TTS AAR: Venetians Abroad vs Granadine (Ewelme 24: Game Three)
/My third game at this year’s Ewelme competition was against Steve’s Granadines: one of the Moorish dynasties established in Spain 1200-1500.
The great thing about fighting the Granadines was that Steve’s army was almost wholly comprised of shieldwall infantry, lights and missile troops: with only up to two units of Knights that might give my men pause for thought before getting stuck in i.e. provided I protected my flanks, I should be able to beat him on a pure unit-by-unit match up.
My tactics, therefore, would be simple: advance swiftly towards the enemy and engage his troops as soon as possible, just going for a quick win by bashing his lesser units off the table as fast as I could! I therefore determined to use my first turn to group move forward each of my three commands with no shilly-shallying around.
Naturally, however, the cards had different plans:
This was, however, only a temporary setback, and soon my men were right on top of the Moors, with Steve’s cards preventing him from countering my advance by also getting in on the ‘double Aces’ act:
After that, however, things went very much to plan: my Knights proved just about unstoppable, and my Alabadiers also showed how good they could be against standard infantry.
In the end my predictions about how the battle would go came true: wherever I could get my men stuck in, the enemy crumbled, so as long as I kept the initiative and forced Steve to respond to my attacks as opposed to being able to manoeuvre and launch any of his own, the game was mine.
The eventual result was a 192:17 victory (13 coins to 2 coins), with my only casualties being a couple of units of Lights.
So three games out of four done: one big loss countered by one big win, and a losing draw on the scoreboard: I needed a good result in game four to save the day!
