A Reckless Sally…

Mr Ardle came over to indulge in another attempt to take a castle with just 20 minifigs and some additional features.

  1. New rules to allow the besiegers to build a siege wall.
  2. A card was drawn each turn to decide whether or not any reinforcements had arrived.

We didn’t get very far with the siege wall because the knights of the Red Lion were determined to sally forth from the castle in the hope of cutting the besiegers to pieces before they had built their siege wall.

As they passed between the drawbridge towers, one of the mounted knights was felled by a fatal crossbow bolt and the other two reckless noblemen were lost in the skirmishes that ensued.

That is not to say that it was not a close run thing for the besiegers. Since all the peasant labour was tied up in building the siege wall the troops were manning the catapults and were hence unarmed. When the knights of the Order of the Red Lion attacked there was a frantic rush for weapons and at one stage it looked as if the field would be lost.

However, another fatal crossbow bolt felled the Red King. One of the peasants joined the attack on horseback and was able to unhorse and destroy the third nobleman.

With the loss of the mounted knights, the foot soldiers who had survived the counterattack from the Vampire infantry fell back towards the castle and a motley crew of Green Knight infantry, auxiliaries and armed peasants captured the drawbridge towers and then rushed across the moat.

Two knights crossed the drawbridge and entered the castle, but the portcullis was lowered behind them, trapping them within its walls. In the ensuing skirmish within the walls, they were killed, but all that remained of the defenders was a skeleton force to defend the castle.

For their part, the besiegers lacked the equipment and the strength of numbers to break into the castle…

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Early in the game, Mr Ardle manned one of the heavy catapults and scored a (surely accidental) direct hit on the Red Lion crossbowmen manning one of the outer towers. On the other hand, his catapult shots on behalf of the Red Lion defenders resulted in a notable incidence of “friendly fire” as the projectile smashed into the back of a hapless Red Lion foot soldier…

The light catapults were totally ineffective in this scenario. I expect that as more minifigs are pressed into service, the light catapults will be productive of deadlier results…

The rules, in which multiple minifig hand-to-hand attacks against a single defending minifig are decided separately on a 1-1 basis worked well in the scenario. We discussed whether or not the rules should be changed and while Mr Ardle would favour rules to jig the probabilities in favour of multiple attackers, I prefer to keep the rules as simple as possible and allow for the defender to show his valour. As it turns out, even a heavily armoured knight may succumb to multiple attacks by lighter troops or armed peasants.