Piquet

I have been remiss in posting about Wednesday night's game. Partly that's because not a great deal happened. The anticipated tank carnage didn't happen and will presumably occur next Wednesday instead. Which brings me to the other thing that has delayed me writing about it.

The name of the game, Piquet, is sort of French(ish). The saga of the Battage competition that I won (boring story - I'll write it up when I'm desperate for something to post about) proved that Americans cannot speak French so I don't want to overdo the language dimension. However, my point is that the French are philosophically inclined to rank theory above practice and these days standard Piquet appeals to me more in an intellectual sense than when playing it. This is probably because I have returned to it from playing several FoB type games, which I greatly prefer.

Jean-Paul Sartre reflects on old school wargaming

On Wednesday my plan - such as it was - didn't happen because I didn't get the initiative and the cards. Peter's plan - somewhat more intrinsically sensible than mine - didn't work either. Although he got the significant majority of the initiative on the night the cards didn't fall in the right order for him and he was disrupted by my artillery. All of that is fine; it demonstrates the difficulties of command and control that Piquet seeks to reflect and is why, at an intellectual level, I like the game. If I wanted to play chess then I would (although actually I'm no good at that either) and the aspect that I really like about games from the Piquet family is the fact that one could play the same scenario dozens of times and the game would never play out the same way twice (1).

But, and it's a big but, it isn't always fun to play. To stand there for 20 initiative points in a row doing nothing more than rolling D6s to defend and D8s against the subsequent morale challenge just gets tedious no matter how well the game works in theory. On Wednesday night I turned just two armoured action cards and one infantry action card in three hours. I did get to blaze away with my artillery a couple of times, but overall it was wearisome. Maybe next week's mutual destruction will be more interesting.

(1) This is of course even before one factors in James' propensity to tweak the rules during games as well as between them.