Stoke 20th July

The 2008 Stoke Challenge

Just a brief entry this time. The Stoke Challenge was a day of locally popular games organised into a tournament format: not a show as such, but some of the Shows North team were there, and we were flying the 'ancients' flag. Mark Fry (Armati League) and Jonathan Murphy (Stoke) had organised a Triumph of Cavalry 'one off' Armati Doubles event. There are very few Armati doubles events around, though the format has worked well with other rules sets, and multiplayer games 'at home' are commonplace. There was a little bit of jiggling on the day, as a result of which Mark played one of the armies single-handed, and there was an extra (and well-appointed) Roman Army in the mix (a Ghaznavid army having been left behind ... but that's another story ...)...

I was there to play in the Armati, but there was DBMM also, plus, out of our period, FoW and some Wings of War...(with some familiar faces ...)...

In the Armati event, Chris and I used the 'Triumph of Cavalry' period's jack of all trades army, the Abbassid Arabs, and finished a respectable somewhere in the middle - losing to Craddock and Murphy's Romans (which should have been Ghaznavid), and narrowly getting the better of Mark's Romano British (Arthur and all ...)... There were also 2 Tang Chinese armies. There were one or two rules clarifications to resolve during the day (as much because Armati players are too relaxed to have bothered reading the rules properly as resulting from different interpretations between local players and the League players ...) ... but no real complications with the format, or the extra generals and slightly bigger armies.

OK ... if you must know .... Roy Boss and Rodger Williams won using their Late Roman (Eastern) army, followed by (2nd) Mark Craddock and Jonathan Murphy - Late Roman (Western) - and (3rd) Mark Fry - Romano British.
Thanks to the Stoke organisers for a great day's wargaming. Here's some of those Romans.