Pulse of Battle - Three Kingdoms

Well, following on from the previous post, Matt and I played a Pulse of Battle game using the 28mm Chinese troops. We set up a nice looking little battlefield and divided the miniatures as evenly as we could.

I have only 16 units painted and based up at the time, so we each took eight units. Each of our armies was divided into 2 commands. Because the battle was small and we wanted it to last as long as it possibly could - we're play testing, so, we wanna play - we gave ourselves the maximum number of army morale points: 10 each.

We deployed the forces using a system Brent is working on possibly for PoB and quickly had troops on the table. So, I took some images (the works are just for show, we did not use them).

We just kept the same sequence decks from yesterday, I ended up with the Poor deck, again. We re-rated our leaders and both commanders ended up as D8 Leadership dice.Matt again represented Wei, and I, Wu.

We also decided to play using all of the rules notes for potential adjustments we discussed the night before in the previous game. This was good, because we refined a few notes, tossed some aside and added more notes. The important thing was experiencing stuff so that we could report data to Brent for his consumption and judgement.

Matt opened the festivities with some light horse coming around but overall was content to sit tight to see what I did. Well, with my right anchored on some woods I decided to launch an assault on Matt's right flank. His flank was also anchored in some woods, but behind those woods was an opening that I thought I could slip some light horse through.

So, I crashed as much as I could onto his line to hold them and swung my light horse around!

They made it around the woods and crashed into the rear of an enemy unit while it was also being hit in front! Destroyed that enemy unit but good! Hey, maybe I'd have my revenge on Matt today?!?!?

Well, Matt is a good soldier. He knows how to handle his troops. He was able to salvage a new line to prevent further havoc from my light horse. The troops on his new line were damaged and disordered, but they were there...we'll see what the sequence deck brings us!

 To counter my move, Matt saw an opportunity on my right to launch his light horse on a death ride into my army - first hitting a foot unit on the flank. This unit was rated as a D12 combat die and a D4 defense die - Matt figured he could cause some damage before the unit was destroyed.

Well, his light horse smashed through than unit and through the gap and into my bolt throwers, taking them out too! As my only reserve unit - a really tough unit of halbardiers - moved to counter them, they withdrew to safety. Once again, Matt schooled me on the use of light horse! I think he rode with Genghis Khan in a past life!

To seal the deal, Matt sent his medium horse forward to clean up the scraps. Meanwhile, encouraged by Matt's light horse, I sent my lights back in for more duty but they got swamped and had to pull out with losses.

At one point, I had Matt down to 1 morale point while I had about 6. Now, I was at 0 and he was back to 5. The battle ended soon thereafter on the appearance of the army morale card. I guess I was not going to get my revenge after all! Well played Matt! Good work!

After the action we had several good notes to send to Brent and the satisfaction of having gotten the 28mm Chinese on the table for the first time and had an awesome fight with them!