Flintcon 2015: Ow, My Eye!

The battlefield, with the Saxons on Senlac hill to the left.

Hastings. 1066 and all that. Even most non-gamers and non-history buffs have at least heard of it. Heck, even my sister knows the gist of what happened! (Perhaps more incredibly, she has been there and I have not. I must remedy that.)

So when the chance came to play in a Hastings game at Flintcon, I took it. I've always been a little wary of Hastings because it seems so, well, preordained. Not very strategic, if you will. But the sheer spectacle of it secured a position on my gaming bucket list, so there you go.

This game was run by Tod Kershner of Pig Wars fame using a new set of his rules, By the Sword Decided (to be published soon). I joined the left wing of the Saxon army upon Senlac hill, and we were given three minutes to discuss our strategy. Well, that took about 10 seconds. "Stay on the hill?" "Um, yeah, sure."

So with that, about all it took was waiting for the Normans to come to us. And come they did. Poor Harold in the center eventually decided it would be a good idea to go DOWN the hill to meet them. While not our ultimate undoing, it didn't help.

Some of the Saxon defenders

As for my small view of things, I think I went through four different leaders! Die, roll for succession, die. Repeat. One of my two units of fyrd ran pretty quickly, the other took a beating but more or less lingered around. Eventually, good old Jon, this time playing on the Normans and rolling unusually well, engaged Harold and killed him - thus earning a fee copy of the rules. Of course it didn't take much imagination to picture poor Harold with an arrow in his eye.

From there, it was pretty academic. The Normans once again carried the day, and the history of Britain was secure.

(I took more photos than this, but they were pretty fuzzy. So that's that.)

My Saxons, heroically holding the line against the Norman invaders. For a little while, at least.