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.