TTS AAR: Welsh Open, Game 1: Venetians vs Ayyubid
/This weekend just gone I started off the 2024 To The Strongest competition season with the Welsh Open in Cardiff.
This was held at Firestorm Games: an excellent venue with a cafe, toilets, plenty of light, plenty of parking and plenty of shopping opportunities! Highly recommended to all wargamers if you happen to be in the area.
Last year on the ‘circuit’ I exclusively used my only 28mm army: the Early Imperial Romans. I fancied a change this year, so over Christmas invested in a Later Italian Condotteri army, specifically designed (and sort-of painted up) as Venetians. The Welsh Open would its first airing and I was looking forward to see what it could do, even if I was feeling a little “jaded” after going out into Cardiff for a curry the night before!
My first opponent was Mark and his Ayyubid Egyptians.
The battle started well, with my Venetians outscouting and moving forward to dominate the cengtre of the field. On the right flank, a unit of my Later Knights dashed some Ayyubid heavy cavalry from the table only to have the Someone has Blundered strategem card played on me: not only was my glorious victory annulled, but my Knights decided that they’d heard the dinner bell and ended up facing away from their opponents just asking to be charged up the backside!
“Someone has Blundered” on the right
Melee on the left
Honours even in the centre
The advantage now swung towards the Ayyubids for a bit (my Later Knights seemed to have decided to wear cardboard rather than steel armour!) until a lucky charge knocked back the Ayyubid Al-Halqa al-Khassa veteran cavalry and killed Salah-ad-Din himself!
This caused the momentum to swing back towards the Venetians, and the game now teetered on a knife edge with both sides down to only a few coins left.
The Ayyubid’s salute their fallen leader!
At this point I should mention that Mark and I both forgot that as a ‘great leader’ Salah-ad-Din should have had another save which may have resulted in him being wounded rather than killed.
But forget we did, and a final charge from either the pike of the Condotteri Knights broke the ayyubid morale and the game was mine.
My final charge goes in…
The final result was a 12-8 victory to the Venetians, so a win by the skin of our teeth.
My Later Knights, although very effective when charging forward, proved very vulnerable to enemy action: as you’ll see in the picture above, I only had two of five left at the end of the game.
Mark made superb use of his Someone has Blundered strategem, completely reversing my initial success and firmly taking the initiative, and if it wasn’t for Salah-ad-Din’s untimely demise, things could have been very different.
So one win and on to the next game.
