Other ancient/medieval games

...i like Art de la Guerre. To win you have to follow a plan and hold back some reinforcements...

DBA Amazing quick play game to smack out four or five games on a club night. Sitting at a tourney you win great, you lose and fifteen min later you are playing again so go for a stroll round the bring and buy. Awesome to build armies for as only 12 elements so you can even do a force you would not be interested in doing a DBMM sized game. Clearly I love it

DBMM only played once, enjoyed it and will play more but never went near pre battle set up. Weather, supplies, dirty back stabbing plots etc. As I understand it the 100 point mini games play like DBA but different outcomes if you are attacker or defender each phase

Lart Amazing game but has more planning of division placement flank attacks, ambushes etc and units have wounds so heavy coog with armour stick around longer than skirmish troops. It has evades, retreat from combat and Psiloi with ranged weapons. I really like it but one or two games a night max. Sitting at a tourney getting three games a day you feel the mental workout

Impetus 2 I am only about 6 games in so not started on the dtrategems etc but I really like it and it plays differently enough to everything else that it feels like a different game. Shooting is much more powerful in this than anything else I have played and I think a LH archer force would have a decent chance of a win on a big enough board. I also play it in 6mm which looks great.

To the strongest, def no expert as only played a few games. Seems simpler to me, with the grid I think it would be great at a show, you remember those right, cos you can play a mass army and move em around simply to get a decently timed game in. I am not a fan of grid movement myself.

Hail Ceasar, love this to and is a simple game.

Milites Mundi only had one game and did not like it though this may have been because loss of one unit on my flank and like a wave I lost about six units. We may have played it wrong of course.

SAGA again an awesome game but obs alot different as it is a skirmish game. Makes my heed hurt sometimes trying to think of a cunning use of battle board whilst trying to work out how will use their board to ruin my day.

Tokens for me
I have seen games played with buckets of tokens and markers for everything.

Figures inhaling, quick put on a token.
Unit looks right, token
I am thinking what to do, not without a bloody token your not
Selecting a token, but you dont have the token to say you can collect a token

All this of course pales in comparison to those criminal minds who are prepared to roll different dice in different size and colour.
If 20 Empire Crossbowmen are firing there should be 20 16mm square sided opaque dice to hand, preferably in a colour matching the look of the army.

Soviets should have red shock/ pin dice
DAK Yellow, Wermacht black etc
Glitter dice where you can barely make out the pips NO

Would fully support Baldie's comments re DBA, whilst adding that the basic rules are fairly simple to learn but complex enough to give interesting challenges without making your head hurt too much. Also cost wise you can probably 4/5 DBA armies for the price of one DBMM/FOG army.

I used to play DBM which I liked but if you realise 20 mins into a game that your set up is wrong or your army is mismatched you've still got two and a half to three hours of playing out the game.

Our group tried DBMM but didn't get on with it. I would probably have given it a go but they didn't like the too many different factors applying at different times depending on whose bound it was, although talking to DBMM players there is reasoning behind these. However if you want more detail in your games and don't like the fact that, for example, all Ax are the same under DBA, but you want your Roman Auxlia to be different to some stick wielding Libyans then DBMM is probably better, with its use of Ordinary, Fast, Superior, Inferior and Exceptional classifications of the troop types.

We didn't like FOG and the cost of buying the rules and all the army lists was also a consideration.

We do like Saga though, but play it with 15mm figures mounted individually on 1 or 2p coins.

My list for ancients is:

DBA: Love because it's simple, with few element types, easy to teach, and fast fast fast. That said I'm always looking to tweak it. 3.0 has come great speed, and more often than not feels right. No book keeping is GREAT. No bloody chits everywhere! d6 makes its really easy to know the numbers. It handles lines really well with side support. I'm a big fan of Big Battle DBA since the rules don't change significantly to play bigger battles

Piquet: Have only played a couple of times, but interesting in that you used different dice for different quality of troops. Also uses playing cards to randomize the turn sequence which is very novel. My old gaming group loved it, but I've never been SUPER fond of it.

Command Colors: Ancients: Neat board game that can be converted to figs easily (and we have). Uses special dice to determine hits. The command and control is handled with cards that limit what you can do, and who you can order about, which is neat. This system is used for all kinds of genres, Ancients, Nappy, WW2, AWI, Samurai...

Song of Blades and Heroes: I mention only because it uses the "beat = recoil, double = dead. d6+CF" mechanic of DBA for a skirmish game with about a half dozen figs each side. Great game! Generic too so lots of periods.

Saga: Love because it strikes me as more the level that Viking raids could be. i.e. not massive affairs, but smaller raids etc. Also lots of chrome and character to it. And I'm a fan of skirmishy fun, and only a couple of chits. Still looking for a good Samurai Skirmish game with this feel. They might bring one out since they are expanding the "Saga Universes" into different theaters, including an Ancients one. The Ancients one (forget the name) doesn't strike me as right since I always picture THOUSANDS of troops lined up as opposed to a raid, but the system itself works for this lower level. It even allows elephants!

To the Strongest!: Love because it removes movement and wheeling problems entirely through the use of grids. Basing doesn't matter, and it's pretty simple to play. A few chits and book keeping, but I made summary cards which help with this. Also uses playing cards, which I replaced with nice looking bag pull chits with numbers on them. Takes a bit of getting used to, but like this set a lot.

Age of Hannibal: Haven't played, but interested since it's based on Fantasy Rules! which is itself based on DBA! There is book keeping since units now can be disrupted, and all the bases are square, which simplifies things. I'm not a big fan of chits, so this one might be held off.

Fantasy Rules!: Had a big following in the early 2000s, but lost steam. This was my stepping stone from Warhammer Fantasy Battle to DBA.

Impetus: Love because it had the idea of a unit being "Spent" after a charge. Exhaustion is something I feel is missing from many sets. It also broke the mold of the idea that all ancient rules sets had to be DBx compatible. Easy to make DBx bases fit the Impetus bases, but allowed for the base to really FEEL like a body of men, instead of 4 blokes carrying their weapons around a golf course.

Triumph!: Just getting into this one. It's the offshoot of the 2.2+ effort which caused a huge rift here. I left Fanaticus because of this for a while and have drifted back since DBA is my first ancients love . I agree that Triumph is a good place between DBA and DBMM with a lot of changes I would have liked to see in DBA. That said, it takes a different tack in which it removes a lot of the exceptions lists in DBA with a much larger number of troop types, each slightly different. Not a big problem since most armies still only have 3-4 troop types anyway. Similar in nature to the Solid vs Fast of DBA 3.0, but with bigger differences in their stats. Flanking is a thing where a unit can be flanked even if it's not pinned from the front, which is a big change. Also, it's seems a bit slower than DBA. No units gets multiple moves, and they use 1/2 BW so more granular, but also more complicated for movement. So some good ideas, but again, makes me sad that it took a large fight, and some pretty nasty language to bring it about. Nobody seems to get terrain setup right, and terrain is always overly complicated. This one uses "terrain cards" which is a novel approach.

good grief no! loved your thoughts on rulesets......

There are a lot of rulesets out there and as a mini project I have bought around 20 of them to supplement my already rather full bookcase. I just cant stop collecting ancients rulesets!