The sound of canons.

So Saturday bought about the huge Pike and Shotte battle at the South Auckland Gaming club. My very first game of Pike and Shotte. The original idea was to do the Battle of Marston Moore, but with the numbers and points, we ended up just basing our army lists on that battle, as we needed to swap the Scots over to the Royalist's side to balance out the points.

Glen, Bryan and Kevin were running the Royalists while Arthur and I were running the Parliamentary side. At 2500 points per side we had a couple of thousand models on the 8 x 16 foot table. To save time once the terrain was set down both sides drew up there deployment plan for there respective sides, then we all deployed at the same time.

Kevin's praying for his Scots before the game even starts.

I deployed my troops down the right hand flank while Arthur took his larger force and covered the center and left flank. The large hill was just inside my deployment zone, so I managed to get all three of my medium canon's deployed directly in place so they could started bombardment of the Royalists from turn one. Bryan's massive cavalry force deployed opposite to me, but was bunched up due to the river cutting off the end corner of his side. The Scots deployed on the center of the table while Glen setup opposite Arthur's main force.

Turn one and the Parliamentary force rushes forward, my canons roaring and dealing out some damage. Mean while over the next few turns I manage to either disrupt some of Bryan's cavalry or he managed to fail all of his command orders, so they stood still for a full three turns.

Arthur advances his troops along the river bank while the canons on either side shoot it out.

Arthur's cavalry goes down the middle followed up by his infantry.  

Parliamentary forces advance

As we are all new to Pike and Shotte, there aren't to many models with paint on them yet, most of my stuff has a base coat and first colour down, but even that has a long way to go before it's finished.

My Crassiers lead the charge down the right flank. (painted models always win of course)

The rest of my infantry move up behinds cover and get into shooting positions while Arthur's cavalry charge down the middle to get stuck in and cause some chaos.

Glen ponders how to deal with those charging Ironside Cavalry

As I'm waging war against Bryan's Cavalry down the other end of the table, Arthur is sneaking troops down the far left flank.

 The Cavalry finally clash and Glen finds out hove nasty those Ironside Cavalry are as things start to die.

With Brian stalling his Royalists I move up my infantry beside my Cavalry and get ready for some hard work as I'm out numbered by several units.

Brian finally gets his army moving and digs in behind a rock wall as we start a good old shoot out.

At the other end of the table Glen and Arthur are getting stuck into each other..

Well actually Arthur is destroying Glen's Royalists.

My Cavalry and infantry get bottle necked as they all try and clamber into fighting positions as I start going through Bryan's cavalry units.

After some good clashes of our cavalry units and a few withdrawals on my side I've managed to cause heavy damage on Bryan's Royalists, with only losing three units in total myself.

Glen and Bryan contemplating the collapse and defeat of the Scots along the river bank. 

This was the beginning of the end for the Royalist.

Not long after that my canons inflict the final blow to Bryan's Crassiers and break his army on the right flank. Arthur also finishes up Glen's resistance as well.

A convincing win for the Parliamentarians. 

I lost one Pike, one Musket and one horse unit in total, and Arthur had lost about the same, so it was a full on victory for sure for us.

My Carassiers worked really well for me, the mortar I had was mostly missing and my Dragoons never saw combat at all. My canon's were awesome, and take the prize of breaking Bryans army, so I'm looking forward to trying out some heavy canons in the next game. Overall I was happy with my list, I've already noted a few changes for next time and worked out a 1000 point list.

It was great fun, (always helped by winning of course) and a really good way to learn the game with such a big battle there were plenty of different interactions and a good cross section of the rules covered during the game. We made some mistakes on rules as you do and adjusted as we went keeping it fair when we worked out what we were doing wrong. I really liked the game system, and it will be even more fun once we start taking advantage of some of the other more advanced rules and tactics.

Now back to the painting table to get more paint on plastic for next months battles.