My first game at this year’s Medieval Madness competition at Roll Call was against a very testing opponent: Dillon’s Later Swiss with their veteran, extra-deep and, in some cases, fanatical pike blocks!

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do against these beasts: stay away from the front and attack the flanks seemed to be the best course of action, but unfortunately the table we were on didn’t have a huge amount of terrain in place to slow the Swiss down.

Worse, the Swiss were also mounted infantry, so the game began with his pike blocks already one extra square towards me:

Dillon had outscouted, so took his turn first, with a very good run of cards getting the pike unit in front of my camp (the pike block top left in the picture, above) into contact immediately.

No matter, I had troops either side who could advance forward and swing into his flank. Then I pulled my first card of the game:

This was not good, to say the last, but no need to panic: the pike blocks on the other side of the field hadn’t got to me yet, so a decent run of cards there would help out:

Fortunately this was only a temporary set back, and my troops soon surrounded two of the Swiss pike blocks and began thumping at their flanks:

And meanwhile a unit of Knights had snuck through and taken half the Swiss camp:

This was all well and good, but the pike blocks in the centre were just refusing to die. Flank charge after flank charge, rear charge after rear charge, I just couldn’t get the four hits I needed to kill them, and the Swiss light infantry was doing a good job in distracting my men as well.

You can also see that the Swiss pike block facing my camp has chewed its way through one unit of Venetian Spearmen and is now right up against the camp itself: unfortunately defended only by some raw militia types.

This meant that both my camps soon fell, taking the last of my victory medals with them, for a 5-12 loss.

Not a very good start, but not a disaster, and three more games to go!