The First Battle of St. Albans

 Today I had the pleasure of helping play test a rank and flank game written by one of our Game Kastle Fremont players called “With Bronze Helm and Steel Sword”. It is a game designed for combat from the ancient period to the age of pike and shot warfare. The scenario we played was the First Battle of St. Albans, the opening battle of the War of the Roses, where Yorkist tried to capture the mad King Henry VI from his Lancastrian escort.

I played on the Yorkist side and took control of Richard Neville the Elder, Earl of Salisbury, and his forces. Our objective was to assault the town, detain King Henry VI, and escort him off our side of the table, Historically, the King locked himself in the cathedral of St. Albans but in our scenario he would move 2d6 in a random direction every turn, which made things a bit easier on us.

The game had activation rules that drew heavily from Bolt Action with both sides activating based on the drawing of chits, which is something I typically like more than “I Go You Go” rules, although they do have a drawback in competitive play as people like to optimize their army lists to have as many chits possible so that they’d have more activations and a higher chance at activating, this however was not the case here as both sides had equally sized forces.

Me and Keith had the largest forces so we faced off against the Lancastrians in the center and left of the table, which was where they had placed most of their units. Matt took the right of the table in order to take their relatively undefended flank. 

Matt only had 1 unit of men at arms but they were an elite unit and the toughest on the table. He moved his battle as far as he could in order to put pressure on the Lancastrians and force them to reorganize their men to hold their flank. This succeeded in taking some pressure off of Keith and I.

Historically the Lancastrians defended the town and manned the barricades, but Paul, Alex and Hanna chose to sally forth with ranged and skirmish units. This helped our side a bit as it meant we did not need to attack a defended town.

Realistically, ranged units of this era were not known for entirely wiping out units, and it was the authors intent to replicate that with his rules. But we quickly learned that that was not the case. Ranged units were actually very powerful and we learned that the hard way early on when our pikemen and billmen took heavy casualties from arrow, bolt, and handgun fire. In my case, I lost an entire unit of billmen to longbow fire. On the left side of the table, the battle turned into a Napoleonic gun line game with my archers and hand gunners shooting against Alex and Hannah’s archers and crossbow men.

On the right, Keith and Matt engaged in a swirling melee against Paul, with multiple flank charges going off.

Meanwhile the Mad King kept moving towards the Yorkist side of the table, against the wishes of the Lancastrians.

After several turns of shooting on the left, and melee on the right, the Yorkists managed to rout most of the Lancastrians opposing them. Most of the Yorkist ranged units were destroyed, significantly weakened, or routing, which allowed Keith and I to position our ranged units just outside of charge range and pepper the Lancastrian men at arms with longbows and hand guns.

On the right, despite early successes, Keith and Matt became tied down trying to dislodge 1 unit of Paul’s men at arms who had taken position in a tavern. Three units attempted to kick them out of the building to no avail.

However at this point of the battle, most of the Lancastrian forces were either routing, down to half or quarter strength or in a disadvantageous position where they would just be shot at with no good opportunities to advance. They decided to retire from the field and the Yorkists would capture the King this day. 

This was just a play test for the rules and I hope Alex learned a lot from it. I did like the system as they were easy to learn, very fast play and our game was filled with a lot of funny moments. Certain things I would have changed were the lethality of ranged weapons and the resolution of combat inside of a building, things that I believe Alex agreed with. And the rules as they are right now seem like they’d work well for gun line battles, so Alex has got a good framework if he ever start writing a Napoleonic game 😂

Next month I will be running a Vietnam wargame using Chain of Command, and I’m eagerly looking forward to it, until then, folks!