Epictetus - Discourses on Wargaming
It's election time; I'm busy.
To tide us over here is some Barry Blue. There are a couple of mysteries about this video. Is the music we're hearing the same as that to which he is lip-synching and 'dancing'? And why have the audience been drugged?
Fun fact: his real name is Barry Green.
Unexpected fact: as a songwriter his work was recorded by, amongst others, Diana Ross and Vera Lynn.
We live in interesting times. It's reassuring therefore that readers have felt able to spare the time to write to me. For the record none of them have asked how the Peninsular campaign is going. Nevertheless I feel obliged to tell you. Mark very nearly won a couple of weeks ago, but the Spanish forces collectively made a burst towards Madrid, recapturing sufficient territory from the French to ensure that it will go on a bit longer. Bastards.
What did seem to be worrying you all was why my list of the most famous Barrys hadn't included Barry from Eastenders. A fine question, but in my defence I must point out that he is fictional, plus of course he was pushed off a cliff twenty years ago. Having said that, he did recently appear at a gig venue local to me presenting his, apparently famous, barrioke; shame I missed it.
Much more relevant to the state of the world is Barry Maguire, who recorded a song in 1965 which I would re-release sharpish were I his record label:
"War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off." - Karl Kraus
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| From this week's Private Eye |
I have set the siege up again to have a little play. It's been getting on for three years since it was last out on the table. I refer to 'the siege' because the initial layout is always going to be pretty much the same. These photos may therefore look familiar.
One change that we decided was necessary was to start the game with some of the second parallel already built, and that's what you see above. I want to test whether that means that any adjustment needs to be made to the force sizes or to the opening values of food, powder, morale etc. I hope not, and that's the way I'm going to try it first. Having re-read the rules I'm not sure we gave sufficient weight to blind spots around the bastions during previous games, although as it was so long ago I may just have forgotten. One aspect of addressing that which requires some thought - and possibly the manufacture of player aid or two - is that my bastions don't have as acute an angle as would have done in real life or as the rules assume. The main reason for that is simply to make the table footprint more manageable, although it also makes it easier to put the cannon and figures in them. As I say I need to have a think about how to match the rules to the terrain.
Speaking of terrain, the only real change since last time is that I have modelled and cast up some proper positions for guns and mortars to replace the rather bodged way in which I did it before. Hopefully you can get the idea from the photo above.
The Peninsular Campaign, which we have been playing on and off now for some months, is in one sense just an extended playtest. James wrote the rules drawing on his vast experience, his status as a wargaming demi-god plus, of course, the ever elusive wargamer's common sense. However, and despite that pedigree, until they were played no-one could know how they would work out in practice. We have made the expected running amendments as we went along, but I understand that James now feels that he knows enough to start thinking about some more fundamental changes and a version 2.0. One aspect that seems certain to feature is some achievable victory conditions.
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The problem with the current system is that it seems to be as easy to lose victory points as it is to gain them. The French are currently ahead, but only by as much as the allies were recently, and a swing back is all too imaginable.
One way out would be a climactic, winner-takes-all battle and we rather thought it had arisen a few weeks ago. One French command under Sault attacked a numerically superior, but otherwise inferior Spanish army. A second French force was due to arrive part way through, but - thanks to a campaign card produced from nowhere by Peter - so was Wellington with a large and very strong Anglo-Portuguese army. This was the big one. Except it wasn't. The luck of the dice and cards resulted in Wellington not bothering on this occasion and the Spanish received the inevitable kicking. I wouldn't be happy if I was them.
I have been asked why my round-up of famous Barrys in showbiz omitted Chuckle. Good question. At the risk of confirming AI in its belief that this is a YouTube channel, let's have some music from another one. And is it just a coincidence that the Leeds born Ryan brothers (real name Sapherson) shared first names with the Chuckle brothers (real name Elliot) (*)?
* Yes, it is.
Haven't done this for a while. New-to-me and otherwise notable games only.
Age of War: OK, but no better. It's samurai themed, but fairly abstract.
Amerigo: Perfectly fine exploration and tile laying game.
Arkadia: Polyomino tile-laying game with some clever variable scoring rules. Good.
Clever Cubed: The third in the Ganz Schon Clever! series. The second remains my favourite so far.
Dead Man's Draw: Nice pirate themed filler.
Dogfight! Rule the Skies in Twenty Minutes!: Played this some more, this time including missions such as bombing and reconnaissance. It's not very good.
Dune Imperium - Uprising: According to those whose judgement I rate, this has replaced the original. I didn't see it as being that much better myself. What I did see was a scam, whereby people are lured into paying full whack again for a game that has a 90% overlap with one they already have.
Evacuation: I really did not enjoy this, indeed I failed to see the point. Other people claimed to like it, so what do I know?
Exit - The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes: I'd never played an escape room game before, and this was much harder than I was anticipating. Fortunately the players included two of the sons of one of my regular companions, both of whom turned out be much smarter than either their mother or me, and so we managed to solve the puzzle. I'd certainly do others in the series, but only when surrounded by younger and more flexible minds than mine.
Faiyum: We gave this a go with four players and it was proved to be a very good game at that number.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal: A fine, fine game; highly recommended. There's loads of stuff in the base box which I still haven't played with, but enjoyed the circuit from the expansion which we tried.
The Hunt: A very enjoyable asymmetric two-player game about the Graf Spee raiding merchant ships in the South Atlantic at the outbreak of WWII and the Royal Navy's search for it.
Imperial: This is Diplomacy with added cash. We only played it because there were six of us, but it turned out to be well over the heads of most of those taking part. I'd like to give it a go with stronger players.
K2: Climb the world's most dangerous mountain and, if you're lucky, come back down again. I've always enjoyed this and snapped up a second-hand copy of the big box version containing the base game and all the expansions.
Kemet: Blood and Sand: This is an updated version of the original Kemet, which I had played and thought was OK. I was more enthusiastic this time, although whether that's changes in the game or changes in me I wouldn't like to say.
Lancaster: Haven't played this for years, and ended up teaching it, which wasn't ideal. It's a good game, sort of about the Hundred Years War, but not really.
Magic Rabbit: Likeable, and short, cooperative game where rabbits have to be sorted into numerical order without any communication.
Mesopotamia: Did they carry stones on their heads in Mespotamia? Did they always execute messengers? Reasonably theme free, but nonetheless interesting, pick-up-and-deliver optimization game.
Modern Art: There are four types of auction in this, which was at least three types too many for my brain. I did very badly.
Nusfjord: Will it be wood or will it be fish? Either way money is scarce and the turns you will have throughout the game are even tighter. Difficult to do well against anyone who has played it before.
Obsession: Downton Abbey the board game. I enjoyed it a lot more than the first time I played it. Worker placement with differentiated workers.
The Quacks of Quedlinburg: A popular game that I had never played before and enjoyed when I finally did. Involves push-your-luck and bag-building, both mechanisms which I enjoy.
Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West: Don't worry, no spoilers here. I'd never played a legacy game before, but am enjoying this one. We have played four of the twelve sessions that will make up the whole thing and so far it has exceeded our expectations.
Vegetable Stock: Fun filler.
Wallenstein: Thirty Year War themed, but certainly not a wargame. The main gimmick is a tower into which your armies are poured to resolve combat, but my advice is not to fight if you can avoid it.
World Wonders: Yet another polyomino tile laying game, but with a neat money track concept. It also has nice wooden wonders of the world which get placed alongside your tiles.
I went to Airecon, the large local boardgaming convention, for the first time this year. It was very good, I caught up with a lot more people than I ever do at wargames shows. The highlight was the bring-and-buy, which is also something that never happens at wargaming shows.
“Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.” - Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I rather enjoyed 'High Fidelity' the novel, not least because it was located in a time and place of which I had direct personal experience (*). I didn't care for the film version because, in a classic case of cultural appropriation, the producers relocated it somewhere else so that they could make more money. Perhaps enough time has passed for it to be worth re-reading and/or re-watching. From memory alone therefore, the Barry character (**) wants to be in a band, but in the end only gets to be in one because those who invite him have decided that all the members have to be called Barry (***).
The chap singing the music in yesterday's video was Barry Booth. He had quite a career and worked with some very well known names, many of whom are listed on his website, the biography section of which is quite amusing (****). Whilst he sadly never seems to have worked with Gibb, White or Manilow, he has collaborated with a couple of aptly named non-musicians, Barry Cryer (appearing not for the first time here) and Barry Fantoni, which whom he wrote a musical.
A week or so ago I went to see Barry Rutter, another figure to have featured in this blog before, speaking about "Shakespeare's Royals". In between giving the full-throttle, chewing the scenery, performances for which he is known and loved, he told several anecdotes. I was personally very interested in the background to a production I saw some years ago, but perhaps the most amusing concerned a backstage encounter he had in New York once with both Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev. Many years after that, Gillespie and Nureyev both died on the same day. Rutter quoted to us the 'In Memoriam' poem composed for the occasion by E.J Thribb, aged 17 and a half.
Barry is already at the shop by the time I arrive. "How was your weekend?" he asks. I think about telling him about Laura but then I think we don't really have that kind of relationship so I reply: "I made a list of all the anagrams you could make out of 'Solomon Burke is God'."
"Cool," says Barry. "Did you include 'I'm a sad twat'?"
* For example the 'Harry Lauder' pub they spend a lot of time in is clearly based on the 'Sir George Robey', which will be well known to anyone who ever visited the Rainbow.
** All three of the shop staff are, I would have thought, just meant to represent different aspects of the author's own personality.
*** Should this, as is quite likely, be wrong, please keep it to yourself because it rather undermines the remainder of the post.
**** Be warned though, many of the photos show him with a convicted paedophile. Booth is no longer with us and the website itself is clearly rather old.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” - Edsger W. Dijkstra
Jonathan over at Palouse Wargaming has asked a chatbot to explain his blog. On the basis that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I have asked the same AI the same question but about this blog. Part of its response says that I am involved in "discussing various historical battles and wargaming topics from an informed, expert perspective". So, clearly nonsense then.
To get a different opinion, I tried Gemini from Google, who after all actually host this blog. Gemini says that it isn't a blog at all, but rather a YouTube channel, citing as evidence the post entitled "YOUTUBE has a wargaming problem". There is no such post on here nor, as far as I can find, on YouTube either.
While I'm sulking about the possibly libellous suggestion that this blog has featured so many videos that it might as well be a YouTube channel, why don't I play some music which celebrates the modelling side of our hobby:
The appearance of a photo of Michael Palin as a shopkeeper early on in the rather overly literal visual interpretation of the song is not by coincidence; he wrote the lyrics.
Mark and I had a little break from endless French versus Spanish in the Peninsula and tried out the 'Altar of Freedom' rules for the American Civil War, whose title comes from a letter which President Lincoln may or may not have written to a woman who may or may not have lost five sons in the conflict.
In turn, the rules may or may not be any good. The one thing I can say with certainty is that they have a bit of a learning curve and one game is not sufficient to come to a conclusion. The main gimmick is a hidden bidding system for command activation priority, but I didn't really get to explore strategies for that. There is also an extensive list of possible traits for each commander and mine ended up with strict restrictions on what he could do in the bidding phase, which was not ideal for a first game.
I enjoyed it all nonetheless, and would be happy to play again. My main reservation would be that it seemed to be one of those games where units can start directly facing an enemy unit and manoeuvre on to a flank of said enemy in one move. That's a feature which I really don't like, but it's always possible that we weren't playing it properly.
Seven years ago I posted a picture (*) of the statue of a comedian on the seafront of a run-down resort on the Northwest coast of England. Here's another one:
Come back in 2031 for a third in the series.
* If anyone follows that link, I did indeed go down with Salmonella poisoning in 2017.
It's possible that you are asking yourselves whether this Peninsular campaign hasn't been going on for rather a long while. It has, gentle readers, it has.
We fought through the conclusion of the latest battle between Spanish and French - Blake vs Marmont, but I still don't know where - over the last two Wednesday evenings. The first of those gave an excellent night's entertainment; the second didn't. Piquet, despite definitely being my rules of choice for Horse and Musket games, is a bit like Longfellow's little girl. Occasionally it is horrid.
Anyway, the Spanish duly lost, but did a reasonable amount of damage to Marmont's army. Elsewhere, Wellington has been trying to get to Sault, believing that he had inferior numbers. He did, but then a campaign card gave him the Old Guard, and then timely reinforcements to existing formations bolstered him even more. He was still too scared to take on the Iron Duke though and has attacked a nearby Spanish army instead. Will Wellington arrive in time to join the battle? I have no idea, because I clearly don't understand the campaign rules.
“This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.” - C.S. Lewis
Someone has very kindly asked after my health. I am much recovered, possibly up to more or less what passes for 100% with me. The one thing that I still can't do is spend much time at a computer screen so, to everyone's relief, blog posts will continue to be infrequent. In other areas of my life I have thankfully managed to return to full man-about-town mode, including catching the current touring production of 'Oh! What A Lovely War', which I very much enjoyed and highly recommend should it come near you.
A talented group of actor-musicians absolutely nail the production's mix of broad comedy, satire and tragedy. If you've seen the film you'll know that the attribution of blame is not especially nuanced, but sadly what the piece has to say about the futility of war is as relevant today as it was then.
Or possibly not. It would seem that Valencia was relieved after all because the French marched their entire force of to battle rather than leaving any to man the siegeworks. I can't tell you what that means for the campaign; presumably all will become clear in due course. Anyway, in another part of Spain the French and Spanish are having at it again; we have already had more battles than there were in the whole of the Peninsular war. This time the Spanish force is that of Blake, who has done nothing so far except receive reinforcements. He outnumbers the French on the table at the start and has therefore attacked. As usual I don't know the location at which the battle is taking place. In my defence I seem to mainly view the map upside down and from a distance.
We've only played the first turn of the game so far, so by way of a change here is a picture of the participants. I apologise for the lack of ties; your bloggist was of course wearing one behind the camera.
Well, was it? I don't think so, but not for the first time the finer details of the campaign seem to be eluding me. More on this later.
I confidently predicted that the Spanish had advanced as far as they could and would be pushed back on the second evening of the game. Inevitably therefore, they kept moving forwards, and it was the French whose units started to rout off the table. However, the French had so much morale left and the Spanish forces were so bad - being largely raw troops who don't fire very often or very effectively (*) - that we collectively called it as draw. As no one won, the situation, I think, remains as it was and Valencia is still besieged.
The campaign rules we are using were written by James, and most enjoyable they are too. Of course, playing through them has led to the odd tweak to improve playability, but nothing especially major. One thing has become apparent though, it has proven rather difficult for either side to land much of a damaging blow on the other. So, we have decided to make the permanent losses incurred by the losing side of a battle greater. The unintended consequence of this could well be fewer battles and more manoeuvre, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing; see previous reports for evidence that I at least have been a bit gung ho in offering battle. The other change we have made is to increase the size of the hand of campaign cards each player is allowed to hold. This may seem a bit of a technicality, but we think it may lead to forces having their supply lines threatened more frequently.
Anyway, more map moves next week.
* Basically the French rolled very well and the Spanish very badly in the set up, and the reverse happened during the game itself.
The current action in the Peninsular campaign is yet another set-to between O'Donnell and Macdonald, who are having a feisty, but probably irrelevant, private war on Spain's Eastern coast. One of them is besieging Valencia, and the other is trying to relieve the siege; at the time of writing I can't offhand remember which way round it is.
The Spanish army is, even by their low standards, pretty rubbish. That's them above; there's a reasonable number of them, but they're mostly very poor quality. Given that they must attack I - and probably everyone else - thought it would be a straightforward French victory. However, the first night of the game proved both highly enjoyable and surprising in what it delivered. Despite that, I would imagine that the photo below shows the highwater mark of the Spanish advance. Note the French flanking attack at the bottom, which subsequently drove the defending infantry out of the woods back across the stream.
The latest iteration of the skirmish rules continue to work well; no doubt we'll find the flaws in due course.
“People have forgotten this truth, but you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.”
- The Little Prince
It's been a while since I mentioned the pigeon. "Wait a minute," I hear you say "you've never mentioned a pigeon." Well, actually I have, you just weren't paying attention. A couple of years ago a pigeon with an injured wing landed in my garden and hasn't been able to leave. International Pigeon Rescue let us down by failing to send their operatives and I don't have it in me to wring its neck, so I've been feeding her ever since. My garden is surrounded by high stone walls and is never visited by cats and so she's still here. Last year she attracted a mate and reared a chick. I'm pretty sure I had never seen a young pigeon before. However, tragedy has struck. Her beau - and they mate for life - is no more, seemingly having flown into one of the same walls that has been protecting them. The original bird has gone full Greyfriars Bobby and has been sitting in the spot where he fell (I've obviously removed the remains) ever since. I shall have to put up a memorial to her. As none of the people to whom it is variously attributed once said "Sometimes you're the pigeon and sometimes you're the statue".
I'm still struggling to spend much time working at a computer screen so posts will continue to be sparse; rest assured that quality will not rise as a result. As it happens I didn't miss any wargaming whilst AWOL, as there wasn't any. But we're back baby, we're back.
When we left it in December the main British force had decided to accept battle from the combined French forces despite the likelihood of being greatly outnumbered. I may be playing the role of Wellington, but I'm not role-playing the great man. There is no way he would have stood his ground, he would have retreated back to Portugal pronto. Indeed as we eventually got to the table I rather regretted my impetuosity. However I was lucky in that one of the three forces seeking to move against me didn't turn up at all. I was lucky again when the second force seemed likely to arrive quite late in the day. At the start of the battle therefore I had superior numbers. Having found my inner Iron Duke at last I didn't attack, rather I simply skulked behind a handy ridge.
The French moved against a village I was holding, with some initial success before being thrown back out of it. The Light Division saw most of the action and in skirmish formation saw off a formed unit with such ease that it has caused us to make a small amendment to the rules to make sure it can't happen again.
That's the 95th in the wood and that's a routing French unit at the top of the table. Subsequently the bulk of the French forces did arrive and the position looked very different.
But, I won the initiative when it mattered, rolling a timely double six (*) and turning eighteen straight cards of the twenty seven in my deck before the French could say "Zut alors!". The battle was drawn with remarkably few casualties on either side. Both sides stay in place and all depends on the turn of the next campaign cards.
* Dice have replaced dominoes, but different dice to the ones that were replaced by dominoes in the first place; so far I prefer it.
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag
What better way to return than with some Rory Gallagher:
