Sign of the Times

 Seen in the window of the charity bookshop in Otley:

Franklin my dear

 It's very difficult to find a subject to blog about when there is so little happening in the world. However UK readers may possibly have seen on the television news that the town is under water again.

The photo that the BBC have been using appears to have been taken from upstairs in one of those houses behind the bridge. On many a summer's day I've thought they look like a lovely place to live; less so on a winter's day when the Wharfe has burst its banks and there is several feet of dirty, cold water in your kitchen. This latest storm was sponsored by that mint which offers overpriced collectibles to the gullible; a strange marketing strategy if you ask me, associating your name with all that destruction. Still, they did once sue the late Princess Diana's charity so they are obviously of the view that all publicity is good publicity. Actually, speaking of crap marketing I have just received an email from a clothing company headlined "Hello Graham, are the storms done yet?", to which the obvious response is "No, look out of the bloody window". They sign off with "Stay cool"; that won't be hard.

I Don't Want To Know About Evil

 I saw more films in January than I saw in the whole of last year. Among them was 'Belfast', which I really enjoyed. My companion for the evening took a different view, complaining of a lack of realism. She even donned a metaphorical anorak and question the accuracy of the way that the buses were portrayed; for the record, I have no reason to believe that she has any particular knowledge of public transport in the Northern Ireland of the 1960s. For me the fact that the film was a view through the eyes of a nine year old meant that one wasn't meant to take certain things entirely literally: the unfeasible good looks of the parents; that a miscast Dame Judi Dench is at least a generation too old for the part; and, OK fair enough, the unlikelihood of the airport bus leaving from the end of their street (*). I also felt that the music of the genius that is Van Morrison added greatly, whereas she felt unable to look beyond the pandemic having led to him completing his journey from curmudgeon to dickhead. 

This dichotomy between the teller and the tale also came up when I recently saw Sarah Jane Morris in concert, as in the first set she concentrated on the songs of John Martyn. Martyn was a sublime practitioner of jazz tinged singer-songwriting; he was also an alcoholic drug-user well known for inflicting physical and mental cruelty, especially against the women in his life. Morris didn't avoid that aspect - she is personally close to some of Martyn's surviving family -  but chose to focus on interpretation of his soulful, and often sad, lyrics.

She was backed by distinguished guitarist Tony Rémy (who has played with Herbie Hancock and Jack Bruce amongst others) and, to my surprise, the wonderful Marcus Bonfanti. I've only come across him before in a blues context - he is a member of the current incarnation of Ten Years After - but he demonstrated that he has the jazz chops as well. In the second set they played a wider variety of music including fine covers of 'Imagine' and 'I Shall Be Released'. The song I think I enjoyed most was 'Piece of My Heart'. Mostly associated these days with Janis Joplin, it was first offered by Bert Berns (who co wrote it with Jerry Ragovoy) to Van Morrison, Berns being Morrison's producer at the time. Morrison declined it, probably grumpily; dickhead. 

Not at all grumpy was Sarah Jane Morris, whose between song monologues about acts she had worked with, activism, and karma added much to the gig,  which I very much enjoyed. In case you are wondering where you have heard that name and voice before, it was her that duetted with Jimmy Somerville on the Communards' 'Don't Leave Me This Way'. Here they are, lip-synching creatively:

Great hat.

* Although, as it happens, in real life the airport bus leaves from directly outside my front door.

Game of War More

 I have finished "Paddy Griffith's Game of War" and, as there was a question in the comments following my previous mention of it, I thought I'd do a review. Overall, it's an interesting enough read. I bought it on a whim and had no particular expectations. Anyone in the hobby of a similar age to me would surely be as diverted as I was by Griffith's recollections of well-known people whom he met, played against and fell out with. This wasn't originally written as a book, rather being a collection of various things, some intended for publication whilst others are private letters or merely working notes. It has all been curated by John Curry, who provides notes on the context where appropriate. It contains things like rules for games run by Griffith in a variety of places and of various sizes. I suppose it's nice that they are included, but they are actually rather dull to read. Perhaps the most telling section is the letter which he wrote following the recording of the refight of Waterloo done in 1997 for the television programme which gives the book its name. He clearly took it all very, very seriously. I do wonder what the programme makers thought when they read it.

I've embedded the video to save keen readers from having to search for it. I haven't watched it myself because the rules printed in the book turn out not to have been the one's used on the day, because judging by what he himself wrote Griffith made a pig's ear of umpiring the game, and because life is short and getting shorter.

Paddy Griffith moved away from games with figures and many of the games described in the book are more at the free kriegspiel end of the spectrum. I've never played any of those so can't comment really. He apparently tried and failed to get wargaming accepted by his employers at Sandhurst, where he lectured, as a valid learning experience. I've never been a soldier, I was a businessman (*). As such I attended, and received a postgraduate degree from, a business school. We played a business game, which sounds very similar to the sort of thing which Griffiths proposed: students in teams playing out a scenario, staff acting as umpires making decisions about outcomes supported by computer moderation. It was bloody useless and I learned nothing. 

Having at some point decided that everyone else was wargaming the wrong way, he seemingly didn't hold back in telling them so (**). For example, there's one piece included here in which he comprehensively slags off competitive wargaming. I've never done that either, but I've known people who have and have very much enjoyed it. I'm really not sure what skin off Griffith's nose it is that they do so. Which I suppose brings me on to his polemic against gaming with figures. His argument goes: your ambition is to achieve a realistic simulation of war, and you can't do that with toy soldiers, especially if they are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I may have missed out one or two steps in his logic, but that's the gist of it. My counterargument would be: my ambition is to play a fun game with nice looking toy soldiers in pleasant company, with any superficial resemblance to military history being the icing on the cake. 

The best quote in the book doesn't come from Griffith himself, but from one of the other attendees at the conference at which Wargames Development was founded: "Most wargamers are stamp collectors playing at being postmen". I don't just acknowledge that description, I embrace it.

*   OK, I was an accountant.

** He comes across as the sort of chap of whom a little would go a long way

Rommel: The Refight

 As planned, we reset the previous week's game and had another try of the Rommel rules. Not as planned, it descended into farce. 

The British commanders are caught out by a daring German attack on their HQ

We have been trying the rules at the behest of Mark, who wishes to rebase his existing collection of Western Desert models to suit this game (*). In the meantime we have been using James' stuff and his gridded desert cloth as originally made for Crusades and To the Strongest!. Unfortunately, Mark wasn't able to make the game, even more unfortunately the rulebook didn't make it either. We were left reliant on the quick play sheets and what James and I could remember from the previous week. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

I didn't really help by repeating my tactics of the previous week - I was once again the Axis commander - and making an armoured thrust straight for the British supply dump. I confess that I was partly doing this to demonstrate where I thought the game was a bit broken. If units can't be supplied then there are consequences. The problem was that without the rule book we weren't sure what those consequences were. In particular the reference sheet - and one of the action cards - differentiate between being 'isolated' and being in a state of 'low supply'. Handily we had the page references for the relevant rules, less handily we didn't have the pages. We carried on regardless, but the game rather drifted. The Panzergrenadiers on Hafid ridge were as indestructible as in the first week, but this time I moved the Panzer reinforcements into the centre to try a two pronged attack on the British armour. Unfortunately I had misread where the grid markings were and there wasn't actually a route for me to get through. It seemed to sum up the evening and so we gave up.

We're clearly going to put Rommel to one side for now and do something else. On the negative side, they are all a bit abstract. As James observed, Command & Colors is a board game that becomes a wargame if you use figures to play it, whereas this just stays a board game with clunky playing pieces. On the plus side, I think there are nuances within that board game. For example, after a few combats it becomes clear on which occasions you should play cards to try to improve your odds of causing casualties, and where you should be trying to reduce those of the enemy; you can rarely achieve both. 

Overall verdict: meh.

* One of the reasons that I like wargaming is that the hobby covers such a wide range of activities: military history, modelling, painting, rule writing, playing the games etc. We can all dabble in a bit of everything, but choose the one on which we wish to focus most of our attention. For reasons known only to him, Mark has chosen to specialise in rebasing, an activity he carries out pretty much continuously.

It Won't Wash

 If you live in the northern part of Britain then you won't need me to tell you that the weather is shite. We are being bombarded by back-to-back storms. Still, at least the one currently raging outside is named after a wargamer. The one due on Friday, on the other hand, shares a name with a flame-haired doxie from my youth. ["I beg your pardon," interjects the Rhetorical Pedant "but you can't call someone a doxie. It's not nice."] Fair enough, although I doubt very much she'll be reading this. And good to hear from you again, RP, it's been too long. I haven't thought about the lovely Eunice for several decades and for some reason the main thing that comes back to me is her throwing a complete paddy when the restaurant we were in ran out of steak. ["Nope, can't say that either".]

A different Eunice

Anyway, the storms mean that there is still no opportunity to spray resin casts with primer. Clearing away the previous game in the annexe took quite a while as I found that I didn't have anywhere to put anything. The fortress and all the siege works had been laid straight on the table from being laser cut or cast, and then painted with nary a thought as to what I might do with them afterwards. Some biscuit tins have been pressed into temporary service. A tin full of resin is very heavy though, so I am reluctant to put them high up on a shelf.

I then tried setting up a medieval siege, the idea being to have three players against the umpire. But inspiration has been sadly lacking, so I'm now thinking of perhaps a WWI action. To that end I've been painting some odd German figures that I had handy. But when I came to apply the black wash that I have used on all their kameraden, it wasn't there. I am baffled by where it can have gone; it's not a big house (*). Anyway, online orders have gone in for a few alternatives and, while the weather is bad,  I shall be experimenting with various ways of making figures look better without doing the hard graft of actually painting them properly.

* Can I refer anyone who wants to know why it's a small house to the early entries of the blog wherein I documented my divorce, the subsequent period of nomadic wandering and why I don't wargame the War of the Spanish Succession.

Game of War

 I am currently reading "Paddy Griffith's Game of War", a volume in John Curry's History of Wargaming Project.

It is an interesting read, although very little of it speaks to the sort of wargaming that I have ever done in practice. I did come across this suggestion though: "...use an active umpire, or in other words a man who is either knowledgeable in the rules, or who invents them as he goes along...". Spooky or what?

Battleaxe

"It sounded suspiciously as though the British commander no longer felt himself capable of handling the situation. It being now obvious that in their present bewildered state the British would not start anything for the time being, I decided to pull the net tight by going on to Halfaya."
                                                                        - Rommel

We were back in the Western Desert, and for once we weren't at Sidi Rezegh; indeed we weren't even in Operation Crusader. We had slipped back six months or so to Operation Battleaxe (I think the second day, June 16th 1941) and were playing on a grand scale using the new to us Sam Mustafa ruleset 'Rommel'. A much shortened section of James' table represented 30km or so of the Libya-Egypt border, from the Hafid ridge to Sollum on the Mediterranean coast.

Peter was absent doing some horse-whispering, so I took the Germans, James the British and Mark umpired in the "Don't ask me, I've only read the rules once myself" stylee that I myself frequently adopt in the annexe. Initial overall impression: it was OK. Clearly this was just a test game, so we shall reset it and play again next week, hopefully with a bit more fluency and control.

It's a high-level, gridded game, and seemed to me to be very abstract and boardgame like. Obviously that doesn't mean it won't either be fun to play or that the narrative arc of the game can't match one's expectations of the period. What I am really getting at is that the mechanics themselves are only superficially thematic. It's a action point type game - as an aside, Mustafa's choice of terminology is really irritating throughout - where those points are spent in moving, fighting etc, but also in playing cards from one's hand which add to one's own abilities or detract from the enemy's. These might read, for example, 'Air Strike', but it would be used simply to give a boost to one's dice roll, not because the circumstances especially favour that manoeuvre over another. One might quite as happily have played 'Reserve Artillery' instead. 

I don't want to sound too negative though. I very much enjoy all sorts of board games whose theme is so thin as to be transparent. In this case I am certain that there will be many subtleties of card play and action point management, which will make for an enjoyable and challenging game. For our first outing we were clearly just doing things to see how they worked, and in subsequent games will certainly be more cagey, which will probably result in a more 'realistic' outcome; provide your own definition of what that actually means. My experiments worked the better on the night, particularly a nifty thrust through the British lines towards their supply dump, forcing the retreat of their armour to defend it. James tried the strategy of expending most of his action points in defence, only to twice roll badly when trying to replace them for his offensive turn. I think there is a lesson to be learned there.

Update: Mark has posted some photos here.

Cast before the storm

"The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its best to vex the lake"

- Robert Browning

Work has stopped on the new items for the siege works. I cast up all the extra bits that I thought I needed, and then cast up some more, rather than leaving half empty bottles of resin mixture and having to throw them away.

However, they require spraying with primer outside, and a period of cold weather has now been followed by high wind and rain from storms Malik and Corrie, which have caused quite a lot of damage around here. They disrupted the roads, which is not uncommon; the railways, which happens from time to time; and, on the first occasion that I can remember, closed the Leeds Liverpool canal.

The Casa Epictetus has been unaffected so far, although I have to admit that the garden is still a complete mess following storm Arwen late last year. The normal protection offered by the high stone walls surrounding it was outflanked by all the energy coming in from the north-east rather than the more usual westerly direction. That's another thing which will preclude spraying the new castings until I clear a space.

Keine Wichtelmänner, keine Pferde

 I have had a couple of posts all planned out for a few days now, but disappointingly the Blogmaker's Elves have so far failed to come in and complete them for me. What did happen was that James posted this review of the second night of the peninsular Napoleonic game we were playing. As he wrote, it had been an excellent game so far and we were all looking forward to its resolution. Inevitably enough the third evening was a complete anti-climax. The French, with one interesting exception, rolled forward inexorably and the British crumbled away and then gave up. The odd men out, as it were, proved to be the French cavalry whose performance was so abject that I started to think that they had perhaps forgotten to bring their horses to Spain. Whether they took on artillery, infantry or other cavalry they not only lost, they vapourised immediately. 

"It says they made three unsuccessful attempts to deliver the horses and have returned them to the sender."

"What of the rules?" I hear you ask. Well, we spent much of the evening listening to reports of changes about to come, so there's not much point in commenting on those we actually played with. My only suggestion at this point is that opportunity chips should be reset to four at the end of each turn.

We're off to the Western Desert next week.