Last Friday, a few of the HAWKs came over to play Look, Sarge, No Charts: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval. This was actually the first time I had played it with historical figures; all my previous play test have been with fantasy figures.
The game involved three legions of Romans versus three “warbands” of Carthaginians. Both sides had some skirmishers and a little cavalry on the flanks.
The game played very well, I thought. Because of changes we’ve made it has a decidedly different feel from the previous three versions of the Look, Sarge rules. I am thinking about adding a charge bonus for melee, however. We haven’t done this in other versions of the rules. (In the Napoleonic version, charging cavalry gets to roll first against non-charging units that are not in square.) As ancients are mostly melee games, with perhaps some thrown spears or pila right before contact, I’m worried that the game will discourage people from charging at each other and could degenerate into folks staring at each other across the table.
Being mostly naked, it was difficult as Carthaginians to defeat the heavily armored Romans unless you could mass several units on one. In this picture you can see that I was deployed in two lines. My first line was in an odd, “refuse the flank” configuration, as I was anticipating an imminent charge by a bunch of Romans. In this version of the rules, units can turn at the beginning of the move and then must move in a straight line. This makes maneuver decidedly more difficult in this period than the other periods covered in this family of rules. Placement of units and keeping a second line of troops becomes very important.
In general, I think these rules are coming along nicely.
