Another opportunity to get the Han Chinese onto the table—this time without any proxies (aside from the delightfully anachronistic Boxers standing in for the Tribal Infantry). They faced what promised to be a stern test: a formidable Hoplite Greek army led by a contingent of veteran Spartans.

We deployed opposite one another, but before the first moves were made, friend Steve revealed he'd drawn the Take the High Ground stratagem. He advanced his Spartiates command another two boxes closer to my battle line and suddenly Leonidas and chums were right on top of me, and it looked as though this was going to be a very short—and extremely brutal—battle.

Steve’s plan soon became obvious: hit me hard on my right with the Spartans whilst the rest of his line protected their flanks by advancing in echelon, with the added bonus that the echelon formation would keep his men mostly out of range of my crossbows until the Spartans had finished their initial attack.

My plan, on the other hand, had been to attack his raw troops on my right flank (the ones with a yellow meeple on them in the pictures) and then to shoot crossbows at the rest of the Greeks until they’d had enough, but that had now been superseded by the situation (no plan survives first contact with the Spartans) and I’d now need to think of some other way of stopping the Lacedaemonian space invaders!

I had an overlap on the left, so decided to try and exploit that by getting around the enemy line there, and otherwise to hold the Spartiates with the Tribal Infantry (with three hits, it might take them long enough to be killed for my curl-around to happen) and otherwise to target all his single hit units - lights and a couple of “small” units of Hoplites - on the grounds that he had a lot of them and killing enough of them woudl therefore cost him a major number of coins.

One unit of Tribal Infantry therefore charged diagonally across the unit next to them and managed to kill the small unit of Hoplites at the front of the Spartan spearhead.

My lance-armed cavalry also charged forward diagonally, along with some spearmen and some very confused fighting and manoeuvring broke out.

Initially, the Spartiates and a Hoplite unit tried to take advantage of the supposed lack of manoeuvrability of my Tribal Infantry, who promptly confounded all expectations and danced forward and diagonally to threaten an attack on the unshielded side of the Hoplites. The other Tribal Infantry unit fell back disordered at the same time as my successful cavalry followed up forward, and eventually the situation ended up as shown in the final picture in the gallery below, with my cavalry heading off God knows where and the right hand units of my main infantry line coming in on the Spartiate right flank.

How were they able to do this, I hear you ask: well, my extra numbers on my left, facing Steve’s refused flank, had proved very successful in containing the Greeks, meaning that my infantry in the centre had been free to shoot down the enemy in front of them with their crossbows. This meant that my infantry in the centre were then free to execute a smart right turn and, as we saw above, threaten the flanks of the Spartiate command.

Inceidentally, the coffee stirrers in the pictures below delineate the two separate infantry brigades.

Meanwhile, my attempts to kill the raw command on the Spartiate left had failed miserably but, if you look at the picture below, you’ll see that the enemy troops in the raw command haven’t got anyone to fight, so are effectively wasting space, and although the Tribal Infantry are under some pressure from the Spartans themselves, they and the raw command are almost all the Greeks have left whereas my army is scattered but largely intact.

The end was nigh for the Greeks, and their final coin was lost when some of my crossbowmen, again coming in from the left, opened fire and shot down the Spartans’ mercenary Cretan archers.

I must confess that I’m still not sure quite how I won the game, but I think it boils down to me keeping the elite Spartiates occupied with the Tribal infantry whilst the rest of my army dealt with the rest of the Greeks. Oh, and keeping the raw command of Hoplites occupied by threatening them with a single Chinese heavy chariot (now deceased).

Lots of lessons learnt: which was a good thing as the To The Smallest tournament itself was approaching fast.