With one utter thrashing and one complete victory under my belt, my third game at this year’s To The Strongest competition at Warfare was against Howard “I borrowed these from Sid’s” Parthians.

I decided to change my initial deployment: choosing to weight all my Knights onto one flank in order to counter the threat of the Parthian cataphracts.

This meant that as the game began, the Parthians, with nothing to stop them, quickly outflanked my infantry line and camp with light horse, but I wasn’t too worried about this and quickly moved to counter their advance.

It was a bit annoying to have the Alabardiers almost immediately disordered from rear charges, but hopefully I’d be able to rally them and move on: the important thing being that the flank was safe for the moment.

Unfortunately, Lady Luck had once again chosen to desert me, and the Alabardiers were quickly disposed of by the enemy!

Meanwhile, back on the other side of the table, my Knights and the Parthian cataphracts had advanced into contact.

I had managed to achieve a tactical advantage for the first clash: getting not only the first-charge advantage but also achieving a two-to-one in a couple of instances, but shockingly bad cards meant that I effectively lost all five of the knights-vs-Parthian-cavalry first encounters.

Here’s the table just after the initial clashes: you can see that I only have two units of Knights left out of five and haven’t destroyed a single unit of Parthians!

The battle then took a turn for the decidedly weird. First up, I had a series of Aces that, I thought, would effectively seal the fate of my poor Venetians: effectively leaving me unable to do anything at all:

But, suddenly, the tide turned, and my last two remaining units of Knights suddenly remembered what they were here for, and started chewing through Parthians troops like there was no tomorrow:

Perhaps I could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?

Er, no.

Although somewhat rocked by the Venetian’s renaissance (technically I think that’s also a pun!), the villainous Parthians re-turned their attention to my right flank and managed to defeat the unit of militia guarding it (yes, the chef’s unit was knocked off the table, although I’m sure he survived) and take one of my camps: four medals lost and game over!

At least I had managed to win back some medals, turning a potential utter disaster into only a heavy 8-13 defeat.

I had been appallingly unlucky right from the initial knight/cataphract clash through to the run of Aces in the endgame (even Howard agreed!) but was very pleased to have been able to gain some measure of respect from the fight-back! Roll on game four…

Howard writes:

Great game Rob - and you really were very very unlucky - ridiculously so when it came to the knights melting in the face of the mighty Parthian Cataphracts! Speaking of which it was actually your lowly (but deadeye!) LI and LC shooters that did most of the damage - taking down a Cataphract unit, 2 LI and a LC! Typical of the Lordly Knights to gloss over that in their report of the battle to the Doge....! :-)
I can tell you that the Chef did survive the battle - he's currently on permanent sabbatical in the kitchens of the Parthian King of Kings in Ctesiphon!

The stage was now set for my final game of the tournament. With two wins and a draw behind me, I would need a substantial win to have any chance of placing towards the top of the leaderboard.

My opponent for this final clash was the formidable Sid and his equally formidable Parthians:

Things started quite well: Sid’s cataphracts on my left attempted to charge forward, drew an Ace, so over-extended themselves into disorder. Unfortunately, I was unable to capitalise on this, and the veteran heavies quickly re-ordered themselves.

Equally unfortunately, this proved the high point of the game for my Venetians!

On the left, a combination of horse archers and heavy cavalry/cataphracts disposed of my Knights, and began curling into my centre. I had my Schioppettiere handgunners to defend my camps, but that meant I couldn’t use them elsewhere.

On my right, the same combination of lights and heavies overwhelmed my troops, although I did manage to do some damage before the flank crumbled.

I was now beginning to think that the Parthians had been taking lessons from the Zulus, as the horns of the buffalo began to close on my centre…

And it wasn’t long before the final curtain as the Parthians on my left flank broke through and took one of my camps and the last of my victory medals!

Excellent play from Sid, leaving me trounced 5-12!

So what did that mean for my overall ranking? Well, two wins, a draw and a loss left me an unexpectedly high 6th place: disappointing but not a complete disaster. Here are the rankings:

Overall a highly enjoyable event, and Firestorm Games is a fantastic venue. I would highly recomend the TTS Competition Circuit to players of the game. Next up are the World Championships “To the World’s Strongest” at the end of Feb.