Battle of Barnet and Days of Knights Rules Test

 

#3 in this series of 6 or 7 medieval rules play-throughs.

Presentation

52pp, of which about 30pp rules. Pdf download, 4olumn layout (of which 1 not normally used) so quite card to read the tall thin columns. Reasonably logical. 1pp QRS, which has a very dense unit stats table but not all the key rules (eg movt) you need to play! $10. 

Set-Up

The Battle of Barnet was distinguished  by being fought in think fog, with units moving around, bumping into other units from unexpected directions, and friends being mistaken for foe - with dire consequences.

To model this I set up a simple grid on PPT and had a simple set of random (D8 based) rules to move units, so they went forward, veered left or right or stayed still, and also randomised their end facing. If two units bump into each other then another roll decides whether the unit fight, mistake friend for foe (and vice versa) or just waste time sorting things out. Here's a pic from the pre-game.

Yorkists start in the S by Barnet, Lancastrians are moving S from the N!

Once two units collide only those two transfer to the table top, with others join as they meet other units, or those on the table top.

How It Played

Sorry, I'm playing catch up here and have played the scenario twice more with other rules so I can't remember much of what happened. As you can see from the map above the Yorkist Main Battle swung left and hit the Lancastrian Van, whilst the Yorkist van just stalled in the fog. Yorkist Rear and Lancastrian Main then came into contact, and then the Lancastrian rear appeared out of the fog on the Yorkist Rear's rear! I think the Lancastrian won.

Rules Impressions

Again only headlines as I've quite  a few to go through:

• Little differentiation between troop types
• Some key unit types missing, - eg handgunners, spearmen
• It was quite confusing as to what "unit" was in the rules ( a base? a group of bases?), especially  in melee and doubling in firing, and how allocate hits are then allocated to a  "group"
• Demoralisation has minimal (-1) effect and doesn't seem to stop actions (and per unit, so can split groups to avoid it)
• As mentioned above the QRS doesn't have all the key info you need 

Overall

Couldn't get o with them at all I'm afraid. Quite hard to read and follow, and the way that the rules seemed to be "base" based for everything (rather than just damage) made it all quite messy.