The Celts of Gaul

The Celts are really fun to play as they are so unpredictable. These were a tribal people greatly feared in battle. Their main weapons being the javelin and the long sword-which did not really bend when used that's something of a myth. Gauls should charge whenever they can. You will find them quite ready to retire if a commander dies or they do not do well at first ontact so be prepared to break some eggs to get that omlette.

Being tribal, the first question to ask is how many figures are in a tribal unit. Well, the tribes when they collected themselves for battle were of various sizes so I have listed a number of different sizes. This will give you a wildly different effect when you play and it can be great fun.

How Many Figures Do I Need?

One of the burning questions gamers almost always with rules systems is "How many figures do I need?" Well, for a legion at a figure scale of 1:100 a player will require 40 figures for the legion and about 9 to 18 cavalry figures. Support troops or units can be as few as 6 or as many as 24. So a single Roman legion of circa 52 B.C. requires less than 100 figures, which isn't that many really.

A Celtic player should equal about the same number of figures and players could double that to 200. When I first started my Celtic army I didn't have that many Celts. So what I did was this. I would count any destroyed units or casualties lost and therefore removed from play. When I amassed 9 or more figures I would place them on the board as a late arrivals. I would often do required morale tests to get routed units out of rout, not worrying if they would rally from rout as I would get them back in any case. That certainly made things more exciting.

While this might seem unfair it is actually quite historical. The Celts as a people were anything but consistant. In Caesar's Commentaries this is made quite clear. At the Sambre, many tribes did not even show up. Also, there is the numbers game. Caesar, like Stone Wall Jackson, was able to isolate the tribes and, while nationally the Celts in Gaul were many times the size of Caesar's armies, he managed to isolate and defeat them piecemeal.