This past Sunday we played a game of Fistful of Lead Bigger Battles at the club. This was our first game with the rules and we made a few mistakes, though nothing major. The game was set in the sixth century A.D. with Byzantines vs Sassanid Persians. The Byzantines had six cavalry units and nine infantry units. The cavalry was bow and javelin armed while the infantry had some units of mixed archers and spear, a couple of units of heavy archers and three units of heavy spear. All were regulars.
The Sassanids had two cataphract units, three units of light bow and spear armed cavalry, three units of spear armed infantry, two units of mixed spear and bow infantry, and five archer units. The cataphracts were regulars, the light cavalry and mixed spear/bow were tribal, and the rest irregulars. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the elephants so the Sassanids were missing one of their better troop types.
During the course of the game the Byzantines had better die throws and broke or eliminated over half the Persian units. The Persians were only able to eliminate two of the Byzantine infantry units. One of them disappeared in spectacular fashion when it engaged a Persian unit and both side eliminated the other with their close combat die rolls.
All units on both sides were eight figures strong. I only took one decent picture during the game. It is posted below with the Byzantines at the top and the Sassanids at the bottom.
2 comments:
I've played quite a bit of FFL Reloaded. In that, each figure uses whatever weapon they have, as befits Old West games. In Big Battles, how do they handle shooting? I see you had units with multiple weapons types.
Did you enjoy the rules, especially given that you were using Ancients?
Depending on weapon type (the rules are designed to cover all periods from ancient to future) one or more dice are thrown per figure. More ones than hits and unit is low on ammo. There are several videos on the Wiley Games Youtube channel with playthroughs of Bigger Battles games. Figures are still armed with the weapon(s) the figure carries. Jaye Wiley has mentioned on his Facebook page that he eventually plans to update the western gunfight and other older rules rules to make them compliant with the Core Rules book. We use the Core Rules for our games.
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