On The Table - Concluded

REG conceded before we started the sixth turn, which brought up an interesting point.

His Egyptians counted as exhausted under the rules, meaning they could take no offensive action.

But my Assyrians were very close to becoming exhausted, and might well have been before turn six was completed.

The rules in the Portable Wargame state that a battle ends when both sides are exhausted, but the rules do not state how the winner is then decided.

Should it be the army that has lost fewer strength points? Or should it be the army that has more strength points remaining? Or should the winner be decided in some other way?

Reg said that, whatever the rules stated, he felt I had scored a moral victory, and I was happy to accept that!

More importantly, neither of us was satisfied with the experience.

The rules seemed bland, with little or no difference between the various units, whatever their weapons, whatever their formation, etc.

We were also unhappy with some of the basic rules, eg archers have a shooting range of three hexes, only one hex more than troops armed with javelins.

And surely there should be a difference between mounted bowmen and those on foot?

Actually  there is a solution to this, which starts in the same way as my adjustments for portable Franco-Prussian wargame rules.

The first step is to take away the ability of units to melee when in adjacent hexes. Instead a melee should occur when a unit attempts to enter a hex occupied by an enemy unit.

The throwing range of javelins can then be reduced to one hex, and that of mounted archers, whether on horseback or in a chariot, to two hexes.

There are other adjustments I plan to make before playing a similar game again, mainly by borrowing fairly heavily from Neil Thomas's biblical rules in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming.

I should stress we were far from being completely unhappy with the Portable Wargame rules.

We felt they helped make a fine spectacle on the tabletop, and played quickly, with fighting not dragging on far too long, as it can in A&MW.

And we particularly liked having to dice at the start of each turn to see who moved first, which added to a battle's tension and uncertainty. 

The bottom line is we enjoyed ourselves - but not as much as usual when wargaming.

*One thing we got wrong: units that move and shoot in the same turn suffer a movement penalty (in addition to not shooting as well as stationary units, which gain a +1 modifier).