyed next turn. Meanwhile, another unit of legionaries had chased the other enemy light cavalry unit off the table, and then halted to guard it’s probable re-entry point. You don’t want an enemy light cavalry unit unattended in your rear!
This was better, but had tied up three legionary units meaning that I only had two and the cavalry left to beat the vast majority of the Timurids in front of me.
Now those of you who watched England’s first match in this year’s Rugby World Cup, against Argentina, will have seen how losing a man to a red card early on it the game inspired the English team to play better than they have done for eighteen months and pull the game out of the bag, and so it was here with the Romans.
The cavalry finally proved their worth, killing an enemy general and some of the enemy horse, and the two remaining infantry cohorts proved positively unstoppable, also disposing of a couple of enemy units despite being heavily outnumbered. Suddenly the score was back to 10-3 in my favour, with several Timurid units disordered as well.
Now Peter proved what a canny player he is: with one eye on the clock, he retreated away from me as fast as he could meaning that as time was called, I had achieved what the system would call a winning draw at the aforementioned 10-3 rather than the 12-3 outright victory that should and would have followed had we continued.
An extraordinary game pulled back from the brink!
Yes, it was a pity I couldn’t get the decisive victory I wanted, but a winning draw after the start I’d had was nothing to complain about…and I would have had the victory had we continued.
On reflection (and we all know that Captain Hindsight has 20:20 vision) the Timurid success in my camps happened too soon for Peter to exploit. A turn later and the legionaries who rescued the camp would have been further from it and less able to do so, and the rest of his army would have been close enough to mine to expect to be able to kill the single unit needed to polish me off even if it cost him multiple units to do so.
Losing a general, a unit of veteran horse, and some more light horse to my first cavalry charge didn’t help either, and from then on I had his main force on the back foot on the right wing.
In the centre, he didn’t get the cards he needed to close with my infantry quickly enough to hit me when it counted and, anyway, when he did, it was veteran legionaries (presumably somewhat annoyed about having their personal possessions trampled by enemy lights!) waiting to cut them down.
A great game that neither Peter nor I will forget!
