AAR: Swiss vs 100YW English

This game was just over 3 weeks ago, so some details are a bit sketchy in my mind. We'd agreed to play 800 points on a 5 foot wide table. With hindsight, I wish we'd gone for 3 foot deep as well, rather than 4 foot.

The circle of cloth represents the extent of a maximum size (16 inch diameter) steep hill, with the hill piece representing the location of the ridge. It was slap bang in the middle of my half of the table. The black bit in the bottom right corner of the picture is a piece of "unpassable terrain". These two pieces really made my deployment awkward. I opted for a holding force on my right flank, with the main force on my left, which would (in theory) sweep round the flank and rear of the English. My skirmishers were to advance up the hill and delay the enemy.

Pikes to the right of me....

Pikes to the left....

Skirmishers in the middle (with you).

Alan's longbowmen charged my light foot. One of them got caught and lost the impact, dropping to fragmented.

"Okay lads, wheel to the right and we'll soon be able to flank the much faster moving longbowmen (who aren't affected by the terrain)"

I've just realised that this is the one pic where you can see the light horse on my left flank. At the end of the game I was in position to charge Alan's light foot and light horse with my light horse, which would have seen them evade off the table (unfortunately we ran out of time before I could put that plan into effect).

How on earth can 4 bases of fragmented light foot win the melee against a 6-base BG of medium foot longbowmen with swords?

Whoops! I forgot I was meant to be refusing my right flank pikes and kept advancing towards the English.

After four (or was it five) rounds of combat, those crossbowmen are still holding up the medium foot!

"Oooh, and just HOW MANY rounds did it take you English to kill one base?"

Having completely messed up the plan, there was nothing for it but to charge in with the 12-base pike unit. Hopefully they'll hold up Alan's foot long enough for my main pike force to come around the flank.

After 6 (or 7?) rounds of combat, the crossbowmen finally broke.

"Right lads, with our rate of movement I make it about another 4 turns until we can charge the English flank. Our boys can hold on that long!"

"Errmmm, maybe they can't...."

As it was approaching 10.50, we called it a night. I'd lost badly with 4 BGs broken and having not caused any damage to the English.