Clash Of Spears: First Units

Clash of Spears is a new set of rules that I'd spotted being widely praised on various sites so with my love of the ancients (especially the Greeks) I thought it was worth a punt. The rule-book itself is produced to a very high standard considering it is the Erize brothers first offering and is packed full of lots of great illustrations and other eye candy. There aren't many videos out yet about the game but a good introduction has been published by the authors.

The initial period covered by CLASH is the Punic wars with several army boxes being produced as part of the Kickstarter campaign. These boxes contain the excellent Victrix models and are made up of individual sprues rather than needing to buy lots of extras as would be the case if you bought the normal large packs individually.
The initial unit boxes on offer where Romans, Carthaginians, and Gauls, from these I decided a good starting place would be the Romans and Carthaginians. In preparation for these arriving I'd placed an order with Victrix to get some shield transfers and as the rules for elephants are in the book I also picked up the elephant box to add some attractive center piece units into the forces.

The elephants and transfers arrived before the UK lock-down moved to a higher level which unfortunately left the army boxes in a warehouse somewhere in the UK. But as I'd completed the Rebs for Deadzone I started on the elephants as the next thing to do.

CLASH is a skirmish game played with around 40-50 models per side and represents the scouting forces of the two armies meeting, it uses an alternate unit activation and fatigue model for the game with players able to try and activate units as a reaction to the oppositions activation's, as such it should keep both players involved at all times.

Illustration from CLASH

Given the scale of the engagements elephants aren't going to be a regular unit in use during these sort of encounters but no doubt some sort of escort scenario will lend itself to their use.

I did learn a couple of things whilst putting together models like it's best to stick the transfers onto the elephants body before adding the fur effect plastic piece that holds the howdah in place and that the howdah does in fact have a front and back. This has lead to some 'unique' transfer placement so I can be sure only other ham-fisted idiots have elephants that look exactly like mine.

I did enjoy painting these and cannot wait for when the rest of the models get released from lock-down so I can get stuck into those as well. In the interim I have some more Mythic Battles models to paint up and if required I do have enough Mycenaean and Trojan types to play a game.