Lisbon, and the Lusitania Challenge - a 4 person team event held in the Military Museum in Portugal's capital on the banks of the Tagus which I'd last been to all the way back in 2012.
In recent years the Lusitania Challenge has been reinvented and reinvigorated by the adoption of L'Art de la Guerre as its Ancient ruleset of choice, putting the event firmly on the map of the pan-European ADLG event circuit.
This time around a staggering 24 teams (96 players) had assembled in the gun-infested bowels of the Lisbon Military Museum to do tabletop ancients battle together (and, also, eat sardines from tins as often as possible).
In terms of the actual gaming this was a competition with 4 players in each team, each playing a themed period roughly analogous to the 4 classic DBM Army List Books - and I was in Period 2, Roman & Classical. having decided that this prestigious international event was the ideal opportunity to put on table the wheeled Persian Archery Towers for the first time in competitive action as part of an Achaemenid army.
The general theory of the army was to use a combination of infantry archers (Sparabara and Immortals) together with good quality Satrapal and Guard cavalry on each wing to overwhelm any opponents mounted troops, and use the Archery Towers, some low-grade mercenary spearmen and a small force of mostly light horse in the centre to block and distract the enemy's capital troops and keep them from reinforcing what I hoped would be their by-then heavily embattled wings.
Over the course of 5 games and 2 days the Persians took on the Sassanid Empire, two lots of Early Imperial Romans, an Alexandrian Macedonian army and then ventured Eastwards to fight the Classical Indians, giving a wide range of opposing armies and troop types for the Achaemenid plan to be tested against.
All 5 battle reports are now available on the Madaxeman website, complete with the usual mix of irrelevant captions, post-game analysis and insults from Hannibal, in-detail reporting of our culinary and beverage related exploits in and around Lisbon, and links to how I cooked up the wallpaper for the towers and the pavises of the Persian army.
