Gaugemela

Ryan and I played Avalon Hill's Alexander the Great, which is intended to depict the Battle of Gaugamela., with Alexander's high quality Greeks on one side, outnumbered by Darius' hordes of trash on the other. In this case, it turned out that the trash wasn't all that trashy, and quantity has a quality all its own.

In the first battle, I took the Greeks. Ryan's Persians squashed my left, as happened historically; my right pushed back the Persian left but got chewed up in the process. I led my elite phalaxes in a go-for-broke attack to eliminate the King of Kings, and it worked; however, the victory conditions specified that in order to win, you have to kill the enemy king and capture both of his camps. My few remaining forces were surrounded by a sea of Persians; I might conceivably have hacked my way through to one camp, but there was no way I'd get to both. Score a win for the Persians.

For the second battle, we switched sides. Ryan did an excellent job of refusing his left flank; on his right, I managed to break his line and get a few units into the rear. His phalanxes charged, but heavy Persian archery forced two of them to withdraw. Once again, Alexander and Darius went mano-a-mano, but this time Alexander was unsupported and both kings fell. The Greek right and center were surrounded and cut up, and the Persians scored another win.

The Basic Game is obviously unbalanced in favor of the Persians. The designers are aware of that; they mention Persian morale should be lower, and there are also a number of special rules to give the Companions, Hypaspists, etc, extra abilities. 

The game design focuses on morale; you lose a little morale for each of your units destroyed, and you gain a little for each enemy destroyed. It's an interesting idea, although I'm not convinced that it's entirely realistic. Units have one combat factor for the front three hexes, half that for the two flanks, and a quarter if they're attacked from the rear. There are no "zones of control", so if you can find an opening in the enemy line, nothing will stop you from running a cavalry unit through, getting the benefit of a rear attack, and rolling up the enemy line. You're likely to lose that cavalry unit next turn, but if you're the Persians, you have plenty more where that came from.  I can't say that it felt historical, but we both had a good time.