Game of War More

 I have finished "Paddy Griffith's Game of War" and, as there was a question in the comments following my previous mention of it, I thought I'd do a review. Overall, it's an interesting enough read. I bought it on a whim and had no particular expectations. Anyone in the hobby of a similar age to me would surely be as diverted as I was by Griffith's recollections of well-known people whom he met, played against and fell out with. This wasn't originally written as a book, rather being a collection of various things, some intended for publication whilst others are private letters or merely working notes. It has all been curated by John Curry, who provides notes on the context where appropriate. It contains things like rules for games run by Griffith in a variety of places and of various sizes. I suppose it's nice that they are included, but they are actually rather dull to read. Perhaps the most telling section is the letter which he wrote following the recording of the refight of Waterloo done in 1997 for the television programme which gives the book its name. He clearly took it all very, very seriously. I do wonder what the programme makers thought when they read it.

I've embedded the video to save keen readers from having to search for it. I haven't watched it myself because the rules printed in the book turn out not to have been the one's used on the day, because judging by what he himself wrote Griffith made a pig's ear of umpiring the game, and because life is short and getting shorter.

Paddy Griffith moved away from games with figures and many of the games described in the book are more at the free kriegspiel end of the spectrum. I've never played any of those so can't comment really. He apparently tried and failed to get wargaming accepted by his employers at Sandhurst, where he lectured, as a valid learning experience. I've never been a soldier, I was a businessman (*). As such I attended, and received a postgraduate degree from, a business school. We played a business game, which sounds very similar to the sort of thing which Griffiths proposed: students in teams playing out a scenario, staff acting as umpires making decisions about outcomes supported by computer moderation. It was bloody useless and I learned nothing. 

Having at some point decided that everyone else was wargaming the wrong way, he seemingly didn't hold back in telling them so (**). For example, there's one piece included here in which he comprehensively slags off competitive wargaming. I've never done that either, but I've known people who have and have very much enjoyed it. I'm really not sure what skin off Griffith's nose it is that they do so. Which I suppose brings me on to his polemic against gaming with figures. His argument goes: your ambition is to achieve a realistic simulation of war, and you can't do that with toy soldiers, especially if they are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I may have missed out one or two steps in his logic, but that's the gist of it. My counterargument would be: my ambition is to play a fun game with nice looking toy soldiers in pleasant company, with any superficial resemblance to military history being the icing on the cake. 

The best quote in the book doesn't come from Griffith himself, but from one of the other attendees at the conference at which Wargames Development was founded: "Most wargamers are stamp collectors playing at being postmen". I don't just acknowledge that description, I embrace it.

*   OK, I was an accountant.

** He comes across as the sort of chap of whom a little would go a long way

Rommel: The Refight

 As planned, we reset the previous week's game and had another try of the Rommel rules. Not as planned, it descended into farce. 

The British commanders are caught out by a daring German attack on their HQ

We have been trying the rules at the behest of Mark, who wishes to rebase his existing collection of Western Desert models to suit this game (*). In the meantime we have been using James' stuff and his gridded desert cloth as originally made for Crusades and To the Strongest!. Unfortunately, Mark wasn't able to make the game, even more unfortunately the rulebook didn't make it either. We were left reliant on the quick play sheets and what James and I could remember from the previous week. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

I didn't really help by repeating my tactics of the previous week - I was once again the Axis commander - and making an armoured thrust straight for the British supply dump. I confess that I was partly doing this to demonstrate where I thought the game was a bit broken. If units can't be supplied then there are consequences. The problem was that without the rule book we weren't sure what those consequences were. In particular the reference sheet - and one of the action cards - differentiate between being 'isolated' and being in a state of 'low supply'. Handily we had the page references for the relevant rules, less handily we didn't have the pages. We carried on regardless, but the game rather drifted. The Panzergrenadiers on Hafid ridge were as indestructible as in the first week, but this time I moved the Panzer reinforcements into the centre to try a two pronged attack on the British armour. Unfortunately I had misread where the grid markings were and there wasn't actually a route for me to get through. It seemed to sum up the evening and so we gave up.

We're clearly going to put Rommel to one side for now and do something else. On the negative side, they are all a bit abstract. As James observed, Command & Colors is a board game that becomes a wargame if you use figures to play it, whereas this just stays a board game with clunky playing pieces. On the plus side, I think there are nuances within that board game. For example, after a few combats it becomes clear on which occasions you should play cards to try to improve your odds of causing casualties, and where you should be trying to reduce those of the enemy; you can rarely achieve both. 

Overall verdict: meh.

* One of the reasons that I like wargaming is that the hobby covers such a wide range of activities: military history, modelling, painting, rule writing, playing the games etc. We can all dabble in a bit of everything, but choose the one on which we wish to focus most of our attention. For reasons known only to him, Mark has chosen to specialise in rebasing, an activity he carries out pretty much continuously.

It Won't Wash

 If you live in the northern part of Britain then you won't need me to tell you that the weather is shite. We are being bombarded by back-to-back storms. Still, at least the one currently raging outside is named after a wargamer. The one due on Friday, on the other hand, shares a name with a flame-haired doxie from my youth. ["I beg your pardon," interjects the Rhetorical Pedant "but you can't call someone a doxie. It's not nice."] Fair enough, although I doubt very much she'll be reading this. And good to hear from you again, RP, it's been too long. I haven't thought about the lovely Eunice for several decades and for some reason the main thing that comes back to me is her throwing a complete paddy when the restaurant we were in ran out of steak. ["Nope, can't say that either".]

A different Eunice

Anyway, the storms mean that there is still no opportunity to spray resin casts with primer. Clearing away the previous game in the annexe took quite a while as I found that I didn't have anywhere to put anything. The fortress and all the siege works had been laid straight on the table from being laser cut or cast, and then painted with nary a thought as to what I might do with them afterwards. Some biscuit tins have been pressed into temporary service. A tin full of resin is very heavy though, so I am reluctant to put them high up on a shelf.

I then tried setting up a medieval siege, the idea being to have three players against the umpire. But inspiration has been sadly lacking, so I'm now thinking of perhaps a WWI action. To that end I've been painting some odd German figures that I had handy. But when I came to apply the black wash that I have used on all their kameraden, it wasn't there. I am baffled by where it can have gone; it's not a big house (*). Anyway, online orders have gone in for a few alternatives and, while the weather is bad,  I shall be experimenting with various ways of making figures look better without doing the hard graft of actually painting them properly.

* Can I refer anyone who wants to know why it's a small house to the early entries of the blog wherein I documented my divorce, the subsequent period of nomadic wandering and why I don't wargame the War of the Spanish Succession.

Game of War

 I am currently reading "Paddy Griffith's Game of War", a volume in John Curry's History of Wargaming Project.

It is an interesting read, although very little of it speaks to the sort of wargaming that I have ever done in practice. I did come across this suggestion though: "...use an active umpire, or in other words a man who is either knowledgeable in the rules, or who invents them as he goes along...". Spooky or what?

Battleaxe

"It sounded suspiciously as though the British commander no longer felt himself capable of handling the situation. It being now obvious that in their present bewildered state the British would not start anything for the time being, I decided to pull the net tight by going on to Halfaya."
                                                                        - Rommel

We were back in the Western Desert, and for once we weren't at Sidi Rezegh; indeed we weren't even in Operation Crusader. We had slipped back six months or so to Operation Battleaxe (I think the second day, June 16th 1941) and were playing on a grand scale using the new to us Sam Mustafa ruleset 'Rommel'. A much shortened section of James' table represented 30km or so of the Libya-Egypt border, from the Hafid ridge to Sollum on the Mediterranean coast.

Peter was absent doing some horse-whispering, so I took the Germans, James the British and Mark umpired in the "Don't ask me, I've only read the rules once myself" stylee that I myself frequently adopt in the annexe. Initial overall impression: it was OK. Clearly this was just a test game, so we shall reset it and play again next week, hopefully with a bit more fluency and control.

It's a high-level, gridded game, and seemed to me to be very abstract and boardgame like. Obviously that doesn't mean it won't either be fun to play or that the narrative arc of the game can't match one's expectations of the period. What I am really getting at is that the mechanics themselves are only superficially thematic. It's a action point type game - as an aside, Mustafa's choice of terminology is really irritating throughout - where those points are spent in moving, fighting etc, but also in playing cards from one's hand which add to one's own abilities or detract from the enemy's. These might read, for example, 'Air Strike', but it would be used simply to give a boost to one's dice roll, not because the circumstances especially favour that manoeuvre over another. One might quite as happily have played 'Reserve Artillery' instead. 

I don't want to sound too negative though. I very much enjoy all sorts of board games whose theme is so thin as to be transparent. In this case I am certain that there will be many subtleties of card play and action point management, which will make for an enjoyable and challenging game. For our first outing we were clearly just doing things to see how they worked, and in subsequent games will certainly be more cagey, which will probably result in a more 'realistic' outcome; provide your own definition of what that actually means. My experiments worked the better on the night, particularly a nifty thrust through the British lines towards their supply dump, forcing the retreat of their armour to defend it. James tried the strategy of expending most of his action points in defence, only to twice roll badly when trying to replace them for his offensive turn. I think there is a lesson to be learned there.

Update: Mark has posted some photos here.

Cast before the storm

"The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its best to vex the lake"

- Robert Browning

Work has stopped on the new items for the siege works. I cast up all the extra bits that I thought I needed, and then cast up some more, rather than leaving half empty bottles of resin mixture and having to throw them away.

However, they require spraying with primer outside, and a period of cold weather has now been followed by high wind and rain from storms Malik and Corrie, which have caused quite a lot of damage around here. They disrupted the roads, which is not uncommon; the railways, which happens from time to time; and, on the first occasion that I can remember, closed the Leeds Liverpool canal.

The Casa Epictetus has been unaffected so far, although I have to admit that the garden is still a complete mess following storm Arwen late last year. The normal protection offered by the high stone walls surrounding it was outflanked by all the energy coming in from the north-east rather than the more usual westerly direction. That's another thing which will preclude spraying the new castings until I clear a space.

Keine Wichtelmänner, keine Pferde

 I have had a couple of posts all planned out for a few days now, but disappointingly the Blogmaker's Elves have so far failed to come in and complete them for me. What did happen was that James posted this review of the second night of the peninsular Napoleonic game we were playing. As he wrote, it had been an excellent game so far and we were all looking forward to its resolution. Inevitably enough the third evening was a complete anti-climax. The French, with one interesting exception, rolled forward inexorably and the British crumbled away and then gave up. The odd men out, as it were, proved to be the French cavalry whose performance was so abject that I started to think that they had perhaps forgotten to bring their horses to Spain. Whether they took on artillery, infantry or other cavalry they not only lost, they vapourised immediately. 

"It says they made three unsuccessful attempts to deliver the horses and have returned them to the sender."

"What of the rules?" I hear you ask. Well, we spent much of the evening listening to reports of changes about to come, so there's not much point in commenting on those we actually played with. My only suggestion at this point is that opportunity chips should be reset to four at the end of each turn.

We're off to the Western Desert next week. 

PotCXIIpouri

 I've been asked if the title of yesterday's post was an instruction to Gamage's not to sell or display martial toys any more. Sadly the store - which I visited regularly as a child, and was quite possibly where I first developed my love of the small shiny figure en masse - has long gone. The title was more an allusion to the refrain in the Proclaimers' song 'Letter From America':

On the subject of toy soldiers on the tabletop, we are two thirds of the way through a peninsular Napoleonic game in the legendary wargames room, hypocentre of such activities in the lower Wharfe valley. James posted some nice pictures of the first night here, and he certainly took some more last night so there may well be another post in due course. This is almost all of his collection (as it stands at the moment obviously) and was a feast for the eyes. Personally I thought we could have done with one or two fewer French guns on display, but perhaps I'm just being churlish. It's been a good game, swinging backwards and forwards over the two evenings. We - the British - took a bit of a hammering at first, but have in the last couple of turns dished it out. If I was going to draw any conclusions about the current state of the rules it would be that attacking is rather hard.

Gamage's No More

 The following newspaper clipping has come into my possession. Can I make it clear that I in no way condone the sentiments expressed, except of course that I like to see large numbers of toy soldiers on a table.

I believe that the year is 1915; I wonder if they were saying the same thing by Christmas 1918. It's also interesting to note the sexism which they've sneaked in among the warmongering. The Daily Sketch was absorbed into the Daily Mail half a century or so ago. It provided the downmarket bigotry which when added to the Mail's existing establishment right-wingery (they of course are the paper that supported both Hitler and Mosley) produced the current appalling publication.

Ethics

 "In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action." - Jerry Pournelle

Valeria Messalina

 I have in the past compared the goings on at 10 Downing Street with scenes from 'I, Claudius' (see here and here). I am going to do it again.

Messalina was Claudius' empress and he was ignorant of, or turned a blind eye to, her ruthless ambition, rampant promiscuity and the fact that her selfish political machinations had caused the deaths of many innocent people. Eventually her faults became so obvious that the Praetorian Guard were sent to instruct her to commit suicide. She couldn't summon the courage and so in the end they did it for her (*).

The bumbling Claudius, elevated far above the level for which his talents and competence befitted him, is represented in this analogy by the Conservative Parliamentary Party. 

* Sorry about the lack of spoiler alert, but if you watch the 1976 BBC series - which you certainly should - then it's best not to get too attached to any of the characters.

Une Bouffée de Fromage

 One thing that often occurs in our small (but growing) regular games group - and I suspect we're not alone - is that when one side announces that things are looking so bad that they are inclined to give up it is immediately followed by the wheels coming off their opponent's master plan and the party of the first part ends up winning. Well, it's happened again; quite astonishingly Vimeiro was won by the French.

"D'you know who's going to win?"

Obviously I was exaggerating for effect when I said in my earlier post that I thought my command would be destroyed in half an hour, but not by much. The morale rules are, shall we say, complicated but what it boiled down to in this scenario was that was either side could win by breaking the morale of two large and one small command group of the other side. Reviewing the table at the start of the second evening's play - whilst collectively laughing contemptuously at the Prime Minister - it was easy to believe that the British would achieve this quite quickly. However, from the off the dominoes, cards and dice seemed to have other ideas, and their progress was slow. It was still progress though and eventually they had broken two divisions and the French commanders (James and I) were moved to launch a number of columns forward into melee just to do something while we were waiting to lose. Perhaps inevitably those forlorn hope charges succeeded and before we knew it we had also broken two divisions. In the end it came down to who was first to cause a couple of UI losses to the other, and it was us. It gave a bit of tension to the evening and one player (no names, no pack drill) got quite excited. For me, it was a bit gamey: in both senses of the word.

However, having said that, let me make two points in favour of the way things panned out. Firstly, there has to be some mechanism for ending the game. If not this one, then what? Secondly, the aim of the rules, and the reason we're doing all the playtesting, is to give victory to those who do what commanders of the time would have done; or perhaps it's better to say that it is intended to deny victory to those who don't do what was done historically. In this case the relevant factor would be cycling spent divisions out and fresh ones in. The British had the chance to do it and didn't do it. From that point of view things worked out appropriately.

Cast off

 I have been doing some more casting.

The different shades are because the resin has just been poured and is curing. Later on, and for the first time so far, I had a batch not cure properly and have to be thrown away. I suspect that I wasn't concentrating and didn't mix it thoroughly enough. I shall therefore pause and reflect before doing any more.

"Always draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency ." - Franz Kafka

Vimeiro, eh what?

 James alternates a bit, when putting on games in the legendary wargames room, between made-up scenarios and historical refights. We have therefore replayed numerous battles from the Punic Wars, the Italian Wars, the Seven Years War and so on, none of which I had ever heard of before let alone knew anything about. Even when we got on to World War II we only ever fought Sidi Rezegh. However, now he has painted up a very large number of Napoleonic units I'm in with a shout. And so we are half way though Vimeiro, sort of. As you will know if you have read his blog he has given the French a chance by allowing all their attacks to go in at once. It doesn't seem to have done them any good, and nor has my knowledge done me any good, but I shall wait until we've finished the game to explain why. What I would say is that his mechanism for forcing the French to attack in the right locations if not at the right times is quite inspired.

The big question was what changes he would have made to the rules, and he didn't disappoint. As a quick summary:

• The movement rules are far better and lifted directly from Black Powder
• The morale rules are much better, but I still don't really like them
• The skirmisher rules are certainly the operationally slickest that we have tried, which is a result in itself.
• And for no reason that I could establish he has changed all the names of the cards, resulting in much confusion. 

So, we resume again on Wednesday when I might take some photos. I shall have plenty of time because I anticipate my command not lasting more than the first half hour or so. In the meantime if any of you are in communication with James you can get on his good side by asking him which card allows you to carry out a small sapping task and whether it costs any initiative.

Besieger Gun Emplacements

 There was consensus around a couple of issues following our siege games. One was to make the game a bit quicker by starting with more of the siege works already in place and the other was about how close together siege guns could be. As I think I've mentioned before, the rules are agnostic when it comes to terrain; you play with what you have. The way I did it originally was to cast the embrasure piece separately so it could simply be slotted into trench lines when required. It turned out to be one of those ideas that were better in theory than in practice. As well as leaving the guns a bit too far apart it was quite fiddly to place on the table. So I have decided to cast up some proper gun emplacements.

The trench sections are 10cm long, so my first thought was to make the emplacements 5cm. However that's not quite wide enough for the guns and crew. In addition, I used bits and pieces from the Italeri Battlefield Accessory Set when making the masters for the trenches and saps and wanted to do the same again for consistency. That decision led to 6cm being a more convenient width and so that's what I've gone with.

The only other materials used in the masters are foamboard and Polyfilla, all covered in a couple of coats of wood varnish. I have ordered both silicone, to make the moulds, and polyurethane, to cast up some models, and will crack on when it all arrives. I'm tempted to make a mortar position while I'm waiting.

2021

 I mentioned in a recent post that this is a time of year for tradition. The context when I wrote it was that I found myself, not for the first time, suffering a dental problem at a time of year when one can't get an appointment with a dentist. That has been swiftly followed by my central heating playing up at a time of year when one can't get hold of a plumber, again not without precedent. So, in order to try to keep warm by typing frantically I am going to revive the annual review of the year, which I couldn't be bothered to do last year. There has certainly been a little bit more to look back over this year, and thankfully quality was mostly high even where quantity was not.

Opera: I saw nine, plus a ballet, and I'm going to give top spot to Opera North's socially distanced 'Fidelio', in large part because it was the first that I had seen for a long time and because it's about freedom. I must give an honourable mention to 'A Little Night Music' in the year that Sondheim died, plus Mahler's 2nd Symphony. I know that's not an opera, but it's my list.

Theatre: I only saw four plays, and the best was 'Wuthering Heights' by the Wise Children company. I note that I also rated them the best in 2019. This production is transferring to the National Theatre in February; you should go. Incidentally, had I bothered to give my views for 2020 the top spot would have been shared between 'Kneehigh's Ubu' and 'Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort of)'. The former starred the wonderful Katy Owen as Pere Ubu, and she also featured prominently in 'Wuthering Heights'; the latter is also just about to open in London's West End and, once gain, I would urge anyone within striking distance to go and see it.

Music: A paltry two gigs to choose from, and I'm going with Martin Simpson, again largely because it was the first in a long time for him as well as me. There might be more of that line of thought in these lists.

Film: A mere three films in the cinema, and the jury has decided to withhold the prize for this year. One of the three was the Bond film: what a load of old tosh, although I did rather enjoy the action sequence in the Italian village near the beginning.

Talks: Talks mainly moved online, and I moved with them. I saw twenty nine, only two of which were in person. The best I think was one on building ventilation given by a member of the government's SAGE advisory committee; I may live the rest of my life outdoors. On a less gloomy note, I very much enjoyed the Royal Armouries talk on 'The Life and Career of Captain William Dawson RN'. The worst talk by some way was 'The Jewellery of Downton Abbey'; what was I thinking?

Books: I read 118 books, it clearly being something that one can do without leaving home. Books of the year were: for fiction 'The Good Soldier Švejk'; and for non-fiction David Hepworth's '1971' about rock music's greatest year.

Boardgames: Apart from the expansion to 'Maquis' - where I'm sorry to say that the French Resistance is not prospering under my leadership - I have only played two-player games. Of those I played 14 different games 84 times. I think I might do a separate post about which of those I would recommend. The local boardgaming club has resumed weekly sessions, and I trust that at some point in 2022 circumstances will be such that I feel comfortable in joining them.

Wargames: I think there were ten wargames played or umpired, although this seems to be the one area where my compulsion to keep records doesn't apply. They were mainly Piquet and its variants except for one game of To the Strongest! and one of X-wing. I enjoyed them all but probably for me the siege games had the edge; possibly because the rules gave a much more enjoyable game for the defender than I thought they would when I read them. During lockdown I have built up a mighty pile of new, unplayed rules and would hope that: a) I can get one or more of them to table in 2022; and b) they work half as well as these did. It was good to see Mark back on a regular basis as well.

Event of the Year: I am very tempted by the time I saw armed police intervening in a queue jumping dispute in a branch of Greggs, which for some reason I neglected to post about at the time. However, really it has to be the first wargame after a hiatus of more than a year. Just because.

I wish you all love in a peaceful world.

The real part of every non-trivial zero of the Reimann zeta function is 1/2

 Or is it?

Otley, the town in which I live, has almost as many churches as it does pubs; and it has a lot of pubs. Because of this - the church bit not the pub bit - I and my fellow citizens regularly get pieces of paper put through our letterboxes informing us of 'the good news'. Indeed one minor upside of Covid is that the various congregations have stopped knocking on the door to tell me all about it in person. Anyway, today being Christmas Eve, I assumed that the home-printed sheet delivered this afternoon was something along those lines. But no, it was someone living relatively locally announcing to the world that they had proved the Reimann hypothesis, a conjecture which as I'm sure you all know dates from 1859 and is one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. Now that is good news.

A chap with a beard

After having a celebration cup of tea and mince pie I started to wonder why the door-to-door delivery had been felt necessary, so I re-read the note. It turns out that the writer was appealing for anyone with a modicum of mathematical knowledge to double check her workings prior to her claiming the large prize on offer, which from memory is US $1 million. Sadly, an unimpressive degree in Mathematical Sciences nearly half a century ago is far from sufficient for me to feel qualified to volunteer. Still, it is the season of goodwill to all men, so I wish her joy in her search, even if her chosen method of making it seems a tad unorthodox. If any reader feels better qualified than me to help, then let me know and I'll put you in touch. In any event, when this auspicious event makes the headlines, remember that you read it here first.

It just remains for me to wish you all Gut Yontiff and a happy, peaceful and, above all, healthy time over Christmas.

Moff Off

 We had a pre-Christmas game of X-Wing last night. I've played it a few times before and always enjoyed it. The rules run smoothly and give a game that's light, fun, quick-moving and - to me at least - completely abstract. I have never seen any of the Star Wars films and therefore know nothing of the setting. That only affects the game very slightly, in that it makes a little harder to keep track of pilots' special abilities etc. But if one just goes with the flow, it passes the time quite pleasantly. Interestingly Mark was playing the game for the first time and also turned out to have no interest in fantasy space worlds, but he seemed to enjoy things as well.

James had written the scenario, which came with a sort of fan-fiction style backstory involving a kidnapped Moff. I shan't pass comment on his prose style - which will in any case be familiar to anyone who's ever read one of his Chronicles of Kermit the Hermit - except to point out that he missed a great opportunity offered by the action described therein to make a joke about Moff balls. It became clear that half the players on the night hadn't grasped the exact significance of the presence of His Moffness aboard the escape pod, so James explained it to us, at somewhat more length than it seemed to me that the subject deserved.  In any event the Rebel Alliance, which was Peter and me, won the day by getting the Moff (I decline to use the surname James gave him) out of the asteroid belt and off the table. 

I've just done some research on Wookiepedia and find that the Grand Moff (how can people say all this with a straight face?) in the original trilogy was played by well-known wargamer Peter Cushing. It's a small world; or a galaxy far, far away; one of the two.

PotCXIpouri

 It's at this time of the year that one likes to indulge in tradition, and sure enough one of my crowns has fallen out, just in time to cause me maximum inconvenience over the festive period. On the plus side, someone reading about my camera connection problems using Windows 11 has pointed out that my laptop would almost certainly have an SD card reader. And indeed it has, if one bothers to look for it, so I am now in a position to thrill you with beautiful photos from the annexe once again.

However, instead I think it's about time I posted another random photo of people you don't know or care about, with no explanation:

I lied about the no explanation; the chap in the middle is W.G. Boorer, whose exploits having been shot down over the North Sea were featured previously on this blog.

The Siege Works

 The rules may work, but the link between my camera and my laptop still doesn't. (As an aside, having failed with everything else I have now ordered a new cable. If that does the trick then apologies to Microsoft will appear here in due course.) In the meantime readers are denied the full range of artistic shots that I took and are instead limited to a quick snap on the phone.

The game was closely poised when time ran out. I said that I would finish it solo and, who knows, maybe I will. One thing I rather like about the rules is the sheer variety of things that can happen, and we had a couple of occurrences that we hadn't encountered before. There was an uprising of sorts by the civilians within the town, which didn't amount to much, and then news came that a relieving army was on the way, albeit it turned out to be coming as slowly as it possibly could. 

So, by and large I am happy with the rules, but I think they need to be tweaked to achieve a couple of things: increase the besieger's chances of winning somewhat and make sure a game will finish in two evenings. The main routes to do that are likely to be to start the game with some of the second parallel already built, for it be be possible for siege guns to be placed closer together (either two guns in an emplacement or just making the emplacements smaller), and perhaps reducing the strengths of the walls. The rules as published are necessarily agnostic about scenery definitions, so I think I also need to clarify further what can and can't be done with the pieces I actually have; e.g. how many units can be one one stretch of fortress wall. And I think some escalade rules would keep the defenders on their toes.

In an event, it will be a while before we have another go. I'm going to clear the table - either before or after I finish off the game - and try something else. In the short term Mark has promised/threatened to bring round his classic 20mm Napoleonics (which can be seen here) for some Old School, er, goodness. 

I've Killed the Ghost

 And so to the opera. I confess that I wasn't at all familiar with the work of Gian Carlo Menotti, who, despite having been at one point the most performed of 20th century opera composers, hasn't been in fashion recently. However, I have now seen two of his works within a week, performed by different companies. He is obviously having a moment back in the limelight.

The Rough Guide to Opera uses the term 'overcharged emotion' to describe 'The Medium' and I think that's fair enough. Indeed, I might go so far as to say it was melodramatic. A similar question is posed as in 'The Turn of the Screw': are the ghosts real or the product of overheated imaginations? The usual operatic spoiler alert applies - someone dies in the end - and for some reason the director chose to make that a different person than the one indicated by the composer. I overheard someone speculate that we were thereby to assume that the other character had died offstage at some point and become a ghost himself, but your guess is as good as mine. Obscurum per obscurius.

The travails of the composer when faced with theatrical reality and the egos of producers, directors, performers and, above all, funders is the theme of Richard Strauss' 'Ariadne auf Naxos', which I've also seen; or to be precise I saw the Prologue, the first part of the opera, which deals with the backstage shenanigans before the opera - i.e. the opera within the opera - is performed. Think, 'Kiss Me, Kate' or the Mechanicals from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.  It was very well done. I felt that the soprano playing the character of Prima Donna - i.e. the soprano playing the soprano who would have played Ariadne had we got that far - had based her performance on Miss Piggy. My companion for the afternoon demurred on the grounds that she - the soprano - was too young to have heard of the Muppets. Tempus fugit.

The other Menotti piece was 'Amahl and the Night Visitors'. This was a seasonal production as the visitors in question were the Three Kings, bearing the usual gifts plus, a new one on me, a parrot. It was quite charming, although in a world where directors feel free to alter things as they see fit, I might have changed the lyric "Little child, may I touch you?". Tempora mutantur.

Smoke on the Water

 If the Epictetus media empire hadn't been offline thanks to Microsoft then it would have been my intention to mark the 50th anniversary of the burning down of the casino at Montreux on December 4th 1971. Better late than never:

Turning it up to eleven

 “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” 

- Terry Pratchett

In my absence from the blog over the last week or so the shocks have kept coming in the the specific fields of politics and cricket: it turns out that the prime minister is a liar and that England aren't very good. However, it hasn't been any amazement which I may have felt that has prevented me from blogging; rather it has been the after-effects of upgrading my laptop to Windows 11. Much driver updating later, almost everything now seems to work. The exception is that I still can't transfer photos from my camera, which is unfortunate because there has been a game in the annexe. 

I have had, therefore, to resort to my phone to record the intricate trenches with which the besiegers have approached the fortress having learned from the mistakes of the first game. The scenario is basically the same, with only some minor tweaks to how the wall strengths are recorded. Once again it proved to be an enjoyable evening, and we shall resume next week with the bombardment proper. My rules for assaults got a run out when the attackers launched a brief sortie against the sappers in the foremost trench. Whilst I hadn't had that specific situation in mind when I wrote them, the process didn't fall over when put to the test; faint praise, but the most that I'm prepared to give.

Here's why 11 is better than 10:

Maquis - New Content

 I have mentioned before that I own a number of solo board games, and also that I virtually never play them; they didn't even get brought out very often during lockdown. Of course that is more to do with me than with any problems with the games themselves, which are mostly clever and challenging designs. That is certainly true of what I think is my favourite among them: Maquis. It's a game that thematically appeals to me as well, as one takes the part of the French Resistance and tries to complete various missions of sabotage, spying, infiltration, propaganda and the like without being caught by the collaborators of the Milice or by the occupying German forces. A second edition has just been published containing additional missions and associated playing pieces. The additional material was also made available as an expansion to those owning the first edition.

Obviously I don't need to explain to fellow wargamers why I would buy extra bits for something that never hits the table in the first place, and so I inevitably sent off for a copy. The missions in the original had their difficulty coded at one star (easier) or two stars (harder), whereas the new missions are given a rating of three stars. I never found any of the first lot of missions - you have to complete two within the allotted number of moves in order to win - to be easy, and these new ones are as difficult as you'd expect. I have so far failed badly to 'Destroy the AA Guns', the main problem as I see it being that the surest route to get weapons is via an air drop, you can't have an air drop if AA guns are present and you need weapons to get rid of the AA guns. In fairness, the resources available have improved including the availability of forged documents so one can bluff one's way past patrols instead of shooting it out with them. There's also now a 'Fixer' character, who can provide whatever you want, for a fee of course.

So, still highly recommended as long as you overlook the fact that I don't actually play it much myself. Having said that, I shall certainly be giving all of the new missions a go before I put it back in the cupboard. Next up is 'Free the Resistance Leader': 'A resistance leader has been captured and will be transported away from town soon. Free him from the occupiers...or make sure he at least can't tell them his secrets'.

Blizzard

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down -
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes -
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there -
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

          - William Carlos Williams

Moys Will Be Moys

 One of my more esoteric medical conditions is that I am unable to be injected in my left arm. Normally this doesn't cause any problems, but yesterday I had both a Covid booster and a flu jab in my other arm, which is now very stiff and painful. Being right-handed this is making typing difficult, which in turn means that the text quality of today's post may be at a level not seen since I used to produce it on a computer missing an 's' key.

So, we finished the second run through of Moys and yet again the Austrians and victory remained strangers. I'm not saying that the events of the two games proved conclusively my hypothesis that they can never win it using Classic Piquet, except of course that is exactly what I'm saying. I've spent more time on that already than is justified by anyone else's level of interest, so I will simply add that the morale rules are also crap and leave it there.

Word of the night was 'snazzy'.

Viva La Revolution, Viva Mexico

 Early last year I mentioned a book  called 'Armies of the Mexican Revolution' by Mike Blake and promised to return with a review. I'm pretty sure that I never got round to it, so let's start today's post by saying that it's excellent. In fact I would go so far as to say that for anyone planning to game the conflict - which obviously doesn't include me - it's indispensable. Partizan Press have followed this up with two further volumes. The first, by Mike Blake and Chris Swan, is the following:

I'm really not sure why the title isn't completely in Spanish, i.e. Viva la Revolución, but in any event, the subtitles sum up the contents better. It's basically a scenario book with a chapter on what rule amendments would need to be made in order to use Black Powder. The scenarios are both historical and imaginary and are easily usable with other rule sets. It's once again an excellent book and worth reading.

The other book, this time by Chris Swan alone, is 'La Cucaracha!', which contains both rules and scenarios for, in the author's words, engagements with small forces. That seems to mean both low numbers of units plus the implication that those units are small enough that key individuals (leaders/specialists/mercenarios etc) would be worth representing both physically on the table and in game terms; a point of reference might be Too Fat Lardies type games. I think that this is my favourite of the three books. In fact I like the look of the rules to the extent that were I intending to start this as a project (*) then I'd give them a go. Including various optional sections they seem to cover pretty much everything from snakes to aircraft. 

Having said that, I'd recommend all three books. The main negative is that none has an index, although 'Armies' has a good bibliography. I got them all from Caliver Books.

* Which I am not.

The Moys Are Back In Town

 James set it all up again and we had at it for a second time, ending the evening after turn four of the eight which the Austrians have to capture all three objectives. James took some photos of the action and may post them on his blog. I didn't, but did remember to take one of the menu style Quick Play Sheets, which I rather like. What he needs now is a blackboard on which he can write the special rules of the day.

I've always bigged up Piquet for its ability to generate radically different games from the same starting position. However, I think any set of of rules would have done the same here. The scenario starts with three Austrian grenadier units about to storm the redoubt. In the first game some extreme dice results at that point saw that command blown away. Not only was that not replicated, but the Prussians spent all night unable to hit a cow's arse with a banjo. By the evening's end they had destroyed a magnificent total of no Austrian units at all and had lost control of the first two objectives. I think next week may be different though. Not just because I am expecting a reversion to the mean in terms of combat dice rolls, but also because my hypothesis about initiative is just about to be proven. We - i.e. the Austrians - are never going to get to turn enough cards to get all our forces up the hill and drive the Prussians off. We shall have to rely on the Major Morale rules to win. I would explain what that means, but I don't really understand it. It's something along the lines of the Prussians having to multiply their number of destroyed or routing units by the value of π and then roll dice and pay morale chips until James declares the game over. A full explanation will follow should we get that far.

Here's a music video, but not the one you were expecting:

 

PotCXpouri

 It's been an odd few days, and I am not referring to the truly astonishing revelations that Conservative MPs are a bunch of crooks, that Yorkshire County Cricket Club is full of racists, or that the Pope is a Catholic. The most disconcerting thing that happened to me was that I found myself the only person in attendance when someone had a heart attack. The main learning point from this was that if one has to have a health emergency then it is better to do so in the company of an individual whose qualifications are in medicine rather than in accountancy. I didn't recognise any of the symptoms and only started to comprehend exactly what was happening when the ambulance controller gave me the location of the nearest defibrillator and told me to go and get it. Fortunately for everyone involved the ambulance itself arrived at that point and I was grateful to be able to hand over to the paramedics. I understand that the patient is recovering in hospital; I also needed a long lie down.

Let's cheer ourselves up with a story about both accountants and doctors:

A woman goes to the doctor and after examining her he says "I'm sorry to tell you that you only have six months to live."

She is shocked and exclaims "Doctor, is there anything that I can do?"

"Well," he replies "you could marry an accountant."

"Will that make me live longer?" she asks, puzzled.

"No," said the doctor "but it will seem longer."

Well I Talk About Moys Now

We finished the battle of Moys (1st run through) which resulted in the Austrians not completely winning as such. There also wasn't much buy-in from the others to my hypothesis that they had been fighting with one hand tied behind their back due to the way that Piquet works. It was pointed out that they had been just as much undone by some brutal dice rolls in the first fifteen minutes or so, which had rather chopped the legs off their attack on the redoubt. And I have to say, that certainly happened. Reference was also made to the foolish commander of the Austrian right having advanced his light troops to harass the Prussians before the rest of the Austrian army had started to move, resulting in their prompt destruction. Reluctantly I have to admit that also happened. In any event we agreed that next week will see the battle of Moys (2nd run through). Will my theory be vindicated?

Cum On Feel The Moys

 It was very nice to congregate chez James once again, and celebrate our host's restoration to health by throwing some ones and drawing some low dominos from the bag. I trust that you have all managed to read the scenario details on James' blog. If not then I have stolen one of his photos, showing what the table looks like. I don't normally take any photographs whilst in the legendary wargames room, but now wish that I had taken one of the new covers for the quick play sheets. They are repurposed menu covers, and both look and work very well indeed.

Having been given the opportunity to play with James' wonderful toys in a scenario he had clearly spent time devising and setting up, it seems churlish to complain. However, it behoves me to point out - to myself if no one else - that James' rules really aren't suitable for this battle; or perhaps visa versa. The rules are a derivation of Classic Piquet, a set which I very much enjoy. For those unfamiliar with them, players get initiative, which they use to both turn cards which show what actions they can take and also to take those actions by command or unit as appropriate. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but that's the essence. The short term fluctuations in initiative for each side plus the arbitrary order in which the cards are turned, plus the normal use of dice for combat resolution, provide a friction which I know isn't to everyone's taste, but which I like. 

However, at Moys the Austrians had twice as many troops as the Prussians. This inevitably means that, given initiative being roughly equal across the whole game, the Austrians will spend twice as much on actions for commands/units; the corollary is that they must therefore turn fewer cards. This is important because when one side has turned all their cards the turn is over and the decks are reshuffled. In a scenario with such disparity of forces this will always be the smaller force. We therefore end up with the counterintuitive, and I would suggest undesirable, outcome of the defenders being far more flexible and agile than the attackers. I think this is such an intrinsic feature of Classic Piquet that no tweaks could compensate for it in this type of scenario. I stress the Classic bit because FoB, the other main game in the Piquet stable, works in a different way and would be perfectly suitable. 

Libertango

Considering that this is a wargaming blog that's been running for more than nine years, it really hasn't included enough tango. So here's the great Astor Piazzolla:

Wargaming will resume soon; I can feel it in my water.

Resurrection

"Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du,

mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh'!"

- Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

Resurrection of the blog? Well, we are starting the new month with a post. Resurrection of wargaming? Perhaps, keep your fingers crossed. But mainly it's because I have been to see a performance of Mahler's Symphony No 2, (known as the Resurrection, although Gustav had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the life everlasting and kept returning to the theme) and very fine it was. It was very loud too, there were eight percussionists; one can't complain about getting one's money's worth. 

The piece is about ninety minutes long, so I won't include a video. Instead here's Ashton, Gardner and Dyke:

Fun fact of the day - apart from that the band actually had four members - concerns the B side of the single in the US, which was entitled 'I'm Your Spiritual Breadman'. I know, but it was the sixties. In any event, it featured two guest guitarists: Sir Cedric Clayton and George O'Hara Smith, pseudonyms for Clapton and Harrison. Sadly, and despite that added firepower, it's not very good. 

World Opera Day

Lack of wargaming here has been compounded by quite a lot of people that I know going down with Covid plus a large house being rendered totally uninhabitable by a water leak. I haven't been ill and it's not my house - although it used to be - but the knock-on effects have kept me away from my duties as a bloggist. I haven't however been kept away from the opera, and as it's World Opera Day I am minded to catalogue those that I have seen.

The plot of English Touring Opera's 'Amidigi di Gaula' by Handel is a love triangle with added sorceress and knitting. At a key moment our hero shows his friend a picture of the woman he loves, only for the friend to realise that they both love the same person. This trope seemed very familiar and I spent quite some time trying to recollect which other piece of high culture I had seen it in before. I eventually came to the conclusion that I had been thinking of the Laurel and Hardy film about the French Foreign Legion (the name of which escapes me for the moment), in which everyone has joined up to escape a broken heart and are found to  all be carrying a photograph of the same woman. I can't remember whether as many of them end up dead as was the case here.

Death often features in opera, but not usually to the extent of Holst's Savitri where he appears as a character in his own right. In Northern Opera Group's production he comes in through a side entrance and stalks slowly and menacingly through the audience before reaching the stage, being implausibly tricked out of his victim and exiting stage right still singing. I preferred that to the other Holst one-act opera it was coupled with, 'The Boar's Head'. The basis for this was all the Falstaff pub scenes in Shakespeare's Henry VI plays taken out of context and rammed together. I think I'm reasonably au fait with those, but I still couldn't work out what was going on. And for some reason the fact the staging featured a door but no walls irritated me enormously.

Back to death on the stage, although this time in a ballet. Opera North's Bernstein double bill included his opera 'Trouble in Tahiti' coupled with 'West Side Story Symphonic Dances'. In the former no one dies (although perhaps it's true to say that love does), but in the latter, well we all know the story. According to the programme the choreography reflects life in South Africa under apartheid, but it looked like the same old street gangs to me; I enjoyed it anyway.

Vellem nescire literas

 As befits a wargaming blog, no wargaming has equalled no posts. Reasons for not gaming have been various, but this week appear to have been related to a Brigadoon-like canal, which is sometimes there and sometimes isn't. I can't paint either because, whilst my balance problems have largely abated, the remnants make close focus work inadvisable. An ideal time therefore to design some scenarios, knock a few rules into shape (e.g. the hex-based version of Pax Romana) or perhaps even just tidy up the annexe (the mice having ceased to be, I am pleased to say). But no, instead I have been gadding about.

I have been to the Nero exhibition currently on at the British Museum, which poses the question: "Was he a young, inexperienced ruler trying his best in a divided society, or the merciless, matricidal megalomaniac history has painted him to be?". I think we all know the answer to that, although the exhibition stressed that he was very popular until he, well, wasn't. I came away conscious that pretty much my entire 'knowledge' of the period comes from watching 'I, Claudius'. Anyway, it's well worth visiting, especially for the Boudiccan revolt section. A bit of rank bad planning meant that I was there the day before the Hokusai exhibition opened, but one could now combine the two.

I also found myself in Leicester, and took the opportunity to go to the Richard III Visitor Centre, which I thought was very well done. The ground floor is given over to concisely explaining the Wars of the Roses, with major figures projected onto the walls and telling us their side of the story. It's a complicated subject, and the museum hasn't got a great deal of space, but they have a reasonable and balanced stab. It's not their fault that pretty much everyone is either called Edward or Richard. The first floor recounts the story of the search, the find and the scientific analysis required to establish that it was indeed him. It's a fascinating story, well told and again worth a visit. One's trip round culminates, as it should, standing by the hole in the car park itself, or more accurately the hole which used to be in the car park.

Yet more bad planning meant that I didn't manage to visit the tomb in the cathedral - it was shut - but while I was in the city I also went to the National Space Centre. It's not Cape Canaveral, but nonetheless was a worthwhile way to spend a morning. It's full of rockets, spacecraft, artefacts etc with plenty of informative and hands-on displays. Visiting the planetarium wasn't perhaps all that advisable for someone suffering from vertigo, but I closed my eyes and it all went away. My companion for the trip crashed in her attempt to land the lunar module, but as I had experienced her driving I wasn't entirely surprised. One of the most entertaining aspects for me was the timeline of the space age (which is almost entirely congruent with my own lifetime) which included many non space-related events, both significant and ephemeral, none of which seem to have happened in the order that I would have said that they did. Memory is a funny old thing.

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

             - Philip Larkin

Hussite Warfare

 It's back to the fifteenth century for a review of Hussite Warfare by Alexander Querengässer, which first came out in German in 2015 and was followed by an English version a couple of years ago.

I say that it is in English, but it's not English as we know it, Jim. Still, lets start with the good bits. The pictures are excellent, especially the newly commissioned illustrations - by Sascha Lunyakov - and the reproductions from contemporary manuscripts. But the text has been translated and proof read by someone with no grasp of idiomatic English whatsoever, rendering large chunks of it unreadable. My guess is that it was done by a bored teenager on work experience armed only with Google Translate or similar. 

The subtitle of the book is 'Armies, Equipment, Tactics and Campaigns' and it is the last of those elements which really suffers. The narrative arc of a campaign description would seem to require a greater fluency than is on offer here. The other sections aren't so badly affected and contain some good stuff, of which I'll pick out just two bits here:

Firstly, the goose controversy. It used to be accepted that the Hussites used the goose as a symbol on their standards because that word in Czech is similar to the name of Jan Huss. It then became accepted that it was the Hussite's opponents who used the goose symbol as a way of abusing the heretics because the word in Czech etc etc. This book has a number of contemporary illustrations showing Hussite flags including geese, which is interesting. It is, of course, difficult to tell whether the manuscripts from which they were taken were written by supporters or opponents of the Hussites and therefore to draw any firm conclusions either way. I modelled my Hussites when the first view held sway and, following my strict principle of no rework or rebasing, they will continue to proudly display the goose.

Secondly, the Hussites' use of artillery. The book makes it clear that notwithstanding their position as early adopters of gunpowder weapons that they, and indeed their enemies, continued to use more old fashioned siege weapons such as catapults, rams etc alongside them. I have quite a lot of those, plus of course a new castle to try out, so what am I waiting for? Many years ago, long before the blog or the annexe, I put on a game loosely based on the battle of Kutna Hora. I need to re-read the scenario notes.

So, the book is probably only for those with a particular interest and not for the casual reader. As I said before, the illustrations are very good, and sit nicely alongside those in the relevant Osprey as a guide to modelling the period.

PotCIXpouri

 In case anyone was counting, the title reflects the fact that, entirely deliberately, there were two separate PotCVIpouri posts. But it has been so long since I was here that you have probably forgotten who I am. Indeed there have been occasions during the last few weeks when I wasn't entirely sure who I was myself. Way back when, we had played the first part of a siege game. I was unavoidable detained elsewhere for the second part, but it did get played. Whilst I obviously can't give any indication of exactly what happened it reached a point where the participants figures that it was simply a question of luck of the dice as to whose morale ran out first and therefore who won. I think the besiegers were being a bit optimistic because, unusually for Piquet, the defenders can carry on after getting down to zero morale and so would inevitably have won.

We need a debrief, I feel, to see what worked and what didn't. What is clear, though not unexpected is that the rules work a lot better with more than one player. In the meantime there have been a series of Crusades games using To the Strongest!, although I have been unavoidably absent for most of them so once again I can't report back.

What I can tell you about is the new campaign underway in the annexe, to which I have given the codename "Operation Mouse Poisoning"; it's a fight to the death.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

                              - Matthew Arnold