Hello my old friend…

My local Wednesday-night club has had a bit of an ancients revival, spurred on by Warlord Games' SPQR. Several units of Romans and Celts have been painted and games played. So many have been painted in fact, there is talk of a club campaign based in the Imperial Roman period, and talk of larger scale battles.

We now have a good number of ancient players at the South Devon Games Club - Ben, James, Chris, Mal and myself - with the possibility of others joining in. That is a lot of people and a lot of growing armies, giving the potential for very large encounters. So what rules set should we use for our big battles? Should we stick to just one or use several? The answer is to try them out and see what people like. Hail Caesar and Swordpoint are obvious candidates but first on the list was my old friend... Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB).

I haven't played a game of WAB in several years. Despite being a little rusty, it all returned to me - the turn sequence, what specific weapons do (such as the odd rapid fire slings at short range) and all those little special rules (drilled, warband, etc). James and I are veteran players, so what I didn't remember rules wise, he did. The basic book contains army lists for the Imperial Romans and Celts, just what we wanted.

The game was great fun. Ben had played previous editions of Warhammer Fantasy, so picked up the mechanisms in the game quickly. The game does have its limitations, such as the ease of command and control and some imbalance in the army lists. The original Roman and Celt lists, however, are fairly well matched. All the photos in this blog were taken by Chris' daughter.

WAB will be the first of several games we'll try. It proved very popular, with two players scouting after the game on Ebay for copies of the original rulebook. So there will probably be more games of WAB in our future. The game may be out of print, but it is not forgotten and not unloved. I've missed playing it.