Action at Dickerhausen

So we managed to play our Lion Rampant-by-Skype game yesterday with me refereeing, Jamie with me commanding part of the Swiss force and moving the toys and Mark, Gus and Andy online. We used my Swiss-Burgundian Wars collection and a scenario from The Pikeman's Lament that I thought worked for a four-player game.

Swiss crossbow-armed bidowers

The field of battle represented part of the outskirts of the fictional Swiss town of Dickerhausen, recently surrounded by a Burgundian army that is starting to build siege lines.

Andy, with two units of Swiss pikemen and a unit of mounted crossbows, was to attack north (from left to right on the photo above) from Dickerhausen towards the Burgundian fieldworks in front of their camp. Gus had three units of Burgundian missile troops to defend the line.

The far (west) end of the table was taken up by an "impassable" marsh.  One day there'll be an impassable marsh in one of my wargames that turn out to be genuinely impassable but this wasn't that day.  Jamie came through the marsh with a light and fast-moving force - four units of bidowers and one of halberdiers (Fierce Foot in Lion Rampant terms).

The final force in the game was the Burgundian horse.  Mark had a unit of coustilliers (mounted sergeants) and two of mounted men-at-arms the were going to enter from the northern corner (bottom right in the photo above.

Gus set up a Skype call to which we were all invited and I set up my iPad to use the rear-facing camera so that I could provide a view of the relevant bits of the table as necessary.

Andy launched a frontal attack on the Burgundian earthworks but it rapidly became apparent that his pikemen were going to suffer against the Burgundian longbowmen and the Italian mercenary crossbowmen alongside them. One block of pikes was routed before the other reached the earthworks and stopped, presumably disorganised by having to climb over the bank.

Mark threw forward his coustilliers but had the usual difficulty getting his men-at-arms to advance to anywhere useful.

Jamie's light troops made fairly good time through the marsh and by the time I got to take some pictures the battle had begun to coalesce into an east-west action around the open end of the earthworks.

The Burgundian left after routing the Swiss pikes

Mounted men-at-arms are scary beasts once they finally get to the scene of the fighting.  They were able to drive off Jamie's halberdiers and eventually rout them.

When we got down to just three units of bidowers left for the Swiss, we decided to call it a day.

The general feeling was that the technology had worked well and that Lion Rampant wasn't a bad set of rules for this kind of distant gaming.  We're going to try it again.  In fact I've started building another unit of pikes from the Perry plastic Continental Mercenaries box.

I think next time I might propose a more straightforward line-em-up-and-fight game but introduce more of the additional rules; Boasts and leader characteristics for a start.