Sarah, Sarah, Sitting in a Shoe Shine Shop

I have been to see Ben Waters. He is an exponent of the boogie-woogie piano (he was the entertainment at Jools Holland's wedding if that puts him into context), and I confess I was feeling a certain trepidation at the thought of sitting through two hours' worth of eight to the bar and walking blues bass lines, accompanied no doubt by out of time handclapping from the audience. I was however, more than pleasantly surprised, because Waters mixed up the musical styles with plenty of rock & roll, plus some less expected covers such as the Kinks, the Beatles and ABBA. On top of which he was an amusing and entertaining raconteur. I was aware that he had connections with the Rolling Stones and he had several anecdotes about the various band members; although to be honest if you can't make something funny out of material like Jagger and Richards then you're in the wrong business.

He also told a number of stories about his mentor, the man who, himself steeped in the traditions, passed on the tricks of this particular piano style (and incidentally taught Waters very well because I had a good view of the keys and his hands were an absolute blur as he played). Given that this is a type of music that originated in New Orleans a century and more ago you can imagine the sort of mental image I had as he spoke. All of which proves that one should never jump to conclusions because the chap in question turned out to hail from Ilkley, and furthermore was sitting in the audience. Thus it was that a sprightly Yorkshire pensioner took to the stage, banged out a few numbers and regaled the audience with his own yarns about playing with Fats Domino, Dr John and the like; although sadly not Professor Longhair, perhaps that would have been too much to ask for. It's a funny old world.

One expectation that wasn't dashed - the audience clapped completely out of time all the way through.

We need some music at this point. Here's something from Fats Domino that speaks to me for some reason:

88mm in the a/t role - was it really that good?

I wrote a while ago about the question of whether units that historically performed well should be rated in such a way as they are guaranteed to repeat those exploits or such that it is merely possible that they may do so if the gods are with them. The issue arose again last night when, once again, Rommel's small quantity of 88mm a/t guns rather wiped the floor with the British tanks. I have no in-depth knowledge of the period and can't really comment except to say that it does rather detract from the game. It probably wouldn't be so bad if the British had the better tanks and the 88's strength was just some sort of compensation. But the Panzer IIIs have a better range, they are backed up by Panzer IVs that act as very effective self-propelled artillery against the British anti-tank gun line and then there are all the other, quite handy, German a/t guns.

I had a few of these when I first started wargaming

I say all the above having once again, due to the luck of the draw, commanded the Germans on the second day of Sidi Rezegh. The terrain had been further upgraded - and looks extremely good; check it out at Fiasco if you can - and the forces were already deployed when we started. The latter at least saving me the embarrassment of bringing my tanks on in the wrong place. The other change was that the British had two commanders with James taking the main tank force which under his leadership didn't actually appear all evening. This change meant that it was, for once, Peter who was the recipient of his tactical advice and as usual it was a) aggressive and b) rubbish. The most egregious example was his urging Peter to put the three companies of tanks already on the table in the place where I immediately, courtesy of the 88, destroyed two of them without actually breaking sweat.

James Roach's tactical inspiration

This time round I did follow Rommel's instructions and attack with my infantry - with mixed results - although I still think that this is the flaw in the scenario. In real life Rommel apparently did this to divert Campbell's attention while the armour arrives on his flank. However, in the current scenario it rather does the opposite. If one is the British then one would rather use any initiative won to fire at things and reload than to turn cards. This is because the British don't want to turn their Desert Rats card until after the Germans have turned their Afrika Korps card (this is all to do with the entry of their respective armour) and so, in my opinion, any attack by the German infantry does the opposite of what, one must assume, Rommel wanted.

The other change was the use of dominoes to generate initiative and, so far, I think the consensus is fairly favourable. Initiative has been reasonably even, but there have been large runs (I got 21 at one point), and yet one always gets some on a reasonably regular basis.

...are OK so far

Sidi Rezegh, the tanks arrive

"I shall never complain about not getting any initiative again." is what I said to Peter as we left James' house last night. The previous week had seen him getting the vast majority of the initiative, but last night I basically got it all. We don't count who gets what so one has to rely on impressions, but I think that we all shared the same opinion. And while it's clearly more fun to turn cards and act on them than not, extreme swings do spoil the game for both parties. As I've said before I really enjoy the Piquet family of games, but can understand why others are put off by this aspect. There were some mutterings last night about trying methods involving dominos and I'd certainly be up for trying an experiment.

'The moon stood still

On Blueberry Hill

Because it didn't win any initiative'

Rather than give a blow by blow account of the battle I thought I'd list some of the other things that I don't like about Piquet or, to be more precise, the WWII version.

• I don't think the card activation system allows the complex activities of 20th century warfare to play out convincingly. It works brilliantly when there are a limited number of types of troops i.e. when the randomness is about how many times one gets to shoot before melee occurs or whether one gets a chance to rally between combats and so on. To my mind this is OK all the way up to Horse and Musket periods, but WWII (on which I claim no particular expertise by the way) is too complicated to be reduced to Infantry, Artillery and Armour. I have no quibble with the work the rules authors (from Bob Jones original concept through to James' constant tweaking) have done in portraying the effect of individual weapons, but I don't think they work in combination.
• Scenario specific objectives never seem to work in combination with the base Piquet mechanic of morale chips. It might be heresy, but I'm tempted to do away with morale chips in WWII and reward stand losses inflicted with a gain in initiative and base morale challenges on an initiative pip cost. Given the extremely high level of tank losses suffered in the Operation Crusader battles it's difficult, based on my superficial level of knowledge, to see why morale is such a factor. Instead the issue would seem to have been issues of quality of troops and material (which Piquet models well) and momentum (which I think would be modelled by rewarding success in combat with more initiative, which of course is what Piquet already does in those periods where melee is the main method of resolving combat). It's all hypothetical because I shall never run a WWII game, but it's worth noting that James and Peter came to a similar conclusion regarding opportunity fire i.e. that the core mechanism didn't work in WWII.
• Taking advice from James. I need to clarify this; James is clearly adept at the finer details of Piquet such as which units to fire in which order at which targets etc and worth listening to at such times. However, on the broader subject of tactics his advice is always to attack and it's always bollocks. The longer this game has gone on the more convinced I am that I was right not to attack with my infantry straight away. This is in large part because of the loss of morale chips involved.

So, a prediction is called for. I think the British will win next week because the Germans are going to run out of morale chips. You heard it here first.