Mrs Thurston Kicks the Dog

 “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” -  Søren Kierkegaard

I have been away walking. The photo is of me climbing up the Long Mynd, or to be precise of me taking one of quite a few breaks as I climbed up the Long Mynd. I should perhaps have done some practice climbs up Otley Chevin before I went.

Sine my return I've only had time to catch up with the absolutely essential stuff: listening to the cricket, going to the opera, reading Private Eye etc. In the Rotten Boroughs section of the last one I was interested to see a reference to Magister Militum. The specific target of their criticism (you'll have to buy a copy if you want to find out the details) is the Tory leader of Wiltshire council, who it transpires is the owner of what the magazine describe as the toy soldier supplier. I'm normally very happy to use the term 'toy soldiers' in these pages and elsewhere, but I wouldn't give 15mm figures to real children, as opposed to overgrown children.

More Map Moves

 Illness having, to some extent at least, abated the group reconvened for some more map moves. I have no idea what turn it is. James has promised a post on his blog covering both the last game and the current campaign phase, so hopefully he'll tell us; always assuming he knows either.

The map moves follow a sort of Too Fat Lardies template, with all commanders having a couple of cards in the deck and being able to move when they are turned, plus various other cards which do specific things including ending the turn. Wellington's lack of activity so far in the campaign has largely been due to his cards never arriving. But all that changed this week, with both Wellington and the Spanish commander Blake activating twice each early on. They used the opportunity to advance on Madrid in a pincer movement from North and South. Wellesley rolled better and it is his forces who will engage Joseph Bonaparte (never, I note, referred to as King Joseph). The French are heavily outnumbered and, probably even more significantly, comprehensively outclassed. They attempted to withdraw prior to battle, but I played a Surprise Attack card and prevented them from doing so. If the gods of the dominos are willing then they will be completely crushed next week. 

The forces have been deployed - see below - with Wellington keeping his plan of attack pretty close to his chest.

Coming back to Joseph, I realised that I knew very little about him and so started to read the article about him on a well-known and highly respected internet resource. I confess that my attention was being rather distracted by the frequent fall of English wickets against Sri Lanka, but I was suddenly interested again when I read that Napoleon's elder brother had married Julian Clary. Obviously this transpired not actually to be the case - even Wikipedia isn't that inaccurate - but it's a thought to conjure with.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

 There's an interview in this morning's Guardian with Jennifer Grant, daughter of the actor Cary Grant. There is apparently to be a TV series based on his life and starring Jason 'Zhukov' Isaacs as the mature Grant. I can't see the resemblance myself, but what do I know? It's an interesting article - though obviously not interesting enough to make me want to watch the programme - and contains a fair bit of detail about the actor's early life in England. Ms Grant states that whilst her father re-invented himself in a very American way, he remained a Brit at heart. Her chosen evidence for this is a bit odd though. Others might have pointed, for example, to his playing for the Hollywood Cricket Club, but she chooses to highlight his apparent fondness for Corned Beef and Cabbage.

No doubt British readers are at this point saying to themselves both that they have never heard of Corned Beef and Cabbage and also that whatever is on that plate next to the cabbage it sure as hell isn't corned beef. If I might be allowed a short digression here, back in the day when I sold weapons of mass destruction for a living I regularly had to travel to California. I happened to be there one St Patrick's Day. The day started oddly when the apparently intelligent young lady who managed the finance function out there for me said that she assumed that this was a big event back in London. I looked at her and asked if she was aware that Ireland was an independent country and had been for a long time. She wasn't. I was then invited out to a bar where the draught beer had been turned green in celebration, an idea which I had naively assumed was a spoof when I had previously seen it in an episode of Cheers. Then, one of the senior managers said he had to leave because his wife was preparing Corned Beef and Cabbage specially. After he left I asked our general manager - a Scot by birth - what on earth the chap had been talking about. The explanation, which I shall repeat here despite having never bothered to check it subsequently, is that Bacon (*) and Cabbage was a traditional Irish dish in the nineteenth century, but emigrants to the US found it easier to get Salt Beef and so that, coupled with cabbage, became a traditional Irish-American dish. Sounds plausible.

Anyway, any US readers please note that Corned Beef and Cabbage is unknown throughout the British Isles, and British readers please note that when Americans refer to Corned Beef they are talking about something that has never been near the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, and is probably all the better for it.

* To confuse matters even more, that 'bacon' would almost certainly have been 'gammon'.

It was out

                    "For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
                     And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

                     And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
                     As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
                     To and fro" - Francis Thompson

I have come to realise that my readers prefer not to have to wait too long for my guidance on the burning issues of the day. Well I hear you people, I hear you. It was out. And the moral? If you don't want to be stumped then don't go walkabout. The other one wasn't out; one doesn't have to know very much about cricket to understand that the crucial feature of a catch is that the ball doesn't touch the ground. The ball touched the ground, ergo it wasn't a catch. 

Here are The Duckworth Lewis Method and 'The End of the Over':

PotCXXIpouri - slight return

 Just continuing with the catch up from my absence I have a couple of things to get off my chest:

Firstly, I had assumed that the minimal coverage, and lack of humanity in that coverage, of refugee deaths in the Mediterranean was down to the innate racism of the British press. However, given the pages and pages of reporting on the plight of a few hubristic billionaires paying the price for their ghoulishness even though, shock horror, they weren't all white, I have changed my mind. Clearly the issue is class: the lives of poor people simply don't matter as much as those of rich people.

Secondly there has been a furore about a new film alleging that Jeremy Corbyn was ousted as leader of the Labour Party as the result of a conspiracy. Now, I haven't seen this film, doubt very much that I will bother, and have a very sceptical view of conspiracy theories in general. Indeed if you want my opinion - and believe me you're going to get it even if you don't - JC's biggest problem was the self-inflicted and all-to-common one for politicians of out-staying his welcome. The hoo-hah regarding the film is centred on it apparently implying that some of those involved in this so-called conspiracy were Jewish. If there is any conspiracy going on it's the one that increasingly says that neither Jewish people nor Israel can ever be criticised regardless of what they do, without fingers being pointed and hyperbolic accusations of anti-Semitism made.

Let's finish on a lighter note. I have been to Barnsley for what I believe is the first time ever. Slightly to my surprise I found it to be a very pleasant place. I intend to revisit it soon to check out an upcoming exhibition at the municipal art gallery. In the meantime here is a statue of one of the town's most famous sons:

The Alteration

 I find that I didn't say everything I wanted to yesterday. I think I was distracted by listening to Test Match Special and wondering if there was an alternative timeline in which England were any good. Jonathan Agnew reported that after the first day's play he had been asked by the ICC's anti-corruption team whether he thought there was anything suspicious about the loss of so many England wickets in such a short time. He had given the only possible answer: "Haven't you been watching for the last two years?".

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was that I don't mind alternative history fiction, because it's, you know, fiction. I'm not talking about about time-travelling fantasy where someone goes back to the middle ages with a machine gun, but simply a novel set somewhere sometime where things have turned out differently. Robert Harris's 'Fatherland' would an example probably known to many readers (*), and a Nazi victory in the Second World War has spawned many others. The only one of these currently on my to-read list is Philip K. Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle'. However, this blog's recommendation in the genre is 'The Alteration' by Kingsley Amis.

The two main alternative path taken in the book is no Protestant Reformation, and therefore no Enlightenment and so scientific progress has been slowed and restricted. The Roman Catholic church now dominates a totalitarian Europe through what is a cross between the Inquisition and the Gestapo. The novel is set in the 1970s and a number of people prominent in that decade pop up in different guises, as do many historical figures. There are many allusions to familiar cultural artefacts in this different context, but perhaps the one to highlight is an alternative history book within a book: 'The Man In The High Castle' by Philip K. Dick in which Henry VIII has had a son by Catherine of Aragon.

* If, of course, the blog had many readers in the first place.

PotCXpouri

 It's been an odd few days, and I am not referring to the truly astonishing revelations that Conservative MPs are a bunch of crooks, that Yorkshire County Cricket Club is full of racists, or that the Pope is a Catholic. The most disconcerting thing that happened to me was that I found myself the only person in attendance when someone had a heart attack. The main learning point from this was that if one has to have a health emergency then it is better to do so in the company of an individual whose qualifications are in medicine rather than in accountancy. I didn't recognise any of the symptoms and only started to comprehend exactly what was happening when the ambulance controller gave me the location of the nearest defibrillator and told me to go and get it. Fortunately for everyone involved the ambulance itself arrived at that point and I was grateful to be able to hand over to the paramedics. I understand that the patient is recovering in hospital; I also needed a long lie down.

Let's cheer ourselves up with a story about both accountants and doctors:

A woman goes to the doctor and after examining her he says "I'm sorry to tell you that you only have six months to live."

She is shocked and exclaims "Doctor, is there anything that I can do?"

"Well," he replies "you could marry an accountant."

"Will that make me live longer?" she asks, puzzled.

"No," said the doctor "but it will seem longer."

The ditch is dear to the drunken man

 Following the untimely end to the cricket in Ahmedabad I have turned once again to the siege. 

I have rearranged the glacis, narrowed the covered way and put a ditch where I said a few days ago that no ditch would be.

Bosworth 1485

"He said, ‘Give me my battle-axe in my hand,

Set the crown of England on my head so high!

For by Him that shope both sea and land,

King of England this day will I die!"

- from The Ballad of Bosworth Field

I own some half a dozen books about Bosworth, so obviously I was in need of another. As luck would have it Osprey have just published one. It is Bosworth 1485, number 360 in their Campaign series and is written by Christopher Gravett and illustrated by Graham Turner, and not to be confused with Campaign series number 66, entitled Bosworth 1485, written by Christopher Gravett and illustrated by Graham Turner. Of course, a lot has been uncovered since their first attempt was issued, not least the location both of the battlefield and of the loser.

Astonishingly, I don't own the original version so I can't be specific about the changes in either test or pictures, except to point out that the subtitle has changed from 'Last Charge of the Plantagenets' to 'The Downfall of Richard III'. I have been teasing away at that switch, all the time clutching my copy of 'L'écriture et la différence', and must conclude that I have no idea what we are meant to understand by it.

Jacques Derrida deconstructs the bowling

The book - the one on Bosworth not the one on structuralism - starts rather poorly. In the first paragraph following the introduction the author makes the bizarre claim that John of Gaunt was Edward III's eldest son. It might, I suppose, be interesting to speculate what difference it might have made to 14th and 15th century English history if he had have been. As Derrida used to say while opening the batting for the École normale supérieure: "Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can “what has always been conceived and signified under that name” be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?"

Anyway, back to the book. It's fine. It adequately summarises all the newly available information alongside what was always known. The maps in particular are plentiful and clear. I don't think anyone reads such a work expecting to be enlightened as to the definitive version of what happened. It was all a long time ago and, in any event, the interesting question about the events of 1483 to 1485 will always be why, rather than what or where, and that is ultimately unknowable. So, a useful addition to the bookshelf, but it still leaves room for others.

85 all out...

...and before lunch versus Ireland at that. Eyebrows may have been raised when I suggested that England's World Cup win wasn't all that impressive, but I rest my case. Congratulations to Tim Murtagh in particular:

Bring on the Aussies.

Pot85pouri

So, I've been working a bit, going to the theatre a lot, and condoling with an old school friend about the Champions League final as well as more serious matters in his life. Amongst other things we had a wander round the Shaftesbury Avenue branch of Forbidden Planet which prompted my friend to express dismay at the lack of Fireball XL5 merchandise; strange that.

Mention of finals makes me realise that I haven't mentioned the cricket. Well, exciting or not I'm really not sure how anyone could get triumphalist about winning in that manner: a fluke followed by incorrect interpretation of the rules resulting in a tie, the nature of the tie-break being completely biased in your favour, still only managing another tie and then turning out to be the winner using a formula that makes the countback method in high-jump look positively scientific. I am unimpressed. I actually missed the climax of it all because I went to see Lisa Mills, last mentioned here, with a band this time and damned fine she was too. In case anyone is concerned, the lack of alcohol free beer has been rectified.

While I am here and complaining about triumphalism, let me write something about the anniversary of the first moon landing, which I am of course old enough to have watched live on television. Notwithstanding its underlying purpose of being cold war propaganda, I still regard it as perhaps mankind's greatest achievement in my lifetime and so full respect go to not just Armstrong and Aldrin but to the whole team behind them. It's just a shame about pretty much everything else that the human race, and especially our rulers, have done over the intervening period.

And finally here is Duane Jarvis covering Lucinda Williams' 'Still I Long For Your Kiss':

Batting on

"Working people have a lot of bad habits, but the worst of these is work." - Clarence Darrow

I have come out of retirement again, most definitely for the final time, and in theory therefore there should be less time for wargaming. However, it's only part time and a spate of heavy rain here whilst there was no rain where the Cricket World Cup was taking place led to me getting the brushes out for the first time in some months. Already half complete was a unit of WWI British cavalry in both mounted and dismounted form and so I finished them off.

As I may have mentioned previously I managed to lose one of the dismounted figures somewhere between the washing and mounting for painting phases. I had hoped that during the long pause he would have made his way back to his comrades like in the scene from the first Toy Story movie, but sadly his desertion seems permanent. The horse holder is intended as a marker to highlight that these are dismounted cavalry.

I also set up in the annexe the Möckern scenario for Epic C&C, last played a couple of years ago (photos here and here).

I think the current set-up looks better for having lost all the bits of coloured felt, although if you look closely you'll still be able to see a small piece marking the ford across the Elster.

This particular battle gives me a chance to put some of my Polish troops on the table. If you have clicked on the link above you'll have seen an almost identical photo.

And a reminder of what the letters mean; the numbers are strength remaining.

The maps just visible on the pegboard to the right are from the not very ongoing Seven Years War campaign.

England batting collapse

That headline has not been at all uncommon during my lifetime and I woke up to it again this morning, along with the smell of fish; I cooked some halibut last night and the aroma has been a bit persistent. Anyway, it has seemed to me that I haven't been very informative in the last few blog posts - unless of course you were using this a very slow way of following the progress of the cricket. In which case Australia won by 120 runs.

Having stumbled into doing the Great War by accident I started small (platoon level trench raids with the Two Fat Lardies), then decided to aim big (a division a side with Peter Pig) and so, inevitably enough, thought why not split the difference and do something at battalion level or thereabouts. I really didn't want single figure removal, nor to worry about looking at individual models to see what weapons they were carrying. I bought a copy of 'Crush the Kaiser', which are at the right level and are full of good stuff, but still - oddly and annoyingly - do both those things.

What was needed, it seemed to me, was a rules root stock onto which I could graft the bits I liked from existing sets plus the bits that I thought others had overlooked. I thought about Piquet, but life is too short frankly. I didn't want a grid game particularly as whenever I get round to it Square Bashing is one of those. We've been playing a fair bit of Black Powder recently - Pike & Shotte to be precise - and they crack along quite quickly to a conclusion so I thought they would be a good place to start. I especially like the blunder rule; it's always easier to represent units not doing what you want than it is to represent them doing what you don't want.

There are however a number of differences between the Great War and the Renaissance ["No shit, Sherlock?"] including not comprehensively and in no particular order:

• Relative homogeneity of troop types
• Open formations
• Importance of cover and therefore indirect fire
• Ongoing melee not being appropriate
• Distance not being the prime factor in command difficulty 

On top of that I rather like an element of meta-gaming (think the opposite of 'play the period, not the rules') and have for example often wondered what sort of game Piquet would be if you knew what sequence the next few cards were going to come out in. The shared tableau of cards in the newish 'Epic' rules for C&C Napoleonics is also the sort of thing that I'm talking about; do you take the card you want, or the one you think your opponent wants?

I have therefore been experimenting with all of the above, so far only with basic infantry and medium support weapons. If it works - judgement reserved at the moment; it's easy playing games when you can just change the rules on a whim; are you listening James? - I shall add artillery plus chrome such as German Stormtroopers and, as I suppose I must, tanks. There will be no gas; it might seem an odd line to draw given the overall subject matter, but nevertheless there it is. If it makes the chemists feel any better there won't be any aircraft either.

442-8 dec and 138 all out; 227 all out and 176-4

So, as Aaron has pointed out, what a difference a day makes. To the game in Adelaide that is; twenty four hours has made remarkably little difference to the ongoing playtest of Blue Guitar. Those who aren't in tune with the rhythm of cricket can sometimes be heard wondering aloud about the nature of a contest played out over a series of five games each lasting five days. Well, what I'm doing seems to have the potential to last longer than the Ashes. However, if I were to be controversial I would say that the case against day-night test matches gets stronger with every game, whereas I am cautiously optimistic about my Great War rules. Except perhaps for their speed. 

I've made it a bit harder to blunder although this still hasn't done much for the companies on both the British and German left flanks who both not only failed to respond to orders to advance, but instead moved randomly backwards. The battalion on the British left has also lost its 2-i-c (not to enemy action - one can only speculate as to where he has disappeared to), on top of which the British support weapons have still not deployed. There has however been some combat at last which has highlighted that while the disordered mechanism seems to work I had set the saving throw at too easy a level.

A really obscure view from behind the German left

I remain relatively happy with the shifting turn sequence.

442-8 dec and 53-4; 227 all out

Despite the improvement in the weather in South Australia I was only able to find time for one move in the extremely slowly developing playtest of Blue Guitar. I didn't plan the scenario in any great detail and simply plonked the British on the baseline; indeed at the time the thing that more concerned me was the realisation that there were more bases in each unit than either utility or appearance demanded. I also didn't do the attackers any favours by putting their support weapons in the middle. The one upside is that the time it is taking for the game to progress has given me more chances to tinker (refine?).

The colonel waves his pistol in despair as his men advance the wrong way

The battalion on the British left has been rolling some very odd command dice and as a result its tactics can perhaps be best described as doing the hokey-cokey. The one company that is getting anywhere has entered the woods, and so that's where the German mortar is now targeting.  In the centre the support weapons have been unable to set up despite the best efforts of the brigade 2-i-c who was despatched to sort things out, although the dead observer has successfully been replaced.

On the other flank the Germans have seized the initiative and moved into the woods where all logic suggests they should have been anyway. Their sniper has been moving steadily forwards - the rules as to how he does that have changed several times so far and may well change again - and has picked off one of the British company commanders. That unit will suffer a permanent -1 to their command roll.

442-8 dec; 29-1

The latest stage in the solo run through of the Blue Guitar Great War rules was somewhat curtailed by the evening rain in Adelaide, to the extent that once again nothing much happened. Things weren't helped by all the companies in the battalion on the British left being sent off in various directions by blunder rolls. The Germans have continued to target the road with their mortar, but the British haven't had the opportunity to move along it anyway.

In the centre the observer for the Stokes mortars was sent forward, but, after some rapid rule writing and a truly terrible throw of the dice on behalf of the British, was caught by machine gun fire and removed from play. Cue some more hurried creativity to work out how a new one can be put in place. On their right the issue was repeated failing of command rolls despite my patent method (essentially stolen from Crush the Kaiser) to reduce the chance of this happening.

The have been another couple of rule changes (enhancements?), but I'll just mention that, notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday, I have decided that what the game really needs is separate 'Command' and 'Rally' phases.

The early finish did however give me a chance to check out the Otley Victorian Christmas Fayre. In addition to buying the traditional festive samosa, seasonal food of choice of the nineteenth century working man, I was rather taken by Hardcastle's Amazing Human Vegetable Machine, which I don't recall seeing before.

209-4

I had an hour so in the annexe this morning while listening to the cricket from Australia and got a couple of turns done. Considering that I wrote the rules there was a surprising amount of checking as to what was supposed to happen next, as a result of which not much actually did. Still, early days.

The brown circle is a rather undercooked marker indicating that the Germans are mortaring the road to deny passage to the British. The 'M's indicate that those support weapons have moved and so cannot fire and the just visible 'O's show that those units are able to use opportunity fire. For those of you keeping track of these things the following is the phase sequence as at the end of turn 2. The 'Rally' phase should probably be called 'Command' phase or perhaps 'Officer Check' for the Piquet players among you.

Shād bād manzil-i murād

So, I tipped India to win the final of the ICC Champions Trophy; I hope none of you followed that advice to the extent of putting any money on it. Not only did Pakistan win, they whapped India so badly that the losers might as well have not bothered to turn up. Once again proof, should any more be required, that Epictetus doesn't know what he is talking about.

I am on firmer ground with music however. As I have previously reminded you, that eminent philosopher Homer Simpson once noted that it had been scientifically proven that popular music reached perfection in 1974. In light of that self-evident truth I have been to see Ian Hunter, former lead singer with Mott the Hoople, a band who broke up that very year, presumably recognising that it was all downhill from there. Hunter is, astonishingly, seventy eight - by some weird coincidence all the musical heroes of my youth seem to be reaching old age together - but played and sang with energy seemingly to spare. He also had a rather good, and rather younger, backing band to help out. He is touring in support of a new album, but while there was a lot of stuff I didn't know, it didn't stray at all from the template of forty years ago. He did, of course, play the songs one would expect from his solo career (Once Bitten, Twice Shy) and from Mott the Hoople (All the Way to Memphis, Roll Away the Stone, a cover of the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane, The Golden Age of Rock and Roll etc). Hunter was a friend of David Bowie and for the encore he first played 'Dandy', his tribute following the latter's death which appeared on the new album, followed, inevitably and understandably, by 'All the Young Dudes'.

C&C Cards

In Epic C&C Napoleonics some Command Cards which in the base game would affect the whole table now have to be played in one section. This seemed a bit unbalanced; for example it would be far more common to have four infantry units in a section (e.g. for Fire and Hold) than four artillery units (e.g. for Bombard). Even worse, it rather slows things down; playing the rules as written would mean often activating fewer units per turn in a large game than in a small game, which seems counter intuitive. I/we have therefore decided to tweak a few and to clarify the meaning of another:

Command Cards

• The following cards apply in all sections rather than just in one:
• Bayonet Charge
• Bombard 
• Cavalry Charge 
• Elan
• Fire and Hold
• Leadership
• La Grande Manoeuvre
• Rally
• For the avoidance of doubt the Give Them Cold Steel card still only applies in one section.

I did think of making some of these cards (e.g. Bayonet Charge, Bombard etc) playable in two adjacent sections, but in the end felt it added complexity for little value. All the cards listed have limits to the number of units that can be ordered - some on the card, some related to size of hand, some determined by dice thrown, and some by number of leaders - and so none are out of proportion to the rest of the game. Give Them Cold Steel has no such limit and could potentially apply to every unit, hence the restriction.

Tactician Cards

Call Forward Reserves: the wording on this card is ambiguous. To me the logic is that units are being summoned by a leader to join them. We shall therefore ignore the clause about open terrain. Units can be moved forwards to any hex adjacent to a leader or occupied by a lone leader. I will also allow any unit to be so ordered, not just those on the baseline; that restriction is presumably intended to make it a counter to Short Supply, but in practice would seem to punish attackers.

I have never been entirely happy with the Short Supply card, either when it was a Command Card, or now it's in the Tactician deck. For a while we played it as a sort of ranged fire equivalent to First Strike instead of as written. However, for the time being at least, it stays. In the next game to be played there will be a scenario specific restriction and we shall see how that works out.


OK, I'm off to sit in the sun and listen to the cricket. If I were a betting man my money would be on India.

Old campaigner

"One of the things I learned in the military is sometimes you don't know what mistakes you make for a long time." - Wesley Clark

I managed to blog every day when it was physically impossible so to do because I couldn't charge the laptop. As soon as the new charger arrives I go down with a virus and miss a day. During my very brief absence my order from Warbases arrived and, as predicted, the paintbrushes came out and the new arrivals have been painted green. There as an error in the order - the first time this has ever happened to me when ordering from them - but they have promised to immediately dispatch the correct stuff and told me to keep the incorrect. So once again excellent customer service from Warbases, who I would highly recommend. The mistake related to some stuff for the Great War project, which will hopefully now kick back into gear.

Also upon rising from my sickbed I note that the Seven Years War campaign is about to kick off again. Unlike General Clark we realised our mistakes pretty promptly and are going to have another try. I appreciate that approach won't work in the real world, but after all this is only a game. I shall write about this campaign in due course - James outlines it here - but there have been others; James seems sensibly enough to be working through the periods he collects.

Many years ago now James ran a multi-sided campaign using his Italian Wars collection. I was the Pope, but had little chance to do anything beyond declare myself a Warrior Pope (which actually gave quite a significant benefit) and ally with the Spanish before I had to go to abroad on an assignment. From memory the campaign was fought to a conclusion, but I seem also to remember the consensus was that it went on a bit. James and Peter fought a crusades campaign which is detailed on James blog, which seems to have been very successful, but I wasn't involved so I can't tell you what made it work so well; probably not all the silly names that James invented and that you have to wade through to find out what happened. Then there was the Punic Wars campaign of a couple of years ago. That was also rather extended - a bit of a theme developing here - and in the end was a dead-heat and decided on the tie-break included in the board game used for the strategic rules. The big unresolved issue for me was the translation of the outcome of battles back to the strategic level. I always felt that one was actually handicapped by managing to engineer an encounter where one heavily outnumbered the enemy, where all logic suggested that the opposite should be true. Once again write ups of this campaign are on James blog.

Now, readers of James' blog may believe, based on the steady stream of WWII western desert postings, that we fought Operation Crusader as a campaign . But no. Shane Warne famously said that Monty Panesar hadn't so much played fifty test matches as played the same test match fifty times. We didn't so much refight Cunningham's whole action as plough through Sidi Rezegh fifty times. Wikipedia quotes someone as saying that Sidi Rezegh is 'the forgotten battle of the western desert'. Not in Ilkley it isn't. Anyway, I hope that in due course we perhaps have a crack at the whole thing.