Dux Bellorum playtest 0

I've been offered a spot on the playtesting group for "Dux Bellorum", the upcoming Dark Age Britain wargame rules by Dan Mersey to be published in 2012 by Osprey.

The rules are to my mind a revamp of "Glutter of Ravens", which has a lot of period flavour but involve quite a bit of status-tracking for each unit. With "Dux Bellorum", you only need to track one unit stat, which is easily accomplished by the use of a single die per unit.

"Dux Bellorum" utilises single-based units, and a "standard" 32-point army has around 10 units. This means you can easily use your DBA army, or use multiple DBX bases as single units, as I have done here. Impetus players will no doubt love how they can simply port their big bases over.

As you will no doubt notice, these are not Dark Age (367 - 793 AD) troops but Normans from a few centuries down the road; fact is I first got GoR with the intent of using them for a 1066 campaign - I reckon they should be close enough to give the right flavour, with what it being essentially the same peoples from the same region doing essentially the same things...

The battlefield is based on the Battle of Hastings. For the Normans I used the Romano-British list, mainly for the large proportion of Noble Riders it allows. I have chosen to use four DBX stands in a 2 x 2 configuration for each unit (organised on movement trays from Zvezda, which are just the right size), with the exception of close-order foot ("Shieldwall" in "Dux Bellorum"), which I think look good in three ranks. So from foreground to background you see three units of Ordinary Shieldwall, Mounted Skirmishers (the Breton cavalry), the Mounted Companions plus Leader flanked by two units of Noble Riders, then one unit of Bow and one unit of Foot Skirmisher.

I hope to get the Saxons (yes, Anglo-Danish, I know) set up tomorrow.