The Raid, part 2

(Burn baby burn) Disco Inferno
(Burn baby burn) Burn that mother down
(Burn baby burn) Disco Inferno
(Burn baby burn) Burn that mother down 

My ex-wife honestly thought that 'Disco Inferno' by The Trammps was a better track than 'Shame' by Evelyn 'Champagne' King, in what must surely have been her worst error of judgement apart from marrying me. That, on reflection, has nothing much to do with today's subject which is the conclusion of the latest game in the legendary wargames room.

There was a consensus that the morale aspect wasn't working so we switched to the rules obtaining in classic Piquet. One clear purpose of those is the completion of games in a reasonable time frame and that was achieved; we finished things off in a couple of hours. I, as the Prussians, went on to the offensive, looked at one point as if I was going to reduce the Russian forces by sufficient to make the target out of their reach, but then lost a couple of crucial combats, ran out of morale and that was that. Although only three villages had been pillaged and burned by that point, there was nothing much left to defend the others.

I enjoyed the scenario. Inasmuch as I have any changes to propose they would mainly be around the artillery. Perhaps the Russians should have two small units rather than one large making them more expensive to move and use and less effective when they fire. As for the Prussian artillery, something needs to be done to give them a purpose. I like the variability of where the defending forces start and where the reinforcements arrive, and it will certainly make the thing replayable. On the other hand the set up that we ended up with from the turn of the cards and the roll of the dice was possibly among the least interesting of the possible combinations. And, as I put in my previous post, I was too much influenced by James' tale of woe about when he had played it before and should have been more proactive early on.

However, the big issue was the rules. The SYW version of Piquet developed by James and Peter is really for large set piece battles; indeed the driver behind the changes they made is precisely that the original game is for a dozen units a side fought over one evening. But with only five or six units and no real division into commands neither version work well. I've mentioned morale, but there are other considerations. Big swings in initiative (and at one point we went from 20-6 directly to 5-18) have a much magnified effect when one is only seeking to move or fire a couple of units and make the game more arbitrary than seems comfortable to me.  And then there are the opportunity fire rules. I can't decide whether the recentish change to a straight ahead fire zone had ameliorated or worsened the strong advantage that defenders get from opportunity fire, but at least in a large game the attackers can concentrate their strength at one point. In this low level sort of game - which, as I have said previously, I enjoy - one is using manouevre, deployements and fire zones intended for long lines of troops, but with isolated units swanning about on their own.

As a result of all that we had a bit of a cast about for suitable other rules that we owned and which might work better; in the end we came up with Maurice. I bought these as part of the abandoned War of the Spanish Succession project and rather liked the look of them at the time. In any event we thought we'd give them a go on the same scenario next week and see what we think.

Which just leaves room for these two, so that you can make your own minds up:

Everyone is naturally entitled to their own opinion, but if you don't think the second one is better then you're a cloth eared numptie.

Vapnartak !!!

At last, the moment that you have all been waiting for. What did Epictetus make of Vaprnartak having had a full week to digest and cogitate? Well, after due consideration I can say that it was OK.

The venue is of course wonderful. The previous venue, the Merchant Adventurers' Hall, is a lovely building, but a crap venue. Apart from anything else it was very dark inside. The Knavesmire by contrast, with its glass walls is spacious and airy with plenty of natural light. The attendees bring their usual accessories of beer bellies and BO, but possibly they have less impact there because one knows that the ambience would be far worse at a race meeting. The dress code at a flat race meeting is better, but there are ten times as many people and, by the end of the afternoon at least, they are all very, very drunk.

A typical wargamer

It was good to catch up with some friends. Mark Dudley of 'Ilkley Old Fashioned Wargaming' put on a game of Maurice using Prince August figures. The game with its plain terrain and large units was a nostalgia fest and the rules seemed to live up to being as good as my reading of them last year. I think that one reason it attracted the attention was that pretty much all the other display games were far too crowded. Those putting them on probably said to themselves 'I've painted it so I'm bloody well going to put it on the table'.  Understandable, but it means that the games never progress much, let alone finish and that anyone with any wargaming experience at all (which yes, cynics, does include me) knows that they're not representative of real life games anyway.