Raphia

[Calandale]

The Battle of Raphia, also known as the Battle of Gaza, was a battle fought on 22 June 217 BC near modern Rafah between the forces of Ptolemy IV Philopator, king of Egypt and Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid kingdom during the Syrian Wars. It was one of the largest battles of the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Diadochi and was waged to determine the sovereignty of Coele Syria (from Wikipedia).

Raphia was technically designed as a Standard Combat Series (SCS) game. However, only a small subset of the SCS rules are needed for play. If you are familiar with usual war-game movement (what an MP is, how units count movement, etc), stacking, step loss, and retreat conventions, there is no need to review the SCS rule-book itself (not included, but will be referenced in the links section).

Players take turns moving their units and conducting ranged combat and melee until the victory conditions are reached.

A player wins Raphia by being the first to move one of their Phalanx units into the enemy home tent. If all Phalanxes are destroyed before either player wins, the result is a draw.

~ GDW Games

Intro

 



 

 

DAR (wrap and review at end of second video)

 

[Carl Marl]

I own this game and remember a couple of things about it. The stacking rules allow you to be stacked at the beginning, unstack but not restack, so for the setup you have to figure out how high you want to go because big stacks are more powerful.

The other thing is that the elephants are mostly irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. Only the phalanxes count in the victory conditions. It's ironic because the lure of the game is both sides having elephants which turn out to be not that important.

[Calandale]

They are FUN though!

[Carl Marl]

Of course!