Elephant man

It seems fitting for this, the one hundredth post, that this blog should feature some wargaming. In order to protect the playing surface ahead of an important competitive fixture, James laid on a Punic Wars game on his current desert terrain. I got to play the Carthaginians because I had never, despite being very old and having been wargaming for more than forty years on and off, played a game with elephants before. Given that, it was inevitable that almost immediately one of my two units of elephants was routed by the skirmish screen of the Romans' Spanish allies and fled the table never to be seen again.

Me in character as the Carthaginians

Anyway, we left the game finely balanced except for the fact that the Carthaginians will win easily. The luck was about even as far as dice rolls went, but my low numbers - including an impressive sequence of consecutive ones - all happened on relatively unimportant occasions whereas Peter's occurred in melees that he should have won. By not doing so his legions were just stuck in attritional combat with my weakest units rather than clearing them out of the way and pressing on. He also failed to get to use his stratagem card which would have allowed him ten extra initiative to represent the historical surprise attack and only won one Lull, promptly turning a Lull of his own which I then won back. All in all it was very satisfactory.