Monday, July 27, 2009

Stoke, July 26th

The 2009 Stoke Challenge
A very fortunate weekend in many respects - a fantastic sunny Saturday at the Festival of History ... and an excellent rainy Sunday indoors at the Stoke Challenge ... Actually the M6 was horrible, but I'd much rather that than the weather be the other way round over the two days ...

The Stoke Challenge is the club's annual invitation wargames event, and this year again featured the two ancients challenges plus the planes and WW2 stuff. A well attended DBMM singles event, and the light-hearted 100 point Armati Doubles event.


I was up there playing Armati (well ancients, A2 Armati, anyway...) for the first time since Glasgow last year. The Stoke club were able to put up three home teams, and the Armati League took up the challenge with three teams of visitors. The six Triumph of Cavalry armies fielded were two Tang Chinese, an Andalusian, an Abbassid Arab, an Arab Conquest and a Sassanid Persian.

(Ghazi Warband from Chris Ager's Arab armies)

After two rounds of entertaining and quite tight battles, the Armati League teams mostly had won, the Stoke teams mostly not. My (Arab Conquest) team's first game went down to the last set of combats (both armies broke on 7 key unit losses, and we started the last turn with us -5, them -6 ... the crucial combat was between tired camels and tired Andalusian lancers - not panicked, both on FV4 and both already on 2 BP: so if the lancers lost, the game was over, if they won, the breaks were levelled and some more 50/50s would follow ... our camels shaded it) ... very close.

(lovely figures from the triumphant Abbassid army)

Mark's prize-giving mostly seemed to be about dead generals and stuff like that, but for what its worth, apparently the highest scoring team was the visitors' Roy Boss/Rodger Williams combo. Well done to them and their Abbassids.


Brian Pierpoint won the DBMM event, with Jim Gibson coming second. There is a full listing of the DBMM results here ....

Many thanks to the Stoke club and to the individual umpire/organisers: great job.

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