Samurai and Elephants

 Andy and I had a Ronin skirmish game at the beginning of the week.

A simple scenario with two Buntai staging an exhibition fight for the Hatamoto.

James took a Samurai onto the bridge over the koi pond for a dramatic Kurasawa-style duel...

...which Andy declined, instead ganging up on the rest of James' Samurai with the advantage of an extra man.  A short and bloody battle ensued, and James could never recover from the initial loss.

We learned a few things: 

• Andy doesn't care for the code of honour that all Samurai follow ;-) 
• Once you're a man down, you need extraordinary lucky dice rolls to turn it around
• Especially when the figures all have the same stats

So the key thing for next time is to create Buntai with more variety in their Combat Points, adding ranged weapons, and to explore the addition of Ronin skills.  I've recently discovered a Facebook group for the Ronin ruleset so I hope to get a flavour of how others are putting their Buntai together for next time.

We also had a swift game of DBA - James as Alexander vs Andy's Indians.

There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to start with but the tide turned when I did a sequence of attacks not realising that the drifting apart wing of Andy's mounted troops were supposed to be still aligned.  This resulted in a loss from outflanking, which Andy punched through and turned onto the side of the pikes, with inevitably deathly consequences for Alexander's army.