The return of 'Warhammer Ancient Battles'.

 Today, Ian, Charlie, Nigel and I played a 1,500pt game of Warhammer Ancient Battles, first time we had used these rules in over 20 years. Charlie and I were in control of my Macedonians with Ian and  Nigel commanding some Late Hoplite Greeks. I set up some simple, almost symmetrical terrain to keep movement simple as we were very much treating this as a learning game. 

Armies were selected from the Armies of Antiquities book. 

The Macedonians arrive. 

Macedonian deployment. 

Greek deployment. 

Note that our formed units were all in movement trays and we marked casualties with numbered markers rather than removing figures, far easier to do. 

I sent my cavalry off on a flanker.

Greek light cavalry on the left being defeated by their Macedonian counterparts. 

A good start for the Macedonians. 

My wedge of companions surge through the gap, get shot at by the Cretan archers in the wood then charged by a unit of hoplites. My flanker failed miserably. 

The Greeks had taken the central hill but Charlie was pestering them with some peltasts. However, the Greek slingers proved to be very effective at short range, I had forgotten how nasty they were.  

Charlie advanced our Hypaspists and Nigel took the bait and charged them with his hoplites.  With their heavy armour and large shields giving them a 3+ save the hoplites were just too tough for the hypaspists and to Nigels glee he soon broke them and off they fled only to be pursued by Nigel's hoplites and destroyed. 

The main macedonian phalanx had clashed with another unit of heavily armoured hoplites and also got well beaten, and destroyed. At this point a well deserved Greek victory was declared. 

We enjoyed playing Warhammer Ancient battles again, most of the game moved smoothly with a bit of flicking through the rulebook. The main part that was a bit trying at times was melee. Basic melee between two units is fine but when you add in different dice throws required for attached command figures and different dice throws required for their war horses through each stage of throwing to hit, then to wound and then to save all seemed a bit too much. We agreed that we would happily play Warhammer Ancients again, but when we meet again in two weeks we will try Macedonians v Greeks using our usual ancient rules of choice, Hail Caesar.