It Ends in the Push of Pike

Scourge of Princes.

Back in July, Chris introduced me to the Scourge of Princes rules for battles in the Renaissance, from the late 15th through the mid-17th centuries. You can find out about it HERE.

I do like these rules. They play reasonably quickly and give you some nice elements of command friction and leans more into the abstraction side of things rather then the more detailed/granular rules out there. I was The next part of this is that I was able to pull out my rather old English Civil War (yeh yeh, War of Three Kingdoms… will always by ECW to me). Anyway dis some plotting and realised that I could do some easy rebasing and have a credible SoP army. Exciting!

I originally painted these up in the late 80’s. They have been following me about ever since. Will admit it is oddly emotional to see them again ready to charge at the dice once again.

I also had a few units of unpainted minis that I could add to the list. I also used this as an opportunity to double up on the amount of flags that the units of foote had. So I now had enough units to field a solid 200 point (ducats in SoP) army.

In the meantime Chris was also madly painting up even more amies, in this case an Imperial army from the Holy Roman Empire.

The game was on.

The Armies Gather

At the start of Scourge of Princes, both players choise a hand of set up cards and then play them in order. These cards guide the set up. Who puts the terrain down, what units are on the table first and a few other cards that enable you to either delay the deployment of an opposing unit, and/or give on of your units an extra move at the start.

In setting up we placed two wooded areas back and close to our start line. This was probably a big mistake, as the woods would constrict our deployment...

So given the position of the woods and how they would slow down our initial movement we divided our forces into three groups. 

On the right was four regiments of horse and the three regiments of veteran foote.  My initial idea was to use this as our main striking force to just smash the Impirialist flank. 

In the centre was the bulk of our foote.

And on the left was two regiments of horse and two of foote. We had advanced a single regiment of dragoons forward of our main line.

The Imperial army was not so constrained fby any woods or other annoying features and were able to deploy in a solid wall of pike and shotte. 

The Imperial army had a lot of guns, this was a bit of a worry...They were also able to push forward their dragoons and occupy a small copse of trees to anchor the flack. 

Opposing our main body of horse on the right was their cavalry.

Sound the Advance!

Now one of the main mechanics of Scourge of Princes is 'Momentum'. At the start of your turn you roll dice for the number of units you have and for every roll 2 or more you get a point on Momentum. You then spend these points on moving your units. Complicated moves, such as going through woods, charges etc cost each unit more of these Momentum points. So, the first thing you have is that you simply cannot do all the things all the time...

The Imperial Army moved first and push forward in the centre, cavalry on our right and moved an extra unit of dragoons to the copse on our left. 

Then it was our turn and a general lack of Momentum points meant we had to make some hard decisions. So leaving our main body standing we advanced in the centre and left. 

Fight for the Copse

So over on our left, we advanced both the foote and horse. The copse formed an anchored to the Imperial line and was occupied by two regiments of dragoons. There were then supported buy some light cavalry. 

Our dragoons deployed in front of the copse and begun trading musketry with its defenders. 
We then got a bit distracted and push forward with our cavalry, the Lifguard charging forward and scattering the opposing light cavalry. 

The way was open into the rear of the Imperial line and to add to the temptation, a large battery of artillery. Again the hose charged forward and destroyed two of the guns. But each time a unit changes, it gets more worn down. Our hose was also receiving fire from the dragoons in the copse and a regiment of foote that had to be rapidly redeployed to met our flanking move.

Eventually our cavalry regiments were worn down and broken. 

Meanwhile the Imperials had moved there regiments of foote and started trading fire with our two regiments. The Imperial musketry was devastating and one of our regiments was also broken. The Imperial units were also getting worn down and things on this side of the battle field ended in a stalemate with a advantage to the Imperials. 

The Centre

 IN the centre we moved the infantry forward. The two woods forced the lines to be ranked up and this took a while, and a lot of Momentum points to shake out into a decent battle line. 

In the mean time, the Imperial infantry were able to advance and bring their superior fire power to bare. 

Fairly soon our yellow regiment had been hammered and broke. But damage was being returned and all the units in this area were taking damage. The Imperials moved in some of their Free Company light infantry to try to take some of the musketry. Soon, we knew that staying in a musketry duel would go badly for us, we pushed forward to go to push of pike. but before the units could clash, the game came to and end. 

The Right

We had gotten overly focused on the actions on the left and centre. This meant that we just did not have the Momentum Points to get our force on the right moving forward. With the fight on the left winding down, Momentum were becoming available and it was time to get our main attack rolling. 

The foote advanced and were met by the Imperial light infantry. Our blue regiment charged, try to clear them out of the way, but the Imperials held firm and our charge was thrown back. Again we charged and again we were beaten back. I think we lost a unit here, but not totally sure.   

                

 Next to this action, the red regiment surged forward and scattered the lift infantry in from of them. The Imperial forces rapidly tried to wheel additional units to close the gap in the line. 

As the infantry fights escalated, the hose were finally ordered to charge! The first charge on the far right was checked and our regiment of horse was thrown back. Then another regiment of horse slammed into the Imperial Cuirassiers (who had been worn down buy our artillery) who scattered to the rear. 

Before we could regroup. the Imperials charged and scattered one of our regiments of horse. 

This was the final death knell to our army, we had lost too many of our key units and the army morale was broken.

Well that was a very enjoyable game indeed. 

We made some major mistakes and there are things to learn. Thanks to everyone involved!

Now to start planning the rematch!