"Bear Yourselves Valiantly" Demo Games at NASHCON

This past weekend the HAWKs (Harford Area Weekly Kriegspielers) made a road trip down to the NASHCON gaming convention near Nashville, TN, to host over a dozen games.  Featured among these games were four demo games of our upcoming rules for Fantasy, Ancients, and Medieval mass combat, "Bear Yourselves Valiantly" (BYV).
  We arrived at the convention hotel late Thursday night after a 12 hour drive from Maryland, and were up early Friday to unpack our van and set up for our midday games.  I was slated to run "The Battle of Five Armies" using BYV in the first game slot of the con starting Friday at 2:00.

A view of my Battle of Five Armies table.

  I had a nice turn out of players, and Dave Wood kindly offered to assist me in my gamemaster duties.  After a rules briefing, we got down to playing the game. We had one player commanding the Elves, another the Men and Dwarves, and two more taking charge of the Goblin and Warg forces.

Dave explains a fine point of closing into combat to one of the Goblin/Warg players  as the Elven player watches.

  The Goblins and Wargs rushed forward as the Allies formed up and moved to meet their attackers.

The other Goblin/Warg player advances a unit of Wargs towrds the Men of Laketown.

The Goblin and Warg forces pressed hard, and despite many losses were deemed to be the victors at games end, having critically damaged the Allied contingents.  Unfortunately, we had to end the game right before the arrival of the Giant Eagles due to time constraints.

Gandalf puts a spell on two of the Warg units causing them to quarrel amongst themselves and attack each other.

Saturday morning I ran the Battle of Five Armies game again for another four players, and once again Dave Wood kindly offered to assist in the gamemastering.

A view early in the game on Saturday morning.

  In this running the Allies were able to stiffen their defenses and the Goblins and Wargs on the right had trouble coordinating their attacks. So in the end, with the Goblins and Warg armies badly damaged, the Allies were determined to be the winners.

The Elves defend at the base of one of the mountain's arms as the Goblins and Wargs move to find a weak spot

Saturday afternoon Dave Wood ran a game of BYV using his collection of 25mm fantasy troops.  The scenario, called "Rescue the Prince", involved an Elvish force tasked with rescuing a Elf Prince and his retinue who have gotten themselves trapped behind enemy lines.  Their way is barred by a forces of Ratlings, Goblins, Bugbears and Skeletons.

Dave's 25mm fantasy troops based on magnetic stands for BYV.  Goblins and Elves battle at the rivers edge.

  At games end the "bad guy" side was determined to be the victor, as the Elves' forces were not able to break through to the prince.

Dave watches as a player rolls his dice to determine if his unit stands to receive a charge

Saturday evening Dave ran a similar scenario, called "Rescue the Legate", this time featuring Romans and Germanic Barbarians.

25mm Germanic Barbarians defend the river line.

     Unfortunately, I was running a GASLIGHT game at the same time, so don't know the details of the battle, but was able to hop over to Dave's table and snap some pictures of what looked like a hard fought battle.

Dave explaining the rules at the beginning of the game.

Romans and Barbarians clash along the river line.

We were very pleased with the way our BYV games went, and had a great time at the convention in general.  The players seemed to really enjoy the rules, some coming back to play in more than one of our games.  Many of the participants were eager to know when the rules would be available, and we were happy to tell them it wouldn't be long now as we plan to have them released for Historicon in July.