Slimbridge Dba

Terrain : bring all options .

Ok guys ,see you Saturday

The pub has an adequate car park adjacent to it, just behind the building next to the canal (before the canal). Don’t stop at the car park 100 metres before the pub building. I understand that the spacious room is free to hire but they appreciate custom at the bar where you can get all the usual pub fayre – probably coffee as well. I didn’t realise this the first time I went and brought my lunch but intend to support them on Saturday.

Colin

Having won some nice looking Khurasan Miniatures Kushan Indian figures at the Alton DBA tournament last year I hunted through my modest lead pile in order to make up a II/46b Kushan army. This is a multi-cultural mix of central Asians and Indians and an army I have never seen on the wargames table. The only figures I struggled to find were the cataphracts, but QRF’s Armenians are the closest I had (the closest of any except Khurasan themselves if you follow the writings of Gorelik and Nikonorov for Bactrian and Eurasian armies). I finished painting the figures just before Christmas and determined to take them to Slimbridge. The list has small numbers of lots of troop types and so I added a Parthian ally giving a base of 4Kns. Now a much more formidable mix of knights and bad going troop types.

My first game was against Classical Indians – a challenging prospect for any army. Holding back my centre I gained considerable success in a piece of rough going on one enemy flank. This proved too much for the Indians who crumbled from right to left. Next came Parthians, in open terrain! My opponent failed to bring sufficient terrain and so I gave him one of my difficult hills to use as a gentle hill. This nearly led to my downfall when I forgot it was gentle and treated it as BG – my Psiloi died, my flank was suddenly wide open! Yes, you are not the only one who makes silly mistakes. Luckily, I had surrounded his general and on the second attempt managed to destroy it, giving me the game. And so, it went on with; two versions of early Achaemenids, Patrician Romans with a knight based ally and it might have been a Bactrian or something similar. Apart from two games where I suffered the frustration of continually throwing ones, I had mainly close and very enjoyable games.

Interestingly I took several generals and camps which in other tournaments would have gained me extra points helping to differentiate the often similar scores at the end of a tournament. In fact, the scoring system led to another anomaly which, for the few players present who were interested in their UK DBA league positions, caused some frustration. Discussions during and after the tournament will hopefully lead to a tweaking of the scoring system which in future gives just rewards for those who win games.

The weird scoring that was being thrown up was the only issue in an otherwise successful day. The venue is excellent and despite being next to the low lying wildfowl wetlands, below the water level of the adjacent canal and following recent weather, was still above water! I put in a lunch order with a delayed delivery time and it arrived just as I finished my game – perfect! Local players turn up for this gaming day who would not travel to other league tournaments around the country, and I do enjoy playing new gamers. So, thank you Berkeley for providing me with another great day of DBA tabletop mayhem. I look forward to your next event – at one point you looked like winning the tournament but as organiser discounted that possibility. So, did you really win or was it the camel meister who gave his camels a day off?

Colin

Ok , winner gets 9points . Generals and camps score an additional point .

This sounds like an interesting thread. What was the scoring system used Keith, and what were you looking to incentivise or reward?