With a careless loss in the first game, I wanted a chance for revenge, so Peter and I swapped sides, with me now taking the Norse Irish and Peter using my Early Imperial Romans.

As you can see, Peter skulked the Romans into one corner of the table, aiming to concentrate his force against only a proportion of my troops, aiming to beat them soundly before turning to crush the rest.

So I could see what Peter was trying to do: the question was, could I do anything about it!

Battle was joined almost immediately, and you can see that the left wing of my army is currently fighting air! His plan seems to be succeeding!

And given the Roman veteran cavalry were facing my weak right wing, my succeed very quickly indeed!

But I had more success in the centre, with Peter rather pleasingly falling foul of a common bête noire of mine: my cards and veteran legionaries proving fragile as eggs!

Meanwhile, my troops were still rushing over from the left: if I could get them into battle, then there was a good chance of a rare victory.

In they came from the left, and prepared to roll up the Roman line. An easy target was the already-disordered legionaries on the central hill. I had two units that could hit them from the sides, so I was confident they would go, hopefully leading to a cascade of disorders infecting the rest of the Latins!

Unfortunately, the first unit to attack (the bottom one in the picture above) failed to do anything, but I had the other, stronger unit still to go.

Peter, however, then pulled an interpretation of the rules that I had not come across before. I won’t bore you with the details (you can read the 50+ posts on the TTS Facebook group for that!) but suffice to say that Peter’s view was that unit A couldn’t charge the rear of unit B because enemy unit C was too close to let them do that as units D were blocking their path on their other side.

I was there very much to play a game not have an argument, and Peter was the host, so I reluctantly agreed with his way of doing things, therefore failing to break that pesky unit B.

What is the correct interpretation, I hear you ask? Well that’s still not 100% decided. The FB Group was split about 60:40 in my favour, with Simon Miller, the writer of the rules saying that I was 100% right and that unit A could charge unit B, but the To The World’s tournament was played Peter’s way, and I think everyone is waiting for the topic to be finally ruled on in a future Even Stronger rules update.

Anyhow, so back to the game. My units didn’t charge into the rear of the legionaries on the hill, which gave the Romans time to reorganise, react to the threat, and get their line back under control.

With his centre now stabilised, Peter was also then able to use his cavalry to finish off my weak right flank and, despite a last ditch attempt to take the Roman camp, my Norse-Irish surrendered their final victory medal and the game.

So a frustrating “so near and yet so far” loss for the Norse-Irish. Would I have won the game if the crucial rear charge had gone in? I think so…but as Peter was kind enough to remind me: “it’s only a game”!

Always good to do a little preparation for a tournament, so the weekend before it was off to Peter’s house for a couple of warm=up games.

The first game was my Early Imperial Romans versus the Norse-Irish: loads of ‘em, and seemingly all carrying javelins!

The Early Imperial Roman army is tactically very flexible (in that the legionaries can make non-terrain difficult moves with no penalty) but strategically a bit of a one trick pony: get stuck in being the order of the day. I duly moved my line forward, pila and gladii at the ready!

Note my one bit of non-conformist thinking: my cavalry were not deployed on the left wing, but one command in from the left. Let’s see if that works…

My right flank advanced up to the rough ground across the centre of the battlefield, and awaited the barbarian onslaught. Those are my veteran legionaries on the right: they should do the business!

At this point I realised I had made a mistake. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see an empty square next to the right hand legionary unit: a square that just cries out for enemy troops to use it for getting past my line and threaten my flanks and rear.

I had intended to shift my entire line forward and diagonal during the advance to the centre, covering the gap, but had forgotten to do so. I blame Peter’s cunning placement of a mirror at the end of the battlefield. On reflection (see what I did there) I’m not sure why that should make a difference, but I’m sure that it was Peter’s fault not incompetence on my part.

To make matters worse, it was also now obvious that the Norse-Irish had spotted the gap as well, and were heading for it at a rapid rate of knots. Lucky my cavalry weren’t right the way over on the other wing: I could leave a couple of units to deal with the enemy horse, and use my equites to plug the gap.

Unfortunately you’ll also see in the picture above that one of my legionary units has turned to its right to follow the cavalry, and left its flank exposed to the enemy.

I’m not sure why I did this, and can’t remember if it was unlucky cards that left them there, but Peter and the Norse-Irish took full advantage…

They were also taking full advantage of my mistake at the other end of the line:

The Romans are, however, a resilient lot, and whilst I was not able to rescue the situation on the right entirely, I was able to make it a bit better!

Unfortunately (I seem to be using that word a lot) the hole in the centre of my line was not quite so easy to fix. The Norse-Irish poured through it, attacked my flanks, and soon the last of my victory medals was on its way to the other side of the table.