EDITOR'S NOTE. Tom Elsworth, who is one of the "savviest" of wargamers, offers the short article below on one of his WRG Ancients battles. PWers who had the privilege of facing Tom during his tour in the USA ( he's now in Oxford) will remember that regardless of the scenario, regardless of the rules, regardless of the odds, Tom usually emerged on top when the battle was over. Some members of PW may know of a British organisation, The Society of Ancients, which has quite a few overseas members. It is a society for all those whose interest lies in ancient and medieval history and wargaming and publishes an excellent bimonthly magazine, SLINGSHOT. One of the endeavors of the Society is to run a wargames competition among its members producing, eventually a national champion. Games take place at member's clubs with the results being sent in to an organiser who assesses their value on the basis of the previous standing of the two players. There follows the description of one such game played at the Oxford Polytechnic Wargames Club in February. My Roman army of the Civil Wars was challenged by a marauding band of Vikings. You will note the cleverness of this challenge ... as it was a "marauding band", it would consist largely of well armed, heavily armored, high quality ferocious Huscarles, not the motley collection one would face if the national array of farmer-militia had been called out. There would even be a high proportion of foaming-at-the-mouth, shield biting berserkers in their ranks! A most serious matter... although the Roman army was generally of high calibre and well equipped, it could not match the Vikings in numbers and might be simply overcome by the ferocious onslaught of these highly trained warriors. Caesar's brain, however, was not long in encompassing the solution to his problem. The answer was to make use of his one remaining advantage -- the Roman superior training in drill and battlefield mobility. He decided to attack "en echelon"... and throw the greater part of his force against one of the enemy flanks while refusing to meet in the centre and other flank. Having defeated the attacked flank, he would sweep up the remaining Vikings diagonally from their flank. If the Vikings tried to turn their unengaged flank to surround the attacking Romans, then the Roman light forces would sweep to the Viking rear. The diagrams below should convey Caesar's plan. Surprisingly enough, what actually happened was not too dissimilar from what was planned as the following battle maps show. The battle was fought using 1000 Point armies to WRG 6th Edition on a table 5 feet by 4 feet without any terrain. EDITOR'S NOTE ... Although we're not sure how he did its Tom shows in Figure 3 that Viking Unit G is routing along with the rest of the Norsemen. Yet Viking Unit G, says the order-of-battle table, consists of 10 sturdy, husky, maniacal, suicidal hopped-up Berserkers ... how they were sent routing would appear to be a story in itself.  Back to PW Review December 1981 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1981 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com