I thought it worked well. The duelling rules are taken from a skirmish combat game and work better for melees rather than 1:1 combat, as the use of outnumbering and maneouvre mean it's not just about luck. The fact that some people wanted to use the melee to fight honourable duels whereas others were trying to fight it like a battle added an extra and unexpected role-playing frisson to it all.

I think limiting communication in some way is probably a good idea - allow it prior to battle and then restrict it during the fight. The shout-out thread is a bit too restrictive but was simple and seemed to function well enough.

Next time, I would probably allow orders of the kind "charge enemy player A" to avoid a slightly unrealistic "ships passing in the night" movement that can happen with just chess like orders.

I'd also remove any "locked in combat" situations. Make sure the retreats from each round of comabt leave each player at least one hex away from any enemy after all combat. Having some fixed points - people locked who could not move - was a little unfair to those players and made tactics revolve around ganging up on them, as you knew where they lived, so to speak.

I agree with the idea of replacing RPS with weapons. I think the RPS in the original duelling system was simply to give players something to do. When they can move, that's not really necessary.

It would be possible to explicitly introduce mounted combat, but we'd need to think a little about the mechanics of getting unhorsed etc. We'd end up with a more complex system, but I am not sure it would add much to the gameplay. At first, I was not convinced by the move six in a straight line rule for people on foot (where 3 in any direction seems better), but on reflection, it makes sense as an implicit way for allowing for mounts.

We might need to think about victory conditions - they seem a little too individualistic for a team based contest. Also, I hadn't anticipated that a captured knight could win a tournament - that seems a little odd. I think I would prefer the next melee to be fought until one side has defeated all enemies and the victor being the last man standing who has the most captures. Or if fighting to the end is too time consuming, declare one side the victor on turn 7 (based on number surviving) and that side's uncaptured knight with the most captures is the tournament winner.

Finally, next time around, I'd make the sides non-random purely for role-playing reasons. The random sides were fine for turn 1, where we don't know each other well. But we will form friendships and loyalties, and it would be nice to try to work with them. Ideally, make it 2 Houses vs 2 Houses with independents making up the numbers. Or just choose two captains and let them pick their men, one at time.