Nobody likes a Soor loser

Before you ask  I shall be tagging this game as Seven Years War despite it taking place during the Austrian War of Succession, because it's my blog and I can do what I want. Whichever the war it is, so far, proving to be the basis of a good game. As you will see from that link James has sought to recreate the conditions on the day by stacking everything in the Prussians' favour and then challenging the two commanders to outdo their predecessors.

I was allotted the role of Frederick and decided that the best tactic was to throw everything at the hill, ignoring the town completely because the bad Austrian deck meant that they could never bring the troops on their right wing across in time to do anything about it. The beauty of Piquet, as I have often mentioned here, is that nothing is guaranteed. In the event the Austrians gained most of the initiative, turned their Command Indecision cards at fortunate points and obviously thought to themselves that if The Prussian king didn't want the town then they would have it instead.

So, cue slight change of plan with a couple of infantry units redirected to evict them. The first of the interlopers has been seen off without any problem; the Prussians are unit for unit much better. The other will no doubt follow shortly. On the hill the first wave of infantry was thrown back, but has rallied and the attack will resume. Similarly, despite losing the initial cavalry melee the Prussian are still there. Given a reversion to the mean and something like equal initiative I am confident that history will be recreated.

You will recall that I had first failed to obtain spray paint for the laser cut walls because the couriers couldn't find the house, and then the can I did get was an unsuitable shade. I have now procured the correct item by the primitive method of actually going to a shop in person and checking that what I was buying was what I actually wanted. It will never catch on. No painting has taken place because we are now being hit by Storm Jorge, which although causing too much wind to spray in is a bit of a wimp compared to his forerunners, including the storm with no name of last week. I can't account for the whereabouts of storms Eglantine, Faramir, Gordon Bennett, Horatius Cocles or Itchy. Presumably they blew themselves out in the North Atlantic somewhere.

Pot91pouri

I forgot to mention when posting about 'The Turn of the Screw' that the evening I attended was broadcast live on OperaVision, which was the first time I'd been at any sort of performance being live streamed. Now clearly I know that what makes this all possible are the significant advances in camera technology including the ability to film in low light levels, miniaturisation and remote control, but nevertheless when I first arrived I found myself looking around for something like this:

I used to share a flat with a chap who worked for the BBC and he had lots of stories about David Coleman; and Valerie Singleton; and Basil Brush: all the greats in fact.

In other news, there has been a bit of a delay in making my castle/town wall. I decided that I had made sufficient bits to make it worth spray painting some to see how it turned out. Since that point we have been subject to Storms Ciara and Dennis, bringing strong winds and heavy rain and so rendering spraying - which obviously has to take place outside - impossible.This weekend there was thankfully no storm, despite which there were mysteriously winds just as strong and rain just as heavy. Indeed for the third time in as many weeks there was this:

And this:

Instead of spraying or laser cutting castle walls, I passed the time making myself a Piquet clock, for no better reason than I'd always wanted one and you can't get them anywhere. Piquet being a rather niche game it wouldn't be economic for anyone like Warbases to make them. I am rather pleased with the way it turned out.

It involved me shocking everyone else in the workshop by leaving the laser cutter and moving across to a different bench; in this case the one with the pillar drill, a tool I hadn't used for half a century. Still, there are some things you never forget:

"Pack away now please"

Ghosts, Zombies and Gypsies

“How on the other hand could I make a reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?”

- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

And so to the opera. I have been to see Britten's 'The Turn of the Screw'. I'd seen Opera North's production about ten years ago, but didn't recognise any of it; old age seems to have some benefits. It was appropriately spooky, the music and singing were top rate and it also involved knitting and puppets; so no complaints from me. I should mention the remarkably precocious eleven year-old who played Miles; I should, but I can't because I have mislaid my programme.

Miles of course dies in the end (sorry for the spoiler, but it's an opera so what else did you expect), but doesn't sing afterwards unlike many others - especially sopranos - do. I have also been to see a zombie themed version of 'Don Giovanni' (if you know the plot then you'll realise that it sort of makes sense) in which Il Commendatore did not just sing after dying, but also after his entrails had been ripped from him and eaten by his murderer. So, more realistic than many operas then. 

Finally, I've seen another Mozart piece - 'The Marriage of Figaro'. I previously saw that one while on my post-divorce exile in the upper gallery so it was interesting to see it up close following my return to the expensive seats. It was well worth it, although I can only repeat my previous advice to the composer: lose the fourth act. On this occasion I not only missed my bus, but on top of that the following one was cancelled; thanks for nothing Wolfgang. 

Vale crucesignati

"Today everything exists to end in a photograph." - Susan Sontag

Everything, that is, except James' Crusades figures, because once again he didn't take any and clearly isn't going to post about it in his blog. And, now it's over; we shall be moving on to my favourite - Horse and Musket using Piquet  - and all those waiting to admire the colourful display will have to wait until the next time the Pope decrees that "Deus Vult".

The last of the TtS! games was very good, although the Crusaders won easily in the end. As the Saracen commander I would point to two successive turns where the entire army decided not to do what was asked of them, but that of course is the beauty of the game. A special mention must go to the commander of the left flank, who saw four units in a row destroyed while he was attached and ended up, in Brigadier Ritchie Hook fashion, leading a bunch of Bedouin irregulars. I should also reluctantly acknowledge that James' new out of ammo system appeared to work reasonably well, and did remove a lot of bookkeeping and clutter. 

So, next week a whole new set of rules not to remember properly. 

You don't know what it's like

As with all great media empires, this blog regularly consults its readers as to what they want and expect. One answer comes back much more frequently than all the others: videos of Leonard Cohen singing Bee Gees songs. Your wish is my command:

Another TtS! triumph

Jonathan asked in a comment on yesterday's post why no photos of James' superb Crusades armies. In response I can only offer photos of my badly painted 1st century CE Romans and Ancient Britons. But never mind the figures, take a look at those bases.

Keith, who clearly has never been told that it's rude to point, returned to the annexe after a bit of a gap for a game of TtS!. You may recall that as soon as he got the hang of C&C Napoleonics I switched games. It had been a while since his first game of To the Strongest!, to give me a chance to double the size of the units in order that they filled the squares, as previously discussed on these pages.

When one overlays squares on to the Hexon hexes on my table there are basically two ways of doing it. The first, which was how I had set it up for his last visit, is six rows deep and the other is nine rows deep. The latter is better just from a manoeuvrability perspective and so I switched this time. The net result is that the new warband bases are too big to slide from one square to another without knocking the grid markers out of position. So, joined up thinking in action then.

Keith had largely forgotten how the game worked, but fortunately it's a set of rules that I am completely on top of, so we didn't have any problems. Nor did the Romans, who saw off the onrush of Celts without much trouble. I don't have any decent photos of the massed chariots, although they did account for the only auxiliary infantry unit to be destroyed with an impressive flanking sweep and charge.

Hopefully, we'll schedule another game after a shorter interval than the last. Maybe some terrain features next time as well.

Another TtS! debacle

"When shall we stop this madness?" - The Hospitaller, Kingdom of Heaven

When indeed? For the third week running we completely mangled the rules while using To the Strongest! for the Crusades. It's embarrassing.

It was a pleasant way to spend an evening, although the game was to some extent spoiled, both by our own decisions and by the gods of wargaming. The game was set up to use the rules for ammunition as written, before we started we decided to not bother with any such rules at all, and then after an hour we switched to James' alternative rules. It was a mess. As for the gods, they completely reversed the previous week's luck as far as commanders went - although they left it with the Crusaders - and I basically couldn't miss with ranged fire. The whirling masses of Turcomans evaporated like water in the desert. 

It all looked very good though; too good in some ways. I was seduced by the all black colour scheme of the Hospitallers, assumed that they would sweep all before them, only to find that they kept refusing to act at all before crumbling ignominiously in the face of a few Kurds. Never trust a man in a fancy uniform.

Crystal mountain

"It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves." - George Mallory

I continue to play boardgames from time to time, but seem to have got out of the habit of writing about them. I certainly haven't come across any that cry out to be recommended to wargamers, but it's also because I only ever seem to play games once, which isn't enough to form a proper opinion. Hard-core boardgamers (which doesn't include me) are obsessed with the cult of the new. They buy games play them two, three, maybe four times and then the games are never seen again. I only play two or three times a month, those I play with tend to game three or four times a week and so everything tends to whoosh past me in a blur. 

However, I do feel the need to mention 'Mountaineers', if for no other reason than because I love a 3D game. Unsurprisingly given that it's made out of cardboard, the thing isn't that stable, especially when you try to push the little plastic climbers in to the holes. The game's owner - that's him in the picture - has come up with a variety of designs for stabilising it; indeed you can just see some aluminium corners which he has fabricated and which, it has to be said, don't work at all. I may be the classic man with a hammer who sees every problem as a nail, but I can feel some laser cutting coming on. Is the game worth it? Probably not; we are doing it because it's there.

I must also mention another addition to my portfolio of one player games. 'Crystallo' is a tile laying, pattern matching game which requires a large amount of table space to play. It's very well designed and produced, but not the sort of thing I am likely to be any good at. The theme is rescuing magic animals and slaying dragons, with a sort of quest overlaid on it. I have so far risen to the level of Impoverished Commoner, which seems about right.

At the end of the day

I have been to see Fairport Convention on their wintour, which has been so regular an occurrence over the last few years that it's almost not worth mentioning. Just for the record I didn't go last year. It was much as always, that is to say excellent, although they do look like they are getting old; perhaps I should pass on to them my secret recipe for never looking any older.

You would never believe that I'm in my sixties

They performed a number of songs from their latest CD 'Shuffle and Go', a number from the 'Full House' record, plus inevitably enough a couple from 'Liege and Lief', including of course 'Matty Groves'. I liked the new stuff, although obviously not sufficiently to buy a copy of the album. I was especially taken by a song about Michael Collins (the American astronaut rather than the Irish revolutionary) which songwriter Chris Leslie (the talented multi-instrumentalist rather than the failed centrist politician) introduced by pointing out that those of us of a similar age (*), he was a child of the Apollo era. Still, given the current political developments in Ireland and the upcoming centenary of his assassination, perhaps there would be a market for a companion piece about Mícheál Ó Coileáin as well. 

Coming back to 'Matty Groves', there has been sufficient time since what I shall refer to as 'the events' for me to once more listen to the song with equanimity. Which is just as well, because it was also played by the Sandy Denny Project when I saw them a week or so earlier. I didn't know what to expect from the gig as Ms Denny had a unique and beautiful voice and mere imitation didn't seem a fruitful route to take. I needn't have worried as the six piece band both shared vocals around and gave us their own interpretations of material written by and associated with the late singer rather than carbon copies. Probably the majority of vocals were taken by Sally Barker, who I had seen supporting Fairport in 2017, and she did a good job. However, at the end of the day there was only one Sandy Denny.

* including those of us who don't look it.

Smiteless in Gaza

We replayed the previous week's game, swapping sides and tinkering a little with rules and scenario conditions. We started the evening with a summing up of the rules we had got wrong the previous week, and ended by analysing the rules we had got right the previous week, but had forgotten to play on this occasion; we really need to get a grip. It was a fairly hapless evening all round for me as commander of the Saracens, who were comprehensively bulldozed out of the way by the Crusader convoy. I would be the first to acknowledge any shortcomings in my generalship, but frankly it was just one of those evenings. The real point of wargames is surely to smite one's enemy, and in two hours of play I only achieved two hits; everything else was either missed or saved.

One problem is that TtS! as written is really a get-stuck-in melee game (apparently on the basis that missilery was relatively unimportant in ancient warfare), whilst the Saracens fielded large numbers of horse archers who operated very effectively from a distance. This is not a criticism of TtS!, which is a great game. Indeed, one of its strengths is that it is (exactly as Piquet is) a toolbox game, in which it is relatively simple to tweak things for period specific versions that match one's own view. James' has, naturally enough, come up with some ideas for beefing up the Turcopoles (not a euphemism) and also thinks he can improve on the author's method of limiting ammunition supplies. We shall see.

In other wargames news, the laser cut walls remain unpainted due to a series of unfortunate events. Firstly there were problems with delivery of paint caused by the same couriers who caused no end of trouble when I bought a Remoska just before Christmas. They keep claiming that they can't find the house, but as I live directly on an 'A' road in the middle of a town, that seems implausible. Anyway, other paint has been sourced, but Storm Ciara, currently raging outside, is precluding any spraying. The new stuff looks too light in colour to me anyway. Once again, we shall see.

Ubu

I have been to see 'Kneehigh's Ubu', which is, as it implies on the tin, Kneehigh theatre company's version of Jarry's 'Ubu Roi'. The reason they have revived this rather notorious piece at this particular time is perhaps most easily illustrated by quoting the Wikipedia entry for the original play. The eponymous Ubu, who has taken over the country in a coup spurred on by his ambitious wife, is described as "fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil". Does that sound like anyone we know?

Katy Owen as Ubu and Mike Shepherd as Mrs Ubu

It was simply brilliant. Described as a 'sing-along satire' it involved maximum audience participation with members invited not just to sing, but even to get up on stage and fight at one point. There was also a keenly fought game of dunk-a-trunk, which looked like good fun; I have made a mental note of the rules and equipment required. Kneehigh's style is much to my taste (see this previous posting on their Tristan & Yseult; and of course the Wise Children company reviewed  glowingly here on a couple of occasions over the last couple of years spawned out of them) and it was equally appreciated by the mainly mid-teen schoolkids amongst who made up most of the audience. Now when I was at school all we ever went to see was Shakespeare.

It is just possible that Alfred Jarry's school focused on the Bard as well because, as you have no doubt already worked out for yourself, the basic structure comes directly from Macbeth, and there are bits of other Shakespeare plays thrown in for luck. Someone even exits pursued by a bear at one point.

The events surrounding the first (and only) performance of the original play are well worth reading about. Amongst those there were W.B. Yeats (whose opinion may have been coloured by the fact that he didn't speak French) and Stéphane Mallarmé, another poet previously quoted in this blog.  Incidentally, Jarry invented the concept of pataphysics; there's a limit to how many times I can post a video of the same song, so let me send you back to here. Whilst this latest production has run for a lot longer, by the time you read this you will have missed the chance to see it. If it's ever revived then don't miss it next time.

Good riddance

This post has been brought to you by Tarquin's Cornish Gin - the gin for the skin you're in. 

Turpe

We turned to the Crusades for a game of To the Strongest! in the week, and most enjoyable it was too. Perhaps inevitably the Crusader wagon train didn't make it across the the table; there was at one point a tempting gap, but I couldn't successfully activate the oxen to head for it before more Saracens arrived. I'm pretty sure we weren't playing the rules entirely correctly, but I suspect you took that as a given by now.

To the Strongest! is also set up in the annexe at the moment. In a burst of laser cutting frenzy I have produced enough (actually somewhat more than enough) warband bases for my new expanded unit sizes. I am a dozen or so warriors short, but that's only one or two per base so we can play without while I paint some more up. What I can't work around is the missing couple of dozen Roman auxiliaries, but they are all on the conveyor belt so just a couple of days and we should be good to go. The massed chariots are looking good even if I say so myself.

The first century AD is the period covered by the imminent release from the Two Fat Lardies, to be called 'Infamy, Infamy'. These were being demonstrated at Vapnartak by one of the play testers. I didn't have time to play a game, but was able to ask a lot of questions and also take a look at the draft, loose-bound version of the rules. They looked OK and I shall be buying a copy when they are eventually published. As Peter and I agreed on the way home, they look like they will address the niche that my going-nowhere Pony Wars mash-up was always intended to, and the included scenarios will hopefully give me a chance to get out on to the table all the non-combatant type figures and buildings that I've accumulated over the years. For example, the demo game included this:

I'm afraid that I shan't be making one, but it reminded me of happy, and very much missed, times past.