Third Crusade Battle - Lion Rampant

Hi Folks

If you have been following the blog you will know that over the past 12 months I have been building and painting two large armies for some big battles of the Third Crusade.



Last night I scrapped the idea I was working on for my Pulp Campaign finale (that's now next week) and chucked down an open desert board and all the figures I have painted for this genre. All told there were close to 600 x 28mm minis on the table including 150+ cavalry figures. It looked awesome.

I was so engrossed in the game I took few pictures but hopefully the few that are here will provide the sense of splendour.



We used the Lion Rampant rules for this game with each side fielding 92 points aside.

To begin with I thought we might be biting off more than we could chew but I had no worries, the game was done and dusted in two and a half hours. It was brutal.

The winner would be the first team to break the opposition by destroying more than half their units on the table. In the end both sides came very close with the Saracens scoring a marginal victory.



From my perspective Lion Rampant worked brilliantly for this large fast paced game...with no terrain to hide behind it really was a straightforward pitched battle. Once again we dropped the rule that a failed activation prevented other troops from performing actions.



Probably like history the Crusaders were outgunned in the archery stakes but more than made up for it in the heavy armour - bow it takes a lot of arrows to bring down armoured knights.

Morale failures were key in this game with many of the crusader units fleeing after a few hits  poor dice rolls.

In the coming weeks we are going to replay this battle using Hail Caesar to see how the two sets compare.

A few more pictures....

 

Until next time