As these things so often are, the route to my latest project was a bit convoluted and organic. My gaming club is holding a Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB) tournament, and my friends and I were interested in participating.
The initial announcement was that the tournament would be “Medieval”. We expressed our interest and waited for more detail. As the weeks rolled by, no further information was forthcoming, so we looked to our own devices.
Our discussions around the Medieval theme settled on 10th-12th Century, with a couple of us interested in the Anarchy (1138-1153AD) and the Anglo-Norman armies that would fight it.
WAB is an odd and archaic ruleset, much beloved by many. But inspired by the period, we went looking for alternatives. We tried Impetus II, but it really wasn’t for us. As a ruleset we found it overly complex and when playing, we got ourselves in a bit of a mess on the tabletop, which the rules didn’t help resolve, so we went looking for something else.
Over the years we’ve tried all sorts of rules and a couple of my group are still HEAVILY into L’Art de la Guerre, playing it at national tournament level to a good standard. I pitched out after winning the Burton Doubles at BadCon in 2018. There’s just something about the fiddle-on with the rules that I don’t like.
Anyway, we came across a ruleset called Triumph. Now, back in the mists of time we played a LOT of DBx games, mostly DBM, again at National tournament grade. I’ve long lamented the end of that ruleset's dominance, and the fragmentation that resulted from it's fall (with tournaments devolving into using several rulesets – DBMM, Morten et Gloriam, Field of Glory, L’Art de la Guerre, etc.).
Triumph appears to be a spiritual successor to the old DBM rules, updated and tweaked. We gave it a go and played a few games. Its probably the nostalgia, and although the rules didn’t knock my socks off, they do work well. They have some nice little addons to make the game a bit more interesting and seem to have removed some of the micro-movement elements of DBM, while maintaining core gameplay. So, Triumph it is!
Triumph has its armies online over at the Meshwesh site, which helps. Although this isn’t an army builder (which is a shame); I assume it allows the publishers to keep lists updated and affect changes quickly.
I set about sorting out an Anglo-Norman Anarchy period army list. As it happens its pretty standard and easy to do, and I selected this:
1x Knights (General)
4x Knights
8x Heavy Foot
2x Bow Levy (+2 "support" figures)
The standard Triumph army is 48pts, and the total unit cost for the above is 48pts exactly. I’ll probably use the “Bow Support” battle card option, which allows me to fold the boy levy into heavy foot units, boosting their fighting against mounted troops (and a few other troop types), but I’ll try out the best use in a few games.
So, I set about building the army in 28mm figures. True to its DBM heritage, Triumph assumes the use of 15mm figures, but gives the options to scale up or down as preferred. I’ve always felt 15mm is a weird scale – too big to look good en masse, and too small to look good individually. For some reason it’s been the standard scale for many historical wargames and periods though. I have many 15mm figure armies, but nowadays I and my friends tend to look at the 28mm scale first and so we did for this.
I went to my go-to supplier for 28mm historical figures, Victrix. They really do hit the nail on the head – great figures, great sculpts, easy to build, and excellent customer service.
I also used the Little Big Men shield transfers available from Victrix. It’s the first time I’ve used them, and while they’re a bit odd, being a mix between stickers and traditional transfers, they are easy to use and have an excellent result! I’ll be using them again in the future. I may need to revisit my Carthaginian army (still in progress).
Sadly, I didn’t take many work in progress shots, so here’s
what I’ve completed for the Anglo-Normans.
A really well painted force.
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