The Forgetting Curve

"A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. we will suppose that after half a year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness." 

- Hermann Ebbinghaus

Wargaming has returned a bit earlier than expected. James and I had a small Italian Wars game using the Renaissance version of Black Powder, the exact name of which escapes me. It wasn't only the name which escaped me however, because I could remember literally nothing about the rules despite having played them six months ago. Fortunately James' remembered slightly more than me, just enough to get us started. With much flipping through the (very badly written) rulebook we managed OK, and finished early enough to spend some time agreeing on exactly which bits we had got wrong. We also made use of a cheat sheet showing the effects of being either disordered or shaken; it turned out that I had prepared it last year, something else that had slipped from my memory. Another game has been scheduled for next week, which hopefully will be soon enough for some of it all to have stuck this time. For the record three Swiss pike blocks were thrown back by a couple of heroic Spanish colunellas lining a wall. James filled the role normally filled by Peter and threw bad dice repeatedly.

I've also bought a copy of Miniature Wargames for the first time in ages. I am possibly in a minority of one in thinking that it was at its best when edited by Andrew Hubback, but at least we can all agree that it's pretty poor nowadays. The June issue has a quite astonishing editorial in which the current incumbent tells the readers that they're wrong when they tell him they don't find the articles in the magazine interesting or relevant. I only bought it for the feature on using cards to generate unpredictability in Zulu wars games, which I thought might have some application to my Romans in Britain game, the one that is forever on the back burner. In fairness it did indeed contain one or two ideas worth thinking about. But in case you read it elsewhere and assumed they were joking, there really is an article about how to paint a realistic elven army, without the slightest hint of irony.