Raiding Season Week #4

This week's campaign battle was Captured from the Cross & Crescent book. It involves one side trying to rescue it's Warlord who has been captured by the other. The game starts with the rescuer having no Warlord so they lose the extra SAGA dice generated and the We Obey free activation until they free the Warlord.
For the campaign the raiders took the part of the capturers so my Warlord was in the clutches of the Normans who needed to escort him off the opposite table edge to secure the win or wipe out my Pagan Rus. I stuck with my normal warband and the Normans fielded 3 points of mounted Warriors, 2 points of dismounted Hearthguard and the Gall-Gaedhill.

The Normans had to setup close to the road with my Rus more spread out than normal in order to cover as much of the table edge as possible. Both side took advantage of the free maneuver moves in the opening turns.

The Normans then push up the Warriors cavalry and unleashed some shooting which had no effect.

The Rus then managed to get a charge off on the right flank and killed several Norman Warriors.

This gave them an early advantage on the flank down which the prisoner was to be escorted.

On the other flank the Normans pushed forwards and took some accurate fire from the Rus scouts who managed 4 shooting casualties in two rounds of fire. In the centre the Norman Warriors combined shooting with a charge to seriously reduce the largest Rus Warrior unit for the loss of only one man.

On the right the Normans pushed for the flank and made a decent amount of lateral movement but not much forwards progress.

Back on the left the Gall-Gaedhill once again got wiped out and caused more casualties with their reflect the hits rule than with their own hits.

 The steady advance continued on the right but with only eight turns to exit the board the Normans were starting to run out of time.

The Rus then pushed up on the left to claim the secondary objective which for the fourth battle in a row was in the same place. The scouts also push forwards and tried to cause enough shooting casualties to take the Norman horse below the SAGA generation point ( 3 models or less ) but failed to kill anyone.

The Norman Hearthguard then got stuck in on the right and wiped out the Rus warrior unit on that flank so the units from the centre started to move over.

At this point the Normans realised they did not have enough time to exit the board as the Rus have an ability which can stop double activations so they would only be able to move the escort party once per turn.
They then concentrated efforts on capturing the secondary objective and in a bold charge almost wiped out the Rus holding it.

So on the right the battle ended with the Rus still in a position to intercept the Warlord.

And on the left the Normans chasing the Rus into a wood. The Slaughter points ended up 14 each which reflected how close the game was, once again the Norman dice let them down at crucial stages so it could have been a different game but I think they still would have struggled to get off.

So this leaves the campaign at 3 PP for the Rus and 7 PP for the Normans after 5 turns with 4 turns left to play for this season.