Dragon Rampant Taster

Not being a Historical gamer or massed army gamer I had been ignoring MacSver's odd subtle hint about Lion Rampant (and I can assure you some of his subtle hints can be very odd!). However, when he bought the new fantasy version he got my ear slightly. When I started to read the odd bit about how the force sizes were variable I became more interested. And when I showed him by small already painted medieval army that had been bought years ago from ebay and he told me I had enough for a game, well you can see what happened.

The Empire gunners are targeted for some action.

So I trudged up to MacSver's Battleshed one evening last week with a box file of figures, a new shiny rulebook (which hadn't even been in my ownership for double digit hours) and an anticipated sense of forthcoming confusion.

As you can tell from the blog I am a skirmish level gamer. Moving big groups of figures around big tables completely foxes me. It's only via the ready painted bargain buy that I could ever have enough figures done as well!

MacSver pulled out 3 groups of of GW Empire Army, pretty much matching my ensemble, which represented about half a normal army, but with ranged, melee and mounted forces on the table it was a good intro to the various basics of the system.

Both sets of cavalry suffer from ranged attacks.

I won't go into details about the play, what we managed didn't amount to much by way of report - there was the usual "new ruleset" discussion, page thumbing, and reference calling.

The last knight flees.

The game is, however, not too complex, which suits my dipping in and out style, whilst giving a flexible approach to model recruitment, which I also like. I was left a bit stumped on how to bulk out my army without trying to find (and paint) similar figures. That was until I read MacSver's review post (which is a much more thorough review of the evening) and he labelled my army as "Old School".

The "Old School" aesthetic of my army.

This lit the (low wattage) light bulb above my head. At last an excuse to paint up those old 70's and 80's Ral Partha sculpts in the lead pile. So I've a bit of happy foraging ahead of me...