Lestrades_Game

  I have played a couple of games of this now and watched one more. Not an expert but enough to share my opinion.   It’s mixed   I have enjoyed my games and will enjoy several more but I would caution the general recommendation for this rule set that gets chucked out regularly on reddit when anyone asks for a medieval or ancients ruleset. Hannibal surveys the field from behind  his gallic infantry   I will stick the boot in first then end on the positives.   As a simulationist by preference this game is nonsense. A generalist ruleset is going to struggle to represent the nuances of warfare in a specific era. I should not be surprised that the way elephants are used is not that similar to their historical deployment, or that running three lines of republic romans is a bad idea however I’m not sure that these rules represent any ancient or medieval warfare in a particularly meaningful way.   Let’s start with the victory conditions. Yo...

  I have spent much of the past month painting 15mm Carthaginians and their allies. The army is initially for playing Le Art De La Guerre, the latest hydra head from the DBM rules heritage. Further down the line I intend to use them for historical scenario pickup games, possibly using the Age of Hannibal or Hail Caesar rule sets.     My forces are made of a mixture of miniatures. The bulk are from the Plastic Soldier Company (PSC) Mortem Et Gloriam ‘Pacto’ range. It would appear that PSC picked up older moulds from both Xyston and a range called Corvus Belli. They then retooled them to take a form of plastic they refer to as ‘Ultra Cast’ and spin out these box sets mostly to support their published rule set.   I went for them as they had fairly good reviews and were cheaper than the alternatives. Most companies in this area charge around £4.50-5 per pack, with a pack being 8 infantry or 3-4 cavalry. A couple of companies charge £15-16 for 24-30 infantry figur...

The IJN had been deployed to the Bay of Tonkin in support of Imperial China's war against France in 1903. Set backs on land required further troop reinforcements and an escort under way in early May. The IJN fleet consisted of;   Ø   Battleship Mikasa Ø   Battleship Fuji Ø   Battleship Shikishima Ø   Cruiser Chitose Ø   Cruiser Nisshan Ø   Cruiser Idzumi Ø   Cruiser Matsushima Ø   Battleship Chen Yuan Ø   Cruiser Idzumo Ø   Cruiser Choyoda Ø   Cruiser Naniwa Ø   Cruiser Itsukushuma Ø   Cruiser Katsuragi Ø   3x destroyers   Divided into five squadrons with three transport ships in a sixth squadron.   The French Marine Nationale under Auguste Boué de Lapeyère found them at dawn. Their six squadrons consisted of; Ø   Battleship Iena Ø   Battleship Messena Ø   Battleship Henri IV Ø   Battleship Jaureguiberry Ø   Battleship Carnot Ø   2x cruiser Friant Ø   Armoured Cruiser ...

 A first for this blog, some miniatures review! Over the past two months I have gotten into miniatures. Prior to this I had stuck to board wargames largely for cost and transport reasons (I have moved house often and did not want to haul minis around). However I do have a strong game designer urge within me. I am always writing RPG material, most of which is never used. So moving over to minis will allow me some space to exercise my creative side in researching and writing scenarios. I want to do skirmishes in the French Indian War of the 1750s. This conflict only had one really sizable pitched battle with most of the action being skirmishes of a few tens to a few thousand men in the forests and river valleys of Canada and the then Colonies. I will be using the Sharp Practice rules at least initially.  I read around and then spent ~£70 on minis from Matchlock. Matchlock are 15mm metal minis sold by Cavalier books, who also sell the minifigs range. The Matchlocks had good revie...

 I ran a game at my local wargame club this eve for the first time. I've posted some comments on the A and A Game Engineering ruleset 'Tsushima' before. It's a good game, a notch above beer and pretzel in terms of complexity and rather traditional in that it uses tables and modifiers etc.  I don't have quite the order of battle for the Yalu River battle of the Sino-Japanese war but my fleet is fairly close. I am missing one of the two better Chinese Battleships and about 3 of the Japanese cruisers. The fleets themselves are the right size as I have a few extra gun boats and light cruisers as substitutes.  Still the setup is quite easy. The Chinese deploy between two islands at the mouth of the Yalu, the Japanese approach from the south west. Taken from Wikipedia I had four players and gave them 2-3 squadrons each. I skipped the scouting phase as I wanted the battle to play out in around 3 hours and the table size was a bit smaller than the recommended 6/4. This was ...

Qwixx is a Dutch abstract dice game about filling out a scratch pad to get a score, Chain of Command is a WW2 platoon level miniature rule set. What do they have in common? Read on…   I played Qwixx as an after dinner game at some friends house this past week. It’s a quick dice gambling, even push your luck game. There is no theme, you are just trying to fill out four coloured rows of numbers by rolling those numbers sequentially. On your turn you roll 6 dice, 2 white, 4 of different colours matching your four rows; red, green, yellow, and blue. Once you have rolled you can add the two white dice for a number to fill any row in the pad, and then add one white die to one colour die to fill a number out of that colour. With me so far? Good. You have to fill out your numbers in sequence for each row. Two rows count down from 12 to 2 and two count up from 2 to 12. So, early in the game I want to roll 12s and 2s. If I roll a 4 I could fill it out in a row that starts at 2 but th...

Gene Wolfe is my favourite author, and probably the most underrated author of the 20th century. Of his works I have read; The Book of the New Sun + Urth of the New Sun  The Wizard Knight  The Fifth Head of Cerberus Latro Soldier of the Mist / Arete And some of his short stories. Most of his work is Science Fiction and Fantasy, although much darker and more thoughtful than is typical of genre fantasy. Peace is something else. This is not SF or clearly genre literature. This is a slight give away, but it is really a horror novel. There will be a few minor spoilers in my comments below. If you want a book that's way cleverer than you are go out and read it. Ostensibly this is a memoire of an older, possibly dying man about growing up in the mid west of the USA through the first half of the last century. Ignoring the Gene Wolfian clever mind games this is a fantastic novel with deep themes even at the superficial level. It deals with the evolution of America overtime from the defr...

 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...

  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 ...