kg m/s

Until yesterday the only thing that I knew about Jean Buridan was that he had a donkey; possibly a dead donkey that had starved to death through indecision, but a donkey nevertheless. Having researched him for the purposes of my last blog posting I now know somewhat more:

• If you're not careful Google confuses him with the actor chappy who won an Oscar for 'The Artist'. As good as that film was, please don't make the same mistake.
• He was, apparently, assless. Who knew?
• He had something against William of Occam. Hiss.
• He was a crucial figure in the development of scientific thought in Europe, paving the way for Copernicus, Newton et al. In fact he developed a theory of the quantity of motion, which he referred to as impetus.

On m'a promis un âne

It is perhaps timely therefore to report that my own investigations into Basic Impetus have come to a dead halt. They have, as it were, run out of momentum. I didn't get to play through a full test game (and nor sadly have I caught much of what has clearly been an excellent ODI series), but what I did find time to do convinced me that these were not the rules for me. My own interest in wargaming stems from the game part; fair enough I like a bit of visual aesthetic pleasure and also some historical references thrown in, but basically it's a game. And as a game Basic Impetus just doesn't float my boat. The combat resolution seems fine, if a bit dice heavy, but the command and control rules don't match my own tastes, which are for decision making within a framework of constraints. These decisions are not in any way meant to mimic the decisions made by real life commanders, they're just the sort of choices that occur in tabletop games: allocation of limited resources, stick or twist, guess what the opponent can/will do - you know the sort of thing. And because of that, and nothing else, I abandoned plans for a game of Basic Impetus when James and Peter came round last night. Instead I rejigged it into a game of the current new, shiny ruleset 'To the Strongest'. I may, or may not, find time to write that game up in due course, but a good time was had by all in any event.