Neil had time for another game of To The Stongest using his 2mm figures. I’d play the Romans again, Neil would take the Ancient Brits.

Following my previous defeat, I thought I’d try something a bit different this time, and stacked most of my troops on the right intending to overwhelm him there before turning back to destroy the rest of his army.

As the game began, my plan unfolded successfully, and at least a third of his troops ended up effectively out of the game until they could get across the table and back into the action.

Unfortunately things began going wrong shortly after that!

Part of the plan was for my veteran heavy cavalry to punch their way through the British chariots facing them on the far right. This didn’t happen and, in fact, the chariots won the encounter and thus blocked my flanking manoeuvre from happening.

Worse, the veteran Legionaries, advancing forward quickly to engage the warbands facing them, failed to dent the Celts, even with a numerical advantage. There really was something wrong with my troops today!

This, of course, gave Neil the time to bring his “missing” men back across the table and into combat, leading to a most unpleasant situation featuring the Legions being potentially attacked from front and flank…

Although the Roman cavalry had by now managed to dispose of the chariots, the time it had taken them to do so left them trapped in the top right hand corner of the battlefield as the Celtic warbands and Legionary units went at it to their left.

The Legionaries were still fighting very badly indeed, and had been pushed back into a position where the British could start to apply their by-now-superior numbers.

In the end, the British did to the Romans what the Romans had been trying to do to them: the Celtic cavalry arrived from the far reaches of the other side of the table and curled round to threaten to take the Romans in the flank.

So two defeats in a row for the teeny-tiny Romans. Admittedly I’d tried the bold tactic of severely weighting one flank, but that had worked until my troops failed to take advantage of their tactical position just after the beginning of the battle.

Captain Hindsight has pointed out that perhaps I was expecting too much from the Legionaries to quickly defeat the warbands in front of them (I should have anticipated the need for a slow, grinding victory) but the Roman infantry didn’t really achieve anything all game: not one warband was destroyed!

The real culprits, of course, were the veteran Roman cavalry. A pathetic initial performance that they admittedly recovered from, but too late to be useful.

So the manoeuvre phase was a success, but the execution of the combat phase didn’t: something to build on for next time!