Maloyaroslavets

I have mentioned before that I don't care for the way C&C handles victory conditions. And if one is going to move away from that part of the base design then why not move away from other elements? So, for the latest game to be set up in the annexe, I have changed the shape of the board. It is exactly the same area, but instead of 20 x 12 hexes it's 16 x 15.

The scenario is Maloyaroslavets (October 24th 1812) which involved the capture and recapture of a village (in the right centre of the board above). To eliminate wasted space on the flanks, try to make sure that cards applying to all sectors can be utilised and provide space for successive waves of attackers from either side it seemed appropriate to make it deeper and less wide.

I took the OOBs from here, but have played about with the terrain a bit. I have added an extra bridge to mitigate against a roadblock for the French and have only included slopes around the village itself, mainly for simplicity. One part of the village and both bridges are in hexes spanning two sectors. Rather than trying to identify arrival times - a concept that doesn't fit easily into C&C's turn structure - commands have been staggered back to the baseline. Each side has a couple of off table commands which can be brought on at any time. If we remember to use the March Move rule that we overlooked last time then it shouldn't be too difficult to get things into action. Victory conditions are the French have to hold the village and one bridge by the end of the evening in order to win. If they don't then the Russians win. The game starts with a weak French garrison in the village just about to be assaulted by a larger Russian force. What is obviously meant to happen is that they capture it only to be assaulted in turn and so on in turn. I envisage burst of fighting followed by periods of regrouping and manoeuvre into position. As usual, we shall see.

The river can be crossed by infantry and cavalry (stop on contact), but a dice is rolled. Sabres means the loss of a stand, flags means the unit stops in the hex before the river. If the river is entered as part of a mandatory retreat then for infantry and cavalry a dice is rolled and unit symbols and sabres count as hits, flags mean an extra hex of withdrawal; artillery are destroyed. The French on the southern side of the river have an extra option when withdrawing; they can either move one hex back towards the baseline as normal, or they can move one hex towards the nearest bridge.

We shall be using the EPIC rules with the shared open hand of cards. Hands will be six cards each (to try to make sure that one has options given that the action will concentrate in the centre) with, I think, a starting hand of four Tactician cards. We shall use our house rule regarding cards such as Bombard, which is basically that you can spread the effect across the whole table. There will be a pre-battle Mother Russia role (six dice), and I think I shall allow Cossacks and artillery to start the game with higher than normal strength if that's the way the dice come up. I have some Russian militia - with a rather nice holy banner - who have never seen any action so I am trying to work out how to tweak things to get a unit of those on table; if they don't appear during the retreat from Moscow then they never will.

The Walk

Glamoured the road, the day, and him and her

And everywhere they took me. When we stepped out

Cobbles were riverbed, the Sunday air

A high stream-roof that moved in silence over

Rhododendrons in full bloom, foxgloves

And hemlock, robin-run-the-hedge, the hedge

With its deckled ivy and thick shadows –

Until the riverbed itself appeared,

Gravelly, shallowly, summery with pools,

And made a world rim that was not for crossing.

Love brought me that far by the hand, without

The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed

And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;

Then just kept standing there, not letting go.

                                          *

So here is another longshot. Black and white.

A negative this time, in dazzle-dark,

Smudge and pallor where we make out you and me,

The selves we struggled with and struggled out of,

Two shades who have consumed each other’s fire,

Two flames in sunlight that can sear and singe,

But seem like wisps of enervated air,

After-wavers, feathery ether-shifts …

Yet apt still to rekindle suddenly

If we find along the way charred grass and sticks

And an old fire-fragrance lingering on,

Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue,

Leaving us none the wiser, just better primed

To speed the plough again and feed the flame.

                      - Seamus Heaney

Senbazuru

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write." - William Makepeace Thackeray

This is the one thousandth post of this blog. I am confident that my wish will now come true. While I am waiting, here are the Kronos Quartet with Tusen Tankar:

I should be so Lucky

I went to see Lucky Peterson last night and shook my tail feather (Do it right, do it right, do it right, do it right!, Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!). Peterson was discovered by Willie Dixon and taught by Jimmy Smith among others; he is the real deal. Fresh from a three day residency at Ronnie Scott's one can only wonder what he made of playing a working man's club in the north of England (and yes once again you could occasionally hear the bingo caller in the next room), but it didn't seem to bother him. Accompanied by guitar, drums and trumpet he mainly played the organ and delivered a wide range of genres, from noodly jazz (never really my favourite) through belting versions of soul classics especially 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone'. This will give a flavour of the sort of shapes that I was throwing:

He was joined for a few numbers at the end by Mrs Peterson, Tamara Tramell, who most notably did a very Annie Mae Bullock inspired version of Proud Mary. She wore more clothes though; this was Yorkshire in January.

Peterson did switch to slide guitar for a fine medley of Muddy Waters' 'Hoochie Coochie Man' and Robert Johnson's 'Dust My Broom'. The latter song is of course most closely associated with Elmore James, who may possibly have been taught the song directly by Johnson. In one of those connections beloved of your bloggist, today is the one hundredth anniversary of James' birth. Here's one of his other songs that I am currently finding resonates with me:

Over the roofs

I 

Oh chimes set high on the sunny tower   

    Ring on, ring on unendingly, 

Make all the hours a single hour,   

For when the dusk begins to flower,   

    The man I love will come to me! ... 

But no, go slowly as you will, 

    I should not bid you hasten so,   

For while I wait for love to come,   

Some other girl is standing dumb, 

    Fearing her love will go. 

       II 

Oh white steam over the roofs, blow high!   

    Oh chimes in the tower ring clear and free!   

Oh sun awake in the covered sky, 

    For the man I love, loves me! ... 

Oh drifting steam disperse and die, 

    Oh tower stand shrouded toward the south,— 

Fate heard afar my happy cry, 

    And laid her finger on my mouth. 

       III 

The dusk was blue with blowing mist,   

    The lights were spangles in a veil,   

And from the clamor far below 

    Floated faint music like a wail. 

It voiced what I shall never speak, 

    My heart was breaking all night long, 

But when the dawn was hard and gray,   

    My tears distilled into a song. 

       IV 

I said, “I have shut my heart   

    As one shuts an open door, 

That Love may starve therein   

    And trouble me no more.” 

But over the roofs there came 

    The wet new wind of May, 

And a tune blew up from the curb 

    Where the street-pianos play. 

My room was white with the sun   

    And Love cried out to me, 

“I am strong, I will break your heart   

    Unless you set me free.”

        - Sara Teasdale

Another triumph...

...for the Prussians, who on this occasion weren't me. The 3-way scenario is starting to look somewhat unbalanced, primarily I think because the Prussian deck is so much better than the Allies that they can almost always do what they want, whereas the Russians and Austrians spent an hour last night without turning a Musket Reload card. I am minded to give one of those little lectures that James would at this point, explaining exactly what that means, but life is too short. We did eventually get the run of luck that we needed, but it was too little too late. It  would have been a sickener for the Prussians in a campaign context though, losing unit after unit when the game was already to all intents and purposes over.

Going back to the balance of the scenario, the Prussians set up second in full knowledge of how the Allies have deployed. And yet oddly enough, both James and I having set up with a completely free hand then fairly soon afterwards decided it was all wrong and started marching troops round the table. Given that we both still won we must assume that if the Prussian player ever gets their initial dispositions correct then it will be a walkover in no time at all.

As previously mentioned I have been trying to recreate a C&C Napoleonic scenario from six months or so ago. I was a tad harsh on  myself before because I do in fact have the OOB. What I don't have is a map and I seem only to have taken one photograph of the table. I was struggling to rationalise how it all went together from this when it became embarrassingly apparent that one section in the original game - the French left/Prussian right - had been one hex too wide and correspondingly the centre section one hex too narrow. Amateurs!

Pot73pouri

I know that you've all been waiting for a dental update so I can confirm that the permanent crown is now fitted and seems to be functioning OK; I am certainly no longer in pain. As for the roof, there has been a slight change of diagnosis. A cherry picker is due later in the week to allow re-pointing of the chimney stack. I have strongly made the case that as I am paying for the plant hire I should be allowed a go on it, but various obstacles are being placed in my path. We shall see.

My boardgaming rebirth has continued with a few more games played, featuring some very poor last places from your bloggist. I did get the biggest laugh in a game of Telestrations, but I'm afraid that you had to be there (which you would be correct in assuming is a euphemism for smut). Indirectly this has led (may lead?) to an unblocking of my current wargaming inertia. I have mentioned before playing a couple of games of C&C Napoleonics with Chris, the convener of the Monday night boardgaming in the pub group. He has requested another game and so the Great War will be sidelined pro tem. What I shall do is set up the sort-of Eckmühl game that James and Peter played last June. Partly because I thought it was a good scenario and partly because I neglected to write down the OOBs at the time and have been meaning to retrospectively do so ever since. There was actually some gaming last week when we played the first evening of a second run through of a SYW scenario at James'. His report doesn't mention that we, the Allies, did in fact turn a Move in Difficult card; it's just that we did so with out last initiative pip and the turn - and the evening - ended immediately afterwards. All we need to do is to win a dozen or so initiative points, then turn Manoeuvre, Musket Reload and Move in Difficult in that order and we're back in the game; not much to ask I think.

I can't go without a brief tribute to Hugh Masekela. Firstly, and perhaps surprisingly, this is him playing the trumpet part on the Byrds hit from fifty years ago:

And of course, I couldn't not include this from twenty years later:

A certain kind of light

I'm in the mood for some Eric Burdon, and of course it will also serve as a belated tribute to Sir Barry:

Pot72pouri

I now have a temporary crown and can eat properly again. On top of that the roofer rose heroically from his sick bed, looked at my roof, agreed that it was leaking and said that he would be back in a fortnight. Normal service has been resumed.

All of which calls for some roof music. There's lots of choice, but we'll plump for one featuring the much missed Humphrey Lyttleton:

By the way James has posted the details of the 3-way scenario we played over the last couple of weeks here. I shall be off shortly to try my hand as the Russians in a re-run. And it will the second gaming experience of the week, because I have broken not only my porridge-only diet, but also my boardgaming fast. I played a couple of co-operative games, but found that the hiatus had made me dislike them less than previously; we lost them both of course. I also tried out someone's prototype of a game they had designed themselves, which is always an interesting experience. On this occasion we conclusively proved that it didn't work with six players, and I'm sure he is grateful to know that.

Worried Life Blues

So, my new crown has fallen out after all that time and discomfort spent putting it in, it's pouring with rain, my roof is leaking and my roofer has gone down with the 'flu (genuinely). Good job I haven't got anything else on my mind.

As we've been listening to piano blues lets have some Big Maceo Merriweather:

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:

If three and four was seven only

I have been to see 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri'; good film, funny, sad, full of twists. My only reservation is that even I don't believe that in the US the police either routinely behave like that or would get away with it if they did. It shares many tropes with 'Wind River' - which I suspect that I have never mentioned seeing before - but was the better film. Maybe it's just that the implausibility level was dialled back a bit; when violence broke out in this one you could sort of see where they were coming from. I think they are both essentially westerns set in the present day; perhaps it's cheaper to film that way, perhaps it's easier to get funded. I had hoped to catch a real western ('Hostiles') last week, but it doesn't seem to have stuck around in the cinema for too long. I'll have to hope that the local arts centre puts it on in one of their oap matinees with free tea and biscuits.

Here's the original version of a song from Three Billboards' soundtrack that struck a chord:

Sans morale, aucune chance pour les hommes.

“You are well aware that it is not numbers or strength that bring the victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods' gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them.” - Xenephon

We concluded the three-way Seven Years War game last night and somewhat to my surprise I won. I am not entirely sure whether to feel embarrassed or vindicated. The former because I set up completely wrong and changed my plan after literally a few minutes. The second because when I started a radical readjustment of my forces my opponents scoffed and claimed that they would have carried on regardless. I won quite comfortably as it turned out, but until close to the end it could easily have gone either way.

Indeed it was the sort of game that if you like Piquet reinforces why and if you don’t like Piquet, well it reinforces why just the same. The luck evened out as it usually does, but the way it fell definitely suited me. For the first week I got all the initiative and my opponents fared much better in combat. However, there wasn’t much fighting and I was able to use my runs of initiative and my better deck to move my right flank away from the pursuing Russians and concentrate them against the Austrians. This week the allies had all the initiative, but couldn’t do anything with it because my better army and good dice rolling meant that I did far more damage than them. The fact that they failed Major Morale twice in a row didn’t do any harm to my cause either. Coming back to Piquet, the changes we have made to the original morale rules are definitely a big improvement.

Next week we shall all be shuffling counter-clockwise round the table and giving it another go. I hope James takes some photos and posts it up this time as it’s a nice little scenario.

What became of all the time

Just a quick post to say that I have done nothing whatever regarding anything at all except make a flying visit to that there London; you will be pleased to know that Revelation 21:21 still applies. 

I won't bore you with what I got up to - which ranged from Rhus verniciflua (or do I mean Toxicodendron vernicifluum?), through Justin 'Nigel' de Villeneuve (the chap Peter Cook bangs on about on Derek and Clive Come Again), all the way to Allectus (the accountant who assassinated his boss and declared himself Emperor; your bloggist nods approvingly) - so let's have some music instead. Here's Ray Charles and Bonnie Raitt:

Bears/woods - Pope/Catholic - Trump/crazy

Ecclesiastes Chapter 10 verses 12-14

    ..... the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

    The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness.

    A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?

Pot71pouri

Your bloggist spent an hour and a half in the dentist's chair yesterday and is feeling pretty bashed about this morning, so I shall be brief.

I am also feeling pretty bashed about in a wargaming sense. The first game of the year saw me in command of a small Prussian army taking on a larger combined Russian and Austrian force. I was promised that the discrepancy in force size was offset by the superior quality of mine, but I have to say that I haven't seen any sign of it yet. The real problem is that having deployed everything I then abandoned my original plan within the first ten minutes, and spent the rest of the evening repositioning my forces so that next week I can try something different. The exercise did at least lend some support to Peter's assertion that Piquet allows a fighting withdrawal to be conducted in a manner that U go-I go rules don't. I sank into existential despair about the game's outcome even earlier than I usually do, but possibly that was just the anaesthetic wearing off.

In other news, the mainstream media has been strangely silent about the recent meeting between on the one hand a dangerous Marxist and republican, who holds much of British society in complete contempt, and on the other hand the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP. Fortunately a photographer was around to record it for posterity.

...I've had a few

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” 

- Søren Kierkegaard

"Maybe all we can do is hope to end up with the right regrets" 

- Arthur Miller

...and all that

There was a heartfelt request in the comments a few days ago that I should post about anything other than wargaming, but as I find myself in the odd position of not having done much else, wargaming it is.

I have been reading 1066, the special edition of Medieval Warfare. The only previous one of these that I have read is 1453, which I enjoyed.  There are a couple of negatives with this one: the maps are particularly poor, showing not much more information than the fact that towns such as London, Durham, Rouen etc all seem to have been in pretty much the same place then as they are now; and the proof reading also leaves a bit to be desired. I know that the publishers don't have English as their first language, the same indeed being true for many of the contributors, but the issues are mostly typographic rather than idiomatic. However the chapters on context such as the backgrounds and experiences of  Harold, Haraldr and William are good, as is the one on what happened next; even if strangely excludes Sellars and Yeatman's insight that "William next invented a system according to which everybody had to belong to someone else, and everybody else to the King. This was called the Feutile System,... ".

I wasn't previously aware of the level of 'restoration' of the Bayeux Tapestry undertaken over the centuries. When one goes to see it they tend not to mention that it might not be be an accurate reflection of how it originally looked. I shall investigate some more. Also new to me was the Battle of Northam in June 1069, although I don't seem to be alone in not knowing much about it. Nick Arnold, the chap writing that article, is rather groping in the dark I think; nevertheless I shall keep an eye out for the book he is apparently writing on the battles of 1069.

In other news I convinced myself that drybrushing a second shade onto the wire wool smoke would be easier because the previous coats would have made it stiffer. They hadn't and it wasn't. However, despite being darker and greyer than I originally envisaged, it has reached the stage of  'it will do' (admittedly a reasonably low hurdle in the Casa Epictetus) and, Storm Eleanor permitting, I shall shortly be moving on to another solo run through of 'Blue Guitar'.

"With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour" - Theodore Gericault

Whereon the throstle rock'd

.................if this life of ours
Be a good glad thing, why should we make us merry
Because a year of it is gone? but Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come
Whispering ‘It will be happier;’

                                 - Tennyson

2017

I have had better years, but I suppose I should be grateful that we are still here and that neither the tangerine half-wit or the only fat person in North Korea have yet blown us all to kingdom come. In which spirit I offer you my highlights of 2017:

Opera: I have seen 15, albeit a number of them being single act works in Opera North's latest 'Little Greats' season. Among these was a 'Trial by Jury' which I can honestly say was the first Gilbert & Sullivan that I have ever enjoyed. Am I getting old? However, the best piece that I saw was a chamber version of 'The Turn of the Screw' while other highlights included a wonderful semi-staged Turandot and the first Tosca I have seen where the heroine actually throws herself off the battlements instead of doing away with herself in a manner unfaithful to the libretto, but simpler to portray on stage.

Theatre: I saw 46 plays (including Romeo and Juliet four times) which only included one real stinker (which wasn't one of the Romeo and Juliets), plus a few that I wouldn't bother to watch again (which did include one of the Romeo and Juliets). A few things stand out: 'Twelfth Night' at the Globe, Bazza's farewell, and a very explicit 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too'. I'm going to award two prizes: Best One Man Show which will be shared between 'The Autobiography of Jane Eyre' and James Hornsby's 'David Copperfield' and Best Theatrical Experience That Has Something Loosely To Do With Jane Austen which is also shared, this time between 'Mr Darcy Loses the Plot' and 'Austentatious'.

Films: I saw 15 on the big screen. Of the new ones (I'll exclude Vertigo and The Graduate from consideration) the best was 'The Handmaiden' which I highly recommend, although as I think I said at the time it's best not to watch it with your mother. Honourable mentions go to 'The Death of Stalin' (did anyone else think Jason Isaac's Zhukov was essentially an homage to Sean Bean?) and 'Baby Driver'.

Books: I am bereft. I can find no indication that there is any intention to translate the fourth book in the 'Fortunes of France' series into English, let alone the rest of them. This is a disaster. In the absence of 'Le Prince que voila' I am instead going to go for 'The Song of Achilles' by Madeline Miller.

"Throw me a frickin' bone here!" 

Gigs: I have seen 43 of these with the blues featuring very strongly. Nevertheless Tom Russell, whom I saw twice, has to be the best with honourable mentions for Wille and the Bandits, Devon Allman and Eugene 'Hideaway' Bridges.

Pancho Villa crossed the border...

Wargames: Highlight of the year was undoubtedly the trip to Kirriemuir, the biggest game that I am ever likely to play in, and the chance to roll dice with with Charles S. Grant. It was excellent, but it was a long, long way. Best game in the annexe was, I think, the ersatz Eckmuhl with Prussians standing in for Austrians in an EPIC C&C scenario. Best game at James' was Sidi Rezegh. No, just kidding, it was his Garigliano scenario, especially the four player game.

Event of the year: This is a tough one. Possibly I should just acknowledge the fact that this year I didn't get taken to A&E in an ambulance even once. It's also hard to look beyond the kick-off for the new rowing boats on the river, which was extremely funny and compelling in a 'can't take your eyes off it, car crash' sort of way; the lesson learned being that Members of Parliament shouldn't get in a rowing boat with someone four times as heavy as themselves. However, I'm going to plump for what happened in Knaresborough on May 30th, the significance of which wasn't fully understood at the time, and the details of which I am not going to reveal.

Observant readers may have noted that some of the items mentioned above are making their first appearance here. My diarist's mojo deserted me at some point in the autumn with the one beneficial result being that I have no longer had the compulsion to tell you either what I ate for breakfast (porridge with cinnamon, honey and sultanas as it happens) or every last detail of my ongoing cultural pseudery. Among the other elements of my life to be jettisoned was playing boardgames, hence the lack of reports on those recently. I had become somewhat jaded with it all, but I think a period away has restored my appetite and I expect to pick it up again in the new year. If you're really lucky I'll start writing ill-informed guff about operas again as well.

Her love like the leaves....

I'm building up to a proper post tomorrow. In the meantime we all need cheering up when it's dark and cold so let's see if Hank Williams can do the trick:

I Started A Joke

Dream A Little Dream Of Me

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong:

Tobit 8:2

This blog has long had an interest in the movement of the earth around the sun and so it is fitting that as the days start to get longer once again that we find the time for another post. There are many reasons for our absence, and possibly the least among them is that I have hurt my arm dry brushing. There was a level of derision in certain quarters when I passed on that news, but unlikely as it sounds, it's true. Perhaps readers deserve a recap.

When I was last here I was playing through a solo try out of my 'Blue Guitar' company level (or possibly battalion or even brigade level - I'm not entirely sure what the naming convention is) Great War wargames rules, and also providing a much needed running score update of the cricket in Australia. What happened next was that there was a bit of a cold snap in the UK and my enthusiasm for going outside to the annexe to roll dice and push little plastic men around a table rather dwindled. It seemed a convenient point to pause, properly write up all the rule amendments arising from the playtest and start again. In particular as weapon ranges had been shortened during the game the defending Germans had suddenly found themselves isolated from each other and rather easy to pick off, one unit at a time.

As I said earlier, it was a bit parky so I retreated to the warm to do some painting and modelling of various player aids. I wanted to make some smoke markers and after due consideration decided to make these out of wire wool. (I should mention that the same doubters mentioned above were also sceptical about this choice, given the material's noted flammability and my own equally well documented propensity to set things alight whilst painting them.) One attraction to me was the opportunity to get out the hot glue gun, which I have owned for years, but which never sees the light of day. Inexplicably, but somehow inevitably, despite never using it I had managed to run out of glue sticks, thereby causing a delay while more were procured.

At that point the cold weather gave way to wet and several more days passed before I could take the stuff outside to spray it with primer. I decided to prime in grey, thinking to dry brush over the top in white. This was a mistake. The grey was much darker than I thought it would be - in fact it was almost exactly the shade on the cap of the can; who'd have thought it? - and wire wool is an absolute bugger to dry brush. This coupled with yet another duff decision, namely to model enough markers to make a smoke screen a metre in length all in one go, have given me a painful RSI type strain to my arm coupled with a great reluctance to overbrush with any more shades. So, my advice for anyone wishing to make some smoke is to prime in white and, even more importantly, don't use wire wool in the first place.

In case I should not post again before Christmas - and let's face it, I won't - Happy Yontiff to you all.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is shattered,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes?
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her,
And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
That night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that is certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes,
I no longer love her, that is certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer,
and these the last verses that I write for her.

                                            - Pablo Neruda

Never give all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

                  - W. B. Yeats

England batting collapse

That headline has not been at all uncommon during my lifetime and I woke up to it again this morning, along with the smell of fish; I cooked some halibut last night and the aroma has been a bit persistent. Anyway, it has seemed to me that I haven't been very informative in the last few blog posts - unless of course you were using this a very slow way of following the progress of the cricket. In which case Australia won by 120 runs.

Having stumbled into doing the Great War by accident I started small (platoon level trench raids with the Two Fat Lardies), then decided to aim big (a division a side with Peter Pig) and so, inevitably enough, thought why not split the difference and do something at battalion level or thereabouts. I really didn't want single figure removal, nor to worry about looking at individual models to see what weapons they were carrying. I bought a copy of 'Crush the Kaiser', which are at the right level and are full of good stuff, but still - oddly and annoyingly - do both those things.

What was needed, it seemed to me, was a rules root stock onto which I could graft the bits I liked from existing sets plus the bits that I thought others had overlooked. I thought about Piquet, but life is too short frankly. I didn't want a grid game particularly as whenever I get round to it Square Bashing is one of those. We've been playing a fair bit of Black Powder recently - Pike & Shotte to be precise - and they crack along quite quickly to a conclusion so I thought they would be a good place to start. I especially like the blunder rule; it's always easier to represent units not doing what you want than it is to represent them doing what you don't want.

There are however a number of differences between the Great War and the Renaissance ["No shit, Sherlock?"] including not comprehensively and in no particular order:

• Relative homogeneity of troop types
• Open formations
• Importance of cover and therefore indirect fire
• Ongoing melee not being appropriate
• Distance not being the prime factor in command difficulty 

On top of that I rather like an element of meta-gaming (think the opposite of 'play the period, not the rules') and have for example often wondered what sort of game Piquet would be if you knew what sequence the next few cards were going to come out in. The shared tableau of cards in the newish 'Epic' rules for C&C Napoleonics is also the sort of thing that I'm talking about; do you take the card you want, or the one you think your opponent wants?

I have therefore been experimenting with all of the above, so far only with basic infantry and medium support weapons. If it works - judgement reserved at the moment; it's easy playing games when you can just change the rules on a whim; are you listening James? - I shall add artillery plus chrome such as German Stormtroopers and, as I suppose I must, tanks. There will be no gas; it might seem an odd line to draw given the overall subject matter, but nevertheless there it is. If it makes the chemists feel any better there won't be any aircraft either.

442-8 dec and 138 all out; 227 all out and 176-4

So, as Aaron has pointed out, what a difference a day makes. To the game in Adelaide that is; twenty four hours has made remarkably little difference to the ongoing playtest of Blue Guitar. Those who aren't in tune with the rhythm of cricket can sometimes be heard wondering aloud about the nature of a contest played out over a series of five games each lasting five days. Well, what I'm doing seems to have the potential to last longer than the Ashes. However, if I were to be controversial I would say that the case against day-night test matches gets stronger with every game, whereas I am cautiously optimistic about my Great War rules. Except perhaps for their speed. 

I've made it a bit harder to blunder although this still hasn't done much for the companies on both the British and German left flanks who both not only failed to respond to orders to advance, but instead moved randomly backwards. The battalion on the British left has also lost its 2-i-c (not to enemy action - one can only speculate as to where he has disappeared to), on top of which the British support weapons have still not deployed. There has however been some combat at last which has highlighted that while the disordered mechanism seems to work I had set the saving throw at too easy a level.

A really obscure view from behind the German left

I remain relatively happy with the shifting turn sequence.

442-8 dec and 53-4; 227 all out

Despite the improvement in the weather in South Australia I was only able to find time for one move in the extremely slowly developing playtest of Blue Guitar. I didn't plan the scenario in any great detail and simply plonked the British on the baseline; indeed at the time the thing that more concerned me was the realisation that there were more bases in each unit than either utility or appearance demanded. I also didn't do the attackers any favours by putting their support weapons in the middle. The one upside is that the time it is taking for the game to progress has given me more chances to tinker (refine?).

The colonel waves his pistol in despair as his men advance the wrong way

The battalion on the British left has been rolling some very odd command dice and as a result its tactics can perhaps be best described as doing the hokey-cokey. The one company that is getting anywhere has entered the woods, and so that's where the German mortar is now targeting.  In the centre the support weapons have been unable to set up despite the best efforts of the brigade 2-i-c who was despatched to sort things out, although the dead observer has successfully been replaced.

On the other flank the Germans have seized the initiative and moved into the woods where all logic suggests they should have been anyway. Their sniper has been moving steadily forwards - the rules as to how he does that have changed several times so far and may well change again - and has picked off one of the British company commanders. That unit will suffer a permanent -1 to their command roll.

442-8 dec; 29-1

The latest stage in the solo run through of the Blue Guitar Great War rules was somewhat curtailed by the evening rain in Adelaide, to the extent that once again nothing much happened. Things weren't helped by all the companies in the battalion on the British left being sent off in various directions by blunder rolls. The Germans have continued to target the road with their mortar, but the British haven't had the opportunity to move along it anyway.

In the centre the observer for the Stokes mortars was sent forward, but, after some rapid rule writing and a truly terrible throw of the dice on behalf of the British, was caught by machine gun fire and removed from play. Cue some more hurried creativity to work out how a new one can be put in place. On their right the issue was repeated failing of command rolls despite my patent method (essentially stolen from Crush the Kaiser) to reduce the chance of this happening.

The have been another couple of rule changes (enhancements?), but I'll just mention that, notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday, I have decided that what the game really needs is separate 'Command' and 'Rally' phases.

The early finish did however give me a chance to check out the Otley Victorian Christmas Fayre. In addition to buying the traditional festive samosa, seasonal food of choice of the nineteenth century working man, I was rather taken by Hardcastle's Amazing Human Vegetable Machine, which I don't recall seeing before.

209-4

I had an hour so in the annexe this morning while listening to the cricket from Australia and got a couple of turns done. Considering that I wrote the rules there was a surprising amount of checking as to what was supposed to happen next, as a result of which not much actually did. Still, early days.

The brown circle is a rather undercooked marker indicating that the Germans are mortaring the road to deny passage to the British. The 'M's indicate that those support weapons have moved and so cannot fire and the just visible 'O's show that those units are able to use opportunity fire. For those of you keeping track of these things the following is the phase sequence as at the end of turn 2. The 'Rally' phase should probably be called 'Command' phase or perhaps 'Officer Check' for the Piquet players among you.

To lay his brain upon the board

I have previously mentioned that I have been writing my own set of Great War rules; or, perhaps it would be fairer to say that I have been melding together bits the I like from other sets while discarding the bits that I don't. Clearly this may result in a majestic set of rules far superior to anything ever seen on the tabletop, perfectly simulating the battlefield of the period and providing a game both gripping and subtle. Equally, and one must suspect far more likely, it may well be an unworkable and unplayable abomination bearing no relation to the Western Front as anyone understands it. There is only one way to find out and so, after a few small scale and half-hearted efforts, I have set up a larger game for a solo run through of the rules, which are named, for now at least, 'Blue Guitar'.

The is no particular assumed narrative behind this, it's sometime in the middle of 1918 during the German retreat. Two battalions of British plus brigade machine gun and mortar assets have come up against a German battalion covering a bridge.

The only conclusion that I have come to so far from setting it out is that the companies (unit is company, command level is battalion-ish) each have one too many stands, so I shall remove the surplus before beginning the game. It has also become apparent that my recent painting spree did not include enough Lewis guns, that there are not quite enough command and communication markers until the recently arrived order from Warbases is painted, and that some of the other player aids such as smoke and explosion markers will have to wait until I decide what size they need to be. However all of those are really only a question of aesthetics and so tomorrow - or possibly the day after if something better comes up in the meantime - I shall play upon the Blue Guitar.

The starting turn sequence