My second game at this year’s Warfare tournament was against Nick and his Thematic Byzantines.

Chatting before we began, Nick mentioned that although he himself was a novice at To The Strongest (this being only his eighth ever game of TTS) his figures were about forty years old and veterans of many a tabletop encounter dating back to the days of WRG 5th or 6th. This made me wish that I’d been using my Early Imperials, also about forty years old, and reflect on all the changes there have been to this hobby of ours since I first started playing as a child, particularly as the Venetians are multi-part plastics less than three years old.

Anyhow, on to the game…

Quite unusually, I won the scouting, so decided to take the fight to the Byzantines, advancing forward strongly right across the battlefield.

My plan was to use my Knights, supported by infantry, to overwhelm the Byzantine cavalry on the left and right whilst avoiding the scutatoi in the centre.

On the right, my initial charge was the usual mix of positive and negative: one unit of Knights doing its job and disordering the enemy, the other getting disordered themselves and needing to be pulled back to recover. What was slightly different about this game, though, was the fact that I had brought my infantry right up with the Knights, so the foot could intervene and make up for the faltering unit of Knights.

On the left, the Knights did exactly what they were supposed to do: smashing a Byzantine cavalry unit from the table and giving me the opportunity to get my lights around behind the Byzantine line.

With the right flank locked into a combat that seemed to be going nowhere, I decided to now focus on the left, where my initial success was beginning to overstretch the Byzantine line, leaving a gap that I could perhaps exploit.

I had a “spare” unit of Knights on the left which I then sent back into the centre, right into the gap that I mentioned above. This worked very nicely, as I had also brought up my crossbow-armed infantry and was peppering the skutatoi with bolts.

With the skutatoi pinned in place, my Knights were able to turn onto their flank: setting the scene for what promised to be a very painful episode for the Byzantine infantry.