Ganesha Games: Ancients

Song of Spear and Shield (to be published in 2010)

Song of Spear and Shield is our stand-alone ancients skirmish ruleset. It is set of man-to-man, small-action rules for skirmishes of about 20 models per player, with the occasional artillery piece or fortification to be used as a backdrop or scenario objective.

Song of Spear and Shield will include rules for all ancient melee and missile weapons,including sarissa, pike, plumbata, swords, and have stats for all the common warrior types of antiquity.
The chariot, artillery, weapon and armor rules will be compatible with Song of Blades and Heroes so it will be possible to “import” these rules in your SBH games.

Formations and artillery in small battles

In ancient warfare, formations were employed by hundreds or thousands of warriors at the same time. These rules work on the principle that one model equals one man. Are we going to use formations or not?

In real skirmishes, the answer was probably no; a “shieldwall” of 10 men can be easily flanked, while one with a frontage of 500 men would be difficult to maneuver around for the space occupied by the mass of soldiers and spear points. Probably in a real skirmish like the ones represented by these rules most men would just adopt a loose order. But for the sake of fun and to give tactical options to players, we will assume that formations like phalanxes, shieldwalls and wedges are as effective in small numbers as they were with larger bodies of troops.

Chariots and artillery probably wouldn’t be used in small engagements, but the battles we play could represent the last fatal moments of an artillery crew against enemy light infantry trying to capture it. We assume that history has seen many battles, too small to be recorded in the books of historians, where such things happened.

Wargamers focus more on the extraordinary rather than on the ordinary. We leave to you the decision to use artillery, chariots, formations, and so on.