The end of the year sees the annual Two The Strongest (2TS) double tournament for To The Strongest.

As friend Peter and I have entered this year competition (going for out hat trick!) we thought we’d better have a bit of a practice, choosing a couple of armies from Peter’s collection: one was one of the later Roman/Bysantine armies, the other was a cataphract/horse-archer army, with Tibetans proxieing in.

I would take the Roman-Byzantine types, Peter the Tibetan types. Each side consisted of two allied armies, each of 100 points.

Unsurprisingly, Peter’s cataphract-types (I’ll call them Tibetans from now on) won the scouting, forcing me to deploy in a long line in order not to be outflanked on either side. This gave Peter the opportunity to try and use one of his favourite tactics (one that I have adopted myself) which is to try and concentrate all your force on one half of an enemy army at a time.

Accordingly, once the game had begun, the enemy facing my right flank turned to their right and sped over to the other side of the table, leaving a lot of my troops apparently facing air! I had, however, been ready for this and, using the Romans’ famed mobility, soon had most of my right hand troops facing left and ‘marching to the sound of the guns’.

The action began with a decent bit of fighting from the Romans: one legionary unit threw its pila like javelins against an enemy heavy cavalry unit, disordering it then moving in with the gladius (or perhaps by now the spatha) to finish them off. This left the legionaries surrounded on three sides, so they sent promptly marched backwards to resume their original position. Now that’s how Romans ought to fight all the time!

By this time, my Romans from the right were beginning to arrive to reinforce my left, and the fighting there became intense.

Fighting of this intensity couldn’t last long and, sure enough, some veteran Roman cavalry managed to destroy the proxie-Tibetans on the far left which, combined with my success elsewhere, took the last victory medals from Peter’s right-hand army. Under the rules of 2TS, this meant that the whole of that army then dispersed, leaving me master of that side of the field.

Well…almost. If you look at the second picture in the gallery below (top right of the four) you’ll see that there are still some Tibetan troops on that side of the field. Peter had managed to find a gap in my line to sneak them through and, in consequence, was able to charge them into the rear of my victorious cavalry (the unit with the ‘ten of spades’ behind it).

This was enough to break them, taking my last victory medal away, so I then lost all my remaining troops from my left hand army leaving, as you can see in the final picture (bottom, left) a very empty left hand side of the table.

A couple of things to note at this point.

Firstly, my Romans had effectively beaten ¾ of the Tibetans with only ½ of their force: a decent achievement especially against such a seasoned player as Peter.

Secondly, because Peter was using proxie figures from several collections mashed together and hadn’t had the time to mark them up properly, when he moved his left hand army to the right, the various commands got very intermingled…to the extent that for this phase of the battle neither of us were sure which of his units belonged to which command, having to guess what belonged where…which is why you’ll see the Tibetan bases now carrying coloured meeples in that final picture: the meeples marking which command each base was from. That meant that although we’re pretty sure we got it right, it’s entirely possible that the units that took my left-hand army off the table should actually have disappeared when his right hand army dispersed…

Anyhoo, on with the action…which took place between the remnants of each sides’ right hand armies.

Both Peter and I had left cavalry on the right hand side of the table, with the Tibetans having an advantage as they had hordes of lights versus much smaller numbers of Roman heavies, and a very open table in which to deploy them.

Unfortunately my luck also turned at this point, and a valiant attempt to take one of the enemy camps and so finish the game in my favour, ended up with my cavalry taking unexpectedly severe damage from the Tibetan lights so losing me my last victory medals on that side just before my infantry could intervene.