Wyrmfall

Your coins are your soldiers. That’s the whole trick. Six of them, copper and silver and maybe a gold if you’re feeling flush, and every one you put on the field is money you might not be taking home. You don’t attack a man’s piece — you attack him, and his line decides what meets you. His braced men first. Then whatever he’d committed elsewhere, dragged back to answer the door. Then whoever was standing about waiting to leave, and those ones die easy, because they weren’t ready. And there’s a wyrm asleep at the edge of it all. It doesn’t care who started it. It wakes to noise, it takes from whoever’s got the most men standing in the open, and it takes the best coin they’ve got. So the fellow who’s plainly winning is the fellow it looks at first. Beat every army on that field and you’ve got the ground — you haven’t got the money. The hoard was the dragon’s before you sat down. Now you have to walk over there and lift it without waking him, and you can absolutely do all of that and go home with nothing.