Garigliagain

We have had another crack at Garigliano, in a revised scenario that James describes here. Hopefully he will follow that with an illustrated game report so I will limit myself to a few points:

• I was the Spanish this week and fared no better than I had as the French. Mysteriously whereas last week the Swiss Pike were shot to pieces as they attacked the colonelas, this week they weren't. While in the first game the Spanish had swept through the defenders at the tête-de-pont and over the bridge, this time they, er, didn't. 
• Of all the periods which I regularly get a chance to wargame, the Italian Wars are the one about which I know the least. I have never read any books on the subject (other than Machiavelli of course) and anything I think I know about Renaissance warfare comes from either listening to James explain why he is changing the rules yet again or from having seen contemporary prints and paintings of battle scenes. I mention this because the games we play using Pike & Shotte develop in such a way that the table looks to me much closer to those visual representations than the games we played using Piquet derivatives used to do. 
• I enjoy the rules, especially the relative looseness of the way movement is handled. I find rallying a bit less to my taste, but maybe I'm just being obtuse.
• We are clearly, and frustratingly, still not playing everything correctly. Partly this is because of our long legacy of playing one family of rules, and partly because the rulebook is so badly structured. These inadvertencies would certainly include melees - which are not intuitive - but also things such as free moves and, no doubt, other areas of which we are not even aware.

Anyway, we shall revisit the scenario one more time next week, with the aid of a distinguished (by which I mean both award winning and indisputably normal looking) wargaming visitor from out of town.