To The World's Strongest Game Four: Early Imperial Romans vs Late Achaemenids
/My fourth and final game at this year’s To The World’s Strongest torunament was against Pete and his Late Achaemenid Persians.
With two losses and one win under their cingula, the Romans were looking for a big win to get at least somewhere near the top ten when the scores were all added up.
Neither side were in the mood for much mucking around, and advanced towards each other at a rapid rate of knots, determined to get stuck in as soon as possible.
Things started off very well indeed, with the large infantry unti you can see on the right of the Persian line being routed by the two legionary units in front of it.
That had been worth a lot of victory medals to the Persians: IIRC it was deep, had a standard, and the general had gone down with the unit so six medals flew my way. Things were going well!
The action then moved to the centre, with massed Persian horse charging my veteran legionaries...
…and getting punished for their presumption!
I was now ten victory medals to zero ahead, needing only two (or it might have been four) more coins to finish the Persians off.
Unfortunately, things then started to go wrong, so horribly wrong!
On the right flank, a unit of Persian guard cavalry plus some lesser horse managed to take out a couple of legionary units (the ones that had beaten the expensive deep unit earlier) due to some foolishness with the cards.
This then enabled the same cavalry to slip around behind my line and hit the disordered centre of my line in the rear, breaking the unit there.
I reached for the coins to give my opponent the two he needed due to the lost unit and found, to my horror, that these were my last two coins. I had lost the game!
But hang on, I hear you cry, you’ve only lost three two-coin units and a two-coin general: how can this be?
Well, the fighting had been fierce, and my Romans had been rallying in between the action…and I had handed over four - yes, four - coins as the ‘penalty’ for a successful rally on an even card. So going into that final rear charge, I had effectively lost ten coins (two two-coin units, a general and four rally=penalty coins) then lost another two, making twelve in all.
From being ten coins up, I had lost the game!
Now I have never liked the coin-for-an-even-card-on-a-successful-rally penalty rule, and now I don’t like it even more! I may have to move to Wales!
But well done to Pete for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat: an excellent example of why you should never give up playing TTS, and how spotting and taking advantage of an opportunity is the key to success. It was a great game to play, even if the result was somewhat of a nasty surprise!
Aftermath
It had been a most enjoyable tournament, despite the fact that my Romans, so successful on other occasions, didn’t rise to the challenge. With three losses and one win, I finished 19th out of 32: not as bad as I had thought it was going to be.
Thanks to Si et al. for organising and hosting, and to all my opponents on the day. Great fun, and I highly recommend a bit of TTS tournament play for anyone who enjoys the game.
