Hail Cid - The Siege of Valencia at the Cannon Show

It is ten years since James Morris's El Cid supplement was released for Warhammer Ancient Battles and a few months after that James took his Siege of Valencia game to Salute, Partizan, etc.

Today James, Tom, Matt and myself re-visited the siege, this time using the Hail Caesar rule set at the Cannon show in Retford.

Randomising the sides, James and Matt would play the Christians while Tom and myself played the Moors.

The game ran pretty much as per the original battle, Pedro Bermudez led the decoy force which drew the Moors towards the gates of Valencia while El Cid himself swept into the Moorish right flank and destroyed and looted their encampment, the Moors chased the decoy force into Valedncia but were unable to force the gates and died trapped between the walls and the flanking force.

The entire game played in about five hours with lots of, photo breaks, shopping breaks, tea breaks, sausage roll breaks and even a pastie break!

We find that Hail Caesar is so much better than WAB for these big games, easy to set up, easy to play a game that looks like something is happening and easy to break down and put all the units away again at the end.

All the terrain and the majority of the figures belong to James, Tom provided about half of the Moors, I provided about a half of the Christains and one unit of Berbers.

Here are a whole load of photos from the game: