Time for a game of For King & Parliament - Eastern Front variant with my Cossacks taking on Dave’s Muscovites.

Ukrainians versus Russians? Nah, would never happen these days!

Unsurprisingly, the Cossacks lost the deployment, so I set up my tabor (wagons) in a long line in the middle of the battlefield, and squashed the rest of my troops in on the flanks!

Muscovites on the left, Cossacks on the right

This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, as Dave promptly ignored most of my troops, instead launching a massive attack with his elite cavalry on the right of my position.

My deployment error was compounded by the fact that, in a moment of madness, I had thought that I might get a Cossack infantry command out from behind the tabor to the left…meaning that as the axis of Dave’s attack unfolded, I also had half my infantry marching away from the schwerpunkt!

On the right, my outnumbered and outclassed Cossack cavalry was very soon swept away by the Muscovite hordes, and I found myself contemplating the possibility that I would be pinned in place, outflanked and rolled up like a winter cloak on the steppe!

[and you wonder why I don’t use AI for my battle reports: that metaphor is courtesy of ChatGPT]

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, my Tatar allies were enthusiastically murdering the Muscovites’ ally Tatars and some traitorous Cossacks…but I had a horrible feeling that this would prove a success too little, too late.

And so it proved!

Although my infantrymen fought bravely, and I managed to get some of the fools who had initially headed left back into the fray, the result at this stage was a foregone conclusion.

Here’s a gallery of the textbook destruction of my main battle line!

In the end, and as a suitable example of how total was my defeat, Dave’s Muscovites took my last coin by taking my artillery with some foreign-trained troops - presumably North Koreans!