Lion Rampant - The Fugitive
On Wednesday, I managed to play a game of Lion Rampant (LR) with my lodger, James. He has a Teutonic army originally built for Warhammer Ancient Battles, which he wanted to try in LR. I took a late English army, all on foot, led by Prince Hal.
The scenario we rolled for was 'The Fugitive'. Somewhere amongst the six terrain features on the board was hidden an escapee from a Teuton dungeon. The Templars had to stop the English from finding the fugitive and leaving the board with them. The English had to search each of the terrain features in turn to find the escapee.
Now James' army consisted of two Knight units, mounted serjeants with crossbows, serjeants on foot and a unit of crossbows. Mine consisted of men-at-arms on foot, two expert archers and a unit of expert serjeants on foot. I managed a good start, searching the two wood copses nearest me, while James had issues getting his units to move. Nevertheless, his mounted serjeants and leader's knights made good progress, threatening my units.
The combination of shooting from the mounted crossbows and the knights charging destroyed my serjeants and the knights then charged my one archer unit. A second charge saw both units battered and both fail to rally. Disaster! I was now down to two units. Things weren't looking good.
Meanwhile, Prince Hal and his knights had marched up to the house, only to find it occupied by the enemy. Hal calculated that trying to take the house would be too costly. So he let the enemy take the house and moved instead onto the next nearest woodland - but again the fugitive could still not be found.
Meanwhile, the remaining archers unit searched the wood nearest them, again no luck. James moved up his knights to threaten them, forgetting their wild charge rule. The knights charged into the wood with disastrous consequences (LR punishes units in difficult terrain). The knights retreated, only to be shot at and for them to charge once more (wild charge strikes again!).
Hal finally found the fugitive (played by a Brettonian lady) in the last woodland. Now all he had to do was exit the board, but no! A three was rolled for activation, giving my opponent James one last chance to shoot the unit down. Luckily he didn't roll a single hit (twelve dice and nothing higher than a three, bar two fours). Hal escaped and the game was mine.
It had been a close-run game; luck had played its part. If I had known what scenario I was playing, I would not have taken a foot army, but that is the beauty of Lion Rampant. We had another good fun game.
