First Game of Dux Bellorum

Last night Scrivs and myself got together for a game of Dux Bellorum. I've had the rules since they came out and had given them a good read over but not got round to playing them. Then James Morris invited me and Scrivs and one or two other folk to help him demo the game at Salute. So with that in mind Scrivs and I though we better at least try and get a game in before the big day.

Seeing as it was our first time, we decided to use 24 point armies (rather than the standard 32pts) but kept the all important LPs (leadership points) at 6. I took a Sea raiders list and Scrivs regular Saxons. In the end we had the same number of warriors but I had an extra Noble unit and Scrivs two extra units of skirmishers.

Although we'd both read the rules, neither had done so recently, so we rather fumbled and flubbed our way through it. However it was pretty quick to play even under those conditions and I can see that with even a couple more games under our belts it would all go very quickly.
There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing through the rulebooks from both of us, with some bits proving tricky to find, but we got there in the end.
The combat left us scratching our heads for a bit and I'm not sure we quite got it right, but it mostly seemed to work
I think we finished the game with a few reservations about it, but on reflection I thought it was good fun. It will give a quick game, there's not too much complicated to remember and it certainly looked and at times felt like a Dark Age struggle of shieldwalls as the armies pressed against one another.
The meat of the game is clearly in the allocation and use of LPs. Without really understanding that and how to get the best from it we inevitably simply hurled our models at one another - more games will, I'm sure, reveal some depth to be derived from LPs.
The one thing neither of us could quite understand was why anyone would take skirmishers - all they seem to do is cough up LPs with little real benefit that we could see.

I did take a few pictures and the camera seemed to survive under the yellow energy efficient bulbs:

 The lines close

 Warriors prepare to deprive Scrivs of an LP

 Wait for the inevitable charges...

 It kicks off in the centre

 Sea Raiders crash into the flank

 The whole line engaged

The final doom of the Sea Raiders

In the end Scrivs got a win by eliminating my general and then mopping up.

You can read his version of events here

We've got at least one more game to squeeze in before Salute and I'm quite looking forward to playing it on the day.