Saturday, 18 February 2023

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Ancients (Marathon, 490BC)

 

A slight change of plan last night. T was going to come over to my place for your next run at Napoleon 1806, but the intrusion of Life Outside Games intervened, so I went to his place instead for a game of Commands and Colors: Ancients (GMT, 2006). We’ve played a lot of C&C: Napoleonics (GMT, 2010) over a lot of years, but Not nearly as much of C&C: Ancients, even though we both have the base game and several supplements. And everything we have played up to now has been Romans vs the rest of the world (or each other). T has been listening to a podcast about the Peloponnesian War of late, and we have never played a scenario from the first expansion, Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT, 2006), so a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like a good time to break it out. Which we did, only to find that, in all the time it has sat on the shelf in T’s study, he has never got around to stickering-up the blocks. So that’s how we spent that night.

Last night was our first actual game using the expansion, so we started with the first scenario in the set, the battle of Marathon, 490BC. Remarkably, the card distribution led to my Greek heavy infantry being placed to turn both flanks of the Persian forces, after taking a hammering in my centre, with the result of a Greek win (six victory banners to the Persians four).

It’s a testament to the adaptability of the C&C system and the thought and research that has gone into the scenario design that, using virtually the same components as the base game (new block tokens, but essentially the same types of units), the experience of fighting as Greeks against Persians feels subtly different to fighting with Roman forces. I can’t quite put my finger on it; I suspect it may take a few more scenarios to tease it out.



Persian commander T considers his options just before the hammer-fall (C&C:A-G&EK, Marathon, BC490.


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