Although Ian and I normally play DBA v3 we also wander off into other periods. Yesterday we set up an ACW battle using 'Rebels & Patriots'. I have played a number of 'Lion Rampant' type games so have some familiarity with the general scheme of things.
Using a 4' by 3' table and what figures I was able to provide we tried Scenario A: First Clash at Lament Ridge. Our armies had the same composition - 3 x Line Infantry, 1 x Medium Gun and a small Cavalry unit. Standard forces are 24 pts so to give variety we only charged 3 pts for the cavalry units - the extra points could be used elsewhere. Classifications were kept simple so no Confederate Poor Shots or Aggressive.
Some initial questions were: Who goes first? How do we set up terrain? When do we declare our troop types? Rather than spend ages reading the book we used DBA v3 conventions and only declared up/down grades when needed.
I had the Union side but did not set up well. My good shooters were on the extreme left (not where you expect to find the NRA ancestors). The dastardly rebels came on slowly probing my defences. After 10 rounds of fighting the Confederates held the central ridge - honour was 2:5.
So how did the battle mechanics go? We learned that a (rebel) cavalry charge can disintegrate under fire. An amazing number of double sixes were thrown (and a few double ones). The thought also occurred that maybe reducing the number of dice thrown according to losses (rather than 'sudden death' from 12 to 6) might speed up matters!
The game took about 2 hours as we had to spend time looking up things in the book. No doubt with greater familiarity it would go much quicker. Had we stuck to the rebel scenario classifications the battle would have been quite a different affair.
Altogether we decided that it would be worth playing again after I had read the rules more thoroughly.
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With about an hour left we played two games of DBA v3:
(1) Later Hebrew (1.34a) v Early Neo-Babylonians - a 'close run thing' with me loosing 3:4
(2) Bulgars (3.14c) v Early Byzantines (3.65) - I achieved a break-through then threw a one for movement, followed by a 2, then another one. My fighting dice also deserted me - another amazing run of ones. A 4:1 defeat.
So a complete wash out for me - the reverse of our last meeting. Such is life (or war)!
