Arenaceous

Wargaming has been almost as rare a blogging about it, or indeed blogging about anything. (Don't worry though; there's an opera festival in Leeds this weekend.) We did however play a game last week sometime, a second run through of the first game with James' new Peninsular War figures. James has written about it here and Mark here, so I won't say anything except perhaps to point out that I was robbed.

I will say something about the rules though. The previous week we had been somewhat rusty and, while I would not be prepared to put my hand on my heart and say that we had got things completely correct this time, we are clearly moving in the right direction. As with all rules we came across certain things that look peculiar, at least the way that we played them.

James mentions in his blog that the Break Test table seems to omit certain period specific circumstances, which was easily enough resolved. There also seems to be an oddity surrounding defending buildings, which I know I will have trouble expressing in clear terms, but let's have a go anyway. There is - at least in our interpretation - a marked difference in the likelihood of success when defending a town section from an attack from the open compared to defending it from attack from an adjacent town section. The extent of this difference seems to grow exponentially as the size of the defending unit decreases; it is not clear that this is a deliberate design feature. We had a brief correspondence on the subject subsequent to the game and I found myself resorting to the higher mathematics to make my point, which is never ideal for anyone involved.

My main dislike was the cavalry breakthrough charge. This wasn't so much with the concept - lot of rules have it - but with the fact that, if we are doing it as we should be, the rules are written such that there is actually an advantage to the cavalry unit from being on their second round of melee rather than their first. I have to say that isn't an especially intuitive approach.

Perhaps these things will be addressed in the forthcoming second edition, which will hopefully be somewhat more clearly laid out.