A Newby's Reflections on Pips and Battleplans

[Philip McBride]

I'm new to Triumph!, just over three months now of trial and error and I'm already a committed devotee. I am retired and compulsive about hobbies, so I've played a lot of solo Triumph! games with ten Punic War era armies that I've rebased for Triumph! An old man with his old toys. After almost two decades of WRG gaming in the 1970's and 80's, what appeals to me very much in Triumph! is the uncertainly of being able to execute even a simple battle plan like 'hold the center while I strike hard on his weak flank.' With 12 to 14 elements in an army and only 6 pips on the dice, not every element is going to cooperate with the plan, sometimes hardly any. As a student of America's Civil War in the musket era, I've come to appreciate how difficult battlefield communication was, and how timing was a critical issue never really resolved, as I've found it to be well simulated in Triumph!. Even when I start both armies forward with long battle lines comprised of half or more of the elements in each army, both intent on winning the center, at the very first contact the chaos of the scrum takes over and an attack that took only one command point to initiate, suddenly requires all the pips to maintain (or survive), robbing the ability to respond or press elsewhere. Add in all the wrinkles of multiple troop types, mandatory actions, and terrain, suddenly this shrunken, almost chess-like, highly structured army is more like a writhing worm than a disciplined linear formation.

Probably not very relevant, but an eight year old grandson is learning to play chess and in our recent afternoon of playing, I was struck with the similarities to Triumph! as I tried to plant an attitude of attack, attack, while he was more concerned about protecting his pieces. I'm not a good chess player, and often lose tabletop games because of that itch to attack. At eight he may have the better approach to chess, played without dice, as well as tabletop wargaming where dice and pips are core features.

[RogerCooper]

Welcome to Triumph. Unlike most miniatures games, skill is important in Triumph as you try to optimize the use of your forces and make every pip count. In this system games can be played an ordinary table in 1 hour and you can handle any Anicient/Medieval/Fantasy army.