Lestrades_Game

 A quick one today I traded off Across the Narva by Revolution Games (should post something on this) for an oldish (2000) copy of an S&T magazine. The mag came with two battles reprinted from the 1978 Quad game on the Crimean War. The full Quad also contained Inkerman and Balaklava, this magazine version just has Tchernaya River and Alma. Initial setup Early SPI games (and actually GDW and AH come to think of it) of the 70s tend to have lots of rules you already know. I go, U go, movement, fire, melee, rally, and most of the rules are standard. Command and control rules and friction of war arrived a lot later. To couter this I have added a simple house rule. For each division (units are brigates and regiments, about 2-8 per division) roll. On a 1 in 6 movement is halved unless the unit can charge, in which case it must charge the nearest enemy.  A simple easy to apply rule for generating those light brigade charges. You could also easily convert this to a chit pull game by division

  I had intended to cover my reading on this blog as well as games, but not really gotten around to it despite reading a fair amount. So I am going to have a quick run through a few items in this post;   The Dispossessed: Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) – This is great, one of the best SF novels I have read and surprisingly so. I had read some of her young adult fantasy a few years back, The Wizard of Earthsea and its followers. The Dispossessed is very different beast, an allegorical story exploring leaving a hippy collectivist commune to engage with the capitalist – communist split world. Being a Sci-Fi novel the commune is colony scraping by on a desolate moon and the imperial world the eden below. A physicist, Shevek, betrays his own anarchist people to return to the mother planet on a quest to heal what divides them. Of course reconciliation is harder than anticipated due to the differing world views and entrenched prejudice. Le Guins' skill is in her character building and the s