Sidi Rezegh, the tanks arrive

"I shall never complain about not getting any initiative again." is what I said to Peter as we left James' house last night. The previous week had seen him getting the vast majority of the initiative, but last night I basically got it all. We don't count who gets what so one has to rely on impressions, but I think that we all shared the same opinion. And while it's clearly more fun to turn cards and act on them than not, extreme swings do spoil the game for both parties. As I've said before I really enjoy the Piquet family of games, but can understand why others are put off by this aspect. There were some mutterings last night about trying methods involving dominos and I'd certainly be up for trying an experiment.

'The moon stood still

On Blueberry Hill

Because it didn't win any initiative'

Rather than give a blow by blow account of the battle I thought I'd list some of the other things that I don't like about Piquet or, to be more precise, the WWII version.

• I don't think the card activation system allows the complex activities of 20th century warfare to play out convincingly. It works brilliantly when there are a limited number of types of troops i.e. when the randomness is about how many times one gets to shoot before melee occurs or whether one gets a chance to rally between combats and so on. To my mind this is OK all the way up to Horse and Musket periods, but WWII (on which I claim no particular expertise by the way) is too complicated to be reduced to Infantry, Artillery and Armour. I have no quibble with the work the rules authors (from Bob Jones original concept through to James' constant tweaking) have done in portraying the effect of individual weapons, but I don't think they work in combination.
• Scenario specific objectives never seem to work in combination with the base Piquet mechanic of morale chips. It might be heresy, but I'm tempted to do away with morale chips in WWII and reward stand losses inflicted with a gain in initiative and base morale challenges on an initiative pip cost. Given the extremely high level of tank losses suffered in the Operation Crusader battles it's difficult, based on my superficial level of knowledge, to see why morale is such a factor. Instead the issue would seem to have been issues of quality of troops and material (which Piquet models well) and momentum (which I think would be modelled by rewarding success in combat with more initiative, which of course is what Piquet already does in those periods where melee is the main method of resolving combat). It's all hypothetical because I shall never run a WWII game, but it's worth noting that James and Peter came to a similar conclusion regarding opportunity fire i.e. that the core mechanism didn't work in WWII.
• Taking advice from James. I need to clarify this; James is clearly adept at the finer details of Piquet such as which units to fire in which order at which targets etc and worth listening to at such times. However, on the broader subject of tactics his advice is always to attack and it's always bollocks. The longer this game has gone on the more convinced I am that I was right not to attack with my infantry straight away. This is in large part because of the loss of morale chips involved.

So, a prediction is called for. I think the British will win next week because the Germans are going to run out of morale chips. You heard it here first.