Greek Persian Wars - Part 1 – Battle of Marathon

This is my first post in my new blog. Since this year is the 2500 year anniversary of the Battle of Marathon I’ve been wanting to play out the battle for a while. I would like to eventually play out a scenario for each of the major battles in the Greek-Persian wars, this is the first installment.

I made a few changes to the actual historical OOB’s, I added one unit of cavalry per side and gave the Greeks some skirmishers, I also allowed for the possibility of the Persian cavalry returning in time to save the day. This scenario was played out with Impetus using 25/28mm miniatures. The Persians have the beach to their left flank, the Greeks to their right. The Athenians are the attackers, the Persians are the Defenders, the Persians deploy first and the Greeks automatically have the first move. Since each side only has one command I decided to modify the Impetus deployment rules and have side take turns deploying half their units.

To add a little twist to the game I decided to allow for the possibility of the Perisan cavalry coming back in time to save the day. Starting from Turn 4 roll a dice to determine if the Persian Cavalry arrive, on a roll of 5 or 6 they successfully arrive on the Persian right flank at least 30U from the centre line. Use 2 dice on Turn 5, 3 on Turn 6 and so on.

Marathon Map

Map of Marathon



Greek OOB




Persian OOB





Greeks and Persians Line up for Battle

 Greek Hoplites advance under a hail of Persian arrows. On the Greek left, there was a duel between skirmishers and cavalry. The Greeks got lucky and managed to destroy the one Persian cavalry unit on the table, but the Greek cavalry was crippled in the process. On the Greek right, anchored by the sea, the hoplites were able to use double moves to run across the table in 2 turns.

The Greeks won a critical initiative roll in turn 3 and were able to get spears into the Persian sparabara before the Persians could fire their bows. Then it became a race against time - could the hoplites break the Persian infantry before the Persian cavalry came to rescue them.