Rampant, but not relevant

I shall be using Lion Rampant rules for the siege game on the table for no better reason than they're what the article in MW is written around. I have forgotten pretty much everything I ever knew about LR, so thought it worth listing what I think I remember before reading them again. Apart from anything else it's an entry for the most pointless rules review ever. What I am describing is the first edition and the second edition is being published literally next Thursday. So, please ignore what follows.

Haven't got it

I don't think I bought the first edition, I'm pretty sure James passed them onto me having received them from Osprey in return for doing something or other. We had a couple of games and my memory tells me that most of the problems were self inflicted. There was no particular issue with using figures grouped on stands rather than single bases, or with the bookkeeping side of the game. I vaguely recall quite liking the combat resolution element, but I seem to remember being dissatisfied overall because:

• The playing area was too big. The book suggest 6ft x 4ft, but says smaller would work. My table is 2.5m x 1.5m, we used essentially the whole thing, but everything was too far apart and it took far too long for anything to happen. There's an activation mechanism which provides a nice fog of war, but also slows things down on its own without adding in an oversize table as well. For this game I shall use 120cm x 90cm.
• There wasn't enough terrain on the table. As I digression I've always found it a bit of a paradox that the larger the scale of the combat being modelled the more the terrain is abstracted away and the table bare, while for smaller scales the opposite is true. Basically, I ignored my own rule of thumb, left big open spaces and it was all very uninteresting. So, put more stuff out this time.
• The 3" rule. There is a strict prohibition on units coming with 3" of each other, which we followed to the letter and which was a monumental pain in the arse without seeming to have any upside to compensate. Subsequently I saw a group playing the rules at a show and they ignored this rule totally, and, who'd have guessed, nothing bad happened. This rule is in the bin.

There you go, a list of the things I probably did wrong, but possibly may not have, quite a few years ago with a set of rules that have been updated since anyway. This blog remains at the cutting edge.