2022

It's time for the review of the year. It was a terrible year for the world in many ways of course. In addition for me there were bereavements and funerals, but I'm afraid that is inevitable as one ages. On the plus side, the year did contain much to amuse those of us with an interest in UK politics; indeed my most read post of the year was this one. While the pandemic now seems a long time ago I found that my caution about crowded places was slow to abate. I may now be back at full flâneur level, but at the start of the year my diary wasn't so full. In any event, what did get done may be appearing here for the first time as I have been remiss in writing about culture in the blog, or indeed writing about much at all.

Opera: I saw eighteen operas this year, which is getting back close to normal levels. Top marks has to go to 'Orpheus Reimagined'. In the words of Opera North this 'melds the music of Monteverdi’s 1607 opera 'Orfeo' with brand new music by composer and virtuoso sitar player Jasdeep Singh Degun. Together, he and early music specialist Laurence Cummings lead a cast starring some of the best Indian classical and European baroque musicians in the UK'. I thought it was sensational. Also well worth a mention was Krenek's 'Der Diktator', both very timely in its subject matter and accompanied by a fascinating post-performance discussion about the nature of authoritarian leaders.

Theatre: I saw twenty nine plays (compared to four in 2021), which once again is somewhat more like it. Best was 'The Book of Mormon' with an honourable mention for Julian Clarey and Matthew Kelly in 'The Dresser and for 'The Corn is Green' at the National Theatre. Seven of those were Shakespeare, of which the best was 'Henry VIII' at The Globe.

Music: I went to sixteen gigs, a big improvement on 2021's four. However the best was once again Martin Simpson, so that didn't change. The best excluding the maestro was probably Errol Linton. It goes without saying that to see Connie Kreitmeier in the flesh was a highlight as well.

Film: Without doubt the best film I saw was 'Hallelujah', the documentary about Leonard Cohen, which I highly recommend. The best non-documentary was 'The Harder They Come', starring Jimmy Cliff, released back into cinemas to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its initial release plus, of course, the sixtieth anniversary of Jamaican independence. The best current offering was 'Official Competition', which was brilliant, but both in Spanish and on rather limited release. If pressed to choose a mainstream film the one I'd recommend the most is, I think, 'The Duke', but with a nod to 'Belfast'.

Talks: I attended twenty seven talks this year, the best of which was on the subject of J.B. Priestley's time in Hollywood. Apparently his regular drinking partners whilst there were Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin, which would have been a pub crawl worth tagging along with I think.

Books: I have read 101 books, which is fewer than the previous year, but then again I went out more. The best fiction was Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The White Guard' with an honourable mention for  'Minty Alley', by C.L.R James. I fully appreciate that neither of those is terribly modern. Best non-fiction was 'Wagner and Philosophy' by Bryan Magee. Best non-fiction that was in any way related to the ostensible purpose of this blog was John Buckley's highly entertaining 'The Armchair General'.

Boardgames: I played 57 different games 157 times, so that's a healthy increase. I've reported on them elsewhere so I'll say no more here.

Wargames: By my reckoning I played around thirty games, many of which spread over two or three evenings. My favourite was 'Flashing Blades' at the Lard Workshop, which as I said at the time was a cracking little game. I am happy to have a go at any rules or period really and enjoyed a number of new ones this year. I found 'DBN' rather entertaining, and while I never really warmed to 'Soldiers of Napoleon' they did include some nice ideas; what they are not is a multi-player game. Probably the most disappointing new-to-me set was 'Rommel', which just didn't seem to grab any of us; perhaps it would have been better if we had used them to refight Sidi Rezegh. The rules/period which I personally would most like to revisit in 2023 is 'Jump or Burn'. Back in March James told us all to think of names for our pilots as we were just about to start a campaign, following which the planes were never seen again.

Exhibitions: The first new award category for a few years. I'm think the highlight was Walter Sickert retrospective at Tate Britain, with a special mention for the British Museum's fine exploration of the history and context of Stonehenge. 

Event of the Year: There were a few contenders. Clearly returning home to find the house full of smoke and my spare bedroom in flames must be one possibility, as was the failure of International Pigeon Rescue to mobilise their Otley branch following an emergency call by one of my occasional companions after she found an injured bird in my back garden. However, I am going for the rather tasty old-school fight on the X84 bus, which transported me momentarily back to my youth, when such things were commonplace.

For 2023 I wish us all, more than ever, love in a peaceful world.

Newish boardgames

 Lack of posting means lack of boardgames reviews, which is a shame because I've played one or two good ones. These are the games I played for the first time since I last did a roundup:

Concordia: In the finest tradition of the blog, having said that these are new games let's start with one I had played before a few years ago, but couldn't remember at all. It probably didn't help my memory that we played on a different map, this time Britannia. In my previous review I said that I chose a strategy and stuck to it despite the fact that it was a wrong one. This time I chose  strategy, stuck to it, and it was the right one. Not a bad game.

Dandelions: This is a roll and move game, which is about as old-fashioned a mechanism as you can get. However there are a couple of simple twists which, combined with its very short length, make it a neat little game.

Dune: Imperium: This is the pick of the new games I've played and it's easy to see why it is so highly rated. I don't want to suggest that wargamers are only interested in fighting, but this game combines worker placement with a combat system. You don't have to fight every battle, but you'll have to take part in some if you want to win. The combat part reminds me of Condottiere, which is high praise, in that it's crucial to decide when to go all in and, equally, to judge when ones opponents are going to do the same. Highly recommended.

Endless Winter: Paleoamericans: Another big, heavy new game with a buzz around it. It was fine, but fell a bit short for me. In particular while the first three of the four rounds it is played over were quite meaty in terms of decisions and actions, the final round was a big anti-climax. It also takes up a vast amount of table space.

Glasgow: A game about building the second city of the empire, so lots of tenement tiles. I probably need to give this another go before passing judgement.

Kluster: A strange game, or perhaps activity, with some very strong magnets. 

Lacrimosa: Based on the writing of Mozart's Requiem, so top marks for unusual theme. It's OK, quite reminiscent of Rococo, a game I like. I have a ticket for a performance of the Requiem in May next year; that will probably get a longer review than the game.

Obsession: It is seemingly obligatory to refer to this as 'Downton Abbey the board game', notwithstanding the fact that the game is set in the Victorian period whilst the soap opera - or so I understand, obviously I've never seen it - takes place between the wars. I thought it was a very average worker placement game, but perhaps that was sour grapes after I bust a gut to marry above my station only to find that it was temporary and I had to do it all again the following turn.

Spirit Island: A co-operative game, but better than a lot of others I have played. We successfully defended our island against the invaders, but no real thanks to me as it turned out I had not fully understood the victory conditions so the end came as an abrupt surprise. 

Take it Easy!: Quite an old game - 1980s I think - about laying pipes and using a bingo-style mechanism. I genuinely thought I was doing very well, but it's a spatial awareness game, so it turned out that I wasn't.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition: A card game version of the bigger game. I didn't really see the point.

Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam: A twenty-minute version of TtR with the same core mechanisms, but a smaller map and fewer pieces to place. The latter change in particular means there is absolutely no room to mess about; you have to be on it from the start. Very similar, and equally good, is Ticket to Ride: London. 

Villagers: If the original source material for Dandelions is Ludo, then this is Happy Families with Mr Bun the Baker replaced by Lumberjacks, Speelunkers, Freemasons and, well, Bakers. It's fine.

Walkie Talkie: Passes the time until you realise that there aren't any enforceable rules, and it therefore probably isn't actually a game at all.

Shake For Me

 How about some Duane Allman slide guitar:

Felicitations

 

Gut Yontiff to one and all

48 Crash

"Watch Out!

You know the 48 Crash come like a lightning flash (48 Crash, 48 Crash)" 

- Chinn & Chapman

Apologies, but the picture of Ms Quatro is mere clickbait. I am going to post about how I seem to have mislaid my wargaming mojo during 2022. Apart from actually playing the games it has been steadily diminishing; for example I have done no painting of any sort for many months now. Perhaps the last element of the hobby to go for me was my penchant for buying any new rules published for those periods which I game, or, as in the case of the Mexican Revolution, which I don't game. But even that seems to have shrivelled and died. Caliver Books were recently offering a deal on Billhooks Deluxe, expanding the 'Never Mind the Billhooks' WotR rules to cover amongst other things the Hussites. And yet, I didn't buy them. 

Whilst en route to Manchester to see 'Die Fledermaus' (*), the December issue of Wargames Illustrated caught my eye in the Smith's at Leeds station, as it contains a couple of sizable articles on the newly published rules. Would my enthusiasm be given a sufficient kickstart to get online and order a copy? Well, not so far it hasn't. I haven't been able to get over the image presented by the following quote: "Archer blocks in line can be deadly. Loosing an arrowstorm of 48 dice makes for a mighty racket as D6s bounce around the table..."

How many? Not for me I think.

* Which was excellent, featuring amongst other characters in the chorus the Spice Girls and Boris Johnson, plus an entirely unexpected appearance by Kathryn Rudge singing the 'Habanera' from 'Carmen'.

Lieutenant Padfield

 The actor Daniel Craig featured in the previous post. Twenty years ago he played Guy Crouchback in Channel 4's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 'Sword of Honour' trilogy. The book documents Crouchback's war, which paralleled Waugh's own in many respects, and has a large cast who I've always assumed were modelled on, or amalgams of, real people. Indeed I have already written about one probable source for Brigadier Ritchie Hook. I have just come across another example.

I have been reading the second volume of the diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon. Now, don't judge me. Channon was clearly an appalling human being: shallow, snobbish, hypocritical, anti-semitic, a Tory MP - I could go on. (By the way the child in the picture is Paul Channon, who went on to become a cabinet minister under Thatcher). However, I got the book very cheaply, and that's not to be sniffed at. And the years covered are 1938 to 1943, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the events of those years were viewed at the time. As with Charles Repington's diaries from the Great War which I read earlier this year it becomes clear that many of them aren't viewed as being worth mentioning. Repington never writes about the Easter Rising or the Russian Revolution and Channon doesn't regard the battle of Stalingrad as being worth even alluding to in passing. The main amusement in Channon's case is just how wrong he was about so many things. Not merely that he was an arch-appeaser (*), but that his tips for high political office - including himself - inevitably get sacked shortly afterwards, never to rise again. At one point he predicts the imminent restoration of the monarchy in Germany, which even without the benefit of hindsight does seem as if he's been smoking something.

Waugh's novel contains a character called Lieutenant Padfield, the 'Loot', an American social phenomenon who is everywhere and knows everyone. Channon's diaries feature the 'Sarge', one Stuart Preston, who is attached to Eisenhower's HQ in some unspecified capacity, knows everyone and is at every social function. The real Preston, who went on to be art critic of the New York Times, is now understood to have been working in counter-intelligence, with the task of infiltrating high society to identify sources of indiscreet gossip; if Channon is to be believed he did so in a very hands on manner. Waugh's 'Loot' turns out to be spying one of the major characters on behalf of a firm of US lawyers, so perhaps Waugh (**), and therefore presumably everyone else as well, was fully aware of what the 'Sarge' was up to.

* After the Germans occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia in contravention of the Munich agreement, he observes that Hitler doesn't make life easy for his friends.

** Who also appears in Channon's diaries; Chips is not a fan.

PotCXVIpouri

 I have been to the cinema to see 'Glass Onion', the second Benoit Blanc murder mystery. Whilst I didn't think it was as tightly plotted as 'Knives Out' it was nevertheless highly entertaining, not least for Daniel Craig's accent. It featured a few surprise cameos including Angela Lansbury. Lansbury of course died last month, and had the sort of career that means much information of interest to your bloggist was often left out of her obituaries. It was mentioned in a few places that her grandfather George Lansbury was the leader of the Labour Party in the early 1930s, but I don't recall reading anywhere that Oliver Postgate, the Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss supremo, was her first cousin. The blog pays its respect to them all.

Someone else who recently left us was Wilko Johnson, who I may or may not have seen with the original Dr Feelgood (*). 

I went to see Eliza Carthy last week and she dedicated a song to Johnson, explaining that she had played with him and that he and her father, Martin Carthy, had been close. This threw me momentarily because Martin Carthy is, well, old. But then I remembered both that Wilko Johnson himself had also been old, and that indeed so am I. Eliza Carthy and her band, the Restitution, were great. Here's one they did:

* For anyone who followed that link, new information has come to light and it would seem that the gig in question was actually at St George's Hall in Bradford rather than at Huddersfield Poly.

Fate

If dawn finds someone proud,

Evening sees them brought low.
Don't believe in success,
Don't accept failure.
Clotho spins and our fortunes change.
The gods do not offer
Any guarantees.
The thread twists swiftly,
And our lives turn with it.

                   - Seneca

Even More Bell Curve Bollocks

 I'm sure everyone is familiar with the remark attributed to a senior French civil servant after something had been explained to him: "That's all very well in practice," he said "but will it work in theory?". I feel somewhat the same about the domino method of determining initiative for games of Piquet. I'd previously been very happy with it, and then I asked myself what theoretical underpinnings it had. I should have let it lie.

The winner's probability distribution is indeed, as I predicted, right-skewed and the mean (9.5) is higher than the mode (7). There is a long tail of high initiatives, which individually have a low probability, but collectively add up to quite a lot. One third of the time the winner will get 12 or more.

The graph of the loser's initiative isn't particularly illuminating. The loser gets a mean of 3.5, with a mode of 4. The system this replaced was opposed D20s with the winner getting the difference. That produces a mean initiative of 7 to the winner, with 0 to the loser (*). Therefore there's a net benefit of 2.5 to the winner and 3.5 to the loser.

Other points to note: 

• 7% of the time the loser still won't get any initiative at all.
• The mode of opposed D20 rolls is of course 1, so there's clearly less overhead involved in drawing dominos.
• The loser can get as much as 10 initiative. That sounds good until you couple it with the fact that it can only happen if the winner gets 20, 21 or 22. Because of the way the initiative interacts with the card decks the chances are quite high that the winner will end the turn with that much initiative and so winning an initiative of 10 is definitely not the same as getting to use an initiative of 10.
• D20s only give 20% chance of getting 12 initiative or more. 

So, my feeling that dominos give big swings to the initiative winner more often is (probably) correct. However, on average it's better for the loser, which was always the point. I still think I'd be inclined to take out all dominos with a six on, but basically, however unthought through the theory behind it was, it mostly works OK in practice.

 

* All the analysis excludes either the same domino or the same result on the dice, both of which indicate the end of a turn.

More Bell Curve Bollocks

 As will have been long apparent, my preferred approach to this blog is to write any old rubbish and then forget it, on the basis that no one reads it anyway. Occasionally this backfires, such as in the case of my recent post about dominos as a means of determining initiative in Piquet. I have been asked if I can justify my assertion that the result follows a normal distribution. In particular, the question was asked as to what specifically I was referring: the winner's initiative, the loser's initiative or the difference between the two? A reasonable question.

Well, the results of drawing a single domino and adding the pips follow a normal distribution. If both sides did the same then subtracting one from the other would be the difference between two independent normal distributions, which would also be a normal distribution. So far so good. But apart from the initial drawing of the dominos that's not actually how we allocate initiative. Even more importantly, what we do with the results of the draw renders the probabilities of the winner's and loser's respective initiatives non-independent. So, the answer to the question is: no, I can't justify it.

The author Michael Green wrote a series of books called 'The Art of Coarse Acting', 'The Art of Coarse Rugby' etc. He never got round to 'The Art of Coarse Mathematics' for some reason (*), but had he done so then I'm sure that he would have drawn the attention of readers to two cop-out phrases beloved of mathematicians who either can't or don't want to work everything out in detail: 'by inspection' and 'result follows'. Therefore, by inspection I'm going to assert that, under our methodology, both initiatives have a right-skewed distribution with the mean being higher than the mode. As for the net initiative - who knows?

This correspondence is now closed.

* I should point out that in geometry and topology 'coarseness' is a real and important concept

Kids in Bavaria

 It's been over a year since The Heimatdamisch, and Conny Kreitmeier in particular, featured in the blog, but I'm glad to say that she's back.

Apologies for the poor picture quality, but I took it on my phone in the Brudenell last night, the second date of their first UK tour. They were billed as 'the ultimate live party band' and judging by the way they were received by the packed and diverse audience there was some justification in that. For those who don't know Leeds, the Brudenell is bang in the middle of the main student area and one easily can see why the band might appeal to that demographic, and indeed why Conny plus half a dozen blokes in lederhosen would attract those whose taste runs to a bit of camp. Both I and my companion for the evening thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, although she did make one or two remarks about my obvious admiration for Bavaria's finest pair of lungs. Their repertoire ranges from AC/DC to Taylor Swift; here's the latter (for the avoidance of doubt this isn't West Yorkshire):

Bell Curve

The refight of Salamanca ended with a pretty overwhelming British victory. I came away thinking, as I often do after wargames, about probability theory. The ongoing rule changes to which I frequently refer are, as I hope you have realised all along, a feature rather than a bug. They are part of our (well James's really) Sisyphean attempt to develop the 'perfect' rules for any given period, usually but not always based on one of the Piquet family; a process which I rather enjoy and think the others do too. There are wargamers out there who indulge in a bit of Free Kriegspiel or in Matrix Games, but we in the Lower Wharfe Valley stick to the turning of cards, rolling of dice, drawing of dominos etc to establish the outcome of events. These randomisers usually involve probabilities which approximate a normal distribution (*). What we and other wargames developers are trying to do - although of course we wouldn't express it in this way - is to make sure that the centre of the bell curve is where it should be (**) on the x-axis, and that the outcomes which occur way along in the extremities of the tails don't ruin the game.

The second of those issues typically manifested itself in the original version of Piquet in the occasional very large swings of initiative leaving one set of players twiddling their thumbs while the other side got to move and fire all their units repeatedly. The second version of Piquet (i.e. FoB) got round this by giving each side the same initiative, while we adopted a domino draw mechanism that, for the most part, suits us by providing different, but mostly acceptable, initiative amounts for each side. It can occasionally go wrong though, and last night it did. The draw which one would most want is to get double six whilst one's opponent draws the six five. The chances of a particular side doing this are 1 in 784. Last night the British did it twice in an evening, say a dozen draws in total. I'll leave you to calculate how unlikely that is for yourselves (***). It did rather skew things. If I had been called in as a consultant by James, and I think you should assume that I haven't, I'd suggest taking out all the dominos with sixes on. As well as reducing the maximum initiative swing from 23:6 to 19:5 it would increase the odds of a turn ending early to 1 in 21, or virtually the same as in the original Piquet rules.

As for the other issue: is the centre of the curve for combat resolution where it ought to be? No, but it is of course still a work in progress. 

*     i.e. are normal in the limit

**   Given both our interpretation of history and our desire for a decent game

*** I believe that the number of times that particular draw of two dominos would be repeated in any given set of twelve draws would itself follow a binomial distribution, but I really can't be arsed to work it out.

From Salamanca to Elchingen

 I broke my recent wargaming fast in the form of the first evening of a refight of Salamanca. I wasn't at all familiar with the battle before, but if I've understood it correctly we're playing the part of the battlefield where the main fighting occurred and the British are not constrained by having to follow Wellington's plan. The main change to the rules in my absence seemed to be to do with infantry melees. The changes sounded interesting - I thought I detected some Black Powder DNA - but we managed not to have any infantry melees so I can't really comment. I'm on the French team and all is not going well on my side of the battlefield, although my reinforcements are about to rush out of the woods, so perhaps there's hope yet.

My knowledge of Salamanca is infinitely greater than my knowledge of Elchingen, of which I had never heard before Mark invited me round to try some DBN. Even now, I couldn't tell you much more than that it involved Austrians and French. We played it through twice, swapping sides, and the Austrians won narrowly each time.

It wasn't just my first time with DBN, it was the first occasion that I had ever played any of the DB family of rules. I have to say that I rather enjoyed it. The game was much as Mark had described it: entertaining and quick. One of the things I wondered about in advance was how it would compare to C&C Napoleonics. The best point of reference is the basic C&C game rather than the expanded EPIC version that I would play in the annexe, and despite very different mechanisms there seemed to me to be similarities. They are both easy to grasp and play, avoid minutiae, but yet have sufficient chrome (e.g. unit types, national differences) to render the period recognisable. Indeed they share the same fault, namely that because victory depends on destroying a certain number of enemy units it can all get a bit cheesy at the end when on is chasing the final elimination.

A very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

The Bear Unecessities

 “Oh well, bears will be bears,” said Mr Brown.” - Michael Bond

There are a surprising number of plays which call for a bear to appear on stage: 'A Winter's Tale' probably being the most well known. Usually, and for obvious reasons, they are represented by some technical trickery such as back projection. In a version of Philip Pullman's ' His Dark Materials' that I saw many years ago the actors playing the polar bears wore very large, but non-naturalistic head gear which worked well. In my review of Cavalli's 'La Calisto' I mention that they rendered the bear very effectively, without bothering to include the detail of exactly how they did it. Presumably I assumed my memory would be sufficient; it isn't. Why am I reminiscing about ursine theatrics? Because I've just seen a bear on stage that was far superior to any other that I have ever seen. I'd like at this point to include a picture of it, but I can't find one online so this one will have to do.

And the play? It was 'Guy Fawkes', guess what's in the barrels in the background there. Now, I don't claim to be an expert on the Gunpowder Plot, but I think all readers in the UK at least will be familiar with the basics of the story, which after all gets trotted out annually. Those basics have, in my case at least, until now excluded the bit about the bear. Still, thankfully one is never too old to learn something new.

The play may have been, shall we say, creative, but wasn't really very good. It did however make me laugh sufficient times to make me glad I went. And that is essentially the problem; they did it as a comedy. Which, when your subject matter is the plotting of a terrorist act intended to cause mass slaughter after which the protagonists are tortured and then hung, drawn and quartered, is to set oneself a difficult task. The author went for treating it as drunken pub talk that got out of hand; it didn't work. But, as I mentioned before, the bear was good.

Stoptober

 Stoptober is all about giving up smoking, but I seem to have given up wargaming for the month instead. No particular reason, just the usual real life stuff getting in the way (*). Nothing particularly bad, although I had an injection in one of my legs at one point, which apart from being painful in itself left me rather immobile for a couple of days. Anyway, before the Rhetorical Pedant puts in an appearance let me acknowledge that I had a relapse mid-month, when I played out the game that had been sitting on the table in the annexe for quite a while. And that's where we pick it up again in November. Having lost a significant part of their food supply, and of course aware that help has been sent for, the besiegers have no option but to launch an assault.

One driver for playing this was to get some of my siege equipment on to the table, but due to the defenders feistiness the only one that has made it is the siege tower.

 

When I first read the 'Vauban's Wars' rules for 18th century sieges I had a think about whether they could be amended for the medieval period, before deciding that they probably couldn't. The little campaign from Miniature Wargames that I have been playing has been fine, but perhaps a little over-simplistic. I like the fact that there will definitely be a final assault, but would have welcomed a bit more to and fro between besieger and defender in the run up to it. For example, the besieger's bombard never got a look in. Maybe some of the relevant elements in VW - food, spies, disease all spring to mind - could be usefully incorporated. 

Just looking at the table I don't see how the attackers can lose, but I shall have to wait to see how the rules for ladders etc actually work in practice. To be continued - eventually.

* For those that know me well, on this occasion it wasn't actually 'the usual'.

No laughing matter

 One of the more embarrassing elements of the recent (*) political debacle in the UK is that it turns out that Liz Truss has the same accountancy qualification as I do. To be honest, she is by no means the first example I have come across of a member of my institute who was useless, but it's annoying nonetheless. Perhaps a joke will help:

A young accountant, newly qualified, applies for a job he sees advertised. He is interviewed by the owner of a small business who has built it up from scratch.
"I need someone with an accounting qualification," says the man, "but mainly I'm looking for someone to do my worrying for me."
"How do you mean?" says the accountant.
"I have lots of things to worry about, but I want someone else to worry about money matters."
"OK," says the accountant. "How much are you offering?"
"You can start on seventy-five thousand," says the owner.
"Seventy-five thousand pounds! How can a business like this afford to pay so much?"
"That," says the man, "is your first worry."

* or perhaps ongoing

It's downhill from here

 "Optimus est, post malum principem, dies primus" - Tacitus

Muppets

 If you live in the UK then you will undoubtedly have seen this already. Still, I never like to pass up the opportunity of featuring Rowlf the Dog on the blog, or indeed of taking the piss out of the Tories.

It's a sign of the times that this video is less than 48 hours old and yet not all those featured are still in post.

Da Da Da Dun Diddle Un Diddle Un Diddle Uh Da Da

 Earlier this year an oblique reference to The Proclaimers led a fellow blogger to report having seen the Reid brothers in concert. I have now joined him in ticking off that feat, and whilst it wasn't my idea to go I can report that they were rather good. I remember hearing Tom Robinson say that he had made a career out of having written two good song, and the Reids have at least three in their quiver. 'Letter from America' (as featured in that previous blog post), their most famous song (lyrics quoted in the title to this blog post) and 'Sunshine on Leith' (which is my favourite I think).

The evening also provided yet another example of how despite being well into my seventh decade I can sometimes still find myself in situations for which life has not sufficiently prepared me (feel free to compare and contrast what follows with this previous example). My companion for the evening and I were in the Kash - compulsory for a cultural outing in Bradford city centre - when we bumped into a colleague of hers. He mentioned that he had been out for lunch to say goodbye to a friend who was leaving for Switzerland. "Lucky him," says I "I'm sure he'll prefer it over there to over here". 

The chap to whom we were speaking gave me a pained look and said "Well, he's been ill.."

"Even better," I replied "The air is so much cleaner and fresher in the mountains, he'll feel so much better in no time."

My companion was by now also giving me odd looks, but it was only when I heard the words "In fact, he's been so very ill that he feels that this is really the best option..." that it began to sink in that 'going to Switzerland' had, in this context, a specific, no need for a return ticket, sort of meaning.

Once again, not cool dude, not cool.

Keep them dogies movin'

 "Whatever happened to the siege you were playing using Lion Rampant?" asked absolutely no one. Well, it fell victim to the double edged sword that is having a dedicated wargames room, or in my case a dedicated wargames outhouse. The great thing about them is that you can leave stuff set up for as long as you like, whereas on the other hand if you are, like me, easily tempted away by other ways of spending your time then out of sight out of mind. Anyway, the other stuff having come to a natural and inevitable conclusion I have returned chastened to the world of toy soldiers vowing never again.

You may recall, although if you do then you're doing better than me, that the game languishing for the last couple of months was an attempt by the defenders to drive off the besiegers' cattle herd. In the photo above the raiders have been successfully guided out of the woods by their local associates, the hunting party is making its way towards them (top right) and those in the camp haven't stirred. The following notes are for my own future reference really:

• The three parties of attackers all got a chance to activate each turn whilst still in the wood regardless of any failures. As it happens there weren't any failures.
• The besiegers in the camp had to activate once to be, as it were, aroused before they could move. This proved to be an important factor.
• As in previous games I tweaked the base unit stats in the rules (and as a digression I played this game with version 2 of the rules, having acquired those since I last pushed plastic) to match what was on the table. Oddly enough the rules don't cover such basic troop types as an early-morning boar-hunting party. I was too lazy to write these tweaks down; this was a mistake and caused me no end of confusion.
• I had decided to have a couple of the units start the game split up e.g. half a unit of crossbowmen were on guard and half were asleep in the camp. The base rules give twelve combat dice until the unit is at half strength and six thereafter. To accommodate my half units I switched to two or four dice per stand left, depending on troop type, which seemed to work OK. It does mean that eventually a unit won't be able to inflict any hits and that this will happen sooner the more armoured the unit which they are facing. I figured that I could live with that. In retrospect though I clearly forgot to make a corresponding change to the courage test rules, so need to remember to do that next time.

It is now revealed which of the raiding parties are real, which was the blind and also the location of their insipid leader.

The crossbowmen guarding the herd have been driven back (if I'd changed the courage test properly they may well have been destroyed), but the raiders have to look to their flank as the hunting party emerges from the wood. There are no combat dice for the dogs; perhaps there should be. To win the game, the raiders have to be in contact with the pen at the end of the turn, without any enemy presence.

The hunting party charged home, honours were fairly even in the melee, but then they rolled very badly in the courage test and had to retreat. Those in the camp have belatedly started to move forwards.

In fact, they have moved so far forward they have reached the pen just in time. This is just as well because the hunting party has had trouble rallying themselves.

They eventually did so and with a total reversal of their dice rolling they completely wiped out one of the raiding parties, at the cost of once again failing their own courage test. The infantry bottom left are similarly broken and the melee just about to happen will see the same happen to the crossbowmen, whose retreat leaves the raiders having achieved their victory conditions. The defenders in this siege have now won every round.

Ian Beesley

 I was ill for part of last week. Just a heavy cold I think, although to be honest every time I have taken a self-administered Covid test over the last couple of years I have seriously wondered whether I was doing the bloody thing properly. I eased myself back into the land of the living by going to an exhibition of photographs and I shall be easing myself back into the land of blogging by writing about it.

Bradford-born Ian Beesley is currently the subject of a career retrospective exhibition at Salt's Mill. That career started at the same time as I was doing my first degree at Bradford University in the mid 1970s and there was much to bring back memories of the time. I was fortunate enough to be guided round the exhibition by the photographer himself and the background information he provided added greatly to the whole experience. As I'm taking things slowly I shall mention just one of his stories.

In 1997 to celebrate the centenary of becoming a city, Bradford council commissioned Beesley to take portraits of one hundred Bradfordians ranging in age from the newborn to the very old. He went to visit one chap of 104 in a nursing home and the manager said that she was pleased he was there as the individual in question had only had two other visitors all year and they were both foreign gentlemen and so didn't really count as far as she was concerned. After taking the photograph Beesley asked about the other visitors. "Well," came the reply "Bert always visits me when he's in the country". Upon questioning it came out that the old chap had been on the ground staff at Maine Road, and that the Bert in question was Bert Trautmann, the German POW who became Man City goalkeeper and played much of the 1956 FA Cup Final with a broken neck. Rather impressed, Beesely then asked about the other visitor. He, it turned out, had been from the French embassy. The old chap had served on the Western Front and his visitor had come to present him with the Légion d'honneur. I think that story - and the manager's part in it - neatly sums up what's wrong with the attitude of the British to the rest of the world. I'd like to be able to say that things have improved in the last twenty-five years, but we all know that the opposite is true.

Anyway, it's an excellent exhibition, and there's a rather fine Hockney piece currently on the display in the next room as well.

Blimey O'Reilly

 "Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives" - John Lennon

It seems only a couple of months ago that I described the contenders to be leader of the Tory party, and therefore prime minister, as headbangers. It would seem that I was too kind to the winner.

Piquet Redux

 We finished off the game of Soldiers of Napoleon about which I was complaining here. We down graded the over-powerful British skirmishers, which certainly made things better, but the game still limped to a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion. Even before the usual post-game discussion there was clearly an unspoken consensus that SoN had run its course, at least for the time being. The rules have many good features, but things don't half take a long time to get going, and just when they do the game seems to be over because one side runs out of morale. I am quite prepared to believe that we aren't playing it in the right way, but then perhaps that in itself doesn't reflect well on the rulebook as published.

In any event, this last week we stayed in the Peninsular, but returned to Piquet with the best elements of SoN (as defined by James) incorporated. The version of Piquet now in use for this period (and indeed that used for the Seven Years War) have migrated a fair distance from the original core rules and incorporate bits and pieces that we have liked in other games; the primary influences before the latest amendments being Piquet's sister ruleset Field of Battle and Black Powder. It all seemed to gel together better than it had any right to, especially since the rest of us often didn't know what the rules actually were until we tried to do something.  What it did do was produce a rather good game.

It was  a Charles Grant scenario based, I am told, on Fontenoy. Given my earlier observation about games of SoN starting slowly it was perhaps just as well that, as the attacker, I got the bulk of the early initiative and was able to move forwards. I was literally one dice roll away from having one of infantry divisions broken leading to inevitable defeat, but turned the card necessary to bolster their morale and never looked back. I eventually won because the British guns in the redoubts were unable to inflict any casualties on the French cavalry as they advanced past them and then the British cavalry commander died in slightly unfortunate circumstances as he tried to rally them.

We going to swap sides and give it another go next week. Piquet always produces a different game and both sides have the advantage of learning where not to deploy (the British infantry need to be nearer the village in the centre and the French should probably not bother trying to advance through the wood), but we shall be lucky if it is as entertaining.

The Howgill Fells

I have been to southern Cumbria for a couple of days, but neglected to take any photos of the Howgills themselves, features which Wainwright described as being like sleeping elephants. However, on my way up there on Monday morning I did take this one of the Ribblehead Viaduct.

An awful lot of people had obviously decided that an unexpected day off would best be spent by climbing Pen-y-ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside one after the other. Your bloggist was not among them. My companion for the trip and I took a much flatter walk for about a third of the 24 miles that the three peaks challenge requires. Then having done the aforementioned photo-free fell walking north of Sedbergh we paused on the way back to walk around Semer Water

One thing that took me north was the opportunity to stop off in Settle and see Maggie Bell and Dave Kelly perform. They have both featured here before: Dave as part of The Blues Band and Maggie as the lead singer with Stone the Crows, whose videos I have posted on several occasions. I have sometimes mentioned acts I wish I had seen forty years ago; in Maggie Bell's case it was actually fifty years ago. Bell didn't hark back to those days much, although she referenced in passing the band's support slot on Joe Cocker's 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' tour (sadly neither they nor Freddie King feature in the film). One track she and Kelly did perform was this:

It was well worth the long wait. She may be 77, but she can still belt out the blues.

Worth remembering

 When the game is over the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

Mockingbird

 No reason.

Cooling

 "Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities." - George Eliot

I've been doing August stuff, including a trip here:

But there has been some wargaming in the background. We had a somewhat bizarre game of To the Strongest!, with some very lopsided luck, which was clearly just that - luck - and not something inherent in the rules. Soldiers of Napoleon, however is a different matter.

I am definitely cooling on this game and considering that I started off lukewarm that is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from the fact that it is not designed as a multi-player game, but there are four of us. We seem to have ended up playing the author's suggested approach, which is basically two games side by side. It's crap (*). We seem to be sacrificing much of the pleasure of social interaction - which is for me at least a big part of why I do this in the first place - for the sake of the purity of the rules. It all seems a bit arse about face to me.

My main problem though is with the flawed arithmetic implicit in the rules. James recently passed me a copy of WRG 6th edition so that I could look at the siege rules. The writers of these appear, to me at least, to have attempted to achieve 'realism' and bugger the playability. Thankfully authors of more modern games tend to do it the other way round, concentrating on finding mechanisms that are easy to use and which move things along smoothly. I play a lot of boardgames and in that sphere one need do no more; it's usually all abstract anyway. When wargaming though one needs/wants to add chrome to make it a reasonable facsimile of what one imagines the historical period was like. Authors don't always seem to me to be able to manage the interface between their neat, simple mechanisms and the chrome. I previously wrote about some nonsensical effects of this in Blitzkrieg Commander 4.

One example from SoN relates to skirmish fire. Now skirmish fire is hard to get right in a set of rules. We tried any number of ways with Piquet and never produced anything particularly worthwhile. The version we ended up with had the sole merit that it sometimes allowed French columns to close with British lines. In SoN units can throw out their light company which then appear as two skirmish stands . You can then fire these with a dice per stand at a longer range than volley fire. If you fire at another unit which also has its light company out then you lose a dice. So far so good. Standard units hit on 4,5,6 and save on 4,5,6, so two units skirmishing against each other would both have an expected value of damage caused of 0.25 disruptions (the term for damage caused in SoN) each time they fire. It's not very effective, but worth doing because units with no disruptions get a bonus in combat. 

Some units, for example those of the British Light Division, qualify for a third skirmish stand. This seems reasonable; specialist troops get a 50% bonus. In practice of course it means they get two dice when firing at a line unit with skirmishers, so that's actually a 100% bonus. And this is where another rule comes into play. One can only save the first hit caused, so the ability to cause two hits is very powerful. I'll let you do the arithmetic for yourself, but it turns the expected hits of these units against a standard unit to 0.625, i.e. a 150% increase. What makes it worse is that these units also tend to be elite (not the term used in the rules) and can both hit and save on 3,4,5,6. If we consider our match up of one of these units versus a standard unit, both with skirmishers out, we find the standard unit's expected hit has dropped to 0.167, while the specialists' has increased to 0.889. Were these units really five times better? It seems unlikely to me.

Add in other facets of the rules, in particular the ability to concentrate of multiple units' fire on one target, and you end up with a game that is dominated by the skirmish fire of certain formations - I'm looking at you again Light Division -  and frankly isn't that much fun. 

* And, incidentally, quite a lot worse than our own quickly cobbled together approach which we tried first.

It gets worse

A haunted ventriloquist's dummy has become Prime Minister of the UK.

What a time to be alive.

Silla

 And so to the opera. In a rare crossover between the ultimate art form and wargaming I have been to see Handel's 'Silla'. The 'Infamy, Infamy' game which I played in Nottingham a couple of weeks ago took place in the Social War of 91-87 BCE, and the Lucius Cornelius Sulla who was involved in those as a military commander becomes Silla in Rossi's libretto. The setting is (sort of - it's not terribly historically accurate) the civil wars of a few years later, through winning which Sulla/Silla becomes dictator. It is, as the programme tells us, about a womanising populist leader who rises to power, but is brought down by those closest to him when he loses his appeal to the populace. It had a contemporary setting (*), presumably so that the audience could more easily read into it whatever parallels they could find.

It was all very good, although the music seemed vaguely familiar. Some subsequent research tells me that the dramma per musica was written for a specific time and place, only performed once and the music was simply used again in 'Amadigi de Gaula' which, of course, I saw last autumn. Among what is by now the traditional trouser-role same-sex relationships and gender-swapping, this production of 'Silla' did contain a couple things I'd never seen before at the opera. At one point Mars, god of war, encouraged the audience to clap along, which did nothing so much as prove that classical music audiences are as incapable of keeping rhythm as any other sort. Then, a bit later on, some members of the orchestra joined in the singing. If you live long enough then you will see most things eventually.

 * I can't help thinking they missed a trick by not setting it in 1960s Liverpool and giving a key role to the cloakroom attendant at the Cavern, all of which would undoubtably have been a lorra lorra laughs. 

Lard Workshop

 The lack of postings here, and the fact that medieval cattle raid hasn't been played yet, are of course due to scorchio. Indeed the only reason I am writing this now, is that the cumulative effect has all been too much and I have retreated indoors. This is not to say that there has been no wargaming. We completed our second game of 'Soldiers of Napoleon', about which rules I have nothing to add to what I have said previously. We shall have a go next week with move distances tweaked to match the specific size of table and bases, and I shall report back. It was fairly sweaty in the legendary wargames room on Wednesday, but nothing to compare with the sauna that was the Old Chemistry Theatre at Nottingham Trent University on Saturday for the inaugural Lard Workshop (*).

The Workshop, which took place alongside the BHGS Britcon show, was organised by Don, my old (very old) school friend and bandmate, despite which it was a great success. I for one thoroughly enjoyed it, and had a blast. And no one could say that it wasn't excellent value for money. For £15 one got a £5 voucher to spend with the traders, a free sandwich lunch (which was rather good I thought) and to play two games; what's not to like? The one thing wrong with it was the heat, plus it was very noisy. So the only two things wrong with it were the heat, the noise and the fact that the toilets were a long walk given that middle aged men need to visit fairly often. Having said that, there were a couple of gamers involved who clearly didn't have prostates, which was the first time I've seen so many female wargamers since, well, since forever; another good thing.

I was travelling light and didn't bring a decent camera, which I regret because the eighteen games on offer were all worth photographing. There was a Far East set game of Chain of Command (possibly run by Richard Clarke himself; I wish I'd taken some notes as well as some pictures) which had more terrain crammed on to one table than I can remember ever seeing before. Very sadly I only took one photo of David Hunter's game of 'Infamy, Infamy', which I played in the afternoon, and that is very far from doing the table justice.

I'm playing the chap at the front left, tasked with getting my men along the road to a camp manned only by some unreliable slaves. The game was set in the civil wars of the early first century BC and, while I didn't get anywhere near the camp my Gallic ally and I had killed enough Italian rebels en route to win the game. I had played Infamy once, pre-publication and pre-pandemic, and despite reading through them again was feeling a bit lost at the start. However, as the game progressed I found it all began to make sense (**). Maybe I should get the chariots out before I forget it all again. 

You've got to love a measuring stick

I took more - and more useful - photos of the game I had played in the morning, Sidney Roundwood's 'Flashing Blades'. It wasn't hard to get a larger amount of the action into the picture because everything happened in a 2ft x 2ft square. It's not obvious from the above, but it's mounted on a Lazy Susan (£14 from Amazon according to Sidney) and players seated around the table can easily turn it to allow them to move their musketeer. Because the Mousquetaires du Roi, opposed inevitably by the Cardinal's Red Guards, are what this cracking little game is all about. The rules are not yet published (***), but they are in a pretty polished state already. The rules have quite a lot of the boardgame about them - and I mean that in a good way - and produce a result that, at least in our game, was a positively cinematic narrative arc. I loved the game, almost, but not quite, with the same passion that James has for SoN. And that was only a little bit helped by it being one of my characters, Monseigneur d'Eclair, who rescued the Comtesse de Chablis from the scaffold and spirited her away.

D'Eclair leads la Comtesse away through a crowd of Parisians

Interestingly, in the afternoon Sidney ran a Samurai scenario using the same mechanics. As for what I spent my £5 on: a copy of the second edition of Lion Rampant, of which more when I have read it. To conclude, thanks to David, Sidney, my various teammates and opponents, Richard Clarke and, in particular, to Don for a most enjoyable, albeit hot, day of wargaming.

* If you are going to Google that, then I would try to be precise in your search terms unless you genuinely wish to find out the best way to render lard, which is a very different thing and quite possibly smells even worse that a hot room full of wargamers.

** Except perhaps the close combat rules, which are, shall we say, convoluted.

*** Next year possibly, depending on the rest of TFL's publishing schedule.

Soldiers of Napoleon again

 “Remember, there are more people in the world than yourself. Be modest! You have not yet invented nor thought anything which others have not thought or invented before. And should you really have done so, consider it a gift of heaven which you are to share with others.” - Robert Schumann

James has given a big thumbs up to Soldiers of Napoleon, as you may already have seen. We've now played three times (i.e. one and a half games) and I still get the impression I'm the least enthusiastic of the four of us. You can't read too much into that; apart from anything else it's an inescapable fact that someone will have be in that position. The context is important as well: we're clearly still not playing them as written; it has become obvious that the text does not adequately reflect what the author and his play testers actually did in practice; and even when one has the rules correct - whatever that means - one still has to get one's head around the best way to play. Picking up on that last point, I'm fairly sure we've been playing the skirmisher rule correctly from the beginning, but it was only last week that I suddenly had an epiphany as to how one used it in practice (*).

I agree with James that the way skirmishers are handled is elegant and makes sense. We had tried something a bit similar with Piquet, but for whatever reason didn't quite arrive at the same rule. On the other hand I think the event cards could very easily get a bit samey each game, because there aren't that many different ones. If one is lucky enough to get the ones that target the other side's artillery or commanders early on, when the situation is less sensitive to what card you play, then they will always get used; later on in the game they probably won't. As for the Big Battle rules as written (**) they are even more pants than the 'How Goes The Day' mechanism. 

One of the issues we had, and which led to the sort of calm, rational, evidence-based discussion so often seen in the legendary wargames room, related to infantry attacking buildings. A lesser man than your bloggist would point out that the answer received back from Warwick Kinrade - namely that units must adopt a special 'attacking buildings formation' - was precisely what I have been saying about the same situation in Piquet. But, as I hope you all realise, I am better than that.

* Apparently you put them out at the front of units and they shoot at things.

** Or to be precise, as James says they are written; I don't own a copy and haven't read them.

Road to Trojan

 Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the independence of Jamaica, and I went along to a celebration. It was rather a large gathering because there a fair number of people with Jamaican heritage in Leeds, including a 96 year old who sailed on the Windrush. I was left a bit unclear as to whether he was actually present last night, it seemed to all depend on whom one spoke to. I hope he enjoyed himself, wherever he was.

First up were the Jamaica Jazz All Stars featuring Brinsley Forde as guest vocalist, very good and very tight. They reminded my of a sort of Jools Holland Big Band with reggae replacing the boogie-woogie. The headliners were Dennis Alcapone, whose birthday it also was, but who was undoubtably a fair bit older than the country, and Freddie McGregor who I had assumed was old, but worryingly turned out to be younger than me.  Anyway, they were both every bit as good as I hoped and I'm glad I've seen them.

The band backing Mr Alcapone in the above clip is the Cimarons, who have previously been mentioned in this blog.