Lard island - 500th post!

The result of mentioning to Lardy Rich that I'd been toying with a set of rules for renaissance skirmishing was an invitation to the Lourdes of the South east, Lard Island.

Straight after me weekend in Nottingham and with my liver already grumbling, I headed down the M1 and was entertained by Mr Clark, who showed my all the wonderful sight of St Albans, mostly followed with me saying, 'Yeah Rich, I used to live here, get the pints in!'

Still I survived the first night and was trusted with many dark and scary secrets about various Lard family members. With the adequate amount of secrecy (methanes.percentages.burdened) I was given the location of Lard island, I proceeded there with haste.

I was treated to a rousing reception to remind me of my homeland and the Glorious Leader herself had baked some shortbread to seal our international meeting!

We (Rich, Nick and I) attempted to play my 'rules' which quickly descended in befuddlement and consternation before we reset and Rich declared 'This is the way I would do it!

We then proceeded to play a couple of games using Rich's Ideas and chopped and changed as we worked through the games.

I had brought two Elizabethan forces, an English one and an Irish one (more of which later). We worked out a simple scenario and put the forces together. 

Each force was made up of groups of 6 figures. The whole force was made up of a variety of arms that would align roughly to a contemporaneous company but with out the pike components. So the English had arquebusiers, musketeers and halberdiers plus officers - a captain, some lieutenants, an ensign and a drummer. The Irish had equivalent officers but had arquebusiers, kern and gallowglass. 

I won't discuss the mechanisms at the moment as obviously early days but they are different to sharp practice and chain of command and will give some interesting subtleties to command choices.

  

We had a couple of really interesting games and the rules played pretty fast and sucked us both into the narrative.

Afterwards we had a good chat about what went well, what we would change and how we could add certain aspects of warfare that we though would relevant. 

The obvious questions came up - 'How would you handle pikes?' and 'What time period are we talking about here?' I'm not going to tell you that we got answers but Pike wouldn't have a huge part in this kind of warfare (small actions rather than large battles) which is roughly equivalent to the end of the Italian Wars. I'd put a rough end to our thinking as being the end of the English Civil Wars (or Wars of the 3 kingdoms if you prefer).

After our chat we retired to make ourselves smell less offensive and set off to frequent all the pubs we missed the night before.

And have a meal obviously....

More pics of the shortbread...

Henry Hyde popped by...

Another pic of the battlefield...

The Kern doing their thing..

The buildings were originally saxon but worked really well.

 A nice action shot

Just to finish off, I actually painted up most of the Irish force especially for the game.

They are mostly Timeline/Hoka-Hey miniatures with some ex-Vendel now Thistle and Rose thrown in for good measure.

I went for a bit more variety in colours than I had used for the Kern and I reckon they worked pretty well.

Well, that's it. That is apparently my 500th post on this funny Old Blog. Thankyou for sticking with me if you've been around since the early days and if you are a recent visitor then welcome along, there's loads of stuff on here that I should really organise in some way.

Cheers.