BtLB 3rd Edition test

On Tuesday last I took the opportunity to test out the Beneath the Lily Banners 3rd edition at Oldmeldrum.

The new version of the rules come in a sumptuous book, lavishly illustrated and photographed which is stuffed full of eye candy of the usual League of Augsburg high standard. Some changes have been made to a few things, probably the most noticeable being that troop types use different dice depending on class -D6, 8's or 10's.

It's been a while since my last game of these rules and my regular opponent was unable to attend so the game was cut back to a very basic cross table encounter. The table was cluttered up a bit with some fields and a mix of troop types fielded to make sure we tried out the full rules. We used my Bavarians and French, since Andy's Danes were absent. Alistair took the French - 4 foot, 2 horse and 1 battalion gun against my 3 foot and 3 Cuirassier.

We walked through the game at a decent enough pace for essential newbies. The downloaded crib pages (6 pages....more than a playsheet!) helped us and after a few turns we kind of got the hang of the dice rolls required. Both of us rolled up plodding generals which didn't help us move into action!

I like the movement in these rules. Troops cannot skip across the field. Marching and manoeuvre is methodical and slow as it should be and both sides found the walls and hedges a distruption, very much as they would have been on a real battlefield.




Attempting to slow up my men, Alistair's French horse galloped across the fields and clearing a wall, charged down on my one of my regiments. However they failed to make contact and took a ragged volley which felled one trooper. They were disrupted but passed their morale and tried to get clear the following turn but took another volley and this time were forced to retire.




On the other flank my Bavarian Cuirassier tried to cut up Alistair's isolated right wing, two regiments charged his battalion gun. The first failing to make the required morale test and the second charging forward but taking enough casualties to force a morale test and a poor throw made that unit retire too.

So we'd managed to test command, movement, charging, morale and firing, with only a couple of causes to actually delve into the book and try to understand the rules. This took a little while and a little discussion before we agreed an interpretation that felt right. Given we'd started too far apart, had been blethering and been slower than usual it was now time to pack up. Overall we both felt it was a decent test and will be giving them another outing next week.