Trumpeter in March

With the rush to finish our home renovations, posting (and all miniature activity) has taken a back seat. Renovations are done (yea!) so I'm posting about the Trumpeter game on the first Friday of March.

It was an interesting English Civil War battle with 2mm figures using the Rampant rules engine (in this case Rebels and Patriots with some modifications, instead of the more temporal Pike and Shotte).

The main modification was automatic passing for movement activation. This made keeping formations possible and worked nicely. I'm not entirely sure whether the formations are built into the game and just renamed or whether they were modifications.

The battle started from a historical deployment. You can see more pictures at The Dying Gaul and he has another account of the battle.

 My initial thought was to push on the right and hold up on the left, falling back if necessary. Another Parliamentary commander showed up so I gave him command of the left starting from the artillery.

I had expected the Royalist to really push hard with both cavalry, so I was surprised when that did not happen. I felt a little bad for giving the other guy a command that wasn't really seeing action, but that wasn't what I anticipated when I gave him those troops.

On my right, I managed to win the cavalry battle by 1-2 punching the Royalist horse with one of my reserve units. I then used them to roll up the infantry.

 Here you see the Parliament horse on the right chasing off the Royalist cavalry, before wheeling to roll up the infantry.

Eventually, after doing nothing for a couple of turns, Rupert finally got the Royalist horse moving forward. However, they suffered from dismal activation rolls so no more than one unit was able to attack per turn.

This meant that the lone Parliament cavalry unit was able to fend off the entire Royalist attack, with minor assistance of a dragoon unit.



The end is nigh with the Royalist infantry threatened from the front and rear.

Good fortune was on the Parliament side for even when I lost a battle, I managed to take out the opposing horse through distracting them with a pursuit.