Our first Mike Adams Memorial game

Hello to my friends and guests.
This is my first posting since our long time friend and fellow gamer Mike Adams has passed away. We never realized how much Mike has been missed. This untimely loss has left a huge whole in our group that will take a long time to close.
So in memory of Mike we will from time to time play Ancient games in his memory. To this purpose we played the first game yesterday at Bill's house. The cast of characters was Bill and Wendel as the evil Persian empire and me as Alexander the Great. We have been gaming with Mike for over 35 years and thought it fitting for our first game to be just us, hoping that Mike was there in spirit.

So Bill put together a game using Tactica rules that he made some special changes to. Most of these changes were not explained to the poor Alexander player until they unfolded or were stumbled upon.

Here are some pictures of the initial set up.

After the set up was complete came the first surprise. Bill says - Greg roll a die. I do this and get a 5. Ok he says, remove to medium infantry units from your army. So I think to myself will these come in as reinforcements or what? After I grudgingly remove the two units Bill says now roll another die. This time a 4 is rolled. Ok says Bill now remove one cavalry unit. Good grief! The Macedonians are outnumbered as it is and now we are removing all of these needed troops. So again I comply and choose a cavalry unit to remove. Well this damned strange but hay I want to roll dice and kick butt.

The four pictures above show the first move from a couple of angles and each end. Both sides were being aggressive at this point. The Macedonians rushing to close into melee and the Persians trying to get into bow range.

As you can see from above the cavalry is heavily engaged on each flank. In the center the Macedonians start to take some heavy losses to the archers. On the other hand the Macedonians are succeeding in the fight on the left flank and holding their own on the right.

Above you can see that the cavalry on the Macedonian left is making inroads against the Persian right eventually taking out the cavalry and chariots clearing the way for a sweep and turning of the Persian right side. At the same time the Macedonians are still keeping the Persians at bay on their right flank.
But the middle keeps getting shellacked in the middle from those endless swarms of arrows. Time now for another of the unpleasant surprises. Bill has modeled four units of Persian heavy infantry to represent them as they should be. A row of heavy infantry in front with 2 rows or archers behind them. Very pretty. So the new rule he created is that they get to fire over their intervening troops to fire salvos of arrows at the enemy 24 shots for 6's per unit - four units times 24 is 96 dice a turn for 6's. Good grief Mike show some mercy here and flip a die or two!

Well the end is not pretty. Macedonian pike unis are fleeing the field having had enough of the stinging Persian arrows leaving in such numbers that victory was not possible for Alexander this day.
Win to the Persians and congratulations to Wendel and Bill.
In all fairness Bill did try to balance the game by weakening the Persian heavy infantry once the front rank was destroyed and there was a rule that if the Macedonians could kill Darius the Macedonians would win no matter the number of losses they suffered. Sadly this rule was not made clear until after we had called the game. Oh yes, I never did find out why I had to remove those troops.
Here are a couple of pictures of the troops.

 And the cast of players.

So anyway we all had a great time getting together and remembering the fallen as old warriors tend to do along with bemoaning the state of the world and how much better it would be if we ran things.
Mike I hope you enjoyed watching.Laughing at our crude attempts to match your humor and certainly matching your die rolls!
Good gaming,
Greg