Zinnfiguren

 After a month of drought there has been a week of feast. I have had my third and fourth wargames in seven days, and in addition of course I went to Partizan. I played two shortish games with Mark's German 30mm flats.

I had never seen thm in action before and found them aesthetically rather pleasing. You don't get the best view of those directly in front of you, but the ones on either flank look anything but flat. And naturally one doesn't stand rigidly in the same place all the time anyway.

Rules were the 7YW version of DBN. I'd only played DBN once, a couple of years ago, so don't remember enough about it to tell you what the differences are. I do remember enjoying it and certainly did so once again. It's quick and entertaining, and what else does one need. It was one win each for both Austrians and Prussians, with the defenders coming out on top both times.

Can Epictetus keep up this punishing hobby pace? Watch this space (pun intended).

Silk

 “Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.” -  Shakespeare

Jonathan over at Palouse Wargaming Journal has been celebrating twelve years of blogging, which made me realise that I had also recently passed that mark. As opposed to that blog, which has gone from strength to strength and features more game reports than any other blog on my reading list, this blog has dwindled and diminished over time, both in quantity and quality. The only positive is that it still costs the same to produce, i.e. nothing. 

Evidence of all this is that I do have a couple of games to report on and can think of nothing more to say than that I enjoyed them both. First up was the Combat at Reichenberg, and the photos on James's blog if you follow that link are much better than the one above. As I say it was a fun way to spend a couple of evenings and resulted in a marginal victory for the Prussians. For those who like to keep track of our rule changes, we started playing Field of Battle 2 - sort of - and ended playing Field of Battle 3 -sort of - with our morale rules not having much to do with either. I know our approach bemuses people, but it is in part because James's table is so much bigger than that assumed in most rules; if we didn't change things up then games would last for months rather than weeks.

One set of rules which I never tinker with is Command & Colours. The above are the starting positions for Dennewitz, which I played recently with Chris, my plumber. It's such a good system for newcomers to pick up, and yet has plenty of decision points to keep more seasoned gamers interested, plus it doesn't last too long. It's not a simulation, but it is fun. To slightly misquote the designer of a different game (and one which I hope to report back on in my next post): "Throughout development, historical accuracy has been just one value among several". A fine approach.

PotCXXVpouri

 After a short gap, wargaming returned to the legendary blah blah with a Seven Years War game. Unusually we didn't use James and Peter's period specific rules (whose name I forget but it has something to do with lemons) in favour of playing Field of Battle virtually as published - at least to start with. We hadn't played them for a rather long time, but gradually remembered what it was we didn't like and so changed it as we went along. James has written up the first evening here, at the end of which we gave the Russians a shed load more morale so we'd get another evening out of it. That ploy worked a treat and the second evening ebbed and flowed quite a bit more than the first, but the better quality of the Prussian commanders proved too much for the Russians in the end.

And speaking of wargaming, it may return to the annexe next week for the first time in months. Having just cracked the problem of how to delineate dead ground in front of bastions, the logical thing would have been to play a siege game. However, instead I have cleared all that and set-up some Napoleonic Command and Colours. The motive for this was a request from my plumber who, having seen games in progress on previous visits, asked on this occasion (new U-bend on the bathroom washbasin) if he could have a game himself sometime. It is, of course, always worth keeping in with a good plumber (*).

In other news, the pigeon (see here for to which pigeon I refer) has gone. We finally did what should have been done a long time ago; i.e. captured her and took her off to International Pigeon Rescue. I didn't participate in that last element myself, but my henchwoman who did reported back that the organisation was impressively resourced, with staff who were well meaning, knowledgeable and every bit as bonkers as you would expect.

* Or indeed any other tradesman.

Lard Workshop the Third

 And so to The Old Chemistry Theatre at Nottingham Trent University for the third August in a row. Had readers given it any thought I suspect that they might have imagined a lecture theatre, or possibly a laboratory of some sort. However it looks like this:

It reminds me of an orangery. You can see why it got so hot in the sweltering summer of 2022. It was bearable this year, although all those hard surfaces still made it difficult to hear anything. The keen-eyed among you may notice that amongst the expected crowd of fat, old blokes there are a couple of lady gamers. There were three altogether, out of a total of fifty-two participants, and I am pleased to say that I got to share a game with one of them; literally the first time I have ever wargamed with a female in more that fifty years in the hobby; a red letter day.

I had two excellent games of Sharp Practice, which I'd never played before. It's obviously similar enough to many of the other Two Fat Lardies games, but I think I preferred it. I can understand why I have heard those more committed to the cult of Lard say that it's their favourite. Being card driven the flow of action is by design somewhat arbitrary, but the flag cards do allow players to seize back an element of control, although at the risk of potentially forgoing better opportunities further down the line. That mix of randomness and choice hits the spot for me.

First up was a French and Indian War set game in which I found myself playing Pontiac, who is pretty much bang in the middle of the photo above although you'll need to zoom in quite a bit to see him. Sadly I didn't take any photos of his later successes, when he got tired of standing off and skirmishing and led two successive charges, routing enemy units each time. It goes without saying that they were units of irregulars, even I'm not foolhardy enough to charge British regulars in line. The game ended in an honourable draw, which is of course a euphemism for saying that we all fannied about for so long that we ran out of time. Excellent fun though, and many thanks to Ken Welsh for putting it on.

The afternoon game was set in the Sudan; I put my name down for this one because while that period may be James's current project, (lack of) progress to date has been such that I thought I'd look elsewhere for a taste of the desert in case I don't last long enough to get to play with his toys. I must remember to take more photos of these things because the one above shows the position before the hordes of natives arrive and therefore lacks a certain something. The background is that two of the Governor's staff - a Mrs Slocum and a Miss Brahms - have been captured and are being held hostage in the building at the back. I was on the British team and we had force marched to recue them and had to get them back off the opposite edge of the table. First though we get to get into the building, and we decided to shoot first; after all that's our advantage, modern firearms. Sadly our technology was having a bad day; if the Gatling gun jammed once it jammed half a dozen times and the rifles seemed better at obscuring everything with smoke than with hitting the target. The Mahdists, amped up with suitable religious fervour, swept down upon us in sufficient numbers that some were bound to get through. In the end we launched an assault on the house and captured it, but achieved no more than ensuring that the ladies didn't die alone. It was a fairly abject defeat, but really enjoyable while it lasted. Thanks to Chris Smith for putting it on.

I have not got much else to say about Britcon - of which the Lard Workshop is a subset - except that it was good value and the lunch was rather nice. I eschewed the opportunity to go and gawp at the Perry twins, and my only purchase was 'The War of the Three Sanchos', and that was on a whim. I can tell you nothing about it yet as it remains unopened.

Piquet Redux

 We finished off the game of Soldiers of Napoleon about which I was complaining here. We down graded the over-powerful British skirmishers, which certainly made things better, but the game still limped to a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion. Even before the usual post-game discussion there was clearly an unspoken consensus that SoN had run its course, at least for the time being. The rules have many good features, but things don't half take a long time to get going, and just when they do the game seems to be over because one side runs out of morale. I am quite prepared to believe that we aren't playing it in the right way, but then perhaps that in itself doesn't reflect well on the rulebook as published.

In any event, this last week we stayed in the Peninsular, but returned to Piquet with the best elements of SoN (as defined by James) incorporated. The version of Piquet now in use for this period (and indeed that used for the Seven Years War) have migrated a fair distance from the original core rules and incorporate bits and pieces that we have liked in other games; the primary influences before the latest amendments being Piquet's sister ruleset Field of Battle and Black Powder. It all seemed to gel together better than it had any right to, especially since the rest of us often didn't know what the rules actually were until we tried to do something.  What it did do was produce a rather good game.

It was  a Charles Grant scenario based, I am told, on Fontenoy. Given my earlier observation about games of SoN starting slowly it was perhaps just as well that, as the attacker, I got the bulk of the early initiative and was able to move forwards. I was literally one dice roll away from having one of infantry divisions broken leading to inevitable defeat, but turned the card necessary to bolster their morale and never looked back. I eventually won because the British guns in the redoubts were unable to inflict any casualties on the French cavalry as they advanced past them and then the British cavalry commander died in slightly unfortunate circumstances as he tried to rally them.

We going to swap sides and give it another go next week. Piquet always produces a different game and both sides have the advantage of learning where not to deploy (the British infantry need to be nearer the village in the centre and the French should probably not bother trying to advance through the wood), but we shall be lucky if it is as entertaining.

Moys Will Be Moys

 One of my more esoteric medical conditions is that I am unable to be injected in my left arm. Normally this doesn't cause any problems, but yesterday I had both a Covid booster and a flu jab in my other arm, which is now very stiff and painful. Being right-handed this is making typing difficult, which in turn means that the text quality of today's post may be at a level not seen since I used to produce it on a computer missing an 's' key.

So, we finished the second run through of Moys and yet again the Austrians and victory remained strangers. I'm not saying that the events of the two games proved conclusively my hypothesis that they can never win it using Classic Piquet, except of course that is exactly what I'm saying. I've spent more time on that already than is justified by anyone else's level of interest, so I will simply add that the morale rules are also crap and leave it there.

Word of the night was 'snazzy'.

The Moys Are Back In Town

 James set it all up again and we had at it for a second time, ending the evening after turn four of the eight which the Austrians have to capture all three objectives. James took some photos of the action and may post them on his blog. I didn't, but did remember to take one of the menu style Quick Play Sheets, which I rather like. What he needs now is a blackboard on which he can write the special rules of the day.

I've always bigged up Piquet for its ability to generate radically different games from the same starting position. However, I think any set of of rules would have done the same here. The scenario starts with three Austrian grenadier units about to storm the redoubt. In the first game some extreme dice results at that point saw that command blown away. Not only was that not replicated, but the Prussians spent all night unable to hit a cow's arse with a banjo. By the evening's end they had destroyed a magnificent total of no Austrian units at all and had lost control of the first two objectives. I think next week may be different though. Not just because I am expecting a reversion to the mean in terms of combat dice rolls, but also because my hypothesis about initiative is just about to be proven. We - i.e. the Austrians - are never going to get to turn enough cards to get all our forces up the hill and drive the Prussians off. We shall have to rely on the Major Morale rules to win. I would explain what that means, but I don't really understand it. It's something along the lines of the Prussians having to multiply their number of destroyed or routing units by the value of π and then roll dice and pay morale chips until James declares the game over. A full explanation will follow should we get that far.

Here's a music video, but not the one you were expecting:

 

Well I Talk About Moys Now

We finished the battle of Moys (1st run through) which resulted in the Austrians not completely winning as such. There also wasn't much buy-in from the others to my hypothesis that they had been fighting with one hand tied behind their back due to the way that Piquet works. It was pointed out that they had been just as much undone by some brutal dice rolls in the first fifteen minutes or so, which had rather chopped the legs off their attack on the redoubt. And I have to say, that certainly happened. Reference was also made to the foolish commander of the Austrian right having advanced his light troops to harass the Prussians before the rest of the Austrian army had started to move, resulting in their prompt destruction. Reluctantly I have to admit that also happened. In any event we agreed that next week will see the battle of Moys (2nd run through). Will my theory be vindicated?

Cum On Feel The Moys

 It was very nice to congregate chez James once again, and celebrate our host's restoration to health by throwing some ones and drawing some low dominos from the bag. I trust that you have all managed to read the scenario details on James' blog. If not then I have stolen one of his photos, showing what the table looks like. I don't normally take any photographs whilst in the legendary wargames room, but now wish that I had taken one of the new covers for the quick play sheets. They are repurposed menu covers, and both look and work very well indeed.

Having been given the opportunity to play with James' wonderful toys in a scenario he had clearly spent time devising and setting up, it seems churlish to complain. However, it behoves me to point out - to myself if no one else - that James' rules really aren't suitable for this battle; or perhaps visa versa. The rules are a derivation of Classic Piquet, a set which I very much enjoy. For those unfamiliar with them, players get initiative, which they use to both turn cards which show what actions they can take and also to take those actions by command or unit as appropriate. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but that's the essence. The short term fluctuations in initiative for each side plus the arbitrary order in which the cards are turned, plus the normal use of dice for combat resolution, provide a friction which I know isn't to everyone's taste, but which I like. 

However, at Moys the Austrians had twice as many troops as the Prussians. This inevitably means that, given initiative being roughly equal across the whole game, the Austrians will spend twice as much on actions for commands/units; the corollary is that they must therefore turn fewer cards. This is important because when one side has turned all their cards the turn is over and the decks are reshuffled. In a scenario with such disparity of forces this will always be the smaller force. We therefore end up with the counterintuitive, and I would suggest undesirable, outcome of the defenders being far more flexible and agile than the attackers. I think this is such an intrinsic feature of Classic Piquet that no tweaks could compensate for it in this type of scenario. I stress the Classic bit because FoB, the other main game in the Piquet stable, works in a different way and would be perfectly suitable. 

Nobody likes a Soor loser

Before you ask  I shall be tagging this game as Seven Years War despite it taking place during the Austrian War of Succession, because it's my blog and I can do what I want. Whichever the war it is, so far, proving to be the basis of a good game. As you will see from that link James has sought to recreate the conditions on the day by stacking everything in the Prussians' favour and then challenging the two commanders to outdo their predecessors.

I was allotted the role of Frederick and decided that the best tactic was to throw everything at the hill, ignoring the town completely because the bad Austrian deck meant that they could never bring the troops on their right wing across in time to do anything about it. The beauty of Piquet, as I have often mentioned here, is that nothing is guaranteed. In the event the Austrians gained most of the initiative, turned their Command Indecision cards at fortunate points and obviously thought to themselves that if The Prussian king didn't want the town then they would have it instead.

So, cue slight change of plan with a couple of infantry units redirected to evict them. The first of the interlopers has been seen off without any problem; the Prussians are unit for unit much better. The other will no doubt follow shortly. On the hill the first wave of infantry was thrown back, but has rallied and the attack will resume. Similarly, despite losing the initial cavalry melee the Prussian are still there. Given a reversion to the mean and something like equal initiative I am confident that history will be recreated.

You will recall that I had first failed to obtain spray paint for the laser cut walls because the couriers couldn't find the house, and then the can I did get was an unsuitable shade. I have now procured the correct item by the primitive method of actually going to a shop in person and checking that what I was buying was what I actually wanted. It will never catch on. No painting has taken place because we are now being hit by Storm Jorge, which although causing too much wind to spray in is a bit of a wimp compared to his forerunners, including the storm with no name of last week. I can't account for the whereabouts of storms Eglantine, Faramir, Gordon Bennett, Horatius Cocles or Itchy. Presumably they blew themselves out in the North Atlantic somewhere.

San Winnoc

The battle of San Winnoc reached a conclusion last night. It really was a most enjoyable game, tightly fought over three weeks and with the result in the balance right until the end. Naturally therefore, we are going to change the skirmisher rules again. I will leave it to James to explain the changes and the reasons for them, but I am broadly in agreement. I do however have observations on two other areas of the rules.

Under the traditional way of allocating morale chips each side got a fairly random mix of morale and additional cards for the deck, each of which allowed extra actions such as firing, moving etc over the course of each turn. The revised method seeks to balance these so that one either has more morale but fewer bonus cards, or visa versa. Clearly getting the balance between the two things is problematic, but I think we are all reasonably happy with the first attempts at doing so. In this game the French had the extra cards and the British the extra morale. The French prevailed, but even so I think, given the choice (which one isn't) I'd pick the higher morale every time. The extra cards are only useful if one gets the initiative to use them, whereas the morale is always of value.

More worryingly it seems as if for the last ten years and more I have been playing a completely different rule for automatic melee (i.e. against disorder or shaken units, flanks, skirmishers, or artillery) to that being played by everyone else. I have no reason to claim that my version is better than what appears to be the actual rule, and it would seem that I have been limiting my options somewhat for all that time. I have re-read both the Piquet master rules and James and Peter's Seven Years War set (Lemons Are Not The Only Fruit) and there is absolutely nothing in them on which to base what I was thinking, so there you go; I feel foolish.

But I'll say it anyway

"This November there seems nothing to say" - Anne Sexton

Our playtesting of Napoleonic rules - specifically Peninsular Napoleonic rules - continues. They are providing entertaining games that are fun to play, which is probably the most important thing. Whether they reflect what actually happened is impossible to tell, but things are turning out noticeably different from the way they do with the Seven Years War rules, which I am going to take as a good sign. In the current game the British have one command which is late to arrive. As French commander I have thrown everything forward (to be more precise I was fortunate enough to draw the morale cards which enabled me to start further forwards) with the hope of winning before the reinforcements turn up. I would offer odds of about 2 to 1 against me at the moment. Coming back to the rules, certain elements have proved sufficiently popular that they may well be retrofitted to previous rules developed in the legendary wargames room. Cue lots more playtesting.

I have got round to opening my recent order from Newline Designs to find that I have bought twice as many chariot crews as are needed for the number of chariots that I purchased. There is only one solution: I shall buy even more chariots. 

Finally, I haven't been mentioning boardgames very much recently because I haven't been playing them very much. I have however managed a second game of Age of Steam, a mere eighteen months on from the first and can confirm my original opinion that it's a good 'un.

York Army Museum

The UK government has, for its own low motives, adopted the language of war when discussing the subject of relations with our closest neighbours and most significant trading partners (there was a thought-provoking opinion piece on the subject by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian yesterday); it's all enough to make one wish that one wasn't interested in military history. However, I am indeed interested in the subject and so have been to York Army Museum, in particular to see their current D-Day exhibition before it closes.

The photo above explains the remit of the museum and they cover it in great detail. The regiments involved have antecedents dating back to the troops raised by James II to counter the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion in 1685 and in the subsequent three centuries been involved in actions across the world. I like a museum to have plenty of historical artefacts and here there are more than I can probably list: a standard carried at Dettingen in 1743, the flag that was raised over Quebec in 1759 to signify its capture by the British, the helmet worn by General Sir James Scarlett during the Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava (complete with dents made by Russian sabres), many medals and decorations including several Victoria Crosses, and much else besides.

There's a captured Great War German Machine gun, which looks exactly as mine do in miniature:

There is also a British Vickers machine gun of the same period, which looks nothing like mine do in miniature and of which I have therefore not included a photo. Captured equipment comes from a variety of sources such as an Iraqi AK47 from the second Gulf War, back through German, Italian and Japanese arms of the second war, Russian items from the Crimea, French uniforms from the Peninsula and Waterloo and so on. There are also souvenirs of Britain's colonial wars including a Maori axe, making one feel that perhaps the conquest of New Zealand wasn't a fair fight, and sufficient Boer weaponry to make one feel that to make one feel that perhaps that wasn't a fair fight either. I found the following especially interesting:

I had a surrogate grandmother (after whom the younger Miss Epictetus is, in part, named) and I can remember her telling me about the street parties that were held in the East End to celebrate the relief of Ladysmith when she was a child; yes, I am that old.

Returning to my opening theme, the museum contains tributes to two members of predecessor units to the Royal Dragoon Guards who seem to me to personify why we should treat the posturings of Boorish Johnson with complete contempt. Firstly that old favourite of this blog Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart VC. It is worth remembering that this man who won Britain's highest medal for bravery and had various bits blown off serving the country in colonial wars and the First World War (and of course memorably pulled his own fingers off at one point) and spent two years as a prisoner of war in the Second World War, was in fact Belgian. Secondly, Captain Oates of Antarctic fame, a man whose quiet self-sacrifice of himself for others stands in stark contrast to our current Prime Minister's bombastic determination that everything and everyone should be subordinate to his own ego and ambition. 

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.

I'm working like a Trojan

Although clearly not at writing blog posts. Partly that is because the Seven Years War campaign is not currently happening  - not dead, just sleeping - and also I have been, in a small way, engaged in trying to prove that democracy in this country is likewise merely resting with its eyes closed rather than completely moribund.

Indeed, the only thing that has appeared on here recently is a comment from Iain that 'Arms and the Man' was also set in the Balkans. I haven't seen the play for many years; in fact the more I think about it the more it seems to me that I am confusing it with 'Man and Superman' and that I have probably never seen it at all. Shaw's plays do still get produced these days - I have seen both 'Pygmalion' and 'Saint Joan' in the last couple of years - so let's hope it comes round soon.

There are a couple of tenuous connections (and you know that's the way I like them) between the play and the specific opera concerned (which was 'Idomeneo'), with a second opera as well plus a tiny, tiny bit of wargaming relevance. The phrase 'arms and the man' comes from the opening line of the Aeniad, Virgil's poem in which a member of the Trojan royal family sails off after the fall of the city to follow his fate by indirectly both founding Rome and causing the Punic Wars to take place. In Mozart's opera it is another Trojan, Aeneas' cousin Ilia, daughter of King Priam, who, having been brought back as a captive to Crete by Idomeneo, provides the romantic sub plot and causes Elettra, daughter of Agamemnon,  no end of grief; although as I pointed out previously her family have already done more than enough to tip anyone over the edge.

Kurt Weill wrote an opera called 'Der Kuhhandel'. A literal translation of that is 'cattle trading', but a more idiomatic one might be 'horse trading', e.g. of the kind that politicians are prone to. Anyway, the plot about arms dealing actually does prominently feature a cow. Its original English title was 'A Kingdom for a Cow', which is, of course, a Shakespearean allusion. Opera North performed it some years ago, but changed the title to 'Arms and the Cow', a Shavian reference which rather nicely sums up what the work is all about. At the time I rather annoyed my ex-wife by going on at length about how accurate was its depiction of the world of weapon sales based on my own experiences of the same; but let's face it, if I hadn't been that which irritated her then it would have been something else.

Enough of that, let's have Dido's Lament:

625

Does anyone remember the old boardgame L'Attaque? Charlie - my old schoolmate, wargames opponent and colleague in the worst band ever - used to have a copy which I can remember us playing avidly in our early teens. Boardgamegeek describes it thus: "The game is played with 36 pieces each on a 9 x 10 square board. Each piece has a numeric value, which is hidden from the opponent and only revealed when an attacking piece moves onto a square occupied by an opponent's piece. In most cases, the piece with the highest value wins and the losing piece is removed from the board."

In other news, the Seven Years War campaign continued with Frederick, who seems to be doing all the fighting for the Prussians, catching the Russian contingent of the allies under Fermor as they tried to cross the border. Unsurprisingly the much bigger and better army carried the day, not helped by the initiative swing being completely the reverse of what had happened the previous week. The fact that chance evens out over the long run doesn't do much to ameliorate the impact on one's entertainment of its short term fluctuations.

I haven't yet received the umpire's report for the end of Turn 3, so I'm not entirely sure how things stand, but my guess would be fairly even. If I have a small army being beaten up in one place then I must have larger armies on the move somewhere else.

361

The Seven Years War campaign has moved forwards in fits and starts over the last week or so, but the core mechanics seem to be holding up, and in one or two peripheral areas where they didn't we have quickly reached consensus about what to do. Wargames campaigns have to serve two purposes: they have to be entertaining in their own right and, even more importantly, they have to generate table top battles. These two elements aren't always compatible because, as in real life, one basically doesn't want to fight a battle unless one has a pretty good chance of winning, and that doesn't always result in much of a game. Indeed during the last campaign we had to develop pretty strict rules about how quickly one was allowed to voluntarily withdraw from the table and at what cost. It was a pleasant surprise therefore that the first battle of the campaign turned out to involve two reasonably matched forces. The slightly smaller Prussian army was attacking the Austrians. This isn't as odd as it sounds because the Prussians are somewhat better in terms of what their deck (remember Piquet is a card driven game) allows them to do. So, how did it turn out?

Piquet has a system for rating units that is flexible within certain parameters. On the night the Prussian turned out to be fairly average for them, whereas the Austrians turned out to be pretty damned good, which was slightly worrying for the Prussians. These had six turns to drive the Austrians from the field or lose shedloads of National Will points. Initiative you will remember is determined by each side drawing a domino from a bag, with turns ending when either side finishes their deck of cards or when both sides draw the same domino, a one in twenty eight chance. On the first turn the Austrians got all the initiative, whizzed through their deck and the Prussians suffered minor damage from artillery fire and hardly moved. The second turn wasn't so one sided, but the Prussian attack still didn't really get into gear before the Austrians had once again run through their deck. The start of the third turn was better for the attackers who got a unit across each of the two bridges, but then they were both routed by musket fire and retreated to whence they had come. The only hope for them at this point was that they had drawn a 'ford' stratagem card (meant to be a secret, but rather given away by the way they had moved up to a supposedly impassable river). Would they turn their card again in time?

In a word, no. The third turn ended abruptly when identical dominoes were drawn. Then the first dominoes of the fourth turn were also the same. As were those for the fifth. And the sixth. Four draws in a row were identical (odds of 614,656 to 1) and the game was over after an hour or so, with a few casualties to the Prussians and absolutely none to the Austrians. If it had been a one off game we would have played on, but in the context of a campaign we couldn't. It certainly wasn't the fault of the way the campaign is designed, just one of those quirks of Piquet. As the Austrian commander I ended the night perhaps somewhat the better off as I am in control of the battlefield and the enemy has had to withdraw. However, I'm not sure such a good opportunity to cause damage to Frederick's forces will come round again very quickly and perhaps in the long run the sudden end to the evening will prove to have been to my detriment.

Pot84pouri

I had rather promised myself that I wouldn't cover this subject again, but I wanted to share something I read elsewhere, which seemed to pithily sum up where we currently stand: "The course of Britain’s politics for many years to come is going to be determined by a group of below-average politicians acting collectively in a blind panic at high speed.  That should produce good governance."

In happier news I have had a game with my recently purchased copy of "Quartermaster General: Cold War". I bought it because I felt it would be a handy standby for when the usual suspects were all available, but there was no game ready to play. 

"The lemonade tastes funny this week."

Unexpectedly this situation arose immediately, when we ran out of steam on the Great War before the new Seven Years War campaign was good to go. So the box was opened, cards were sleeved and we gave it a try. I think it went down well and it certainly served its purpose in bridging the gap. I have now played the Soviet Bloc in all three of my games of this and despite winning - by a solitary point - an definitely going to try one of the other factions next time. 

Map moves for the campaign have now started and after the first turn the Prussian public have been set all aflutter by rumours of an Austrian (or is it Russian) show of strength on the border; but are those rumours true...? In the finest traditions of wargaming in Lower Wharfedale the umpire's interpretation of things hasn't thus far been what I was expecting. Ironically, and without wishing to give too much away to my opponent, the relevant bit in the rules literally starts "to prevent any doubt". Perhaps James has missed his true calling and he should be drafting the timetable for leaving the EU.

I must also mention that I have once again been lucky enough to have seen the wonderful Wille and the Bandits (previously reviewed here), so let's end end with some music:

Amiens - the tanks advance

We played out the Amiens scenario and the tanks did indeed advance, but quite slowly. They found hills difficult - entirely consistent with the original battle - and as the defenders kept scoring high on the countdown roll the game finished one turn before they would undoubtedly have secured victory for the British.

Neither Peter nor James seem to find it intuitive that one could lose the battle but win the game. I must admit that I don't really understand what their problem is; apart from a lot of spurious precision in the totting up of victory points there isn't anything involved that we haven't done before many times with other sets of rules. Anyway, flooding permitting, we are now going back to the legendary wargames room and the Seven Years War for a campaign of James' devising - more details at James' blog; I am commanding the Austro-Russian force - so it may be time to sum up my feelings about Square Bashing so far.

Firstly, the mechanics are straightforward enough and we got a few good games out of it. There seems to be consensus about which bits we would change. In particular ranged fire seems to involve an awful lot of dice rolls for basically no effect. That would seem to imply two alternatives so, based on a natural reluctance not to have any shooting at all, I think we will beef it up a bit. Also up for some tinkering are the pre-game asset rolls, the higher command stuff and aircraft.

More pertinently there is the question as to what it is trying to represent. It is pretty explicit that the forces are a division a side, but - in my opinion at least - divisions didn't fight like that on the Western Front; certainly not in attack. Now believe me I am firmly in the 'game' camp (as opposed to the 'simulation 'camp), but even so one of the reasons for historical wargaming in the first place is to try to reflect the realities and constraints of the time. In addition to that, the more I read I feel more strongly than ever that the best level for gaming the last year or so of the Great War is brigade. You may recall that's what I attempted when messing about with my own 'Blue Guitar' rules at the end of 2017. So, there you go, pick the bones out of that.