Oathmark! First blood.

This morning I tried Oathmark for the first time, after frantically reading the rules. I played a small Pitched Battle game to get the feeling to the rules, with a marauder party against the civilised cities militia in a 4x4 feet board.

The raiders were two units of twenty soldiers with one champion plus one unit of Orc's wolves for 651 points, whereas the milita consisted of two units of twenty spears and one unit of ten archers for 640 points.

 Civilized cities to the left and marauders to the right already deployed for battle.

Situation of troops after the first turn, using the optional rule "Forward Unto Battle" in wich you move without rolling for activation to speed up the game.

Second turn and you can see in the picture the effect of archers on the left flank, firing over a friendly unit and killing three marauders with one salvo. The Wolves sneaking on the right flank and behind the hill.

Another four casualties from shooting (I had forgotten about shielding). "Romans" waiting in the hill.

Marauders leaded by a champion charged uphill but were rejected.

On the other flank spears charged the already decimated barbarian unit. It looked civilised cities were goint to win the day. The red marker is for disordered units.

I was keeping the wolves to attack the archers, but after seeing how the main unit of marauders had been repelled, I decided to charge them on their flank.

Spears cancelled Wolves charge bonus with their abitlity "Brace". After melee both units were disordered.

I found out that disordered units cannot charge, so I rallied the wolves and moved them past the spears, threatening the archer's flank.

But they shot first and killed two wolves, and then they activated first in the following turn and pivoted and fired again, killing three more. They finished the last ones in melee when the wolves charged them, at the cost of one archer.

After another round of slaughtering melee combat, the main marauder unit fell back and spent two consecutive turns failing its activation and seeing how his allied were exterminated.

They finally charged the spears and routed them, whereas the other spear unit on the right killed all the marauders.

As it was the first game and I was getting used to the rules, I decided to play up to the bitter end. So the two last surviving units rallied, turned around and faced each other for the last stand.

Marauders had one full rank and a champion whereas civilized cities had two full ranks, so in my view anyone could win. But after two turns of fierce fighting, the civilised and more disciplined forces were favoured by the dice gods and won the day, being the barbarians massacred up to the last men.

I am just a lazy gamer so I'm letting a proper review of this new ruleset to other more industrious fellow gamers, but I wanted to say that I am delighted with this new ruleset as it plays fast and fun, but with a lot of tactical decisions to make every turn. 

Activation works really well, movements and manoeuvres are easy to do, combat is fast and effective. The only thing it bugged me a little was having to roll for morale everytime a unit suffered a casualty, but this wasn't so important en the end as test rolls are easy and fast to do.

 By the end of the game I didn't have to check the charts for combat, shooting or morale as they are pretty straight forward.

I look forward to have another game as soon as possible, and I do hope it gets translated into Spanish someday so it will get popular here and then I will have opponents to play against.