The theme for this year’s Ewelme tournament was Africa and the Middle-East. I could have fielded my usual Venetians Abroad, but as I now had just enough of my new Celts to make up a Galatian army, that was what I decided to field. I even finished them in time to have three practice games prior to the event, but as I lost all three battles (and two of them badly!) I wasn’t feeling too confident of success.

My first game was against Steve’s Tuaregs: an army comprised mostly of lance-armed camelry. I lost the scouting, deployed, and watched as the Arabs came forward.

It’s always bad to surrender the initiative to the enemy, and so it proved here as Steve’s first action of the game was to neatly pick off the Galatian cavalry on the far left of my line with a unit of his camels: their bonus in defence against my horsemen being irrelevant as my chaps were immediately blasted off the table without any chance to fight back.

This set an unfortunate pattern for the game as, certainly for the first few turns, Steve couldn’t miss a hit and I couldn’t save a thing!

The Tuaregs also came forward on my other wing, where my other cavalry there were also soon under huge pressure.

There was a glimmer of hope when my flank march arrived shortly after this, but the Tuareg had so many units that they could spare a couple to bottle up my horsemen, and all that happened was that I eventually lost a few more coins, although we were both quite surprised at how long the Galatian horse ended up lasting!

Steve’s tactics were now obvious: avoid my fanatical warbands and win the game by destroying my vulnerable-to-camels cavalry. This worked very well for the Tuareg, especially given the cards we were pulling, and with both commands of Galatian horse defeated and off the table, I was soon down twelve of my fourteen victory medals.

I did have a little success with my infantry, but nothing to write home about, and it wasn’t long before I was handing over my last two medals for a heavy 31-150 defeat!

Well I have to say that that was a brilliantly executed, textbook victory for Steve, with my only consolation being that I had plenty of time to look at the other games being played!

One game down and three to go, and it looked like being dark clouds over Ewelme for the Galatians!