I managed to blog every day when it was physically impossible so to do because I couldn't charge the laptop. As soon as the new charger arrives I go down with a virus and miss a day. During my very brief absence my order from Warbases arrived and, as predicted, the paintbrushes came out and the new arrivals have been painted green. There as an error in the order - the first time this has ever happened to me when ordering from them - but they have promised to immediately dispatch the correct stuff and told me to keep the incorrect. So once again excellent customer service from Warbases, who I would highly recommend. The mistake related to some stuff for the Great War project, which will hopefully now kick back into gear.
Also upon rising from my sickbed I note that the Seven Years War campaign is about to kick off again. Unlike General Clark we realised our mistakes pretty promptly and are going to have another try. I appreciate that approach won't work in the real world, but after all this is only a game. I shall write about this campaign in due course - James outlines it here - but there have been others; James seems sensibly enough to be working through the periods he collects.
Many years ago now James ran a multi-sided campaign using his Italian Wars collection. I was the Pope, but had little chance to do anything beyond declare myself a Warrior Pope (which actually gave quite a significant benefit) and ally with the Spanish before I had to go to abroad on an assignment. From memory the campaign was fought to a conclusion, but I seem also to remember the consensus was that it went on a bit. James and Peter fought a crusades campaign which is detailed on James blog, which seems to have been very successful, but I wasn't involved so I can't tell you what made it work so well; probably not all the silly names that James invented and that you have to wade through to find out what happened. Then there was the Punic Wars campaign of a couple of years ago. That was also rather extended - a bit of a theme developing here - and in the end was a dead-heat and decided on the tie-break included in the board game used for the strategic rules. The big unresolved issue for me was the translation of the outcome of battles back to the strategic level. I always felt that one was actually handicapped by managing to engineer an encounter where one heavily outnumbered the enemy, where all logic suggested that the opposite should be true. Once again write ups of this campaign are on James blog.
Now, readers of James' blog may believe, based on the steady stream of WWII western desert postings, that we fought Operation Crusader as a campaign . But no. Shane Warne famously said that Monty Panesar hadn't so much played fifty test matches as played the same test match fifty times. We didn't so much refight Cunningham's whole action as plough through Sidi Rezegh fifty times. Wikipedia quotes someone as saying that Sidi Rezegh is 'the forgotten battle of the western desert'. Not in Ilkley it isn't. Anyway, I hope that in due course we perhaps have a crack at the whole thing.
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