Basic Impetus 2: first game

Just a short report to update you on the ongoing activities. We were looking for a fast-paced, easy-to-learn, and easy-to-teach, wargame ruleset for ancient to medieval field battles, so we dusted off our 15 mm miniature collection from the shelves to try  Basic Impetus 2. My first miniatures were old Black Hat miniatures, and this scale resurfaces periodically at our club. 

Basic Impetus 2 is the second edition of Basic Impetus, a ruleset written many years ago by Lorenzo Sartori, the owner of Dadi e Piombo, an Italian Wargame Magazine. The second edition is now on sale both as a digital and as a printed copy. 

Our first game was Late Romans (Patrician) vs Early Visigoths. The battle was fought quite straightforwardly with the Late Romans posing little resistance to the Visigothic advance. The Roman Cataphracts kept as strategic reserves were blundered by a Foederati unit retreating directly against them, causing them to receive a disorder marker and later a hit, hindering their usefulness. The only losses in the Visigothic army were made by light cavalry combined shooting.

Conclusions: the game is quite simple, it lacks some nuances that a veteran player may expect (for example there is a reaction fire, but not a countercharge), and that can be easily amended. Some solutions (such as the option to charge only frontally without any pivoting) are a bit old-styled. Anyway, any doubt could be easily resolved with a quick check on the rules (which are about 12-15 pages). These rules could work as a gateway to wargaming, giving some easy notions of strategy while getting used to the general concepts. 

the initial battle lines

the cataphracts (on the right) are smashed by their retreating foederates

the combined light cavalry shooting was the only success of the day for the Romans

the Roman center is on the brink of collapse