George Macaulay Trevelyan

 I've been doing a little bit of research about the collection of model soldiers at Wallington in Northumberland. Unsurprisingly perhaps I discovered that this wasn't the first wargames blog in which the figures have featured. There's a bit more detail and a lot more photos on a post on Tom's Toy Soldiers from October 2013. The eponymous Tom seems to have found some notes about the collection, which is more than I did. Maybe he was extravagant and bought a guide book. It's interesting to note that the Trevelyan brothers seem to have bought whatever figures happened to be available and then used them to represent whatever they needed them to be; it seems nothing much had changed between the 1880s and when I started wargaming in the 1960s. It also explains why I thought there were figures from the Risorgimento.

I hadn't come across Tom's blog before, but it looks like it will be worth reading. In another of those happy coincidences which always intrigue me his post from last Monday also concerned model soldiers at a National Trust property.

The George mentioned solely by Tom in terms of his role as a substitute for dice rolling grew up to be the distinguished historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. This fact was picked up by an even earlier, and with all due respect to Tom, even more celebrated wargames blogger. In his Wargames Newsletter #114 (*) from September 1971 the late, great Donald Featherston says that Trevelyan credited this early study of war games with his ability to so vividly describe battles in his own writing. Among Trevelyan's major works is his trilogy about Garibaldi; I wonder if that interest was also inspired by the figures in the collection.

* This edition also contains a letter from Gary Gygax and the exciting news that Airfix are to release a set of French Napoleonic Infantry.

The Spur in the Dish Warns the Border Chief that the Larder Needs Replenishing

 Well, another month nearly finished and not many posts, but let's see if we can squeeze one more in before September starts. In any event I continue to attract thousands of views a day without bothering to write anything. The blog's stats page tells me that the most popular article yesterday was that from a few weeks ago complaining about the constant trawling by AI. Coincidence? I think not; these LLMs seem to be as vain as one of the blog's previous, and much missed, followers, who had a strict policy of only reading posts in which she featured.

And speaking of coincidences... I have been in Northumberland for a few days and finding myself in Alnwick I obviously popped in to Barter Books. I didn't stay long as it was hot and crowded, but I did buy a book almost at random just to show willing: "The Adventures of Speedfall" by John Fuller, which I didn't enjoy and don't recommend. I would describe it as a mediocre mashup between P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner and Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and, having put it to one side, I found the latter of those on my Kobo (*) and started to re-read it. I quickly came on a passage in which one character, as part of a diatribe against the feckless working class, mentions a painting that he once saw in which a wife served her husband a spur on a plate rather than the dinner which he was expecting. That struck a chord with me because I had myself seen that very painting - it's by William Bell Scott - the day before at Wallington. Also seen there, and of somewhat more relevance to the blog, were these:

As well as the Napoleonic figures there were what looked to be some units from the Risorgimento. Unfortunately the hand written labels seen in the first photo were all the information displayed, so I don't know how old they are. In terms of scale I would judge that they were in height a small 20mm, think Irregular or Tumbling Dice, but they were very slender. Let's end with a photo of Dunstanburgh Castle as approached from Craster:

No kippers were harmed in the taking of this picture.

* I have, not before time, kicked Amazon into touch.

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.

Games, we must!

 Culture has been to the fore at the Casa Epictetus recently, in a tasty salmagundi of film, gospel music, calligraphy, West End musicals and, er, boxing. I might return to those, I might not. But there has also been some wargaming.

We had a couple of goes at another Tabletop Teaser, although I have mislaid the note I made of which one specifically we played. The photo above is from the second night, but broadly shows the set-up for both games. The French must seize the river crossings - there's another bridge in the village - before the Spanish reserves arrive and then beat off the counterattack when they do so. 

Or at least that's the concept. On the first evening the Spanish reserves failed to arrive at all. Still, these things happen, so we swapped sides, made a couple of small adjustments which we thought would improve things and went again. The Spanish reserves once more failed to arrive. Oh well. I'm reasonably confident that the fault was ours rather than Charles Grant's, and we are moving on to a different teaser this week, with - I believe - an ancient setting of some sort. 

Games, must we?

 In my last post I said that the opening scene of 'Owen Wingrave' contained a reference to Austerlitz. I nearly made a smug comment to the effect that I was probably the only person in the audience that picked it up. Two things stopped me. Firstly, the realisation that I was probably the only person in the audience that cared at all. And secondly, the possibility that I might have deduced the wrong battle anyway. There was no mention of the battle by name, simply a few oblique clues. One of these was the name of General Vandamme.

As it happens the villain in Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest', played by James Mason, is also Vandamm - no 'e', but close enough.

Two days before seeing the opera, I went to see Wise Children's stage version of the film, and am happy to report a return to form for the company. It's a whimsical crowd-pleaser rather than a straight thriller, but there is intelligence in the way that verbal humour, physical comedy and audience interaction are substituted for the darkness of the original. And then there's the action scenes. The film featured locations such as the UN building, various trains and stations, a cornfield being buzzed by a crop-spraying aircraft and, of course, Mount Rushmore; all are transposed to the stage with imagination and invention. It's well worth seeing.

Fact of the day: Eva Marie Saint, who played Eve Kendall in the 1959 film is, astonishingly, still alive and is the oldest living Academy Award winner.

False Plumes And Pride

 And so to the opera. Regular readers will know that going to the opera is as close to my heart as indulging in a bit of toy soldier action. I was delighted therefore to attend a performance which included both. The figures - understandably impossible to see in any detail - were present in the opening scene of Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' when our 'hero' and his friend are being instructed in the strategic lessons to be learned from the battle of Austerlitz. Sadly, there is no room in the libretto to include what these lessons might be, but we do learn that Napoleon was delighted with the outcome.

Less delighted with things is Wingrave himself, who subsequently rejects his family's plan for him. This is that he kills and quite possibly dies for the glory of Queen, country and the honour of the Wingrave name as countless generations have done before him. That's the countless generations haunting him in the picture. 

I'd never seen it before - it's rarely performed - but rather liked it. Unlike many operas the plot is very straightforward with literally everyone else except the title character being an unsympathetic baddie including, oddly but effectively, the house in which they all live. The piece was originally commissioned by the BBC to be shown on television, something which would never now happen, thereby neatly encapsulating the level of cultural decline in the UK during the last half century.

Obviously pacifism is a more complex issue than as portrayed here. I have never read the Henry James story on which it based, but don't really expect to find subtlety there either. The name 'Owen' means 'young soldier' and 'Wingrave' is clearly, well, 'win grave'. Possibly if Britten had not run away to the US during the second world war, but had stayed in the UK and lived out his principles in the context of a society under attack he may have been able to add some more nuanced touches.

.

Tabletop Teaser #3

 No sooner am I back than I am going away again. However, I do just have time for a little wargames coverage, illustrated as usual with one terrible photo taken on my phone.

The noteworthy thing about the game was that we played one of C.S. Grant's Tabletop Teasers as published in, I think, Battle magazine many years ago. We played number 3, Advance Guard Action and very good fun it was too. We used Anglo-Portuguese and French Peninsular figures, but just as generic troops without national characteristics; no better firing for the British for example. It worked very well, but I just couldn't bring myself to form the British into attack column, however much the situation called out for it.

In Which I Don't Spend Any Money, But It's Still A Substitute For Doing Something

 By far the biggest cause of my loss of wargaming mojo has been the death earlier in the year of Peter, a long-time member of our small group. He is, of course, remembered whenever we meet up, especially when repeated bad dice rolls occur; that being one of his superpowers, along with getting really, really annoyed about making  repeated bad dice rolls. This was certainly the case this week when we refought Salamanca. It was expected to be a game that would last two or, quite possibly, three evenings. Instead, it was all wrapped up well inside two hours. Wellington, that was me, rolled consistently high whilst Mark, as the French, channelled Peter to an uncanny extent; except thankfully for the throwing dice at the wall in anger, restricting himself to swapping his dice repeatedly. I won't pretend it was a very good game, but it was certainly funny.

When Peter died we were asked to help dispose of the very large stockpile he had amassed over fifty years in the hobby. And when I say 'very large' I mean it literally. I think a kind interpretation of his approach would be to assume that he was storing up projects for retirement when he would have more time to actually get any use out the stuff he had bought. Anyway, this process is underway, although in the interests of accuracy I need to point out that James and Mark have done everything and my role has merely been one of supportive encouragement. Boardgames, model kits etc are steadily being put on eBay, figures are being sold through a well-known trader in pre-loved collections, and the books will follow in a similar fashion in due course. However, we have, with permission, put aside a couple of small things for us to play with, which after all is what they are meant for, and think of him as we do so. For example, our recent games of Nimitz have been with Peter's ships. I have now taken a starter set of 'Cruel Seas', which Peter bought at Vapnartak in 2018 or 2019 and which was never seen again, with the intention of painting the boats up and putting on a memorial game.

So, from famine to feast, two new projects for 2025. Watch this space, although given that it's Christmas, feel free to start the watching in a couple of weeks from now.

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.

Wellington Triumphs Somewhere Or Other

 The Peninsular campaign hasn't been getting a lot of love in the blog recently, or indeed from your bloggist if truth be told. However, we have been plugging away by playing a game that's lasted a full four weeks, the longest that I can remember happening in the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach, and I've probably been playing there for close to twenty years(*). In the interests of complete disclosure I have to say that week two of the game was dreadful, at least from the point of view of my colleague Mr Jackson and myself, because we never got to do anything. But, in the finest traditions of the band on the Titanic we played on and, if I may mix my metaphors for a moment, we rose from the dead like one of those gay vampires that Ulysses S. Grant's great-great-grandson writes about. The final two evenings were highly enjoyable, with plenty of to and fro plus the good guys won in the end. What more could one want?

Well, fewer casualties probably. I still don't understand how the campaign loss system (ⓒ J.Roach) works, but the fact that the tray is overflowing is unlikely to be a good sign.

* Refights of Sidi Rezegh always felt like they had lasted for a month, but that's not the same thing.

Eve of Destruction

 We live in interesting times. It's reassuring therefore that readers have felt able to spare the time to write to me. For the record none of them have asked how the Peninsular campaign is going. Nevertheless I feel obliged to tell you. Mark very nearly won a couple of weeks ago, but the Spanish forces collectively made a burst towards Madrid, recapturing sufficient territory from the French to ensure that it will go on a bit longer. Bastards.

What did seem to be worrying you all was why my list of the most famous Barrys hadn't included Barry from Eastenders. A fine question, but in my defence I must point out that he is fictional, plus of course he was pushed off a cliff twenty years ago. Having said that, he did recently appear at a gig venue local to me presenting his, apparently famous, barrioke; shame I missed it.

Much more relevant to the state of the world is Barry Maguire, who recorded a song in 1965 which I would re-release sharpish were I his record label:

Vauban's Wars Revisited

 I have set the siege up again to have a little play. It's been getting on for three years since it was last out on the table. I refer to 'the siege' because the initial layout is always going to be pretty much the same. These photos may therefore look familiar. 

One change that we decided was necessary was to start the game with some of the second parallel already built, and that's what you see above. I want to test whether that means that any adjustment needs to be made to the force sizes or to the opening values of food, powder, morale etc. I hope not, and that's the way I'm going to try it first. Having re-read the rules I'm not sure we gave sufficient weight to blind spots around the bastions during previous games, although as it was so long ago I may just have forgotten. One aspect of addressing that which requires some thought - and possibly the manufacture of  player aid or two - is that my bastions don't have as acute an angle as would have done in real life or as the rules assume. The main reason for that is simply to make the table footprint more manageable, although it also makes it easier to put the cannon and figures in them. As I say I need to have a think about how to match the rules to the terrain.

Speaking of terrain, the only real change since last time is that I have modelled and cast up some proper positions for guns and mortars to replace the rather bodged way in which I did it before. Hopefully you can get the idea from the photo above.

The Spanish Have a Beef With Wellington

 The Peninsular Campaign, which we have been playing on and off now for some months, is in one sense just an extended playtest. James wrote the rules drawing on his vast experience, his status as a wargaming demi-god plus, of course, the ever elusive wargamer's common sense. However, and despite that pedigree, until they were played no-one could know how they would work out in practice. We have made the expected running amendments as we went along, but I understand that James now feels that he knows enough to start thinking about some more fundamental changes and a version 2.0. One aspect that seems certain to feature is some achievable victory conditions.

The problem with the current system is that it seems to be as easy to lose victory points as it is to gain them. The French are currently ahead, but only by as much as the allies were recently, and a swing back is all too imaginable.

One way out would be a climactic, winner-takes-all battle and we rather thought it had arisen a few weeks ago. One French command under Sault attacked a numerically superior, but otherwise inferior Spanish army. A second French force was due to arrive part way through, but - thanks to a campaign card produced from nowhere by Peter - so was Wellington with a large and very strong Anglo-Portuguese army. This was the big one. Except it wasn't. The luck of the dice and cards resulted in Wellington not bothering on this occasion and the Spanish received the inevitable kicking. I wouldn't be happy if I was them.

In another part of Spain

            There was a little girl,
            Who had a little curl,
            Right in the middle of her forehead.

            When she was good,
            She was very good indeed,
            But when she was bad she was horrid.

                       - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's possible that you are asking yourselves whether this Peninsular campaign hasn't been going on for rather a long while. It has, gentle readers, it has.

We fought through the conclusion of the latest battle between Spanish and French - Blake vs Marmont, but I still don't know where - over the last two Wednesday evenings. The first of those gave an excellent night's entertainment; the second didn't. Piquet, despite definitely being my rules of choice for Horse and Musket games, is a bit like Longfellow's little girl. Occasionally it is horrid.

Anyway, the Spanish duly lost, but did a reasonable amount of damage to Marmont's army. Elsewhere, Wellington has been trying to get to Sault, believing that he had inferior numbers. He did, but then a campaign card gave him the Old Guard, and then timely reinforcements to existing formations bolstered him even more. He was still too scared to take on the Iron Duke though and has attacked a nearby Spanish army instead. Will Wellington arrive in time to join the battle? I have no idea, because I clearly don't understand the campaign rules. 

A l’hora del record seràs València

 Or possibly not. It would seem that Valencia was relieved after all because the French marched their entire force of to battle rather than leaving any to man the siegeworks. I can't tell you what that means for the campaign; presumably all will become clear in due course. Anyway, in another part of Spain the French and Spanish are having at it again; we have already had more battles than there were in the whole of the Peninsular war. This time the Spanish force is that of Blake, who has done nothing so far except receive reinforcements. He outnumbers the French on the table at the start and has therefore attacked. As usual I don't know the location at which the battle is taking place. In my defence I seem to mainly view the map upside down and from a distance.

We've only played the first turn of the game so far, so by way of a change here is a picture of the participants. I apologise for the lack of ties; your bloggist was of course wearing one behind the camera.

Was Valencia Relieved?

 Well, was it? I don't think so, but not for the first time the finer details of the campaign seem to be eluding me. More on this later.

I confidently predicted that the Spanish had advanced as far as they could and would be pushed back on the second evening of the game. Inevitably therefore, they kept moving forwards, and it was the French whose units started to rout off the table. However, the French had so much morale left and the Spanish forces were so bad - being largely raw troops who don't fire very often or very effectively (*) - that we collectively called it as draw. As no one won, the situation, I think, remains as it was and Valencia is still besieged.

The campaign rules we are using were written by James, and most enjoyable they are too. Of course, playing through them has led to the odd tweak to improve playability, but nothing especially major. One thing has become apparent though, it has proven rather difficult for either side to land much of a damaging blow on the other. So, we have decided to make the permanent losses incurred by the losing side of a battle greater. The unintended consequence of this could well be fewer battles and more manoeuvre, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing; see previous reports for evidence that I at least have been a bit gung ho in offering battle. The other change we have made is to increase the size of the hand of campaign  cards each player is allowed to hold. This may seem a bit of a technicality, but we think it may lead to forces having their supply lines threatened more frequently.

Anyway, more map moves next week.

* Basically the French rolled very well and the Spanish very badly in the set up, and the reverse happened during the game itself.

Will Valencia Be Relieved?

 The current action in the Peninsular campaign is yet another set-to between O'Donnell and Macdonald, who are having a feisty, but probably irrelevant, private war on Spain's Eastern coast. One of them is besieging Valencia, and the other is trying to relieve the siege; at the time of writing I can't offhand remember which way round it is.

The Spanish army is, even by their low standards, pretty rubbish. That's them above; there's a reasonable number of them, but they're mostly very poor quality. Given that they must attack I - and probably everyone else - thought it would be a straightforward French victory. However, the first night of the game proved both highly enjoyable and surprising in what it delivered. Despite that, I would imagine that the photo below shows the highwater mark of the Spanish advance. Note the French flanking attack at the bottom, which subsequently drove the defending infantry out of the woods back across the stream.

The latest iteration of the skirmish rules continue to work well; no doubt we'll find the flaws in due course. 

Wellington Doesn't Lose

 I'm still struggling to spend much time working at a computer screen so posts will continue to be sparse; rest assured that quality will not rise as a result. As it happens I didn't miss any wargaming whilst AWOL, as there wasn't any. But we're back baby, we're back.

When we left it in December the main British force had decided to accept battle from the combined French forces despite the likelihood of being greatly outnumbered. I may be playing the role of Wellington, but I'm not role-playing the great man. There is no way he would have stood his ground, he would have retreated back to Portugal pronto. Indeed as we eventually got to the table I rather regretted my impetuosity. However I was lucky in that one of the three forces seeking to move against me didn't turn up at all. I was lucky again when the second force seemed likely to arrive quite late in the day. At the start of the battle therefore I had superior numbers. Having found my inner Iron Duke at last I didn't attack, rather I simply skulked behind a handy ridge.

The French moved against a village I was holding, with some initial success before being thrown back out of it. The Light Division saw most of the action and in skirmish formation saw off a formed unit with such ease that it has caused us to make a small amendment to the rules to make sure it can't happen again.

That's the 95th in the wood and that's a routing French unit at the top of the table. Subsequently the bulk of the French forces did arrive and the position looked very different.

But, I won the initiative when it mattered, rolling a timely double six (*) and turning eighteen straight cards of the twenty seven in my deck before the French could say "Zut alors!". The battle was drawn with remarkably few casualties on either side.  Both sides stay in place and all depends on the turn of the next campaign cards.

* Dice have replaced dominoes, but different dice to the ones that were replaced by dominoes in the first place; so far I prefer it.

The Battle of Cacares

 At least I think that's how you spell it. Whilst here has been no wargaming content on the blog for a while, there has been plenty going on in the background. Over the last three weeks we have been playing out the Battle of Cacares, or possibly the battle of a place which has a name that looks a bit like that. I trust that James will write it up fully in a blog post heavily laden with photographs, but here's a few of my thoughts with only one picture, and that one a tad arcane.

Wellington, having captured Madrid, immediately abandoned it and pressed on to confront Soult, taking advantage of a chunk of the latter's forces being holed up in Badajoz with a Spanish army camped outside.  My strategy, for it is I, is based on an assumption that the underlying purpose of the campaign is to provide us with opportunities to play with toy soldiers, and I therefore seek to bring the enemy to battle if the opportunity arises. Reading between the lines, I suspect that my fellow players feel the same way.

The first evening mostly involved manoeuvre by the Anglo-Portuguese while the French just sat there. I had been thinking for some time that the skirmisher rules were too advantageous to the British Light Division and had in a previous game adopted a particular approach aimed at exploiting what I thought was a loophole, thereby encountering much derision from the others, who didn't agree at all. I stuck with it however and committed much of the initiative which I gained from the draw of dominos to an elaborately choreographed advance by the Lights on my centre right which caused no French casualties and got us absolutely nowhere. Somewhat more was achieved by the cavalry. Most of the French cavalry was on their left, and not wanting this on the flank of my advancing infantry I sent my cavalry to see them off, which they did, ending the night poised to force the French infantry into square. On my left the only action was the playing of an event card by Mark allowing him to carry out a prebattle artillery bombardment. This made such a mess of the 3rd division that they played no further part in the game.

I had thought that the French, who started with more units on the table than the British, would attack on their right and my plan was to bring my reserves on to my extreme left and get behind them. No such attack having been forthcoming I brought the reserves on anyway at the beginning of the second evening and moved forwards. This second evening was marked by a British inability to cause any casualties in combat or indeed to throw anything worthwhile in defence either. This was despite no longer being encumbered with the by now abandoned Epictetus grand theory of how to use Napoleonic light infantry. Far from forcing the French infantry into square my cavalry was blown away by musket fire and the entire division became 'spent'. In fact the French switched their remaining cavalry unit to their left flank, with the clear - if ambitious - idea of seizing the village on the Allies baseline and gaining a cheesy victory that way. The evening ended with the British infantry with charge distance across the whole of the French defensive line.

On the third evening British luck with the dice changed and weight of numbers and, probably more importantly, the quality of their troops broke the French line close to the end of the fourth turn of the allowed five. Thankfully for the credibility of the morale system the French do-or-die cavalry raid, er, died. Permanent losses for campaign purposes were quite high, more so for the losers. The following photo makes clear the method of establishing those casualties.

OK, I admit that it doesn't make anything clear, especially to me. Still, James knows what he's doing, and he says I'm currently leading the campaign scoring track, so all is well.

Battle of Madrid, the Conclusion

 The game reached its inevitable conclusion, although it took a little bit longer than I thought it would. The French had played an event card (*) the previous week which meant that their best division could carry on after its morale was all spent, and carry on they did. Together with one of their cavalry units they caused a couple of British units on the left flank to rout. The focal point was however on the British right flank and there the Light Division advanced steadily and the day was won.

Things I would have done differently include arranging the units of the Light Division differently and possibly continuing the cavalry's move from flank to flank instead of pausing it for a while. I shall have a chance to test the first of those next week, because following another couple of turns of map moves (I think we're now half way through turn 8, but please don't rely on that) Wellington's army will now face off against Soult's.

I know everyone is interested in whatever rule changes occur. This week's related to morale losses following losing a melee. There was a certain amount of robust discussion around this as it seemed to appear from nowhere. James' justification didn't really consist of much more than saying that it was what he had written down and therefore it must be right. Fair enough, that will do me. And it is, of course, the same for both sides.

* These cards are part of the campaign structure. Personally, I'd include them in the base tabletop rules as well. I didn't like much about Soldiers of Napoleon, but I liked the event cards.