Another week another game

Apologies for another post without pictures.  I was so involved in the game that I forgot to take any photos.

In a personal best for consecutive games this century, Tuesday of last week saw me back at the gaming table.  this week for a game of Arte de la Guerre.  Now these are a set of rules I own and really wanted to like.  For those who haven't seen them (have you been off planet or something?) these are an extremely popular set on the competition circuit and get a lot of blog coverage.  Trebian hosted the game and has already posted a battle report over on Wargaming for Grown ups (Link to Wargaming for Grown Ups) so I'm going to stick to a quick personal view.

As I say I wanted to like these rules and I did.  Like all rule sets there are niggles but overall these are because of the basing conventions and are similar to those experienced in any game with DBx style element basing. What I did like was the use of cohesion points to give a bit of resilience to the units.  Heavy Infantry need to take four cohesion hits before being destroyed, most other units take three,  with light troops taking two.  Units with a single cohesion hit fight with a disadvantage which means that you have to think about screening melee troops and withdrawing the screening units before they are destroyed.  I'm less keen on the army lists which feel very competition focused and don't have the detail of the lists from DBM or DBMM.

The rules are translated from the French and the translation is very good but some of the concepts do need a moment or two before they click.  For example heavy troops are not better armoured than medium troops.  Instead its a measure of how close packed and how resilient they are.  I have settled for thinking of light troops as open order, medium as at deploying at order and heavy as being at close order.  Instead there is an option to give some troops the 'armour' capability giving them the chance to offset loosing combats effects.  To make things even more confusing Cataphracts and Knights are already 'armoured'.

All of that aside the game played well and allowed a battle to be played to a conclusion in under three hours.  It was tight and winning didn't harm my view of the rules either!