Beyond the horizon

James and I concluded the latest Seven Years war game last night, it ending as expected in a good kicking for the Russians. If anything the initiative was even  more skewed in favour of the Prussians than it had been the previous week, but it was nevertheless and enjoyable game. In fact, on the wings the Prussian cavalry was completely destroyed. Unfortunately this was because there was too much Russian infantry on the right and not enough in the centre and that was where the game was lost. The new morale rules worked well I think, and the charge restrictions on Cossacks meant that I used them in a different way, only lost one unit of them and yet they still caused a fair amount of disruption.

Indeed James asserted that the rules (provisionally entitled 'Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops') were now pretty much finished. This should be treated with a certain amount of scepticism, especially as it was followed by some suggestions regarding cavalry opportunity charges. The rules favour the Prussians, which is reasonable enough, but in order to make a decent game of it this has to be compensated for by scenario design. At its crudest this means giving the Russians more units, but exactly how many more is more of an art than a science. It maybe that, given that their strategy seemed to be simply to try to hang around long enough until Frederick's army got fed up and went away, that they should be allowed a number of 'free' unit losses not countable against Major Morale. Also, it would seem to me that any scenario should not require them to actually do anything. The previous game we played fell down because they needed to switch units around in reaction to a flank attack, and they couldn't. In this game my deployment was too much to one side of the town and I could never bring the units back across.

On a different subject you may remember that a couple of years ago James and I got into some heated discussions about the length of day at the equator. This was particularly pointless as this is a very well understood phenomenon, has been for thousands of years, and it could be demonstrably proved which one of us (i.e. me) was right. You'll be pleased to know that we have moved on to a new and somewhat upgraded topic to argue about when we should be turning cards and rolling dice: gravitation as explained by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This is also completely pointless as, let's be honest, neither of us has the faintest idea what we are talking about; didn't stop us though.