My first game-proper at this year’s Britcon tournament was against Ian Ralph and his Normans. I hadn’t played Ian before, so was looking forward to our encounter. As the Normans are mostly cavalry, I loaded the table in front of my infantry with hills and tried to keep the wings open for my knights to try for his flanks: this worked on the right, but not the left.

My plan was to hold the centre with my infantry on the hills and to attack hard on the right, hoping that my heavier knights would smash through their Norman opposition and then be able to turn left and run riot. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do on the left: lots of shieldwall troops in front of my other knights and some difficult terrain as well.

The game began with the Norman horse coming forward hard, with poor cards on my part meaning that the hail of missile fire from my infantry that I thought might slow the enemy down a bit down doing nothing but use up a lot of ammunition for no effect!

At the same time, with the Norman infantry on my left showing no sign of advancing - only drifting further away from me to their left - I sent my knights forward to see what mischief they could get up to. I still had no clear idea what I was going to do with them, and poor cards soon saw the command split.

Meanwhile on the right, with my infantry doing nothing, my knights were now outnumbered tw0-to-one. No matter: my knights are tough, and this is what you pay the points for.

Unfortunately it was another cardboard armour day, with my veteran later knights, and army standard, being smashed from the field in the first charge!

This was not good, and my only consolation was the fact that three units of Norman horse then spent far too long trying to mop up my light troops on that flank: something they eventually mostly achieved, leaving me down a total of nine coins, but giving me time to try for a desperate counter-attack in the centre.

The Normans then got a bit overenthusiastic: attacking my infantry in the centre despite my troops’ defensive positions. The enemy cavalry bounced off my right hand infantry command and then withdrew to reorganise, hotly pursued by my troops who recognised a good opportunity to gain the initiative.

By this time, I was also managing to bring my other infantry command in from the left, followed by my other knights, as the Norman shieldwall infantry that could have blocked them had retreated back into their camp and let them go by. Admittedly the enemy infantry then came forward again to threaten the flanks of one unit of knights, but that was a problem for the following turn!

My later knights in the centre did a fantastic job of knocking out the retreating Norman horse top right in the picture above, running over some light infantry whilst doing so (both the lights and the Norman horse failed to evade), and ended up blocking the path of the other retreating Norman horse coming in from their right. This left them vulnerable to a flank charge from the other retreating Norman horse, but I hoped that my pursuing infantry would sort the situation.

Unfortunately, although my spearmen showed a remarkable turn of speed, the effort left them too exhausted to lift their weapons, and it all looked a bit unfortunate for my later knights. My Alabardiers next door hadn’t helped: they also failed to finish the Normans in front of them off: to my mind an easy task despite their disorder!

The disordered Norman horsemen in the centre of the field then had to make a fatal decision: charge my later knights in the flank or turn and face the spearmen behind them. As the disordered archers top right in the picture above had managed to turn to face my knights, they chose to about-face and try and run over my infantry.

This didn’t work and, next turn, my later knights crashed through the unfortunate archers giving me Ian’s last two coins and the game.

That had been a very close run game: 13-9 in terms of coins, although the tournament scoring system we use came out 140-69 in my favour. Ironically, I think it was the initial Norman success on my left that gave me the win: although I had one command completely wiped out, I was then able to contain and thencome in on the flank of the main Norman attack.

A close run thing for the Venetians, and my thanks to Ian for a great game!