Post-completion Fiasco

Don't fear, I am intending in due course to bore you all with more details of my trip to Spain plus of course all my other cultural activities (there's been a lot of political theatre this month; bet you can't wait), but once again I find I have other, and frankly more interesting, demands on my time. Therefore this just a quick follow up on Fiasco. For those who haven't seen it already James has posted a report here with lots of pictures, plus a rather a laboured joke about a lost D8. Let me add another photo, which I pinched from here, showing James saying "I spent hours writing those scenario notes and you tell me you haven't bloody read them!" to a suitably shamefaced Holy League commander who wishes to remain anonymous.

You don't have to be bald to play Piquet, but it helps

And finally, there is still no sign of any photos of the game in the Daily Telegraph. This is one of the pictures they have found space for instead; as so often with that newspaper it's hard to fault their editorial judgement.

Foosball

"Table Football is a combination of Soccer and Shish Kebabs." - Mitch Hedberg

It is my practice to every now and then publish a photograph of a bunch of grizzled old men with no accompanying explanation. Here is another one:

There are herein a couple of coincidences of the type much celebrated by your bloggist, but of no interest whatsoever to anyone else. Firstly, did you know that table football - a game that I really love playing by the way - was invented in its current form in Spain during the civil war, a topic in which I have obviously been immersed for the last couple of weeks while I was there (*). Secondly, one of the chaps in the photo spontaneously and with no prompting brought up (**) the subject of the Gong concert about which I blogged a few weeks ago. He claimed to have 'looked after' me at the time and added a lot of spurious, and - given the length of time that has passed - obviously unreliable, detail about just how unwell I was.


*   There will be no Spanish Civil War project in the annexe; should any Spanish speaking rebels ever appear on the table they will be Mexicans.

** Pun intended.

Complete Fiasco

Since my return the demands on my time and energy have been such as to preclude much posting here, but I did manage to tear myself away in order to attend Fiasco yesterday. James put on a refight of Ravenna (scenario details here) which was well received. It is possible that had I read those notes before the game - I was, as I may have mentioned, rather busy - the outcome of the game might have been different, although somehow I doubt it. I acted as sort of adviser/occasional dice roller for someone who had read the rules, but hadn't really followed them and wanted a run through to help him out. I think it did help, despite the handicap of having me misinforming him about strategy, tactics and indeed the rules themselves. In my defence we have recently been playing standard Piquet in various Horse & Musket periods and the last time we played the Italian Wars we used Black Powder. However one looks at it though, things started badly and went downhill from there. In fact my only success of the day was probably finding the Tetley Car Park despite my notoriously bad sense of direction. My unfortunate pupil wasn't the only one to obtain a copy of the rules so they are gradually spreading out to Italian Wars aficionados; just in passing may I mention that one of the guys deep in conversation with James about the period must challenge the chap who used to do Western Desert games on Hessian matting at Derby Worlds as being the tallest wargamer I have ever seen.

The show was free this year and was, in the morning at least, buzzing. The consensus was that there were a large number of walk up visitors attracted in from those attending the Royal Armouries Museum itself, and if that's true I think we can assume that they would have been less likely to come in if they had to pay £5 or whatever. You never know, some of them might even have picked up a taste for wargaming. One person who was certainly intrigued was the photographer for the national press who was actually there to take pictures of the Spitfire currently in the plaza outside the armouries (which long term readers may remember as hosting many different kinds of re-enactor when I lived in an apartment overlooking it during the early days of my nomadic wanderings), but who was persuaded to visit Fiasco by a wargaming employee of the museum. She - the photographer - looked confused about a lot of things frankly, and had clearly never come across the idea of playing games with toy soldiers before, but was rightly blown away by James' display and took many close up shots with an enormous lens on an expensive looking camera. If they ever appear anywhere they will be worth seeking out; I shall keep you informed. The wargaming armouries employee also seemed to have some ideas for future gaming projects actually among the exhibits; again I shall let you know as soon as I do.

Museo del Ejército

Your bloggist has too many faults to list in just one post, so let's just have two: I am rather dilatory in doing any research prior to going anywhere and I have a tendency to wander off the subject of toy soldiers when writing here. As luck would have it the first has given me a chance to address the second.

The Alcazar is the large building to the right

Whilst on my recent peregrinations I found myself with a couple of hours to kill in Toledo (the original rather than Corporal Klinger's home town) and the military museum in the Alcazar seemed as good a way to spend it as any. One of the many things that I didn't know about the Museo del Ejército was that it is the national army museum of Spain and would take far more time than I had available in order to do it justice. My initial reaction was to focus on the Peninsular War (or War of Independence as the locals call it) because it is of course very much le jeu du jour, as we say in Yorkshire, with a brief nod to the Italian Wars. However, all that went out of the window when I discovered that they host a collection of some 40,000 model soldiers. Even the legendary war games room would have to doff its flat cap to that lot.

The display covers a wide range of scales (mainly the larger ones), in a variety of materials (including some carved from wood!), and especially noteworthy are some very large exhibits of flats. So, without further ado, here are some photos:

Moulds - the display is comprehensive

That's the Kaiser and the Czar on the sled, presumably before 1914

3,500 figures in this case alone

That last sign shows how we all started out; except for the girls of course, I don't remember any of those.


Toledo itself is a lovely place to visit, so let's finish with a photo of the cathedral:

Or not quite finish: a couple of days before I was there a bad storm had passed through and a 100kg stone had fallen from the tower on the left; check your travel insurance before you set off.

No longer still here

Still still here

I have been reading and/or re-reading the Smiley novels in order. I have just finished 'The Honourable Schoolboy', and what a bloated pile of old tosh it is. However, the purpose of the post is not literary criticism, however concise and erudite, but to highlight a case of life imitating art.

Your bloggist poses in his special accounting hat

In the books Smiley is often (surprisingly often in fact) summoned from a quiet retirement pursuing his hobbies in order to shed light on something from the past that only he will remember. Your bloggist has likewise been torn away from his painting table (*) to advise a former client on something from a while ago that everyone, including him, has completely forgotten (**). It has been a complete shock to the system I can tell you, and has rather got in the way of posting here. On the plus side the unexpected income is burning a hole in my pocket in a way that can only possibly be satisfied by buying some new toys for the tabletop.


* This is merely a literary conceit; obviously no painting was actually taking place

** In one small change to events in literature, rather than going to the Aberdeen in Hong Kong I have been to the one in North-West Scotland; just as vibrant and colourful, but with more kilts.

Still here

I may have given the impression recently that I was imminently going somewhere; that was as reliable as most things in this blog and I am not only still around, but have managed a couple of games into the bargain. We are still in the Peninsular two centuries ago and our first game was first and foremost an attempt to play Black Powder correctly. We succeeded (I think) in this limited objective, but there was a consensus afterwards that it hadn't felt Napoleonic enough. French versus British surely implies at a minimum blue columns charging red lines and receiving a volley or two as they do so. For some reason - not on this occasion related to D3s being thrown by your bloggist - this never really happened. We therefore determined to give Piquet a try.

Let me first say that this game played out much more in line with our view of how things worked on a Napoleonic battlefield (*). And let me secondly say that this may quite possibly have been down to the way the luck went on the evening (**); Piquet never plays the same scenario in the same way twice. On this occasion the French got all the initiative, thus allowing them to charge the British line, and the British got a Reload card just at the right time, thus allowing them to give the French two volleys from each unit.

The appropriate Piquet period supplement is 'Les Grognards' and we left it to James to decide whether to use version 1 or the much chromed up version 2. Naturally enough he instead chose to use his Seven Years War version, 'Lemony Picket', with amendments. These primarily concerned the large number of extra formations that infantry can adopt (as an aside, if there is anything duller than Osprey book illustrations of the difference between a column of companies in quarter intervals and one in half intervals then I really do not want to see it) and skirmishers. The latter are probably the more problematic, but I thought James' proposals worked very well for a first pass. There was a general agreement to further restrict the range and position of skirmishers from what we started with, but other than that they will (probably? perhaps?) last until the next game at least. There were a couple of aspects where I couldn't decide if they were carefully thought out design features or strange quirks that didn't really make any sense. So, to aid my memory as it may be a while before I play them again (***), here they are:

• Piquet uses the concept of initiative. This is allocated between sides (we use dominoes) and then the side with higher initiative goes first in that turn. It seemed to me as if the side going first got substantially more value from skirmish fire than the side going second when shooting at formed infantry rather than at other skirmishers.
• Skirmishers firing at other skirmishers can do permanent damage to the parent unit of the target, skirmishers firing at formed infantry cannot; intuitively I would have thought that men standing in rows would be easier to hit when shooting than those in an open order.

* Not of course to be confused with how they actually worked.
** There is also the possibility that it had something to with James rebasing everything between games.
*** I am going away shortly.