"Poison Weapons" Topic

Having just watched a movie involving Amazon Indians and their curare-tipped weapons… were poison weapons ever effective, and are they represented fairly on the wargames table?

One of the answers to that question may come from the answer to this question: Was the side using poisoned weapons the victor?

Usage of poisoned weapons in warfare does seem to be an almost usefully reviled tactic, and poisoning arrows or spear tips on the exceptionally large scale needed for decisive warfare would somewhat defeat the purpose of using poison in the first place.

The ancient Indians had poison weapons but generally would not use them against each other. If they used them against Alexander they don't seem to have been all that effective.

The difficulty with the efficacy of poison weapons is that if you hit someone with enough force to deliver the poison, ie you penetrate the armour of the person you are striking, you often have inflicted a debilitating wound anyway.

The one exception may be horses, but they may require a larger dose of the poison anyway. Depending on what it is.

My guess is that they are represented in their favour in fantasy games and about right in historical games, as in not really at all, I have played.

In the case of the Amazonian Indians, poison arrows and darts are used for hunting, not for intertribal warfare, AFAIK.

Caliphates, like Sokoto, used their pagan subjects in war to shoot poison arrows into their opponents. Quilted armor could stop it, but the lighter infantry were not so lucky.

I believe the blowpipe, used by many of the forest dwelling indigenous tribes of the East Indies (16th-17th centuries), propelled poisoned darts which were especially effective against mounted opponents.

the Greek word for archer was "toxote" from which we derive the English word "toxic". This probably stems from Greek archers dirtying their arrows with dung or dead flesh in order to make their wounds more deadly. I wouildn't call this poison exactly, and this would only be useful in a siege or other instance where the battle is not won in hours (so the infection has a chance to set in).

I was reading a book recently on the Dacian wars and, I believe Polybius, comments on the Dacians using poisoned arrows.

I'm pretty sure Polybius died long before the Dacians existed. Tacitus perhaps? I don't know?