The answer of course is one bite at a time. And that is how I have disposed of the Carthaginian elephants in the battle currently taking place in North Africa during our Punic Wars campaign. My invasion has gone reasonably well so far and due to rebellion one of the provinces has come over to me and in the battle I am on only slightly worse terms and with evenly matched generals. So far I have had by far the better of the cards. The only problem is that they will eventually balance out so I have to make the most of it until they do. Anyway, the elephants have proved completely useless so far. It was W.C. Fields who observed that women were like elephants, interesting to look at, but one wouldn't want to own one. How true, how true.
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| Run, elephant, run |
Q: What do you call an elephant that doesn't matter?
A: An irrelephant.
You will notice that I do not refer to the battle ongoing at the start of last week. I had a brief, but pointless, moment of success when I managed to extend the battle by capturing the village in the middle. However, I still lost heavily, and the retreat was even worse; the entire army disappearing. It's not looking good.
Someone once told me that the correct answer to the question of how you eat an elephant is "with Branston Pickle", though I have doubts myself.
ReplyDeleteThe problem of the cards eventually balancing out is a nippy one. I really like card systems, they are versatile and they feel like a proper game, but a finite, known pack of cards is always a limitation (I feel this seems to apply especially when I play Bridge, as a matter of fact, but I refer to war-games here). At least dice rolls, crude as they are, have the decency to be from an infinite series, of unknown form. I have decreed that all packs of event cards and similar used in my own war-games will have a proportion discarded, blind, before the game starts, and will contain one or more cards which say "shuffle the pack and start again". A humble provision, but one which prevents the Great Fire of Naples occurring exactly once for each run through the pack.
The ideal pack of cards, of course, and one which would get us to play Trivial Pursuit again, would be a Magic Pack which was different each time we open the box. That would be smashing, but somehow I don't think it is very likely, boys and girls.
You are right and my observation about the cards balancing out was more based on the law of averages (and speaking as someone whose first degree was in mathematics I know perfectly well that there is no such thing) rather than the cards being known, finite or whatever.
ReplyDeleteWe are playing Command & Colours and whilst the card numbers and proportions are fixed, the deck is shared and you don't know which ones you will draw. And the 'I am Spartacus' card does result in a reshuffle. We normally play Piquet and the decks of cards are far more restrictive in that game, although despite that I am a big fan. My main problem with C&C isn't the cards so much as the split of the battlefield into left, centre and right. And the bit I like the best is the dice mechanism. The cards are just sort of OK.
For no good reason, I had assumed that you might be using Mr Roach's own rules. I have no experience of C&CA, though I am devoted to C&CN - most of my Napoleonic miniatures games use these rules, and my ECW minis games are mostly based on a variant of C&CN.
DeleteInterested by your views on C&C - the "sectors" aspect of the Command Cards is frustrating at times, agreed, but it does successfully introduce a form of restriction, and is maybe as good a way of dicing an onion as others. My gripe about the C&C command cards is the lack of a strategic movement, or the option to shift concatenated groups (maybe this exists in C&CA, come to think of it) - this can result in C&CN being excessively tied into scenarios involving developed positions.
Or you can tweak the rules a bit, of course, which is what I do.
On balance, i think cards are pretty cool - they just need to be bossed about a little.
Elephants too, probably. My first degree was in maths, also - my second was in actuarial science - what a sad little person i am. That is probably why i know very little about elephants.
Well they're all James' rules to a certain extent. By C&C I actually mean James' version for playing without hexes. It works OK with a certain amount of tolerance from the players. Playing his version of an existing ruleset rather than his own rules does mean that there seem to be fewer mid game changes. Although Numidian cavalry have gone up in melee and down in firepower between the last two battles; just as I got some to play with for the first time (due to my causing a rebellion in Numidia) in fact.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I take your point about the sectors providing a restriction, there are an awful lot of games that do that in different ways and for me personally arbitrary geographical deliniation is just about my least favourite mechanism.