Crusade at Penarth

One of the first big shows of the season is Crusade, organised by the Penarth Wargames Club in Cardiff.

Getting up at 5am on a Saturday morning is not exactly my idea of fun but on this occasion it was well worth the effort. We took along our newly completed demo game for War & Conquest - The Battle of Ashingdon. In this battle, Cnut of Denmark fought Edmund of Wessex & England for the throne.

Here's a picture of the layout. Apologies for the poor photo quality but like most sports halls the lighting is far from conducive to taking good pictures!


Here's another from behind the Danish lines.



Since W&C is very flexible about basing of characters we decided to mount all of the personalities on slightly larger round bases. This, I think, makes them stand out clearly plus they look more 'heroic'.

Here is Edmund's army drawn up around Ashingdon hill and village. For a rally point we had a Saxon Bishop with attendant monks praying around the "holy stone of St Osferth". To represent the Strategy Intervention Points we used several Hnefatafl (see here) playing pieces - you can just see them to the right of Edmund's unit on the hill.


Here are the Danes. Their rally points were made up of carts, baggage ponies, etc representing all the 'loot' they had accumulated from recent raids and battles.



Steve joined Rob, Jenny and myself to play the battle twice and both times the Danes were true to history and defeated the Saxons and wounded Edmund in to the bargain.


I took a few photos of the battles in progress (plus some of other tables) but alas my camera struggled in the variable light and the photos were mostly rather blurred!. However, Steve has some pics on his excellent blog here.

Many thanks also go to Barbara for looking after us with plenty of sandwiches, cakes and much needed coffee!

Another good show where the game of W&C generated plenty of interest and questions from the show-goers. There was also a good range of traders - so naturally I had to pick up a few "essentials" (mostly Normans for my next W&C army project). A show well worth attending.

By the way ... it's less than 3 weeks to the next Scarab War & Conquest gaming day, so please come along if you can. Details on the Scarab forum here.

Comments