6th September Kelham Hall

The Autumn shows season kicked off on the first Sunday of September at 'The Other Partizan' - and as far as I'm aware this was the last of the long-running Partizan shows to be hosted at the beautiful if problematic Kelham Hall.

The Society of Ancients joined regular collaborators, the Lance & Longbow Society and the Northampton Battlefields Society and put on a participation game of Bouvines using, for the first time, DBA V3 ...

Regular readers will be familiar with the look of this game - I was asked to have a look at this battle for the forthcoming Great Battles of History scenarios volume being prepared by the DBA test group so as a starting point recycled a lot of my Basic Impetus project.

It was very successful.  One of the features of the battle is the forced march of Ferdinand Count of Flanders up a short cut to Bouvines via Cysoing.  The forced marchers ran into the French rearguard under the Duke of Burgundy in what became the opening phase of the battle.  DBA deals with this deployment from a road particularly well.

(photo by Chris)

We ran the battle through twice, in the morning amongst the usual suspects, in the afternoon as a full 6 command 6 player participation game.  The French narrowly won both games, but as in the historical battle, the outcome was far from certain for some time.

(Emperor Otto IV and his CWg battle standard)

Some elements were somewhat improvised, of course ... the German army standard/Command Waggon was just an appropriate blank with Otto's figure and his banner cart on it ...

(Philip II king of France) 

Elsewhere personality figures were placed behind the elements that represented those specific generals ...

(the Count of Flanders column passes Cysoing)

... and there were plenty of captions to give an indication of which prominent figures were in which contingents ...

(the French left wing under the count of Dreux)

Although the deployments followed what we know of the historical battle (so were  mandatory) the scenario clearly allowed quite a lot of flexibility as the two games developed along differing lines - the second game, producing a generalised melee right across the battlefield probably taking a more historical shape.

(Bouvines 1214: the heat of the action)

The second battle ended spectacularly on the destruction of Otto's 'general's' element  (and therefore, as in 1214, his Imperial Eagle battle standard) ...

I probably do need to look more closely at some of the troop type translations but, by and large, DBA V3 applied out of the box to historical deployments gives a pretty convincing game of the battle.

Some of the other games ...

Simon Chick and associates presented a splendid big medieval wargame, Berne Baby, Berne, featuring massive Swiss pike formations ... 

Wargame Developments entertained numerous volunteers with their Coastal Command participation game ..

(Jerry puts another set of players through their paces ... ) 

And even more sprawling, Simon M hosted a larger than large Dark Age 'To The Strongest' fight

Being The Other Partizan, there was much more still, but commitments on the stand meant I barely got pictures of all the ancient and medieval stuff ... (well mostly medieval it seems) ... 

Wonderful show as always and many thanks to the Newark Irregulars who've been making this show work at Kelham for years and years - we can only hope they enjoy the same success in their new venue next year and enjoy similar, possibly even better, support from exhibitors and enthusiasts - goog luck Partizan!!