PotCXXVIIIpouri

"Nowadays Roman numerals only exist for things which powerful people want to look permanent, but which are actually very impermanent indeed." - David Boyle

Firstly, I'm still getting twenty thousand hits a week, and it's still annoying me; much more so that if none were being registered at all, and that would be substantially closer to the truth. I saw a statistic yesterday that 80% of all website hits on the whole internet are currently being made by bots of one form or another. However, that figure came from an AI source, so who knows.

Secondly, there has been some wargaming, so hooray for that.

It was game of To the Strongest! using James's Crusades figures. He thinks it's his best painted collection, which means it's very, very good indeed. The plan is to switch next week to possibly his least colourful period - although they're still lovely models - with some early WWII North African action. Will it be Sidi Rezegh? Let's hope so.

Various cultural activities have started up after the longish, hottish summer. I went to the Proms, something I had never done before. Also uncharted territory was a visit to a Rugby League match. I went to see the Leeds Rhinos, courtesy of Leeds Building Society who are their main sponsor. The pre-match meal etc was all rather good; the game itself left me uninspired and I didn't come away with any regrets for having given it a miss over the decades during which I've lived in the North. The outcome wasn't in doubt once the legendary Leeds ex-player brought on before the start to tell the assembled corporate guests what he thought would happen forecast that Rhinos would win at a canter by thirty or forty points. Inevitably the Catalan Dragons took an early lead and pulled steadily away as the game progressed. 

PotCXXIVpouri

 I've been busy electioneering of course. I'm quietly confident in Leeds North West, not least because no other party seems to be doing any campaigning at all. As for the overall result, who knows? I would, however, like to point readers towards this little 'prediction' I made on the 23rd April 2020, during the first lockdown when the Tories were well ahead in the opinion polls. As I said then: we shall see.

I have found time away from politics to do a few things. Firstly, walking. This is an entry in the very infrequent series of bridges of the Yorkshire Dales. In the Worth Valley, it's not far from the house that the Railway Children lived in.

We also finished the To The Strongest! game, with a win for the Crusaders, but not by much. I then took myself off to see Mississippi McDonald, who was excellent despite clearly not coming from Mississippi. This one's called 'If You Want A Good Cup Of Coffee'. If you do, then take my advice and don't go to McDonalds, whether in Mississippi or anywhere else.

Revelation Chapter 21 Verse 4

 We met last night for a game. James had chosen the Crusades using To the Strongest! for our return to the legendary wargames room.

It was fun - TtR! always is - but I'm not going to write much about it. I shall however share a couple of photos of James's extremely impressive Middle Eastern town, which hit the table in its full glory for the first time.

As you can tell it is modular, with the sections mapping directly onto the squares of the gridded tabletop. James had come up with rules for assaulting the town and then for fighting between sections that seem to be working well so far.

I hope that James is going to include some better photos on his blog, but this is the situation as we left it. It's not immediately obvious, but the Crusaders have broken into the section directly in front of the siege tower as well as the edge of the town on the left of the picture. However, I as the Crusaders may just possibly have overextended myself in an attempt to reach the palace at the back and thereby meet the victory conditions. The Muslim army has pulled itself together and moved to seek to drive the infidels back out. Plus, their forces outside the walls must surely get going sooner or later. To be continued.

Empress Augusta Bay

 This blog has been ignoring wargaming recently, but wargaming has not been ignoring your bloggist. James has recently rediscovered the joys of blogging and has produced a summary of recent games in the legendary wargames room. I won't repeat anything except to concur that the last crusades game using To the Strongest! was a belter. For various good reasons we have been having shorter gaming evenings and the likelihood of winning flowed backwards and forwards over two evenings. The only slightly odd thing was that going into what turned out to be the final combat either side could have won a crushing victory depending on the result. That doesn't affect how good a game it was, but does make one question the victory conditions.

This week we turned to a naval game using the newish rules Nimitz. I only took one photo and that wasn't a very good one. The rules however are rather good: easy to pick up and very playable. The Japanese won a refight of the battle of Empress Augusta Bay, albeit one transposed to daytime. As with any first game of anything, I wouldn't repeat what I did with my forces a second time. The main moral I took from the game was that ships cannot really be used defensively. Having said that I also ended up thinking that charging straight at the enemy at full speed wasn't likely to achieve much either. Somewhere between the two lies the sweet spot perhaps. We are having another game next week so I shall have a chance to put my analysis into practice. After that it's a grand Peninsular campaign in which it seems I am to be in command of the British.

PotCXXIpouri

 My absence from the blogosphere has not been entirely due to scorchio, my broadband hasn't been working properly either. Obviously too much has happened in the Casa Epictetus during that time to include all of it in detail here. Most notably there was a visit from the blog's Luxembourg correspondent involving food and drink aplenty and an erudite conversation which ranged from Qatargate to the dynamic pricing of tickets for Springsteen's Munich concert via Piltdown Man. There has also been a variety of musical and theatre entertainment of equally varying qualities. But you're all here for the wargaming.

First up was a run out for James' new Spanish Army for the Peninsular war. Given that they were newly painted and that they were Spanish troops in the Peninsular war, they inevitably ran away. But quite a bit of luck with the dominoes meant that they hung in there for longer than anticipated and a good time was had by all. The picture above shows a Spanish cavalry unit which having unexpectedly routed their opposition in melee were then effectively destroyed by what seemed to your bloggist to be a very harsh pursuit check rule. 

Next up was the battle of Harran using To the Strongest!, the outcome of which was a defeat for the forces of Outremer, just like the original. The photo is of Bohemund, who despite being the main hope on his side never really got going. A combination of the Armenians to his left suddenly going into an uncontrolled advance - which unsurprisingly ended in disaster - and me constantly choosing the wrong order in which to activate commands, took away all his room for manoeuvre. Not that Baldwin or Tancred did any better mind you. It was a very bad day for the forces of Edessa and Antioch.

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.

Royal Armouries Lectures

 During the last few months I have found that many of the things I enjoyed doing pre-plague aren't anything like as good when one tries to do them online. I appreciate that comment will be misinterpreted in some quarters, so let me be clear that I am talking about opera, theatre, live music etc. However, one thing that seems to work rather well is the giving of talks, and I have watched quite a few now, on subjects such as how the myth of Prometheus has influenced culture, The Beatles and the Sixties Art Scene, and Crusader Arms and Armour from Africa and Asia; and very good they have all been.

The last item on that list was the first of the winter series of lectures from the Royal Armouries, a series which under other circumstances I would have attended many of in person. That's obviously an option for me because I live in Leeds, but their new practice of streaming them means not only that I don't have to get off my arse any more, but that others who are not based in West Yorkshire can see them as easily as me, either live or after the event. A recording of the recent one about 'genuine' Crusader armour and weapons sold to the unwary by Victorian dealers (and they may be fakes, but it's a very interesting story) can already be found here on their YouTube channel. The next two are on the subjects of 'Plug Bayonets' and ' The Development of Gunpowder Weapons in Medieval England', either or both of which may be of interest to either or both of my readers. The lectures are given by staff at the Royal Armouries, so they know their stuff, and are free, which now I think about it was what attracted me in the first place.

Details and a link via which to book can be found on the Royal Armouries website. Presumably future recorded lectures will appear on the YouTube channel, which anyway contains all sorts of fascinating stuff.

Vale crucesignati

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

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

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

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

Another TtS! debacle

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

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

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

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

Smiteless in Gaza

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

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

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

Turpe

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

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

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

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

Potential whooshing noise

"Personally, I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms." - Dale Carnegie

These days what drives buzz around new wargames rules is the size of the marketing budget involved, usually promoting not just rules, but often an extensive range of miniatures as well. The denizens of the lower Wharfe valley are not immune to the effect of that. (I'm sure that we will at some point have a game of of Cruel Seas for example) but there is often a lag of a couple years before we get round to playing sets that have become fashionable (Black Powder being a case in point). One or two of these (To the Strongest! most notably) find a sufficient resonance to stick around as rules of choice for a particular period.

Nonetheless, we usually find ourselves returning to either original Piquet or its derivative, Field of Battle. Neither of those have ever had any sort of commercial push behind them or ever achieved a wide user base, although having said that, we are not the only ones still playing about with the toolbox: check out this for example (and incidentally he is using a variant of which I was previously aware, but have never tried). The reason for mentioning all this is that having had a few games with James' new Peninsular War collection using other rules we have now tried FoB a couple of times. Our decision? We weren't keen. And we weren't keen for a really quite old school reason: we didn't like the ground scale. 

In FoB there is the possibility of multiple moves - a bit like Black Powder (except that it actually predates the latter). We came to the conclusion that we were happy with this for the Crusades for example, because those battles were in fairly small areas and because one actually wants horse archers to sweep around the flanks of the Christians and the Saracens to be in peril from swiftly charging knights. In the Napoleonic era however the battlefields are much larger and one certainly doesn't want cavalry to be able to start on one flank and charge across to the other before the defenders have any chance to react. Our initial thought was to try classic Piquet, probably the version we use for the Seven Years War as amended for the peculiarities of Napoleonic warfare. However, there are a number of elements in FoB that we do like, so, after due consideration, Peter and I have tasked James with melding together the two versions of Piquet into a seamless, playable and period specific form and, oh, doing it by next week.

FoB2

So, my venture back into the life of work has ended, not with a bang but with a whimper, and I am able once again to turn my attention to wine, women and wargaming; obviously, due to my teetotality, without the wine. So it was that I found myself in the legendary wargames room having another bash at Peninsular Napoleonics. When I was last there we were playing Lasalle, and it was looking promising. However, in my absence it has been found wanting and put back on the shelf. Scanning along those same shelves James' eye lit upon Field of Battle 2, and it was decided to give those a go.

I have mentioned before that the Piquet family has two main strands: the original, of which we use a heavily amended version for the Seven Years War, and a newer, simpler adaptation called Field of Battle (known as FoB), of which we use a heavily amended version for Italian Wars, Crusades etc. The reasons behind the development of the newer version are essentially reduced complexity leading to quicker games plus the elimination of the large initiative swings (for which read long periods of one side standing around doing nothing) to which the original game can be prone (*).

At some point Brent Oman, Piquet head honcho, developed and released FoB2, but I had never previously played them. James' email summons to the game made it plain that for the first run through we would play them as written, without introducing any house rules. Anyone for whom this isn't the first of my blog posts that they have read will naturally know what to expect. Peter and I arrived to find that he had in fact changed the musketry ranges. His reasoning for that was that in his view they are really written for a mid-19th century, American Civil War type game and need tweaking for the dynamics of Napoleonic warfare, the validity of which view also became apparent as various cavalry charges swept across the table before infantry had even had time to consider forming square.

I didn't find anything that particularly irritated me. They are faster moving - both in terms of distances covered and casualties incurred - than any of the Piquet versions we have been playing, but I'm sure one can adjust tactics when one gets the hang of it. Given that further house rules are inevitable (**) it almost seems redundant to comment in great detail, so just a couple of first thoughts:

• There is a Peter Pig style pre-battle 'Fate' routine which affects setup etc. When we last tried the equivalent for 'Square Bashing' we rolled lots of dice and in the end there was not much impact on the game. Here we rolled somewhat fewer dice and there was not much impact on the game. Still, we rather liked it and will try it again.
• The unit classifications and how they manifest as defence and attack dice are quite elegantly simple to use, if not to generate.
• In what I think is a new rule, one can cause the withdrawal of units through ranged fire as well as melee. I think I approve, although the exact mechanics of their interaction with supporting units perhaps needs a bit of clarification.
• The fighting of melees to a resolution (similar to a number of other sets of rules) is welcome, but the benefits of attackers outnumbering defenders seem a bit lightweight.
• There isn't enough morale. I have an overall observation about Piquet which is that it is very difficult to judge what is the correct amount of morale chips that each side should have. However, whatever that level is, it's a lot higher than these rules say.

*    Although read here for an example of it happening in FoB as well.
** While compiling this post I have received from James a list of suggested house rules. As he says that he is going to make some new sticks for measuring ranges it would seem that the rules are going to be around for a while; having said that he made some beaten zone templates for Lasalle and they didn't last long.

Thy Will Be Done

I'm going to resurrect the monthly post about boardgames played, partly because I have for the first time in a while played enough to make it worth doing, partly because I haven't played so many that I can't be bothered to write something about all of them, and partly because I played a new one that wargamers might like.


7 Wonders: Armada: I've always liked 7 Wonders without ever being any good at it. One of its strengths for me is that it is very scalable; you can play with up to seven people and it's just as good and doesn't take any longer. The various previous expansions never did much for me, but I rather liked this one wherein one sails little boats up various tracks in addition to all the usual stuff. There is more interaction than with players other than one's immediate neighbours, but it still doesn't seem to slow it down.

Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done: And this is the one. It's not a wargame, but its theme of wandering round Europe biffing infidels of various types and building castles, cathedrals etc, while taking every opportunity to dick over one's opponents, may well appeal to readers. It has a very clever structure combining mancala and rondel mechanisms with individual player tweaks supposedly based on the historical crusading orders. On top of all that we played our first game, including rules explanation, in an hour. As you can tell, I liked it.

Cryptid: This was explained as being a thematic version of Zendo; it's rather more like Cluedo with bears and abandoned cabins replacing the Reverend Green and the lead piping. A tad ho hum.

High Society: Excellent little filler which involves bidding to win various cards except when they're bad, in which case one bids not to win them.

Illusion: More of an activity than a game this one. It involves trying to rank patterns in the correct order of how much of a particular colour is in them. Despite my colour blindness I was rather good at it; the colours used are quite distinct. The problem with it as a game is that one's success or otherwise depends pretty much entirely on the player to one's left. If they are not very good at it then you will win. Still, it was an interesting way to spend ten minutes or so.

NEOM: One of many games where one builds cities based on tile selection - via drafting in this case - with various constraints and scoring criteria. It did nothing to stand out from the others, although I did build a pretty impressive park.

Terraforming Mars: This is currently number four in the Boardgamegeek rankings of best games of all time. I confess that I don't see it myself. I enjoyed this play more than the last time I played it about eighteen months ago, but it still goes on far, far too long. I've only played one other game in the geek top ten - Great Western Trail at number nine - and I didn't like that either. It's everyone else that's wrong, not me.

Gaming in 2018

I started this blog as someone who didn't wargame, but would like to. As 2018 draws to an end I find myself in much the same position, real life events having conspired to prevent any gaming for the last six weeks or so. Working on the assumption that things will perk up a bit in the New Year I have taken the opportunity to remind myself of what happened this year. Despite the weather (unusually bad at the beginning and astonishingly hot in the middle) I played or umpired twenty one games, many of which ran over two or even three evenings. Details - and these may not be entirely accurate, but they're the best I could come up with - are:

Punic Wars                                               2
Crusades                                                  1
15th Century Central/Eastern Europe      2
Italian Wars                                               1
Seven Years War                                      8
Napoleonic                                                7


To the Strongest!                                      5
Black Powder                                           4
Piquet                                                     10
C&C Napoleonics                                    2


The split by period is interesting and anyone who reads James' blog will notice the correlation with what he has been painting and building. Notably there was no Romans vs Celts, Wars of the Roses or 20th Century. I'm not complaining - if the god of wargaming decided to limit me to one period I would always choose Horse & Musket - but that's a lot of unused toys. I have had a game set up in the annexe for a while now, just crying out for a solo run through to alleviate the lack of games elsewhere; which needless to say I haven't done, although I have tinkered with the layout. Here's what it currently looks like:

It also demonstrates that much of my painting this year has been producing extra WWI figures and terrain to provide the forces for a game of Square Bashing; still no tanks though. And for anyone remembering my promise to spend some of my recent windfall on wargaming, I haven't yet done so.

I wandered away from boardgaming during the year, and then towards the end edged back towards it a bit. Boardgamegeek tells me that I played 65 different games a total of 89 times, which feels about right. The one game from that lot which I would recommend to the blog's target audience of wargamers is Medieval, a game whose tagline of 'Wage war, unleash the plague, excommunicate the unworthy, and drive back the Mongol hordes' is right up our street I think. My own experience of Quartermaster General: The Cold War with six players wasn't very good, but others whose judgement I trust confirm my impression that with three players it would be excellent.

Varna

A sadly postponed visit to an exhibition about Noggin the Nog (would I lie to you?) left some unexpected free time which was utilised by having a first pass at setting up Varna. My information about the battle came mostly from the Freezywater publication on Janos Hunyadi, written by Bob Black and available from the Lance & Longbow Society, and from the Warhammer Historical book Vlad the Impaler by John Bianchi, which I suspect is out of print. A lot of online references to the battle seem to be of the lunatic, right-wing, alternate history type, but I thought this blog post from Dalauppror was very useful.

Janos Hunyadi puts himself about

The battle has some resemblances to a couple we have played in the legendary wargames room over the years. Firstly, it occurred during a crusade and, just like their predecessors three centuries earlier, the crusader commanders seem to have been totally inept at manoeuvring their armies.  On November 10th, 1444 they found themselves with their backs to the Black Sea, Lake Varda on their left flank and the impassable Franken Hills blocking the way to their right. The only way home was straight ahead, which was why the Ottomans had placed their army there and built a fortified camp. Secondly, at one point Sultan Murad II was apparently on the verge of doing a Frederick and making a run for it leaving his army behind; unlike the Prussian flautist he stayed put and, perhaps as a result, never became 'the Great'.

The view from the Franken Hills

Having quoted my sources - such as they are - I had better say that I have discounted much of what they write. I take the view that the forces were fairly evenly balanced, with the crusaders claim of being outnumbered three, or even five, to one being by way of an excuse for losing. I also don't believe the assertion in Bianchi's book that Vlad Dracul (the Impaler's father) commanded the Wallachians.

Murad's camp

The letters behind each unit are there to distinguish commands, while the numbers represent the base saving throw of the unit. White beads indicate lances, green beads are heroes, and in due course red beads will be hits. I may, or as so often may not, have a play through solo to see what happens, but there will certainly be a couple of changes. At the moment Zizka is standing in for Hunyadi, but Black's book has a Hunyadi standard and I have a mountain of unpainted plastic so I shall knock out a command stand for him. I also need a couple more stands of horse archers. Apart from that - and as long as one can cope with WotR hobilars as Wallachian light horse - we're good to go.

Some you win...

It's looking as if there might not be any wargaming for the rest of the month. "What on earth," I hear you ask "will you write about?", which is a question both pertinent and fair; this blog does not willingly stray from its narrow remit of toy soldier related doings. But I am a bloggist, and a bloggist blogs, so I will just have to scratch around to see what else I can find to entertain you with.

Let's start, perhaps controversially, with some wargaming. We had a Crusades game last week, which I have to say probably won't live long in the memory. It did produce an entertaining enough evening's play, despite turning out to be somewhat one-sided. As I've said before the Piquet family of games are chaotic (in the mathematical sense) and ensure widely differing games from the same starting point because of the way the cards and the initiative interact. On this occasion the Franks didn't move very quickly but the Saracens did, and that made all the difference; the Frankish knights didn't manage to charge home, but the horse archers easily got into shooting range. The narrative - as so often - made perfect sense: a small group of crusaders sets off in great heart across the desert, but the going proves slower than they expected, they are overwhelmed by swarms of tribal cavalry who can never quite be brought to hand to hand combat, they are forced to stop moving and make a stand as they are surrounded, and - their morale gone - they accept their inevitable fate.

Unusually, but consistent with the above, the game ended in a clear victory despite the fact that all units were still on the table, none from either side having been destroyed or routed off.

Evasion by Horse Archers

I haven't posted anything on this controversial subject for a couple of weeks, and nor frankly can I remember what my views were when I last did, beyond a general dissatisfaction with life in general. I have however just come across this post from four years ago, so you can see it's by no means a new topic. I remember that game all too well (James' describes the scenario here); it was a pretty spectacular defeat for the Saracens with all of their commanders dying and all of their commands failing major morale. In Piquet terms, that's just about as bad as it gets.

In other news, a reader has asked if I now have heating and hot water. No I don't, although I'll give the plumbers full marks for trying. The lack of heating wouldn't normally be so bad given the time of year, but unfortunately it has not just been brass monkeys here today, it has actually been snowing. So much for spring.

In which I am not ill

Normally, when your bloggist disappears for a while he has been ill. But not this time, I am at peak fitness (a). Harold Macmillan was once asked by a journalist what he feared most as Prime Minister. "Events, dear boy, events." was his reply. And so it has proved here; there have been events. I'm not sure what the long term fall out, if any, will be, but in the meantime let us attempt to return to normality. Actually, let's break the mould - to misuse another political cliché - and talk wargaming.

Last night saw the second half of a  most enjoyable crusades game in the legendary wargames room. The Saracens (i.e. not me) won by dint of the last three turns ending very quickly on doubles. However the fact that they were ever in danger of losing was because they had drawn morale badly at the beginning whereas I had drawn rather well. Having said that, one reason that the crusaders didn't do better was the abysmal performance of their cavalry (or to be more precise their Christian cavalry - their Moslem allies did rather well) who didn't move very fast and when they did get there fought like wusses. The Hospitallers - cream of the army - were knocked back by a few skirmish bowmen and the knights guarding the True Cross got seen off by someone equally useless. Which all goes to illustrate some of the reasons why, in my opinion, the Piquet family of rules provide such good games. The many variables interact one with another in ways that are unpredictable. It reminds me in many ways of a well designed boardgame, with multiple paths to score victory points, all of them interconnecting, but doing so in ways that alter each time you play it. The new catapults were good too.

And some exciting news from the annexe: I have had some shelves put up.

(a) It must be understood that this represents peak fitness for your bloggist; everything is relative.

Mi Revenis

I have returned. My absence has been due to a surfeit of stuff occurring in real life. I won't go into details, but at one point the big bouncy woman was rendered speechless for the first time since I've known her. There were also a couple of birthdays: the younger Miss Epictetus has turned twenty one and I have celebrated becoming twenty one and some months, 480 months to be precise.

Anyway, I have managed to do some other stuff including the first evening of a Crusades game at James' which I'm rather enjoying. My plan once again involved my forces moving swiftly across the table and once again they didn't. Still, the newly painted catapults are fun to play with. In other wargaming news I have done a fair bit of painting (fair bit for me that is) during the month:

German WWI 7.7cm + 5 crew	1
German WWI infantry	18
British WWI 18pdr + 5 crew	3
British WWI trench raiders	10
15th century longbowmen	12

What I haven't done is very much boardgaming so I think I'll wrap the review of games played in March into April's report; I know you'll be bitterly disappointed.