Wot - no wargaming?

So, four posts in to the commentario revixit and no mention of it's raison d'être. ["You can pack that in right away." expostulates the Rhetorical Pedant "You know that no one likes a smartarse."] So here's the wargaming.

In the legendary etc. etc. we have been firmly fixed in the Central Europe of the mid-Eighteenth Century, which is fine by me. As much as I enjoy all the other periods and rules that we play, Horse & Musket using Classic Piquet floats my boat the most. Not that James' period specific set (somewhat ironically entitled "Easy, Peasy, Lemon Squeezy") remain terribly close to the original. One further rule changes has seen melee being possible from within 3" instead of only when in contact and incidentally has confused the hell out of James himself despite it all being his idea. It does seem inevitable that we shall see at least one further alteration in the immediate future. There is an obscure rule allowing some cavalry and grenadiers to issue a morale challenge under certain circumstances simply by virtue of being hench. This rule has been faithfully reproduced in each successive version of the rules despite never actually being used. However, back in the days when I could still read, it caught my eye. Several - mostly fruitless - uses later and one can see James itching to completely rewrite it.

The main scenario played has been Kolin, which could just be the least balanced ever written. Peter and I took the Austrians against James and Mark's Prussians and, as I said to my colleague afterwards, I've ever rolled so many terrible dice and yet won so easily; it was all over in a couple of hours. We gave them a chance to even things up and, with Mark notably upping his game second time round, they made more of a fist of it. Peter, despite changing his die roll of choice from 1 to 2, couldn't hit anything with musket or artillery fire and lost every cavalry melee. And yet, and yet, the Prussians ran out of morale chips and we won by a country mile once again.

The annexe at the Casa Epictetus has been cleared of all the stuff moved there après le déluge ["Stop it, right now"] and I have purchased my own hard copy of To The Strongest!. I intend to stay in Bohemia, but jump back three centuries or so.