Summing Up Our Biblical Dry Run

IT was a shame, at least from the viewpoint of my winning chances, that we ran out of time and were unable to finish the game.

Under Neil Thomas's rules victory goes to the player who reduces the opponent's army to two units (from a starting total of eight).

After 12 turns the Hebrews were down to four units, while my Egyptians still had six units, so in terms of units destroyed I was leading 4-2.

The difference in bases was also stark, in that my army ended with 14, against the Hebrews' six.

There can be little doubt that, given a few more turns, the Egyptians would have won.

In Thomas's book, the refight given for the biblical section of the Ancient & Medieval Wargaming rules took 15 turns to resolve.

However, his refight of Ipsus in the classical section was over in eight turns, as was Mount Badon under the dark-age rules, although the medieval refight of Agincourt lasted 15 turns.

I guess an average of 10.5 turns is fair enough, although in our biblical battle we both felt some of the melees rather dragged on.

We also agreed that using green beads as hit markers makes for easy totting up, but spoils the table top - almost as badly as in photos of wargames with dice and rulers clearly visible among the troops.

I will need to devise something less obtrusive if we use the rules again, which we almost certainly will.

Generally speaking, our consensus was that they made for a reasonable game, with more problems caused by bad generalship than by bad rules.

Whether they will be our main set for refighting battles from the Bible remains to be seen.