Epictetus - Discourses on Wargaming
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.
