Cross-mojulation

"So I started to work my mojo, to counter their mojo; we got cross-mojulation, and their heads started exploding." - Austin Powers

I have, I think, mentioned before my admiration for those who regularly post photographs of what they have painted. I don't do that because my painting is no good, I don't have a camera and, most depressing of all, I never paint anything. Or do I? The mojo has suddenly, out of nowhere, reappeared. I rushed to my secret drying cupboard and retrieved everything to remind myself of the state of play. Some French Napoleonic line lancers requiring their arms attaching - check - and an ammunition caisson from the same period and country requiring assembly - check. After a thankfully disaster-free use of superglue and a rare trip to Guiseley to score some plastic primer (the car accessory shops in both Ilkley and Otley having recently gone bust as part of the ongoing economic recovery in the UK) the paint has begun to flow once more. Happy days are here again.

There was also wargaming chez James last night as we continued the latest Seven Years War battle of Neue Strassen. It was the difficult middle episode of any trilogy, the characters had been introduced the previous week, the denouement  will be next week, but in the meantime we needed to move things along a bit, and so we did. I drove the Austrian Grenzers from the wood - despite initially having completely misunderstood how this could or should be achieved - but then the bastards reappeared and we had to do the whole thing again. Peter made the fatal mistake of listening to James' advice regarding evasion by his skirmishers and it was predictably a disaster. He then took the far more sensible step of ignoring James' advice about charging his cavalry across the stream and it turned out that it would have been a huge success. Who'd have thought it?

There was a bit of a debate about tactics, specifically the way that armies deployed from march to battle line. The vagaries of Piquet, so good for the combat phase of the game, tend to militate against following the historical precedent (the historical precedent as per James; I have no idea at all what they used to do) because the penalty for getting caught in column of route is so big. I would imagine the best way round that is some sort of scenario specific deployment rule triggered by proximity as was indeed seen in a different context in the recent refight of Mollwitz.

And talk of tactics brings me to the subject of the First World War. I have been reading up on the subject and will return to what I have read in a future post. What strikes me is that detailed familiarity with the tactics of the period is quite important to be able to sensibly play the sort of low level trench raids that I was considering; possibly making them unsuitable for the sporadic pick up games that would occur in the wargaming annexe. Add to that the need for specific terrain, the dullness of the uniforms, and my well known dislike of small scale skirmish games and one has a pretty compelling case for not proceeding. I have therefore placed an order for several sets of figures (British and German) and can report that the project is 'Go'. I also ordered some Celtic chariots at the same time, simply because.