Sound drums and trumpets!

I have recently been painting a few Romans (and making a really bad model villa and a not much better marching fort) to provide some more variety to the Romans in Britain game. However, I have been assuming that we won't be playing it again for a while and have been wondering what to set up next in the wargaming annexe. A side conversation during last week's Seven Years War bash in the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach has led to some action.

As you may have seen on his website, James is designing another campaign. Among the mechanisms that he described was a random countdown to define the campaign length, reminding me that various Peter Pig rules use something similar. That led me to re-reading Bloody Barons and that has led to the Wars of the Roses figures hitting the table, at least in the sense of being set-up. Real life has so far prevented any actual dice rolling.

I have gone for Tewkesbury - using the scenario in the book - for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it's relatively well balanced compared to most WotR battles. I've had to bodge the basing of what the rules refer to as Generals and Captains because it doesn't match mine, and to work around a shortage of levy bowmen; the rules are for 15mm and therefore tend to require a lot of figures. Sufficient reinforcements have left the mound of unpainted plastic and joined the workbench and will quite possibly be finished before I get round to playing anyway.

Bloody Barons involves motivation dice rolls a bit reminiscent of Blitzkrieg Commander plus some pretty traditional rolling for hits followed by saving throws. A word of warning though, the rules are really badly written, not so much in the sense of the mechanics being poor, but more in the sense of trying to work out what the hell they are in the first place. If anyone has worked out what the 'Extra arrows' markers are for then please let me know.