'Age of Hannibal' Ancient Wargaming Rules

In my previous post, I wrote about my adoption of the 'Three Ages of Rome' rulebook by Philip Garton. Over the Christmas period I had the chance to play a game with my eldest son using these rules, and this went rather well. 

Father in 'head down' mode.
A 4' x 4' table worked fine, and was easy to set up.

But wargamers can be fickle. Whilst checking out the latest on the Little Wars TV website, I was brought to remember that they had a set of ancients rules available, which were designed to be simple and straightforward to play. I delved a little deeper and was quickly hooked.

I have a high regard for the rules that various members of LWTV have developed themselves - they tend to be simple and to the point, emphasising quickness of learning, but quite clever in capturing the historical character of their period. I had already been impressed by their 'Live Free or Die' rules, written for the AWI but perfectly applicable to the SYW and other mid-18th century European wars - you can check out my playtest here. Gregg Wagman was the main man on 'Live Free or Die', and was also the main author for 'Age of Hannibal', so I had high hopes. The printed AoH rulebook is a bit pricey at around £30 in the UK, but fortunately a PDF version can be acquired for about £13.50, so I went for that. 

I immediately had the feeling that these might be for me. The actual rules are just 8 pages (including examples of play), although the whole book extends to 44 pages, with additional rules for seige warfare, three historical scenarios, and various other stuff such as terrain and strategem cards to print for use in setting up the game.

The first thing to say is that, like 'Three Ages of Rome', these rules are suitable for most periods of ancient warfare, not just the Punic Wars. Data for all the troop types you need are included in the book. Maybe 'Age of Hannibal' wasn't the best choice of title if LWTV wanted to maximise sales, but that's just my opinion. I won't go into the details of how the rules work as there is a rules review video available to watch which gives a pretty good overview. 

The rules are designed for big battles (i.e. Cannae) using small (6mm/10mm) figures, with units on 40mm x 40mm bases representing about 750 infantry or 500 cavalry. Not a good start, you might think, for someone using 28mm figures, but in fact the rules say double all measurements for this size of figures. This made sense straight away as my 28mm units are mostly on 80mm wide bases. Doubling the distances is not really an issue, as moves, for example, are quite short in the basic rules, just 4" for formed infantry and 8" for light cavalry. Doubling these ends up equating quite closely to the normal movement in 'Three Ages of Rome', so a 6' x 4' table is quite big enough for most games. Missile ranges in AoH are a bit longer than in 'Three Ages of Rome', but again this was no problem. If you wanted to do Cannae in 28mm, a table at least 8' x 6' would be needed, maybe bigger, but this was not my ambition.

Anyway, why the switch, if 'Three Ages' was working fine? I'll list my reasons:

1. To make 'Three Ages' work for me, I had to do quite a bit of alteration to the original rules. This was interesting to do but a bit frustrating. 'Age of Hannibal' felt like only the odd tweak would be needed. The rules are in their 2nd edition, so most of any problems have already been ironed out.

2. Support for 'Three Ages' is non-existent. My Facebook page had attracted some members but not much was going on - in fact, as far as I could see, none of the members were actually current players of the rules. 'Age of Hannibal' has the various useful bits and pieces on the LWTV site, and also has an existing Facebook Page which is reasonably active, and provided somewhere to ask rules questions.

3. AoH are even simpler and easier to grasp than 'Three Ages'. One particular example of this is that 'Three Ages' is quite table heavy, with lots of modifiers. AoH is very different. Modifiers are kept to very low numbers, and the only stuff that is occasionally tricky to remember are the troop characteristics, or 'traits', that you need to apply, mainly in close combat.

4. I was also attracted by the terrain set-up method in AoH, which uses the terrain cards system mentioned above. LWTV have a tutorial video on this if you are interested. Something a bit different. 

Terrain card examples. I needed to buy the little plastic sleeves, 
which you can find HERE, for example.

5. No re-basing needed. The rulebook says any base sizes are OK, provided both sides are the same. This is not strictly true, as square bases work best with the rules as written, but only the odd tweak and bit of common sense is needed if your bases (like mine) are rectangles.

So, here we go again. This is the fifth set of ancients rules I have seriously tried. Previously I have used my own rules (abandoned years ago),  DBA, 'Kings of War Historical', and 'Three Ages of Rome', quite apart from dipping into various other rulebooks along the way: 

Dipping into 'Armati' with friends Roy and Keith.
A most interesting set, but just not to my taste.

So let's not get too excited. But I'm looking forward to more solo learning games, and then trying them out on gaming friends. Should be an enjoyable journey.

'Til next time!