Fuentes de Oñoro

 I previously wrote that I was having a month's break from wargaming. I don't seem to have added that I signed off by taking the role of General Ney in the first night of a refight of Fuentes de Oñoro. 

I obviously expected it to be all wrapped up by the time I returned to the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach, but there seemed to have been some slacking in my absence because the situation hadn't moved on much at all. In particular some stubborn British infantry in square, who had held up the French swinging left flank advance were, weeks later, still doing the same thing. However, I broke the square with my heavy cavalry and rode them down. This was historically a rare event, and to do so in Piquet, or at least the bastardised version which we play, requires a rather unlikely sequence of cards to be turned. I got so excited at it all falling into place that sadly I forgot to take a photo of the event. After that it was fairly inevitable that the British would eventually run out of morale, which they duly did.

I also got in the first game in months in my annexe, with a re-run of the C&C game of Dennewitz last played with my plumber. This time it was against one of regular boardgaming opponents, who acquitted himself well in this different form of gaming as long as you ignore all the suicidal cavalry charges he made. 

And to continue this startling run of hobby activity I'm off to Partizan on Sunday, provided of course that I survive the excitement of tomorrow's 214th Otley Show.

Silk

 “Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.” -  Shakespeare

Jonathan over at Palouse Wargaming Journal has been celebrating twelve years of blogging, which made me realise that I had also recently passed that mark. As opposed to that blog, which has gone from strength to strength and features more game reports than any other blog on my reading list, this blog has dwindled and diminished over time, both in quantity and quality. The only positive is that it still costs the same to produce, i.e. nothing. 

Evidence of all this is that I do have a couple of games to report on and can think of nothing more to say than that I enjoyed them both. First up was the Combat at Reichenberg, and the photos on James's blog if you follow that link are much better than the one above. As I say it was a fun way to spend a couple of evenings and resulted in a marginal victory for the Prussians. For those who like to keep track of our rule changes, we started playing Field of Battle 2 - sort of - and ended playing Field of Battle 3 -sort of - with our morale rules not having much to do with either. I know our approach bemuses people, but it is in part because James's table is so much bigger than that assumed in most rules; if we didn't change things up then games would last for months rather than weeks.

One set of rules which I never tinker with is Command & Colours. The above are the starting positions for Dennewitz, which I played recently with Chris, my plumber. It's such a good system for newcomers to pick up, and yet has plenty of decision points to keep more seasoned gamers interested, plus it doesn't last too long. It's not a simulation, but it is fun. To slightly misquote the designer of a different game (and one which I hope to report back on in my next post): "Throughout development, historical accuracy has been just one value among several". A fine approach.

PotCXXVpouri

 After a short gap, wargaming returned to the legendary blah blah with a Seven Years War game. Unusually we didn't use James and Peter's period specific rules (whose name I forget but it has something to do with lemons) in favour of playing Field of Battle virtually as published - at least to start with. We hadn't played them for a rather long time, but gradually remembered what it was we didn't like and so changed it as we went along. James has written up the first evening here, at the end of which we gave the Russians a shed load more morale so we'd get another evening out of it. That ploy worked a treat and the second evening ebbed and flowed quite a bit more than the first, but the better quality of the Prussian commanders proved too much for the Russians in the end.

And speaking of wargaming, it may return to the annexe next week for the first time in months. Having just cracked the problem of how to delineate dead ground in front of bastions, the logical thing would have been to play a siege game. However, instead I have cleared all that and set-up some Napoleonic Command and Colours. The motive for this was a request from my plumber who, having seen games in progress on previous visits, asked on this occasion (new U-bend on the bathroom washbasin) if he could have a game himself sometime. It is, of course, always worth keeping in with a good plumber (*).

In other news, the pigeon (see here for to which pigeon I refer) has gone. We finally did what should have been done a long time ago; i.e. captured her and took her off to International Pigeon Rescue. I didn't participate in that last element myself, but my henchwoman who did reported back that the organisation was impressively resourced, with staff who were well meaning, knowledgeable and every bit as bonkers as you would expect.

* Or indeed any other tradesman.

PotCXXpouri

 This is mostly going to be about wargaming, but I must pass on my congratulations to the boy Windass, who done good. My interest in football has diminished in line with the growth in murderous regimes using it as a front. However, young Josh was at school with the elder Miss Epictetus (and yes, his father did cut a somewhat incongruous figure at nativity plays etc), so I have kept half an eye on his career from afar. I have no real idea why young men seek out the highly-paid and glamorous career of a professional footballer, but moments like that at Wembley yesterday must go some way to making the rest of it tolerable.

Anyway, on with the wargaming. We have played Möckern twice more, or more accurately one and a half times. It has become apparent that Epic C&C will not fit the role assigned to it i.e. a game that can be guaranteed to finish in an evening, which is a shame because to me it's much better than the original version. On a happier note the new 'Activated' tokens worked very well, to the extent that I have dug out some other tokens (actually they're tiddlywinks) to mark things such as units taking a march move. I don't know why I didn't think of this years ago.

There has also been some progress on the kern. To recap, I bought these  - a mix of Tumbling Dice and Red Box figures - earlier in the year when Test of Resolve was all the rage, but then went down with Covid. Having recovered sufficiently to think about painting again I discovered I had no plastic primer. By the time I bought some more the moment had passed and, once again, nothing happened for a while. Eventually having sprayed the plastic figures it was necessary to fix javelins to the metal figures, but I found that my superglue wasn't very super. In fact it wasn't any sort of glue at all. This was a bit of a surprise because my normal problem is sticking the wrong things together - one of them usually being my fingers - rather than failing to stick at all. Either I'd had it too long or I'd bought cheap stuff in the first place; knowing me it will probably be both. So, after yet another delay more glue was procured and there has been some progress.

I wouldn't hold your breath for a photo of the finished article, nor for a report on our refight of Mortimer's Cross.

Partizan 2023

 Enough of things I've done before, here's something new: I've been to Partizan for the first time ever. I have to say, it was just as good as I was told it would be and I enjoyed it a lot. It's a nice venue, which didn't get too hot, plenty of traders and far more games than one gets at, for example, Vaprnartak. No doubt comprehensive, photo-replete reviews will appear elsewhere so I will cover the fact that I didn't take many pictures or write down the details behind anything by just concentrating on a couple of the highlights for me.

Inevitably perhaps, the first would be the refight of Möckern using C&C being displayed by the Old Guard from Bexley. The coincidence of us having played this exact same thing last week is perhaps lessened by the point I made in the last post that there aren't very many published scenarios for Epic C&C. They were using 28mm figures on, I think, 6" hexes and so had room for much more terrain and larger unit sizes than I use. I've seen elsewhere on someone's blog about the show that he found the players to be somewhat uninterested in speaking to punters. I have to say that I didn't find that to be the case and they passed on one or two tweaks to the scenario which they use to even it up a bit. I may well incorporate those into at least one of the two further reruns of this that I am planning for this week. (For those wondering why I would do that it's because I want to host two games and I don't really have the time to set up anything else. In an exciting development we shall be back in the Legendary Wargames Room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach for the following week.)

My only purchase of the day - although there may just possibly be a rather large follow up on-line order - was also C&C related. I bought some activation markers from Warbases. As readers may know from photos in previous posts I use a small marker behind each unit which shows type and strength. It has been our practice for many years now to rotate this by ninety degrees to indicate that a unit is activated for this turn. However, this has proven to be an increasingly complex concept for one player - an age related issue maybe? - so I thought I'd try a different tack to see if it was simpler. I believe the markers I bought are actually intended for Chain of Command, although I got involved in a demo game of the same and didn't see any such markers.

I say 'involved in' rather than 'played in' because it had finished before I had managed to remember anything much from my one previous play of the game. We - a British paratroop force - won from a losing position by rolling a double activation, which I believe is exactly what happened in my first game; another spooky coincidence. You may just be able to see towards the far end of the table a burning German AFV (possibly a Stug III) which, in my only real contribution, I had caused to be knocked out by the anti-tank gun at the bottom of the photo (possibly a 6 pdr) by rolling a shed load of 5s and 6s. The distinguished looking chap on the left is Don Avis, my first ever wargaming opponent, now acting as proof-reader, event-organiser and all round consigliere to Richard Clarke of Too Fat Lardies fame. I hadn't expected to see Don there and we hadn't been chatting for more than a minute or so before the subject of our failed career as rock musicians was raised; it was ever thus. Don also dragged me into a game of What a Cowboy, which I thought was great fun, enhanced perhaps by the fact that the boys from Boreham Wood cleaned up the town and took down the bad guys.

So, all in all, a good day out.

PotCXIXpouri

 “Don’t repeat yourself. It’s not only repetitive, it’s redundant, and people have heard it before.” 

-Lemony Snicket

The lack of posts here is not because I begrudge the time to write them, or indeed the sheer hard work necessary to maintain the high standards for which this blog is known. It's not even because I'm not doing stuff, it's more that I've not only done that stuff before, but increasingly I have also written about doing it before.

One area in which that doesn't particularly apply is boardgaming, where I have played a fair number of new-to-me games recently, and I shall return to that subject shortly. One of those games had a Wars of the Roses theme, which reminds me that the new version of Kingmaker was released last week. It looks good in the photos and some of the revisions seen intriguing - pre-packed factions for example. However, the estimated playing time is up to five hours, and that alone means that I shan't be bothering.

Anyway, back to stuff I've done before and have now done again. Firstly there was the Stephen Daldry production of 'An Inspector Calls', which was just as good as ever. Secondly there was Walter Trout, who was...etc. etc. Trout, who looks in remarkably good nick for a man in his seventies with a transplanted liver, played at the King's Hall in Ilkley and rather bemused the audience by referring to the great views as the band drove over the mountains to the town. The views are indeed great, but you would have thought that someone from a country where they really do have mountains would have spotted that Ilkley Moor is relatively low rise. 

Last but not least there's wargaming, where we trotted out that old favourite Möckern. Actually, it's not particularly a favourite of mine; the French always win. However, there aren't that many published scenarios for Epic C&C Napoleonics, and even fewer for which I have the figures. On top of that I already have the map and OOB printed and to hand so laziness won out. It still gave an enjoyable game though. I shall only include the one photo, but it does show the defining moment of the evening. For those not familiar with the Epic rules, two cards are played each turn; one from your hand and one from a shared tableau. Peter, playing the French, chose Cavalry Charge from the table and followed up with Bayonet Charge from his hand. If you're going to play, play aggressively. 

Großbeerencore

 It's election time, and campaigning seems to be taking up somewhat more of my time than I expected or signed up for. However, I did manage to squeeze in one quick game. I was playing a boardgame with someone who admitted to dabbling in Napoleonic wargaming, so I invited him round to the annexe for an introductory game of Command & Colors, which of course is a boardgame that I happen to play with figures. For reasons I can no longer remember I always use the Großbeeren scenario in these circumstances, and so that's what we played.

I can report that he enjoyed it, as people always appear to, in his case not least because it would seem to have been substantially quicker to play to a conclusion than the home-brew rules he is more familiar with. He won as the French, and a victory always eases one's path into a new game. He went for a very ambitious attacking strategy, pushing units forward piecemeal and absolutely refusing to go into square when threatened by the Prussian cavalry. He might have suffered for all that, but I consistently drew only left sector cards and, especially given that the objective villages are in the middle, I was therefore rather handicapped. Anyway, a good time was had by all.

The Prussians have hardly moved in the centre or on the right

I'm now going back to explaining to voters what they will miss if, or let's not delude ourselves when, they don't vote for me, but there is the rumour of some ACW action shortly. It must be decades since I have gamed that period.

Tewkesbury Again, Naturally

 To the surprise of absolutely no one, the next battle in our trial of 'Test of Resolve' will be Tewkesbury; indeed the only reason it wasn't the first one was that I didn't own the relevant scenario book at the time. I got into the habit of playing Tewkesbury with new rule sets because it is, in my opinion anyway, the battle from the Wars of the Roses which is most balanced and in which the inevitable treachery, subterfuge, delayed arrivals, ambushes etc are still present, but don't overwhelm things. Plus of course there is now the added attraction of being able to compare one author's scenario with another's. 

Once again I am playing it as written, and will report back. My first thoughts are that I might have had Wenlock and Devon on higher ground than the approaching Yorkists, but I don't suppose it will matter much. 

This time it is Edward, Prince of Wales whose demise would signal the end of the game. Can he survive for longer than his father did in our refight of 1st St Albans? We shall see. 

I'm trying a different method of recording casualties and morale this time round. I originally made my markers for Command & Colours and, as I have no intention of making any more, am struggling a bit to find the best way of fitting a square peg in a round hole.

From Salamanca to Elchingen

 I broke my recent wargaming fast in the form of the first evening of a refight of Salamanca. I wasn't at all familiar with the battle before, but if I've understood it correctly we're playing the part of the battlefield where the main fighting occurred and the British are not constrained by having to follow Wellington's plan. The main change to the rules in my absence seemed to be to do with infantry melees. The changes sounded interesting - I thought I detected some Black Powder DNA - but we managed not to have any infantry melees so I can't really comment. I'm on the French team and all is not going well on my side of the battlefield, although my reinforcements are about to rush out of the woods, so perhaps there's hope yet.

My knowledge of Salamanca is infinitely greater than my knowledge of Elchingen, of which I had never heard before Mark invited me round to try some DBN. Even now, I couldn't tell you much more than that it involved Austrians and French. We played it through twice, swapping sides, and the Austrians won narrowly each time.

It wasn't just my first time with DBN, it was the first occasion that I had ever played any of the DB family of rules. I have to say that I rather enjoyed it. The game was much as Mark had described it: entertaining and quick. One of the things I wondered about in advance was how it would compare to C&C Napoleonics. The best point of reference is the basic C&C game rather than the expanded EPIC version that I would play in the annexe, and despite very different mechanisms there seemed to me to be similarities. They are both easy to grasp and play, avoid minutiae, but yet have sufficient chrome (e.g. unit types, national differences) to render the period recognisable. Indeed they share the same fault, namely that because victory depends on destroying a certain number of enemy units it can all get a bit cheesy at the end when on is chasing the final elimination.

A very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

More Rampant Ramparts

 Having bigged up the 'Lion Rampart' article in the July Miniature Wargames I do have a slight complaint: it was a tad vague on one detail. "Surely not," I hear you cry "wargames rules that are ambiguous? Say it ain't so!". The issue relates to what I see as the key difficulty with gaming a siege on the tabletop, namely that sieges are clearly campaigns. They go on for a long period, with happenings in slow time punctuated by happenings in quick time. If one wishes to get all one's toys out on display - and what else are they for? - then one ends up with the table being the map and the map being the table. 

This typically means that the slow-time stuff works fine, but there is a problem when we need to move to the quick-time stuff, typically assaults and sallies. The 'Vauban's War' answer to this is to pretend there isn't a difference and that one can just switch to a tactical ruleset and carry on. This was so obviously bollocks that we didn't even try it. Instead I quickly knocked up an abstract high-level set using C&C dice, but they haven't been used to date because in our playtests everyone seemed to prefer the grind of bombardment and starvation. I think that the answer to this dilemma which has been decided on by the author of 'Lion Rampart' is to admit defeat and put the toys back in the cupboard. A lot of action will be pen and paper until there's a need to set terrain up, get the little men out and play a scenario. I say that's what I think because it would seem implicit, but he never actually comes out and says it. 

It all makes sense, but I rather like the look of how my home made town and castle all looks and want to leave it set up to be admired, although admittedly only by me and the window cleaner. So, I've chosen to go for two 'tables' side-by-side. The first is the town and is the one on which the final assault (*) will be fought; the other is a space on which scenery will be set up and taken down to fight out the smaller actions along the way. I think this is not only aesthetically pleasing, but actually beneficial based on what I remember of how 'Lion Rampant' plays in practice. More of this in due course.

* And one thing I really like about these siege rules is that there will definitely be a final assault come what may.

Some Napoleonics - mainly

 It's been a while since wargaming featured here, but there has been a bit going on in the background. Mark and I had a run through of Friedland in the annexe using C&C, but came nowhere near finishing, which was a bit disconcerting as the ability to play a game in an evening has always been a big attraction to me. I don't think we were playing particularly slowly; just an effect of having lots of troops on the table perhaps. Before setting the game up I had a vague idea of the strategic significance of the battle, but couldn't have told you any of the tactical detail. Having read some background it reminded my why I started tweaking the victory conditions on official C&C scenarios. Historically the Russians were trying to evacuate across a river, but don't get any victory points for doing so, only for destroying enemy units.

Speaking of rivers, the next game I played in was a couple of weeks later in the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach was set in the Peninsula and featured a British attempt to deny a bridge to an advancing French force. You can just see the bridge at the top of the photo. The French collapsed rather quickly, and in the after game debrief there some tentative suggestions that the scenario would have been better if they had a bit more morale. When we met again the following week for another peninsula game James admitted that he'd cocked the calculation up and the French should have had twice as much morale; proving I suppose that sometimes one's instincts are correct.

The new game, which took place over the last couple of weeks, proved to be the best of the three, despite me as the French losing to a tag team of British commanders in Peter the first week and Mark the second. If I could summarise James's intention in developing a Piquet variant specific to the Peninsula, it isn't especially to recreate history. You will recall that, by and large, British lines always beat French columns. Instead it is to make an enjoyable game in which the French, using columns, can sometimes close with and overwhelm British lines, but will sometimes be repelled by firepower. The rules have a lot of moving parts which all need to gel together, but if I was going to pick one change which occurred over the time we have been working on them, and which appears to have helped, it would be the handling of skirmishers. When we started we kept trying to make skirmishers do what they did - or what we thought they did - historically. Where we have ended up is using them in an essentially abstract way to make it easier for troops that have them to move up to charge range. It all comes back to whether one is striving for a historical simulation or an enjoyable game.

Lastly, you are all no doubt wondering how I am getting on painting the packs of Peter Pig Mexican Revolution figures I bought some weeks ago. Well, in the way these things always work out, such limited painting as I have been doing has been of some Kennington Grenadiers à Cheval.

Laon, 1814

 C&C Napoleonics returned to the annexe for the first time since September 3rd 2019. Could we remember the rules? What do you think?

At some point in the last few weeks we had another - and I suspect final for a while - crack at the ancient galley rules. Overall, I think everyone is happy with them. They give a quick, fun, decisive game with multiple players each controlling multiple ships and it all wrapping up in a couple of hours. If I had to search for negatives I would say that the situation where many ships end up locked together and resulting in a mass melee requires an application of wargamers' common sense to make it work. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it will be difficult to write down and even harder to explain. I don't know if James intends to publish these, so perhaps that point is moot.

Anyway, back to C&C, which is another game that gives a quick, fun game, all over in an evening. We didn't do too badly with the rules really, our main problem being trying to keep track of all the national characteristics associated with the various units. Having said that, we also got the rules for cavalry vs square badly wrong, but it was the same for both sides. We had a go at the Laon epic scenario from the C&C Napoleonic website using the epic rules from expansion 6 and the tactics cards from expansion 5. I really like the latter in particular; they ensure that plans don't always work as intended and do it in a manner which appeals to me. The French won when the Old Guard stormed through the middle destroying everything in their path. The Prussians being a bit too feisty early on was their undoing. We shall have another go next week: Friedland I think.

Rommel: The Refight

 As planned, we reset the previous week's game and had another try of the Rommel rules. Not as planned, it descended into farce. 

The British commanders are caught out by a daring German attack on their HQ

We have been trying the rules at the behest of Mark, who wishes to rebase his existing collection of Western Desert models to suit this game (*). In the meantime we have been using James' stuff and his gridded desert cloth as originally made for Crusades and To the Strongest!. Unfortunately, Mark wasn't able to make the game, even more unfortunately the rulebook didn't make it either. We were left reliant on the quick play sheets and what James and I could remember from the previous week. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

I didn't really help by repeating my tactics of the previous week - I was once again the Axis commander - and making an armoured thrust straight for the British supply dump. I confess that I was partly doing this to demonstrate where I thought the game was a bit broken. If units can't be supplied then there are consequences. The problem was that without the rule book we weren't sure what those consequences were. In particular the reference sheet - and one of the action cards - differentiate between being 'isolated' and being in a state of 'low supply'. Handily we had the page references for the relevant rules, less handily we didn't have the pages. We carried on regardless, but the game rather drifted. The Panzergrenadiers on Hafid ridge were as indestructible as in the first week, but this time I moved the Panzer reinforcements into the centre to try a two pronged attack on the British armour. Unfortunately I had misread where the grid markings were and there wasn't actually a route for me to get through. It seemed to sum up the evening and so we gave up.

We're clearly going to put Rommel to one side for now and do something else. On the negative side, they are all a bit abstract. As James observed, Command & Colors is a board game that becomes a wargame if you use figures to play it, whereas this just stays a board game with clunky playing pieces. On the plus side, I think there are nuances within that board game. For example, after a few combats it becomes clear on which occasions you should play cards to try to improve your odds of causing casualties, and where you should be trying to reduce those of the enemy; you can rarely achieve both. 

Overall verdict: meh.

* One of the reasons that I like wargaming is that the hobby covers such a wide range of activities: military history, modelling, painting, rule writing, playing the games etc. We can all dabble in a bit of everything, but choose the one on which we wish to focus most of our attention. For reasons known only to him, Mark has chosen to specialise in rebasing, an activity he carries out pretty much continuously.

Vauban's Wars - the unboxing

I mentioned a couple of months ago the publication of 'Vauban's Wars', a set of horse and musket siege rules which had been long in the gestation. It had been my intention to take a look at James' copy - he's in the Piquet Inc inner circle and will undoubtedly get one - but given that I'd been waiting to see them for some seven years already, plus the likelihood that the way things are being managed in the UK at the moment it will probably be another seven years before the inhabitants of the Wharfe Valley are allowed to visit each other's wargames rooms, made me splash out and buy my own copy.

The man himself

So, these are my first thoughts:

• The production values are good. It's a 98 page ring bound book in colour plus quick play sheets. 
• Sheets containing the cards, which need to be cut out, are provided. Alternatively you can, as I did, pay extra for a playing card quality version. Either will fit the standard 63.5mm x 88mm sleeve.
• There is a thorough list of contents, background information including a glossary, designer notes and game markers for photocopying.
• The colour photographs are not, as is so often, merely to look good and inflate the price, but actually give a pretty good indication of what is going on, which is particularly useful given the differences with a normal tabletop battle. 
• The game is a Piquet derivative - hence the cards - or to be more specific it's based on Field of Battle, the faster flowing and less swingy updated version of Piquet.
• These rules cover the aspects of sieges such as sapping, mining and bombarding at the level of one turn representing three or four days. As and when assaults and sorties are indicated these will need to be resolved using a separate set of tactical rules, before returning to siege game. Rules to manage the transitions are included
• Events such as weather, supply, espionage, disease, relieving armies etc. are covered, but all at a fairly abstract level.
• There are no army lists as such, but some reasonably prescriptive constraints as to the minimum and maximums of each unit type. National characteristics exist - especially for the Ottomans for some reason - but don't appear to be that significant.
• Everything seems straightforward to me from my first read through, although it must be remembered that I have played a lot of Piquet. 
• Overall, I'm very impressed, but the proof of the pudding is of course in the eating. It will be a while before I can try them - and they have to take their place in the queue of new rules anyway - but there is a report of a playtest game here for those interested.

A couple of relatively unimportant points require mentioning. Firstly, the rules are printed on US size paper, which is unsurprising but irritating for those of us in the rest of the world. It makes it much harder to put the quick play sheets in protective coverings. For C&C, for example, I retyped them all on to A4 before laminating them. Secondly, and on a more positive note the rules contain an absolutely explicit definition of what constitutes a flank, which happens to be the definition with which I agree and have been pushing for some years, and the author supports this with no less than a full page colour diagram. It's all a bit superfluous because, by and large, units are behind cover in trenches and fortifications and impossible to flank, but it's the thought that counts.

I have a twofold interest in the rules. I would like to play them as written, although that would probably require James to acquire the necessary siege and fortress guns, which I don't expect come cheap in 28mm. As far as I know nobody makes them for 20mm Napoleonics, so any game in the annexe is going to see some substitution taking place. I am tempted to make some bastions to match my town walls in any event. One question would be how to interface the siege rules to the hex grid if using, as I probably would, C&C for the assaults and sorties. Which also reads across to my other area of interest. It seems at first review that there would be scope to straightforwardly amend these for the late medieval period, and in that case the same question of matching to a grid would come into play if I wanted to use them in conjunction with To the Strongest!. 

Another TtS! triumph

Jonathan asked in a comment on yesterday's post why no photos of James' superb Crusades armies. In response I can only offer photos of my badly painted 1st century CE Romans and Ancient Britons. But never mind the figures, take a look at those bases.

Keith, who clearly has never been told that it's rude to point, returned to the annexe after a bit of a gap for a game of TtS!. You may recall that as soon as he got the hang of C&C Napoleonics I switched games. It had been a while since his first game of To the Strongest!, to give me a chance to double the size of the units in order that they filled the squares, as previously discussed on these pages.

When one overlays squares on to the Hexon hexes on my table there are basically two ways of doing it. The first, which was how I had set it up for his last visit, is six rows deep and the other is nine rows deep. The latter is better just from a manoeuvrability perspective and so I switched this time. The net result is that the new warband bases are too big to slide from one square to another without knocking the grid markers out of position. So, joined up thinking in action then.

Keith had largely forgotten how the game worked, but fortunately it's a set of rules that I am completely on top of, so we didn't have any problems. Nor did the Romans, who saw off the onrush of Celts without much trouble. I don't have any decent photos of the massed chariots, although they did account for the only auxiliary infantry unit to be destroyed with an impressive flanking sweep and charge.

Hopefully, we'll schedule another game after a shorter interval than the last. Maybe some terrain features next time as well.

Skirmishers etc

"...those who in the skirmishing or in similar circumstances in which there is no need to engage in single combat, have voluntarily and by choice placed themselves in danger" 

- Polybius

The search for a mechanic for dealing with Napoleonic skirmishers within the overall framework of Piquet, one which is elegant and simple, but which also gives the appropriate flavour to the game is over. We've given up. Instead we have decided to embrace the complexity and, wouldn't you just know it, seem to have straight away stumbled across something which is actually not that complicated, looks and feels sort of right, and appears to give quite a good game. I'm sure it will undergo refinement, but for now at least the core structure seems OK. That's more than can be said for the town fighting rules, but one thing at a time.

In other wargaming news I have got off my backside and set up a game in the annexe. My new local opponent has just about got the hang of C&C, so it is therefore time to move on to different rules before he starts beating me. I have consequently set up a simple Roman vs Celts game of To the Strongest!. Doing so has made me realise that I don't have that many Roman auxiliaries. I can make up sufficient units, but they are all a bit on the numerically small side. I have therefore ordered a couple of boxes, plus the appropriate movement trays to beef them up to a more robust and aesthetically pleasing state. Looking at the table the crapness of the chariots - well known to regular readers - is also apparent and so I have ordered some of those as well. Have no fear, I won't actually get rid of any, I shall just field more and more and more.

Daniel Chapter 6 Verse 7

The Good Soldier Svjek (*) recently posted a comment on this blog to the effect that we really need Spitting Image at the moment. However, it seems to me that political life in Britain has transcended the ability of satire to mock it and so I am going to do something unexpected and write about wargaming.

Firstly an apology. I may have given the impression that I didn't think James would be able in the time allotted to come up with a hybrid of Classic Piquet and Field of Battle for use with his ever-growing Peninsular Napoleonic forces. Well he did, and they proved very playable. We are still in that phase of rule development where things change constantly (**), but to be fair the elements moving are either minor tweaks or are related to the bane of Napoleonic rules writers, namely skirmishers. It is period where, especially at a scale where each unit represents a battalion, one wants to be able to recreate all the different formations: line, attack column, square etc, an important element of most of which is clouds of skirmishers out in front. Nevertheless there is a very good reason why the designers of many sets of rules choose to abstract the skirmishers away, namely that it is all a bit difficult. Still, in our case one factor overrides them all: James has painted them and he is bloody well going to use them. Indications are that we'll end up with a compromise whereby they are physically present on the table, but more as a marker reflecting the state of their parent unit than anything else.

The game itself, played over two weeks, was a resounding British victory. One reason we wanted to move away from FoB was that we couldn't see how French columns could ever reach the British lines, let alone defeat them when they got there. Our first pass at the new improved rules seemed, to me at least, to suffer from the same issue, but hopefully it's more a question of fine tuning than anything fundamental. We shall try again next week with some refinements to the rally rule. The position of the French wasn't helped by my deciding to launch an impetuous cavalry charge in the belief that they could capture one of the objectives before British reinforcements arrived. They couldn't.

Going back to rules which don't bother with skirmishers, I have also had a game of C&C Napoleonics with Otley's other wargamer. We had intended to finish our game of the Möckern scenario which was still set up in the annexe, but it was so long since we played the first time that I simply reset it and we did it over again. It turned out very differently - always a good sign - but ended with the almost inevitable French victory. A good time was had by all, and now that Keith has started to get the hang of C&C the obvious thing to do is to move on to a completely different game. I think I shall reset the table for some To the Strongest!.




*  And I really hope that you have all been following the adventures of H.G Wells in Treboria on Tony's blog. That Miss Perkins is my sort of woman.

** Which of course we shall never leave.

Hello Stranger

“There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.”  - Coco Chanel


And exactly as she describes, I have been hard at it; too much so to do any posting here. However, for one night only, I'm back.

Anyway, as previously predicted, wargaming has returned to Lower Wharfedale, both in its epicentre - the Legendary Wargames Room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach - and also in the annexe. Dealing with the latter first I had another game of C&C Napoleonics with the local chap I met a couple of months ago, this time with the more advanced rules. Once again it went very well and he enjoyed it. 

The above is the only photo  required because we both became obsessed with holding the town and every other one just shows different units in it. We had to break off with it all fairly even because I needed to leave to see a stage version of Ben Hur. We may return to finish it off at a later date and indeed I may also return to posting on the subject of the play. For now I will simply say that both the galley battle and the chariot racing were surprisingly well done considering that they only had a cast of four.

James has written on his first game of Lasalle here and you will immediately note my absence as I was, somewhat bizarrely, at a Nuclear Innovation conference. I shall also sadly miss next week because I am going, somewhat less bizarrely, to the Buxton Opera Festival. If you've read James' blog then you know as much as I do about it, but I must say that I was shocked, shocked!, to discover that he has been tinkering with the rules already.

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.

Grossbeeren

In an unexpected turn of events we switch abruptly from politics to wargaming.

Or perhaps not that abruptly. The recent election required me to drop my usual - and natural - curmudgeonly persona and actually talk to people. In conversation I discovered that one of my fellow candidates was a wargamer and so invited him round for a game.

He is apparently a competition wargamer, playing 15mm Ancients with some form of DBA; I've never played any of that family of rules so I'm afraid I can't be more specific. I had suggested C&C Napoleonics and thought it best to start a newcomer to the game with the original card deck and size of playing surface. I therefore set up the Grossbeeren scenario, which as I had all the stuff printed off and to hand I must have played at some point before. Note that the bits of coloured felt previously used to denote different terrain types have been upgraded to something more aesthetically pleasing; and not before time.

The French capture the town

My guest played the French and I took the Prussians. He managed to deploy his troops away from the baseline much more quickly than me and it didn't look to good for Blucher after an hour or so. It took him a while to adjust to not being able to shoot everything every turn, but for a complete novice he was making fairly shrewd card selections. But then I embarked on a run of good fortune with the dice which would have embarrassed even James, who is notoriously lucky at C&C. In the end it was a comfortable win for the boys in dark blue.

But not for long

The game was well received and hopefully we shall fit in another in the not too distant future, probably using the rules in expansions 5 and 6.