Another ECW AAR - Baroque Rules

We played our second ECW game using Baroque rules last November (so yes I am a bit late with this AAR!). It was another balanced scenario with two sides of 600 points using the rules army lists as we were introducing George and Al to the rules, we'll get a bit more fancy next time!

Maurice adjudicated, George and I were the Royalists and Alan and Dave were the Parliamentarians. I was busy playing so we only have a handful of pictures from the night!

Hidden deployment was used and surprisingly both sides set up with infantry in their centre and left and all their cavalry on their right, an interesting situation. The picture below shows the royalists on the left  and the Parliamentarians on the right.

The Royalists went ahead with their plan to roll up the Roundheads line and their horse charged forward, interestingly the Parliamentarians decided to abandon their plan and moved their horse across the front of their line to engage the Cavalier's cavalry! One Royalist Horse Unit pushed hard and it can be seen in a position to flank the Parliamentarian infantry!

The Cavalier cavalry where overall (but not totally) successful and began to roll up the Roundheads line!

Overall view of the battlefield point...

...and a close up of the main area of action, the successful Royalist cavalry can be seen massing to the left, there is less Parliamentarian infantry and the Roundhead horsemen can be seen still redeploying to come to grips with their opponents!

Cavaliers face off against the sole Parliamentarian infantry unit to survive the initial Royalist surge!

There was some desultory fire between the armies infantry units in the centre before the Roundhead infantry was trampled under foot!

But the Royalists inflicted enough losses during the cavalry clash once the Roundhead horse redeployed to break the the Parliamentary army which withdrew even though the actual cavalry clash was a very even fight!

A Royalist victory, thanks to their rampant cavalry!

I wonder if the Parliamentarians had kept to their plan and used their cavalry to push the Royalist left whether the result may have been much more interesting, as it was while the Roundhead horse wasted time redeploying the Cavalier horse used the same time to trample many a foot soldier gaining the Royalist a big advantage!

Anyway another good ECW game ensued on the night and it played out in a timely manner! We got the rules pretty well spot on this time and Al (with no initial knowledge of the ECW or the Pike & Shotte period) and George were across them by the end of the night. Overall these rules are really easy to pick up, as mentioned last time the combat system (the same system for firing and melee) takes a bit to get across it but once you do know the process to follow it works well! Units can become brittle and once they are at that stage can break quickly so force management is important! Next time I'll look at the ECW scenarios we have on hand and play one of those for some variety!