"Finish them!!" Blood, sand and ancient battles

Nigel Heather asked me a while back about the Command and Colours (my spelling) system - I hadn't heard of it, but I had heard it's designer Richard Borg and therefore I knew it would be a good game because he also had a hand in Memoir '44. During our recently game of Memoir, we had a look through the two systems he had, Ancients and Napoleonic, and having played a lot of Rome, Medieval and Empire Total War on the PC, I knew these would be to my liking.

We arranged a game of Ancients to start us off with to see how it went. And I have to say I love this gaming system! As it is very much like Memoir, firstly I felt very at home with it - the large hex board, single hex overlays for terrain, command cards and dice rolling for attack and defence.

The first scenario was set in 406BC - The Battle of Akragus - the Carthagians vs the Syracusans (Nigel). As can be seen in the following pictures, units are depicted by wooden blocks with coloured unit pictures on them - these pictures correspond to easy to use crib sheets to show the units movement, attack dice number, range firepower and distance, plus other figures. Unlike wargame systems I've used in the past (I'm thinking Advanced Squad Leader here for starters), the crib sheets are not awash with tiny details on every single possible aspect of battling with the units. That was a big plus point. Just some key numbers - if you are attacking X with Y, you roll Z number of dice.

My Carthagians (bottom) attempt to form a defensive shell

Each dice has coloured markers, red, blue, green, flag (for retreat) plus leader symbols and crossed swords. This allows a great deal of simplicity in combat - if a unit attacks a green infantry type, check the crib sheet, see it uses 4 dice, is allowed to use crossed swords as a hit. Roll the dice, get 2 greens and one crossed swords, so three enemy units are removed. It's as simple as that.

There are some similarities in Memoir 44 - such as each player is dealt command cards that indicate which units on the field can be used (left, centre, right or a particular type such as cavalry), the dice combat, terrain and movement. There are a few differences which make the game, in my view, that much more tactical and requiring you to think a bit more about how and why you do things. The first is Leaders - your army can come with one or more Leaders who are added to a unit and allow a dice roll to use the Leader marker as a hit, allowing some devastating attacks. Another is in Memoir, if you move into close combat and the defender fails to break or is not destroyed, the units remain facing each other and there is no come back on the attacker. This is different in Ancients in that if the defender is not broken or destroyed, they get a chance to attack back, possibly leading to the destruction of the attacker! This changes the balance of the tactics some what and makes a more thoughtful game. There is also the extra ability to move the entire army, as long as each unit is connected to another to form a line, forward as a single unit one space - this represents the tactic in the ancient world of just moving one vast number of troops towards another in one go.

Nigel's Red heavy troops move into attack

We played two scenarios - the one listed above where I was destroyed by Nigels victorious army and the second was at the Crimissos River in 341 BC with the Carthagians (Nigel) vs Syracusans. This time Nigel was deployed in two places, one in front of my army, the other on the other side of the river. He had some very powerful troops on the other side of the river, but they could only cross at certain key points. I had to quickly move up my archers and slingers to take out as many as I could before they crossed (not many!) before they had to fall back under the weight of the attack. Then I brought my heavy infantry to bear in two directions, North and North-East towards the river, splitting Nigel further and preventing his river crossing troops from helping out his other soldiers. A couple of lucky Utilise all Heavy Troops cards allowed me to close the trap on the unlucky troops crossing the river, as any troops that tried to retreat ran into Nigels army behind them and had to loose more units for failing to retreat!

Crushing the Carthagians as they cross the river!

Bringing the game to a close, I won 5:3 (which was the same historical result), whilst the first battle was won 5:4 to Nigel. Fantastic system, can't wait to play again to see other unit types - it's a pity the add ons are so hard to get hold of.