My team finally won the Super Bowl. Still doesn't seem real. . . and I am honestly still basking in it. I was in 6th grade when my family moved to the Kansas City, MO (NOT Kansas) area, the year after the Chiefs won Super Bowl IV against the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings were "our" team then, since we had lived in Minneapolis for a couple years previously - Kindergarten and 1st Grade for me - so we were pulling for the Vikes in IV. I stayed in KC until my mid-thirties, long enough to become a fully-vested member of the Chiefs Nation, before heading back to Minnesota for work. Fifty years is a long time to wait just to have your team in the Super Bowl, let alone win it, in the midst of family and friends, in the burbs of Kansas City, whooping and crying. Congrats, Chiefs! What a fun win!
A couple weeks before, Bruce and I met for our monthly game of DBA 3.0. Bruce provided 2 28mm Classical "Greek" armies: II/22 Alexandrian Macedonian and II/5c Later Hoplite Greek Theban. We played Big Battle format; each army x 3 for 36 elements per army. After dicing I got the Thebans, defending. Not much terrain; a Woods, some gentle hills and ploughed fields, mostly on the flanks. Pretty Classical.
The Macs were Pikes supported by Knights, Cavalry, Auxilia and Psiloi. . .
The Thebans were basically the same, with Spears instead of Pikes, and no Knights. . .
So, it would be a contest of double-depth Pikes against 2 lines of Spears. The Theban army is interesting in that it has a Spear General and an element of double-depth Spears (8Sp), both of which get a +1 in combat in Good Going against Pikes. Number of elements times 3, remember, we're playing Big Battle. Moving into close combat and thereby getting to choose the order of combats could be critical when engaging the Pikes.
The Macedonian mounted threatened my left flank, so I refused and expanded it with my own mounted. Our Auxilia skirmished in the hills on my right flank.
Then I spotted a potential "Gaugamela Moment" on my left flank. . .
. . . and due to very favorable dice roll the Mac General went down fighting!
The loss of the General slowed down the threat on this flank while the Spears in the center pushed into the Pikes and we both fed Cavalry into the skirmish on the opposite flank.
First contact in the center went slightly in the Spears favor, and the subsequent elimination of a couple of Pikes elements, despite the loss of a couple of Spears, led to increased Theban momentum as a couple of holes in the line were exploited. The second line of Spears moved up where needed to plug their own holes. Combats on both flanks also favored the Thebans.
And suddenly, due to their small sizes, both Macedonian flanks were demoralized, and despite the fact that the center large command had taken losses but was still intact, per the rules the demoralization of two commands breaks the army.
Thanks for another fun game, Bruce!
See ya!
