The Bretons are coming again

 Well it''s game night again, and since Mr Watts has opined that his Bretons can handle a steppe army, tonight I'm going to use The Wriggly Worms, The Juan Juan.

There seems to be an awful lot of terrain for two cavalry armies, but here I am invading Brittany on a cold winter's morning.

BUA in the centre, two woods, an  orchard, a bog and two gentle hills

His position is pretty tough to attack, so I think the central BUA will be pivotal. I'll concentrate my psiloi there, then shift my forces to concentrate one side or the other after I see his deployment.

Deployment

 Turn 1

Turn one sees Wayne advance his cav around the village, and move his CinC from his extreme left towards the center. I got six pips for my left, so was able to pounce on the cav and still fend of the left hand column. In the center my psiloi scurried for the village.

Turn 2

Wayne got good pips and did an abrupt about turn in the center while opening the action on my left.

Franks. Not totally unexpected

And to no-ones surprise the Franks have turned up from ambush behind the hill on my left

Won the first roll in the light horse lottery, killing an element on a factor 1 vs 2

. Bagged another one in my turn to even up the numbers on that side. Due to lack of pips I  had to advance all my LH towards the BUA, but didn't t kill the cav that I caught.

Turn 3

Franks charge forward. LH from my centre come over to counter

The Franks charged forwards and the light horse fight developed on the left where things started to go bad due to poor pips and poor combat dice. On the other flank a group of Bretons came sneaking round the wood, but were surprised by my ambush that was in the rear edge of the wood

Turn 4

The Franks have plenty of pips, was hoping they'd have a crisis, but they split up, and kill some light horse from my left. Things continue to go badly for that command and it disheartens then breaks. However, good pips with my column from the center allow them to launch a devastating counter attack on the Franks, breaking them. This in turn disheartens the light horse command next to them.

Turn 5

Mostly mopping up, most of the Franks cleared off, and one more was killed to shatter the command. On the right the small  group behind the wood was finished off. On the left Wayne marshalled his forces for a counter attack.

Turn 6

Skirmishing to the left of village., took a loss but could have been worse. Poor pips made it hard to collect the group behind the wood, Mild excitement as one of Wayne's horde killed a psiloi in the village.

Turn 7

A bit broken up on the left, looks like the counter attack is going to be nasty..

... which it was, bringing my central command close to broken. On the plus side I broke the small cavalry command on the left, and began to move forwards with my Cv(S) on the right. The runp of the center withdraws.

Turn 8

More losses on the left combined with some psiloi losses in the village  breaks the center and gives the game to the Bretons 17 - 8

Reflections

A tough game where I broke two commands, but still lost. Wayne played it pretty well, concentrating contingents from several commands in the critical area to mitigate the vagaries of irregular pips. On the other side, his sacrificial raid around the wood kept my rightmost command out of the action, while allowing his opposite command to use its pips in the critical area left of the village.

We continued to experiment with writing the battle up as we went. Writing the text. taking and annotating the photos all works well, but putting all together on the IPad doesn't work well, due to problems with the Blogger software. Might let Wayne put it all together on his laptop next week, while I do photos and notes.

This week we used some new technology; a chair, for the high angle shots