Romans in Britain

Not the Howard Brenton stage play which was at the centre of an early manifestation of the social intolerance of the Thatcher era, but rather a bastardised version of the Pony Wars rules. I have mentioned before that many years ago I had a doomed plan to interest my (then) young daughters in wargames by setting up an asymmetrical, narrative driven game. I rejected the obvious colonial games such as the Northwest Frontier, Cowboys and Indians, Zulus etc for reasons of political correctness. My own favourite would have been the French Foreign Legion , but given that we lived in Bradford I didn't see any virtue in a game where the baddies were all muslims, or indeed where all the  muslims were baddies. In the end I decided that the period would be early Imperial Roman Britain and that the natives would be the Celts - more specifically the Brigantes of the Wharfe Valley; in other words 'us'. Or at least would have been 'us' had not both my daughters been born in London rather than Yorkshire and if their roots weren't a mixture of Huguenot, Irish, Gypsy and - a guess based on my mother-in-law's appearance and demeanour - fearsome Viking looters and pillagers.

The barbarians sweep past a somewhat battered villa

Anyway, the advent of the wargames annexe meant that this long abandoned project has been revived. After fiddling about with Patrols In The Sudan and Pig Wars I decided that something as close as possible to Pony Wars was the answer. However, I had a difficult time adjusting the rules to deal with the lack of ranged fire. Indeed, having fixed a date for a game I despaired of getting it to work and nearly abandoned it completely and set up something fifteenth century instead.

A formidable host of hostile tribesmen arrives

I didn't in the end and am glad because it turned out to work rather well and gave us an interesting and enjoyable game, narrowly won by the Romans. We treated it as a brainstorming session and refined the rules as we went along. Normally that would have been right up James' street, but he was noticeably tired on Wednesday. Despite that I think we ended up with a useful framework which I shall write up in due course. I also now have a small modelling and painting list to flesh out the game with some more possible events and perhaps make it look a bit better. It feels quite odd to have such a gap (certainly ten years or so) between conception of the idea and doing all the painting and then getting round to actually playing the game; but better late than never.