My second game at this year’s To The Strongest tournament at Warfare was against Nigel’s Komnenon Byzantines: a tough nut to crack with their combination of Kavallariori lance-armed horse and Varangian Guard veteran shieldwall infantry.

I lost the scouting again, and quickly saw the Byzantines advancing towards me at a rapid rate of knots.

I advanced my left flank out to meet him, getting an advantage as I was able to charge a unit of my Later Knights in against some of his veteran cavalry. Nigel attempted to evade but failed, which meant i would enjoy three strikes (attack, lance and bonus rear) against his hapless horsemen, with my army standard providing me with a back-up should I fail the first one.

Unbelievably, every single one of my attacks failed to hit, something my rudimentary stats skills tell me should only happen approximately 6% of the time.

This was not good, and I soon found myself victim to a general assault across my line. Particularly worrying was the big hole facing the elite Varangian Guard: the only thing between them and my camp were a couple of raw schioppettiere hand gunners, almost as afraid of the weapons they held as the mad vikings’ approach!

Fortunately - very fortunately - my other command of knights on the right flank was doing what they were supposed to do, and had forced back the Byzantine horse, both light and heavy.

This gave them the chance to manouevre onto the flank of the advancing Varangians: something that, much to my surprise, caused a crisis of confidence in the enemy centre, which promptly withdrew back away from my troops.

This was very strange, but also very welcome…the only problem being that we were now almost out of time, which seemed like a very quick game to me, but I wasn’t manning the stop-watch!

I was winning, just, but needed a big win to make up for my huge defeat in game one, but the only way I was going to win this was my either destroying a 3-coin unit such as one of the Varangian Guard, or by taking the Byzantine camp, currently unguarded.

The camp it was then, but it would need three activations for the knights on the far side of the table to reach it. Fortune, however, had decided to compensate me for the failure to hit the enemy horse and, with a triumphant clatter of hooves, the knights rode down the Byzantine camp followers taking the camp and Nigel’s last three coins for an 11-0 victory.

So a bit of a narrow escape: I think I would have been in deep trouble if those Varangians had ignored the knights on their flank and headed straight forward!

But as great game against a fun opponent, so onto game 3 with one loss and one win under the belt.