Some thoughts about Aztec Warfare

I’ve been thinking about Aztec warfare and how to represent it on the table top. I'm looking to produce games that read like an excerpt from The Conquest of New Spain written by the Conquistadore Bernal Diaz.  If you are interested in Aztec warfare that is the must read witness account.  You will want the Maudslay edition.

Lets start with the basic Aztec unit.  It contains troops of every quality.  Men who had never fought before, men who had a bit of experience and elite warriors.  That was the reality.  Naturally, the elite did most of the slaughtering.  The others did they best they could.  Motivation all round was high because fighting was how you got up the Aztec social ladder.

A composite unit then, with a mix of weapons. Some of those weapons were short range distance ones. Fighting commenced with a short range barrage followed by a fierce attack.  The elites led the fighting and everyone else joined in to the best of their ability.  Ambitious men, of whatever status, sought to take prisoners.  Those who did so might advance a social rank.

This means that we should rethink our idea of Aztec units. No more serried ranks of Eagle or Jaguar knights in neat units. Instead we should imagine them mixed together and supported by the other men of their neighborhood. 

Priests fought in their own units but again by temple.

I envisage a notional Aztec unit as comprising about one quarter of elite warriors and ditto experienced with the remaining half being more or less untried. All of the unit lived in the same locality.  In a wealthier area it might be one half elite warriors-remember social standing was intrinsically linked to battle field prowess.

 

The elite were the better fighters and also comprised the leadership of the unit.  This had consequences when the Aztecs met the Spanish.  We will get to that later.

For the moment how do we represent the different fighting abilities within our Aztec unit?  I've gone for different coloured dice.  Let's say our unit has four combat dice, one black, one red and two yellow.  The black dice requires a lower score to achieve a kill or wound than the red dice.  The yellow dice has less chance of causing a hit than both. The black dice represents the elite warriors, the red the experienced fellows and the yellow dice the new boys.  Should that prove to be over elaborate I'll move to one third, two thirds 1 black dice, two yellow ones.

Let's take this further.  Our elite warriors lead the fighting and so are more at risk.  Any casualties should come first from them.  As they are better protected and highly skilled they might benefit from a saving throw. Not so the lesser warriors.  If they become casualties that's that.  This all works well enough against other Meso-Americans. That, of course, covers most of the fighting, for allies always hugely outnumbered the Spanish contingent. 

Fighting the Spanish was different.

Spanish weapons utterly nullified Aztec armour.  Our elite Aztec warriors were much more likely to die when leading the attack against Spaniards.  Consequently, our Aztec unit could quite quickly lose its leadership and cohesion.  Morale then sharply diminished and unit withdrawal and collapse became likely. 

How to represent all this is vexatious.  As you might expect easy solutions do not readily come to mind.  Currently, I'm pondering Die Fighting by Bob Jones in this context.  Bob has given us something very elegant and very different.  My previous insight was that wounds were the way in to capturing what happened on the battlefield.  Bob's method which involves dice being gained or lost lends itself to what I have in mind.  A note of caution is needed here.  I can't just try to force what we know of Aztec warfare into Bob's innovative system.  That way lies failure.

I consider the above useful progress.  

Next, I need to think about captive taking and how it influenced the conduct of both Aztec and Spanish troops. Perhaps a winning Aztec unit gets an additional 'captive' dice for the second round of melee or any pursuit.  A score of 5 or 6 results in a captive.  Maybe, may be.  

An alternative might be to to give the Aztecs the option of turning a kill into a captive by way of a dice throw.  A dice throw because there was a chance that fellow Spaniards would rescue the would be prisoner.  That, after all, is how Cortez escaped death.

Here are some Aztec skirmishers should you have thought I'd forgotten them. 

Also, it maybe that Aztec Cuachic veteran warriors formed discrete units. Either operating as a reserve to the warriors of their locality  or leading the advance.  I'm going to go with that concept, not least because I have a surfeit elite warrior figures.

Welcome to an Aztec Game work in progress.  I'm minded to call it Bernal or perhaps Cuauhtemoc.  Will it work?  I don't know, but the journey should be interesting.

The time scale for progress is elastic.  I do want to first write something here about why the Aztecs lost.  There was more to it than Guns, Germs and Steel important as those three were.