DBA and FOG at Legions…

I’ll combine two different days here, first up is DBA day at the new Legions store. The hobby store we call home has moved to a bigger place just down the road from the old site (Get ready for StoogeCon II, bigger and better!). Three of us met for some inaugural DBA festivities.

Look at all the gaming space here! I used my Medieval Germans (IV/13b) much better than they performed at Fall-in..or at least my dice were better!

A few days later, on the first Monday in December, we had a bigger crew to try to learn FOG, or to get FOGged. Field of Glory uses more troops than DBA, and we had three commeander per side with the Mongols versus Fatimids .

Here I confirmed what I had suspected from playing FOG 5-6 times…..they are NOT the rules for me! My first morale roll was snake-eyes, and with FOG the lower the number the worse it gets! My next roll was slightly better…a 4! The new guys found out quickly why I AM the Diceman!

My leader, Hasn Bin Sober, commanded the left wing of  two infantry units and a unit of heavy lancer cavalry. The dice were my undoing as Jim’s Mongols rode down the archers and impacted my Lancers, who performed a little better than the cowardly foot <G>.

Here’s the dice throws for the record…I rolled snake-eyes for morale AND then a 1 to lose a stand! Jim naturally rolled box-cars for his morale. And he gets no casualty either.

After this miserable showing, I gave my FOG rules to Mike for an early Christmas present…my dice are too bad to play this game!

 

Field of Glory

August 1st featured a Field of Glory game with my Seleucids versus Jim Naughton’s Early Imperial Romans. My army was pointed by Tim Hladon, and we were surprized to see no ellys or chariots! That’s not the Tim we know! It seemed a good build, though, so I went with it. This was about my third game with the rules, but we have played a few more in Pittsburgh so the basic concepts are known. Terrain placement took about 15 minutes, and generally seems to leave the center of the battlefield open for combat–a good thing for the most part.

Jim deploys his Romans

My phalangites are in the center with Roman-style Argyraspids and archers on the flanks. Cavalry is deployed on each wing. My plan was simple…crush the middle with the pikes while the cav held off Jim’s flanking attempts.

He had bad going on his flanks with “ambush” counters showing, so I knew he would hold back, pin my pikes, and then try to work the flanks.

One good thing about FOG is that the combat starts pretty quickly. In a few moves we were in combat. Jim’s artillery and slingers hit first on my left, rocking back some Argyraspids and even managing to kill a stand. His dice rolls were magificent, while I was the Diceman <G>

Impact round

I took 6 hits while gave Jim only 2!

Nice dice..6 hits out of 7 dice!

Jim’s better quality troops allowed him re-rolls on dice showing 1 or 2. My morale /death roll was equally magnificent..one stand dead and a 3 for morale. Needless to say this was bad! Short news is the game continued in the same vein. Jim’s next rolls were just as good and mine were just as bad. End result is a broken Seleucid army. We didn’t finish the game due to time, but the result was ordained. I would have killed only one of his aux units that I caught with cataphracts in the open, but my pikes were toast.

Diceman’s verdict on FOG?? Thumbs down so far. It’s too sensitive to morale for my bad dice to handle. Combat and movement seem OK, although the combat takes several phases with different factors in each phase. I like terrain generation and ambush possibilities. Markers are needed to remember hits and moral level loss. It seems more in line with the old WRG 6th edition rules but less tedious to figure combat results. The game lenth seems a bit shorter than DBM. On the whole, I think I prefer DBA Big Battles or DBM for my choice for ancients. YMMV as always.