Games, must we?

 In my last post I said that the opening scene of 'Owen Wingrave' contained a reference to Austerlitz. I nearly made a smug comment to the effect that I was probably the only person in the audience that picked it up. Two things stopped me. Firstly, the realisation that I was probably the only person in the audience that cared at all. And secondly, the possibility that I might have deduced the wrong battle anyway. There was no mention of the battle by name, simply a few oblique clues. One of these was the name of General Vandamme.

As it happens the villain in Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest', played by James Mason, is also Vandamm - no 'e', but close enough.

Two days before seeing the opera, I went to see Wise Children's stage version of the film, and am happy to report a return to form for the company. It's a whimsical crowd-pleaser rather than a straight thriller, but there is intelligence in the way that verbal humour, physical comedy and audience interaction are substituted for the darkness of the original. And then there's the action scenes. The film featured locations such as the UN building, various trains and stations, a cornfield being buzzed by a crop-spraying aircraft and, of course, Mount Rushmore; all are transposed to the stage with imagination and invention. It's well worth seeing.

Fact of the day: Eva Marie Saint, who played Eve Kendall in the 1959 film is, astonishingly, still alive and is the oldest living Academy Award winner.

False Plumes And Pride

 And so to the opera. Regular readers will know that going to the opera is as close to my heart as indulging in a bit of toy soldier action. I was delighted therefore to attend a performance which included both. The figures - understandably impossible to see in any detail - were present in the opening scene of Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' when our 'hero' and his friend are being instructed in the strategic lessons to be learned from the battle of Austerlitz. Sadly, there is no room in the libretto to include what these lessons might be, but we do learn that Napoleon was delighted with the outcome.

Less delighted with things is Wingrave himself, who subsequently rejects his family's plan for him. This is that he kills and quite possibly dies for the glory of Queen, country and the honour of the Wingrave name as countless generations have done before him. That's the countless generations haunting him in the picture. 

I'd never seen it before - it's rarely performed - but rather liked it. Unlike many operas the plot is very straightforward with literally everyone else except the title character being an unsympathetic baddie including, oddly but effectively, the house in which they all live. The piece was originally commissioned by the BBC to be shown on television, something which would never now happen, thereby neatly encapsulating the level of cultural decline in the UK during the last half century.

Obviously pacifism is a more complex issue than as portrayed here. I have never read the Henry James story on which it based, but don't really expect to find subtlety there either. The name 'Owen' means 'young soldier' and 'Wingrave' is clearly, well, 'win grave'. Possibly if Britten had not run away to the US during the second world war, but had stayed in the UK and lived out his principles in the context of a society under attack he may have been able to add some more nuanced touches.

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Boardgaming Q1 2025

 The usual list of mostly new-to-me games:

Antike: Yet another game of civilisation building around the Mediterranean. This one hinges on when you switch from peaceful coexistence to destroying your opponents temples. It was fine.

The Downfall of Pompeii: You can not only overwhelm your opponents with lava flows, but then you get to throw their pieces into the volcano.

Fit To Print: A real time spatial awareness game; that's a lot of red flags for me.

Flip 7: A rather good push-your-luck filler.

Francis Drake: I had played this once before, about ten years ago. This time it lasted about four hours and I lost because the very last tile I turned over read 3 instead of 1 or 2. So, either mail-bitingly tight or entirely luck based depending on your point of view.

Fromage: Ostensibly about French cheese, but really about the revolving board mechanic. However, the latter works well and it's a good game.

Harmonies: I had heard that this was the new Cascadia, but it's somewhat more complex than that game. It was OK, but I won't be seeking it out.

Landmarks: It's a cross between Codenames and Survive. Not for me.

Metro: Not bad, but it seems as if someone said let's add some unnecessarily complicated scoring to Tsuro for a laugh. 

Oregon: I quite liked this. It's a fairly abstract tile-laying game.

Sausage Sizzle!: Fairly amusing Australian barbecue themed Yahtzee.

SCOUT: This filler is a few years old, but has a bit of a current buzz for some reason. It's OK.

SETI: Search For Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Another game that involves gimmicky revolving bits and pieces. In this case they are thematic, representing the solar system. Other parts aren't quite so realistic, such as landing on Jupiter. However, it's a good, crunchy, heavyish Euro game.

Thunder Road Vendetta: I'm always on the look out for games that I think wargamers would like. Some wargamers might like this - there's lots of aggression and destruction - but others might not - it's basically chaos. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think we've only scratched the surface of what could happen.

The pick of the bunch out of this lot is SETI, although Thunder Road Vendetta is good way to wind down after more intellectually challenging games.

Tabletop Teaser #3

 No sooner am I back than I am going away again. However, I do just have time for a little wargames coverage, illustrated as usual with one terrible photo taken on my phone.

The noteworthy thing about the game was that we played one of C.S. Grant's Tabletop Teasers as published in, I think, Battle magazine many years ago. We played number 3, Advance Guard Action and very good fun it was too. We used Anglo-Portuguese and French Peninsular figures, but just as generic troops without national characteristics; no better firing for the British for example. It worked very well, but I just couldn't bring myself to form the British into attack column, however much the situation called out for it.

Crocodile Rock

 Apologies for my absence, but this retirement malarkey doesn't leave one any free time. Amongst other things I have been to Largs and the Isle of Cumbrae, both of which sound like they are taken from a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but are in fact real; the former is even on the rail network. The latter enhances its fantasy credentials by being home to this:

Apparently alcohol was involved at some point in creating this, but it was over a century ago so no record remains of  whether deep fried food also featured. For those who worry that Scottish stereotypes are not what they once were I can offer the reassurance that whilst in Glasgow I saw someone walking along the road swigging from a bottle of Bucky. I visited Nardini's whilst in Largs; lovely art deco building, terrible service.

Anyway, here's Sir Reg (*) with a totally non-fantasy version of a song that either has no relation to the above or indicates that Bernie Taupin holidayed in Millport as a child.

* Or, to be more precise, someone playing the part of Sir Reg.

Optimised for Rowing

 "There are no galley-slaves in the royal vessel of divine love - every man works his oar voluntarily!"

- Saint Francis de Sales

Someone - and I wish I could be more specific, but I wasn't paying attention - has acquired some ancient galleys and is looking for a set of rules. As part of the process of passing some on to him (or possibly, though unlikely, her) we cracked out James's Punic wars fleets and had at it. The rules were 'Fleet of Battle' as written by James and Peter and published in Wargames Illustrated (*) a few years ago. We played them as printed, in other words nothing like the the last time that we played a set of rules with that title, or probably as we shall play next time. I'm fairly sure that last time we did this we were trying to make them work with hexes, the same hexes that can still be seen on the tabletop in the photo above.

In any event, they worked well enough, with a bit of fudging where there appeared to be bits missing. For reasons of space the published version effectively only contains the QRS and not actually any rules per se. Obviously we know how it's all meant to hang together, but you have to wonder what anyone else made of it. Still, as I always say, if you can't rely on the common sense of wargamers then what can you rely on?

* I think; it could just as easily have been one of the others.

Yeed Our Last Haw - For Now

 "And a thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen" - Plato

We finally got round to having a more ambitious game with the What a Cowboy! rules, more figures on the table and even a scenario of sorts. 

Sadly the quality of the photos hasn't improved. The two characters hidden on the right are bandits trying to ambush the wagon, which may contain money, or gold, or possibly their arrested leader. There were four factions on the table and I'm not sure anyone fully understood what they were trying to do, even James and he designed the scenario. I was in charge of one lot of lawmen, did the least and ended up the winner.

The rules continue to entertain. Richard Clarke likes to put spotting into his rules and it doesn't always sit right with me, but here they do make sense and the rationale behind them is well explained in the text. Reloading is possibly one area that seems a bit odd, but we came to the conclusion that it was perhaps about getting the cadence and flow of the game to work smoothly rather than a literal interpretation of either real life or of  how it's done in Hollywood. Anyway, having got on top of it we are inevitably now going to do something else. After all, it's hard to be a cowboy in the north of England.

What? More Cowboys!

 Actually, it was exactly the same cowboys as the previous time. Plans to expand the game foundered on a lack of the correct paperwork.

The ambidextrous Pinkerton man whose base isn't finished demonstrates that we have been playing with what we inherited as we found it. However, I do anticipate this small collection being upgraded at least a little bit because we've all been enjoying it so much.

The playing card tokens help us keep track of who's who, and the tuft indicates that the figure has been pinned and can't do anything until it's removed.

What? Some Cowboys!

 As previously mentioned, we have been intending to play with some of Peter's collections which never saw action while he was alive. My progress with 'Cruel Seas' has been, to no one's surprise, non-existent. Fortunately, there were a small number of painted cowboys plus a set of the Two Fat Lardies' 'What a Cowboy!' rules. With James' Crusades era buildings standing in for adobe dwellings of the South Western US we were good to go. As I had played these rules before (once, and a couple of years ago) I was given the role of umpire/page turner. 

I must put some effort into taking more and better photographs, recent offerings really haven't been good enough. Given the figures which we had available the game saw a High Noon style face-off between a small group of Pinkerton detectives and a suspiciously equal in size, armament and skill level group of Mexican bandidos, both sides having neglected to bring their horses with them. It went down rather well, and familiarity with the rules having increased (we didn't find shooting all that intuitive, but got there in the end), we shall try a slightly larger game next week. Still no horses I suspect, somewhat ironic given that the figures were Peter's. The result of the game was inconclusive, with one bandit dead and two of the agents quite seriously wounded. There was a noticeable reluctance on the part of the players to pull back and recover their strength rather than constantly rush forward with all guns blazing.

I tasked James with the disappearing Triples entry on his blog (see the comments on the previous post) and he acknowledged that he had deleted it after a few months, feeling it was perhaps a bit strong. Despite it all being over ten years ago he clearly hasn't forgiven and forgotten though. His explanation for those present last night who weren't previously aware of the story was both forceful and embittered. 

“Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.” - Rider Haggard

Vapnartak 2025

 We played Ravenna again last week. The French won again, this time without even reaching the barricades of the Holy League, let alone crossing them. It is just possible that the scenario parameters (i.e. the number of morale chips) aren't quite right. On the other hand it was both fun and all over in an evening, both of which are factors not to be sniffed at. I'm afraid I only took this one, terrible photo.

I thought we were going to be doing the Italian Wars for a while, but this week - tomorrow in fact - promises something very different.

On Sunday I went to Vapnartak, and thought it was pretty poor. It was certainly rather empty, both of punters and traders; there never have been that many display games. One blogger I have read since compared it to the declining years of Triples. I didn't experience those due to 'an incident' after which we never returned. I hope the parallel doesn't prove to be accurate.

I went to York with one of my occasional companions, who was overall more positive than me, but then she'd never been to a wargames show before and was possibly just relieved that it wasn't as bad as her worst fears. She said that everyone there reminded her of her brother. Having observed their sibling relationship for a few years I don't think this was a compliment.

It's All Over Now

 

Ravenna

 There has been the first wargame of the year, the snow having cleared and Storm Éowyn not having yet arrived. We are going to have a run of Italian Wars games as the one we played a couple of months ago convinced James that the rules needed to be tweaked to reflect current thinking. What does that mean? Well, a bit more classic Piquet, a lot more streamlined. Now you know.

The chosen battle was Ravenna, which I know we have played many times, but about which I can remember very little. I was the defenders, which I'm pretty sure made me the Spanish; should you know differently feel free to leave a comment. There was a certain amount of making it up as we went along. but the game flowed well and finished easily in one evening. Whilst there were a series of cavalry melees on the left flank, the key action was as shown above. A whole line of pike blocks charged a single tercio behind a barricade. The white dice you can see relate to a somewhat complicated mechanism for reflecting stubbornness. I never like to see a rule without using it, so I spent morale freely to maintain my position at the defences and repel all three pike blocks. Unfortunately I spent the whole lot, which meant I had lost. A more sensible strategy might have been to withdraw the battered tercio at some point and let the pike blocks face the fresh one in reserve. Next time.

No Rules, Everyone Loses

 

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." - André Gide

In Which I have Money To Spend, But Nowhere To Spend It

 Back to the Mexican Revolution, but probably not for long. So, I bought some 20mm Mexican Revolution figures on eBay for a price that I thought was reasonable, intending it to be the start of a new project. I knew how many figures overall and the split between foot and mounted, but nothing more (*). It didn't matter because the total quantity was such that I needed to top it up before I could play a game. That, of course, would not be a problem as there are three suppliers of 20mm Mexican Revolution figures: Shell Hole Scenics, Early War Miniatures (these being the two represented in my purchase) and Jacklex. Even as I analysed what I'd bought I discovered that Shell Hole Scenics had shut down. Disappointing, but no problem. I had, in parallel with the eBay transaction, ordered the Jacklex sampler for the period. This put me on their mailing list, which is how I found out last week that they had also, in their words, permanently closed. Well, there's always EWM. Or at least there may be in due course; their website is down, has been for some time, and despite their promises doesn't really show any signs of being brought back up to speed.

Your bloggist reviews potential new recruits

I am well aware that these are all small businesses and have every sympathy for the problems they face, among which are the inevitable difficulties in exporting to the EU now the UK is no longer a member (**). However, I do fear it is a sign of things to come in the hobby. Anyway, we've waited a long time for this project, looks like we're going to wait a bit longer.

* For the record there are about twice as many revolutionaries as federales.

** Although, reading between the lines, one of the owners voted for it and still hasn't acknowledged his error.

Let's Hope It's A Good One