This and that

There has been some movement in the wargaming room since Easter, including some painting, which has been a welcome development. The day job's intensity has recently risen and as a way to declutter the mind before sleep my better half suggested I paint some of those figures taking up space in all the nooks and crannies of the house. Very thoughtful of her!

Mind you, this painting did not happen immediately. First I had to reorganise my storage by buying stackable plastic containers. One for figures primed in bags, one for figures primed and on temporary bases, one for figures half done, one for all the elephants I bought late one night from Potbelly Miniatures, and so on.

I then had a 'some of these boardgames on the shelves should really be played' fit and after a week of picking boxes up and then putting them down I finally settled on GMT's Fields of Fire. It was the third time I have set out to learn this highly-regarded solitaire system. Over the next week or so I spent about ten hours on it before packing it up and putting it away again. The third time was not the charm.

Alongside this I watched the entire series of the Japanese anime Attack on Titan. Also at the instigation of my wife. She is a fan of the series (as are two of my children) and convinced me to watch an English subtitled version through Crunchyroll. This took us about four weeks. Anime's not my usual sort of thing but it grabbed the interest and it's always a plus to have something to watch with the beloved. 

And so, by roundabout ways, and having exhausted all other options, I came at last to painting. 

It has been quite good. The figures are Xyston Theban hoplites that any other right-thinking ancients enthusiast would have finished ten years ago, but which I have not. Helping me through are podcasts on Napoleon. I'm not quite sure why Napoleon became the subject, but he has done the job. 

I'm on the home stretch with this batch of figures and was planning to get another couple of hours in last night, but got distracted by a link to an Armchair Dragoons review of the Phil Sabin introductory wargame Take That Hill. Originally found in the Simulating War book, this game has now been spruced up and printed by Fight Club International. It is free to download and print from the website. The target audience is people who have not played wargames before, especially those in the armed forces or defence industry. 

Also linked there is a Connections Online webinar on the game presented by Phil and three other affiliated persons, which I started watching and couldn't stop. If you are interested in Phil Sabin's designs and design philosophy at all it is worth a look.

The simplicity of Take That Hill is certainly in contrast to the fiddliness of Fields of Fire.

Anyway, time to go back to the painting desk. It's been six months since I last finished off some figures. If I keep going at this rate the unpainted lead will outlast me!

Upcoming game day

There has been a slow move back towards a figure gaming focus at the house of Prufrock. I placed a couple of orders with the excellent Potbelly Miniatures (elephants, if you must know!) and have been gingerly plucking elements out of the lead pile for some attention. With the Waitangi Day holiday coming up next weekend, I have decided to invite a few people over for a figure game.

I am thinking Lost Battles multi-player, but have not yet settled on the battle. Heraclea, Asculum, Sentinum, Sellasia, Zama, Magnesia and Pharsalus are all on the table (as it were). 

We shall give it some more thought!

Hope 2026 has started well for all wargamers. 

And the year is almost done.

 It has rushed by like a freight train, hasn't it? 

At the stage of life I'm in the successes that count tend to be those of our children rather than my own. On that score I could not be happier. The children are now all into their teenage years and I am very proud of them. The effort they have made in adapting to a new country, new language and new way of life has been immense. They lost a grandmother who was very dear to them this year, but despite that shock they have worked hard and done exceptionally well in their studies. 

Having turned 50 this year myself I am acutely aware that the years I will be around to guide them are limited. There is a strong sense of wanting to do what I can while I can.

It has been a good year for gaming-related matters. Painting has started again; blogging - while still sporadic - has picked up. Rather more money has been spent on games this year than had been for quite some time. 

The things I can remember buying are:

• Memoir '44 (and something like seven expansions)
• The Lamps are Going Out
• Boots on the Ground
• Fields of Fire
• 300: Earth and Water
• Strength and Honour and the new expansion

There has also been a reasonably steady diet of games played. Some solo battles or solo boardgames, and I would guess monthly meet-ups with SP for games of one sort or another. It has been good.

I had hoped to put together a multiplayer game this year, but I have not been organised enough to do that yet. I do miss the end of year games that I used to put on in Japan for assorted ex-pats: there is not quite as much of a captive audience here, and there is also a slight shying-away from larger gatherings on my part. When I was teaching I was starved of adult company and was therefore more motivated to ensure there was some of it around. Now, dealing daily with people while working in an intense service role, I am less inclined to want to be around others on my days off. The batteries need to be recharged!

And what for the year ahead? I think there will be more Memoir '44. I would also like to write some articles again for Slingshot. I realised recently that I have not written one since 2019! That is too long.

Purchases should drop off. Being a little more judicious about what I buy is important. I almost grabbed a couple of other games last week, but had to ask myself if I would ever play them. The answer was maybe, but probably not. The truth was that I was only thinking about them because they were available. We shall see if this being more sensible lasts!

To close, I'd like to wish everyone who has found their way to this blog this a wonderful Christmas and New Year, along with success and good fortune for 2025.

On rules lawyership, and matters pertaining thereto

Jon Freitag recently did one of his famous data dives and looked into people's least favourite things about wargaming.

Rules lawyers were top of the list. That's right, not expensive, errata-riddled rulebooks; not cheats; not figures that break at the ankles; not stubborn mould lines; not kickstarter addictions; it is rules lawyers that get under our wargaming skin. 

I have a bit of difficulty around this. Not because I have been traumatised by any lawyers, but because I have a sneaking suspicion I might be one. 

I am going, therefore, to do the most rules-lawyerish thing possible, and mount an inquiry.

1) What is a rules lawyer? 

What do people mean when they use the term rules lawyer? Wikipedia has one answer:

A rules lawyer is a participant in a rules-based environment who attempts to use the letter of the law without reference to the spirit, usually in order to gain an advantage within that environment.^[1] The term is commonly used in wargaming and tabletop role-playing game communities,^[2] often pejoratively, as the "rules lawyer" is seen as an impediment to moving the game forward.^[3]

Carlos Caro on Quora has another:

A rules lawyer is a person who insists on rules in an RPG, wargame, or other sport/game being followed to the letter. This applies to games besides Dungeons and Dragons. A rules lawyer is a person who insists on Rules As Written (RAW) and scorns Rules As Intended (RAI)

A Steven Dashiell starts short and sweet before elaborating exhaustively in an article through Analog Game Studies:

A rules lawyer is a player who argues and interprets the rules of the game during play

A thread on the Boardgamegeek site solicits plenty of responses on rules-lawyering, but one by a Dave Weiss is pithy:

It's the manipulation of the rules to favor the lawyer

Going by these definitions rules lawyers seem to share three main characteristics. The first is rules pedantry, the second is arguing over rules, and the third is the tendency to make this all work in the rules-lawyer's favour.

So we have pickiness in applying the rules, but with a tendancy for this pickiness to be somewhat selective, with the sense that there is strict application of the rules when it suits. We have a willingness to argue over the interpretation of rules, with these interpretations again tending to advantage oneself over others. Finally, we have one's table-side manner used in a kind of metagame to bring advantage. 

2) How is a rules lawyer different from an ordinary player?

Knowing the rules and applying them in the pursuit of tabletop victory is not a bad thing. In fact, it is the essence of wargaming. The rules that define the arena we operate in regulate play and allow us to formulate plans, make decisions, and take action towards specific goals. Rules are necessary, and knowing the rules is essential for the game to work.

It is also not a sin to want to win. Some people are happy win lose or draw. Others, for their own reasons, want to get a W. 

The things that make a rules lawyer's behaviour different from that of an ordinary player are, I would suggest, a) motivation and b) degree. Ordinary players can question rules interpretations, point out rules forgotten or misapplied, consult rules books and argue points. When it becomes rules-lawyerish is when the motivation is to gain an undue competitive advantage for oneself (interpretations become selective, or rules are applied less scrupulously if to apply them would benefit an opponent) or to throw someone off their game.

The other point of difference is degree. The rules lawyer will do these things as a matter of course. An ordinary player might become picky and/or argumentative about the rules in a tense situation when there is something riding on the result, if they are playing someone they have taken a dislike to, or if they feel they are being taken advantage of. The rules lawyer will exhibit these traits regularly: he is serially picky, argumentative and self-interested.

3) Am I a rules lawyer?

Now we come to the heart of the matter. 

The answer for me is, I think, both yes and no. I could come across as a rules lawyer in some situations. I like to get rules correct, and if there are times that rules may need some discussion, or a point argued, I will usually have the discussion or argue the point. But I also like to be fair, and I like to be consistent, so I would hope that it would not seem as if my motivation for being careful / picky / pedantic was to gain an unfair advantage. That said, in the heat of the action, my idea of fair and my opponent's may not quite line up, so I can imagine a person could question whether the motives behind my penchant for pedantry were always pure. 

I grew up in a large family with competitive instincts. In our house you never got to take a move back in chess. You touched a piece, you moved it. There were no 'gifted victories' to ease you in. I still carry some of that mentality with me and I have to fight against it a little.

So yes, I do tick the 'matter of degree' box as well, unfortunately.

As with all things, I try to pick my audience. I love a hard battle against an opponent similarly experienced and with something on the line, but do try to temper my approach to the environment. Still, there are one or two times I have been a little ashamed of my rules-pedantry. One occasion was at the end of a game of Machiavelli, when I pointed out an error in how victory points had been calculated. The recalculation then gave the win to me. The problem was that the initial reading of the score would have given the win to a high school lass in her first game with the group. 

Given my time again I would keep my trap shut. 

4) Is being a rules lawyer such a bad thing?

The results of the survey Jon analyses leaves little doubt - it is a bad thing. The worst thing! It is the thing that drives people away from particular opponents, from gaming groups, from particular games, and even from games at all. 

The best that I can hope for is to be a rules lawyer that is 'lawful neutral' but I suppose I am not the one who gets to judge! 

5) What can I do about being a rules lawyer?

Aside from ringing or emailing every person I've played with to apologise for any negative experiences they may have had, I think the thing to do is to be aware of the tendency and try to catch myself. 

Is it worth telling people before I play that I have a tendency to be a bit picky with rules and if you think I'm being a dick, tell me so? This may smooth things with an ordinary player, but if you are up against a fellow rules lawyer - especially one who is lawful evil - they will school you like a rookie!

6) What do people think?

Do you have rules lawyer tendencies? If so, when? 

Do you not? Not even a little bit?

Have you had particular experiences either as a rules lawyer or as the victim of one?

How would you suggest a rules lawyer go about making themselves more acceptable as a gaming opponent? 

Finally, a wildcard: why do people exhibit rules-lawyerish behaviour? Is it performative hyper-masculinity? Is it to establish uber-nerd cred? It it to mask deep-seated personal inadequacites? Is it just a bad habit?

I would value your thoughts!

An audible feast

There was a poll recently on the Society of Ancients forum about whether members listen to wargaming podcasts while they are painting. Curiously enough - and perhaps proving once and for all that we are indeed crusty, cantakerous old coots - most of us said no, or not much.

I suspect that if the question had been more general - do you listen to podcasts of one type or another while painting, say - the answers might have been different. 

For myself, I don't listen to wargaming podcasts at all. When it comes to wargaming, I prefer the written word. I also enjoy the occasional accompanying map, illustrative graphic, apposite picture, or short, sharp, how-to youtube video, but for me reading works best: it allows me to control at what pace and level I engage with the content. 

Listening to wargaming chat (unless one is taking part in it) strikes me as a bit boring and a bit distracting. I don't think I could listen to it properly while painting, nor paint properly while listening. 

I've tried history podcasts, and had the same issue. Either the inner critic engages or else I switch off and then come to finding I can't remember what they've been talking about.

What has worked for me in the past is lectures. I had a great series on noteable Greeks and Romans that I would listen to on repeat while painting. Sadly, the format I had them in is no longer current (and besides, it was in another country). 

But what does work for me at the moment is the marvellous Mary Beard. I signed up to Audible a few months ago, found it to be not really my medium, and exited. But I had a few credits to use before I left, so on a whim I grabbed a couple of Mary Beard audible books. 

I have of course seen some of her documentaries and read SPQR, but I hadn't thought about her being a good accompaniment to painting Greek light horse.

Well, I started listening to the audiobook version of her Emperor of Rome the other night while doing the dishes. You have to love Mary - she reads the book herself. It turns out I could listen to her all day, part of the evening, and even when I paint.

If you don't know her, I would recommend checking her out. She is an absolute treasure. Quirky but carefully considered narrative structures capture your interest, and she presents familiar material in new ways, finding parallels you hadn't thought of, or approaching things from angles which surprise. You shouldn't expect military focus, but you will get great, thoughtful storytelling. 

Anyway, consider her Prufrock-endorsed!

  

In the post

Since moving back to New Zealand in 2019 I've missed playing Commands & Colors: Ancients. I have the boardgames of course, but playing with figures is for me where the game is best as a spectacle.  

In Japan I had made a hexmat myself, but utilizing as it did quite a lot of spray paint, it would not be very economical to use that method in New Zealand. So after a delay of five almost gameless C&C:A years, I decided to order a mat from Tiny Wargames in the UK. It should arrive soonish, and I am looking forward to it very much. Commands & Colors will never be the best simulation you will find, but it is easy to remember, small enough to play on the kitchen table, and so quick to set up and take down you can give the table back to the family by breakfast. 

Also heading this way is the World War One boardgame The Lamps Are Going Out. I have been looking for an affordable copy of it for years. The one I am getting is the paper map first edition, but that suits me fine. I will be playing it solo, and the fact that it uses areas rather than hexes is something I find helps to avoid analysis paralysis. Time will tell how much play it gets (my record with boardgames is not great!), but I hope that it will be one I can set up and play in a weekend, and come back to repeatedly when the mood strikes.

Speaking of boardgames, I also recently got hold of a copy of Ben Hull's Fields of Fire. It is a heavy undertaking, but I am building up to it. As a dedicated solitaire game it is something that once learned will be rewarding. But I digress from my stated purpose - that one is already out of the post and on the shelf!

Shogun

I'm not a huge TV watcher, but a mate told me I had to watch the new Shogun series, so I did. I now join the vast majority and recommend it highly. Sanada Hiroyuki (as producer) has got it spot on.

It widens and narrows its scope superbly. Great job. 

 

Easter activities

Well, the Society of Ancients Battle Day has come and gone, and I didn't get to do an Ilipa refight after all. With SP busy with work and my not having cultivated enough other interested parties we will have to do it belatedly.

I did get to take the family over the Takaka Hill to Golden Bay for a couple of nights though, which was a great success. We stayed with my aunt and her partner, who was born in America and is an American Civil War buff. As I knew of his ACW interest I put a copy of Battlecry in the car, and on the second night asked if he wanted to try a game. He did. It turns out that he used to own a couple of America Heritage games in his younger days.

He took to the game quite quickly, and we got through two scenarios in about four hours.

I have a couple of copies of Battlecry (one given to me by Pat Hirtle; another that came with some other games I bought from a fellow online), so I have given him the one I took over.

Hopefully he enjoys it, and we might be able to get a game or two in when he's over this side of the hill on business. 

Hope Easter has been restful for you all!

On wargames campaigns (after Polemarch)

The excellent blogger Polemarch has recently put up a couple of thought-provoking posts on campaigns. The first talks about types of campaigns, concluding that they are often better in the idea than the execution; the second offers further reasoning about why that might be. 

In the ancients era that I usually game and with the types of large set-piece battles I most enjoy, campaigns tend to not have much value. In this era, campaigning was (with one or two notable exceptions) essentially about bringing one's enemy to battle in circumstances least advantageous to them. The battle was had. If the winner was the home team, the invaders were dispersed and the game, so to speak, was up; if the invader was victorious, terms would be reached and the thing was over (unless of course you were fighting the Achaemenid Persians or the Romans, who would [eventually, or fairly immediately, respectively] raise another army and make you do it all again).  

The interest then in this era is to try to get battlefield advantage. That is not usually best expressed by manoeuvrings over a campaign map, but by some sort of pre-battle system which modifies morale, numbers, terrain, deployment or leadership to the benefit of one or the other side.

If one is to do this, it is quite useful (as indeed it is for just about any circumstance!) to read Caesar to see the kinds of things he considered important when choosing if or when to give battle. 

To me it seems that ancients campaigns work best at either the grand strategic or the tactical level. You can follow the fortunes of nations over years or decades, where competing powers look to prise provinces or regions from one another, or you can follow the fortunes of smaller entities raiding or subduing neighbours in lower intensity local conflicts.

I tried a solo campaign of the latter type set in tribal Iberia. I put quite a bit of time into it, but it simply wasn't exciting enough. It turned out I'd rather refight Zama for the tenth time than try to sustain interest in endless minor encounters between similarly equipped neighbours over local concerns.

For the former type, you can't beat boardgames. If you want to replay the Punic and Macedonian wars, it's far better to do it in a boardgame in one sitting than to stretch it out with questionable bespoke rules to take up three months' worth of miniatures battles, trying to involve players whose chance of winning was, after the first week, only slightly better than nil.

I remember that the time I was most excited about campaigns was back in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle days, when I was young, had oodles of time, and thought that defending a pass against a tidal wave of Orcs was the perfect way to spend a Sunday (and the week before it mulling over army choices!).

The difference here is the difference: you could have Orcs, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, various humans, all with different characteristics and fighting styles, and all within a realm's distance of one another without doing violence to backstory. Celtiberian tribal dominion versus Celtiberian tribal dominion does not offer quite the same opportunites for variety.

For me, if I want to get six people involved in a game, there are two choices: a boardgame, or a multi-command set-piece battle.

But it's good to be open to being convinced otherwise!

You can't fight the Borg

Richard Borg, that is. Following on from my last post, featuring the Borg board game Memoir '44, it turns out that this game I was definitely not going to buy (and on which point I essayed argument), has shown up secondhand. 

I couldn't stop myself.  

I now find myself wondering whether I need to get some expansions, and if so, which ones. Such is the gaming life.

In other, more miniatures-gamery news, I had to make another quick trip to Japan late last week to bring the kids back as a family situation has meant that my wife has had to stay on longer than we expected. On the last evening (of three) there I popped into a local hardware store and found, for about $2.30, wire enough to fit out a dozen pike armies. The beauty of this stuff is that it's stainless, cheap, and dead straight. 35cm sections, with one bend in each. A person of wargamery inclination can get seven to ten pikes per section. This lot should see me right for the rest of my (un)natural life!

I also snuck into the suitcase a few other bits and pieces I'd not previously had room to bring back. 1/72 Zvezda Samurai (could be used for another Borg-inspired project?), some WWII books, and not yet in my suitcase but will be in my darling wife's when she returns, a giant stash of my absolute favourite guitar picks, which can only be found in one shop, and then only if you are lucky. 

Not ideal circumstances, but sometimes you can still get your pikes and picks.

Tying up a loose end

Back in 2007, when I was living in Japan and my passion for Commands & Colors: Ancients was at its height, I took a 'partscaster'* version of the original back to New Zealand on holiday with a view to introducing the old man to it. 

He loved it. So much so that he ordered in copies of the original game and the first expansion from the US. He bought a folding table sized just right and sourced some large plastic containers to store the blocks in orderly, easy-access fashion. When I went back to NZ thereafter we would play his copies and we roped one of my brothers in to play as well. There were some great times, with that good-humoured banter that you get when playing games with members of your family. 

That was before the old man got sick. After he got sick, we went back to playing Catan, and later Carcassone. When he got really sick we moved back to New Zealand to spend time with him. Well, strictly speaking, I moved back to find a job and house so that we could bring my wife and the kids over, but things moved too fast for the family to get here in time. One of the last things I did gaming-wise with him was paint up some 20mm figures to make a 'partscaster' version of the Desert Raiders of Catan variant. He was proud of the figures but I think we only got to play about three times before it became too hard for him to muster the concentration needed to play.

When he passed away things were pretty raw for a while. I asked Mum if I could have his Commands & Colors games and a couple of other things. They've sat on my shelves for about four years.

My brother, who lives in Australia, every now and then gives me a video call for a catch up and a few drinks when he is back on shore (he skippers a fishing boat). Earlier this year he mentioned C&C:A and we talked about how much fun those games had been. He said he'd love to play again. I said I'd kept the old man's copies and would get them to him.

It turns out that Mum is heading over to Australia to visit Stu and his family for Christmas. Miracle of miracles, she has a bit of room in her suitcase and is happy to take the games over to him. I packed up everything in the original box and left the expansion box empty so Mum can see if she can fill it with socks or something and squeeze that in as well. She reckons she can.

The old man's giant plastic storage boxes are too big to send so I am keeping them here. I put all my blocks into them tonight.

My C&C:A collection now stored in the old man's containers.

It's a strange thing, but it feels like a bit of a weight off the shoulders. I guess it has resolved something that was perhaps more important that I had realised. 

Anyway, I've got us tickets to see Iron Maiden in Auckland in September, so we will be able to talk it through in person!

* for the non-guitarists out there, a 'partscaster' is an electric guitar you put together out of bits from different guitars, or that you assemble yourself from a kit.

If I could turn back time...

JWH, in his Heretical Gaming blog, recently put up a post - inspired by the late great Peter Young - on the advice he would give to a wargamer just starting out. It is a post worth reading and as an added bonus leads naturally to a person wanting to put up something of their own on the same topic.  

So what would I tell a younger person starting out on their wargaming adventures?

1) Do what you enjoy. Obvious, but harder to keep to than you'd think. There are times when a person buys into something for some other reason: because it's good value; because you feel you should; because you make a plan with another gamer or group; because it might be good for a rainy day. You really don't want to waste time and energy into armies or periods or rules that you won't enjoy. Life is too short.

2) Build both sides. Wargaming is often a solitary activity, so don't be reliant on others. People move; people get busy. Keep your independence. Make sure that you can use those figures solo.

3) Expand on what you have. Easy when you play ancients or WWII, but it applies to other periods too. Why build Romans and Britons in 2mm when you already have part of what you need in 15mm? If you have Carthaginians, you're not far off being able to field an army of Spanish, Gauls, or Numidians. Have Marian Romans? Build a few more units of legionaries and you'll be able to play out Roman civil wars till the end of your days. But see point 1 - choose your expansions wisely!

4) Make wargaming friends who know more than you. I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance early on of a couple of grizzled wargame veterans. They show you the standard, give you good practical advice, and help remove mental obstacles. Invaluable.  

5) Get things while you can. You have to be sensible (well, maybe not all of us!), but work on the principle of get what you need when it's available. Vendors close down, lines disappear, prices go up, and personal circumstances change. If you can afford to get what you need now, do it. You can paint at your leisure, but you may not be able to pick up 240 Macedonian phalangites from that manufacturer at that price ever again...

6) Push yourself to paint hard while your eyes are good. Once they go, you'll wish you had painted more when it was easy!

7) Invest in making your table look good. You can have the loveliest armies in the world, but they only look as good as the terrain they are situated in.

8) Be as consistent as you can with your basing and painting styles. Try to do things in such a way that what you produce now will work with what you will produce in ten years.  

9) Find some board games you like. They are easy to set up (provided you have some space around the home) and they offer a different perspective. You can game when you don't feel inspired, they are portable, and they are a great way to introduce non-gaming friends to the hobby. 

10) Take things seriously, but not too much. You need a certain amount of fire and motivation to get projects underway and finished, but we're only playing with toy soldiers. It's not worth making enemies over and some of those rants a person can go off on don't always look so righteous five years down the track!

11) It's a big hobby. You will have times when you're on for certain aspects of it and times when you're not. Make the most of it all - writing, blogging, rules-writing, painting, researching, playing, youtubing, terrain-building, podcasting, and whatever else. Enjoy the variety and don't stress when you're having a fallow period.

12) Be aware that your gaming will go through different phases. Life will intrude. You will have times when there are funds to use and times when there are not. Use the former to help you get through the latter!

13) Have a big idea to work towards. 

14) Have fun!

Thanks for the inspiration JWH (and many others at different times), and anyone reading please feel free to add comments or link below to your own takes on this.

Cheers, and hobby on!

State of the wargame nation

It's been quite some time since I've posted here. We've been through a busy period of house renovations, kids developing social lives, work secondment opportunities and various other things. Earlier in the year I was invited to join a band, so we've been working quite hard learning songs and getting match fit for shows. Things are rolling now - we made our live debut last weekend - and it has been a lot of fun. The last time I played in a live band (apart from attending the odd open mic night) was 1998. I'd reconciled myself to the fact that it may never happen again, so it was a VERY good feeling to get back up on stage in front of a crowd and blast out a few tunes.

We hope to be able to get three hours' worth of material together to allow us to start gigging regularly. There is still some work to be done to get to that stage, but the challenge has been set!

Hobby activity has mostly been confined to looking at my shelves and deciding it's too late to play a game or browsing local boardgame options and making the occasional purchase. So far this year I've picked up Seastrike, Undaunted: Stalingrad, Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 minutes (if you're thinking of getting it, don't bother), Twilight Struggle, and Mare Nostrum. It's an eclectic mix; overseas shipping being prohibitatively expensive means I'm confined to opportunistic nabbing of things that are already in the country. Caesar is a bit of a dog, but the others all look promising. 

In regards to figure gaming, I haven't done any painting since 2019, and I also fell out of love with the Society of Ancients. As this was the avenue I tended to use to present 'serious' hobby pieces, I don't currently have any motivation to put together that sort of structured hobby writing for public consumption. The figures already painted are always there waiting to be used, but whether I will make any further dents in the lead mountain or get back to being the kind of contributor on matters ancient that I used to be is a bit doubtful.

It's been a bit of a depressing period hobby-wise, but you never know when that will change.

So there we are; that's about the state of it. Hope all others in the blogosphere are doing well!

Rumours of war(gaming) and the kindness of strangers

It's been a long time since I've rock n rolled, as the song goes. While a neat little intro, it's not strictly correct: I have played a few games, but nothing worth blogging about.

Sadly, that seems to have been the case for most things at the moment - not worth blogging about.

But that has all changed today. Two things happened. First, I caught up with my old mate SP, who assures me he is keen to get a game underway as soon as we can; the other is that a kind denizen of boardgamegeek has gone to considerable trouble to look out and send me the rules for a vintage game I bought recently that arrived sans booklet.

It would be very rude to get it to table given the lengths the fellow went to to scan the paperwork, so playing it has become mission number 1. 

While speaking of kindness, I should also mention a first class instance of it from the folks at the Plastic Soldier Company. I ordered some plastic Carthaginians from them a few months ago but the pack arrived two figures short. I emailed to let them know about it and they promptly sent me replacements along with an extra figure or two for good measure. 

They are damned good too, being of the Corvus Belli 15mm range.

So there we are. I hope 2023 will treat all readers well (or if not well, at least a good deal better than it's treated Jeff Beck), and that your dice roll what you wish for a decent portion of the time.

The changing face of wargaming

One of the things that has impressed me most in the time I've been wargaming is the way that game design has progressed.  

When I started it was with Diplomacy and Warhammer Fantasy Battle, both of which required a certain time investment to play. Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd Edition was massively fun at the time, but it took an evening to cost out your army, took all day to fight, and the amount of dice rolling was phenomenal. Diplomacy required eight people (seven if you could get by without an umpire), and by the end of the game your relationship with at least one of those players would be damaged almost irreparably. 

That said, each game was a genuine event, and would be remembered for years.

When I got into wargaming again in the post-university years, it was with process-heavy historical miniatures games - seemingly cut from similar cloth to WFB - and sprawling hex-and-counter games such as those from The Gamers. 

Enter card-driven games -  Hannibal: Rome versus Carthage and For the People, for example - which used point-to-point movement instead of hexes, based victory around control of blocs of territory, and made card play the central decision mechanism. Able to be used in a variety of ways, each card gave players the choice to trigger an event, use the card to perform an action, or try to bury it so that it could not be leveraged to advantage by one's opponent. 

Then there were Commands and Colors: Ancients and Lost Battles: both hybrid developments of earlier miniatures and board game types. Commands and Colors used cards for unit activation, employed custom dice, and provided generic units with customisable battlefields. Lost Battles used a square grid with a lead (as in front, not metal!) unit model to allow tactical match ups, a handicap system to afford outmatched armies a chance at a game win, and followed a uniquely academic approach.

In the meantime both eurogame and wargame designers had been coming up with interesting new takes on old game mechanisms, such as tile drawing, deck building, trick taking, dice hoarding, chit pulling, and bluffing. Friedrich, Maria, the Simmons titles and Sekigahara all helped bring some of these interesting intersections into the world of wargames. 

Then along came W1815, the strikingly innovative map game on Waterloo, which featured static forces, and an action card for each commander, not only designating possible actions as in other card-driven games, but also - brilliantly - functioning as individualised combat results tables. This game on its own has led to an entirely new 'static battle' genre that is being explored by designers to take on previously hard-to-game situations, and its influence is felt almost everywhere. 

Ian Brody's groundbreaking Quartermaster General series has been another landmark modern design. In terms of how cards can be used to introduce player options, create gruelling battles of hand and mind, while also reducing large conflicts to key elements playable in ninety minutes, it is hard to overstate its importance. Who would have thought in 1980 that you could take World War II and play it out as a six-player game in recognisable and satisfying fashion in less time that it takes to complete a game of Risk, and without a die in sight? Certainly not Milton Bradley!

The Quartermaster series has broadened the definition of wargame.

And the dance continues. The Undaunted series has added new layers of depth to map, card and dice combinations in wargames. Solitaire games, using bots, are plentiful - and designers are retro-fitting older games for solitaire play using these new concepts. We are seeing an explosion of impressive fast-playing, decision-centric, bot-soloable, war-themed crossover games that bring in ideas put together in fresh ways by young(ish), crafty designers who are not afraid to defy wargame convention, who have wide gaming experience in different genres, and will borrow and refine from anywhere in the service of the game.  

It seems, at the moment, that possibilities are legion.

What a great time to be a wargamer! 

Painting, Gettysburg revisited, and a musical diversion

For the first time since perhaps March 2019 I have picked up a paintbrush. The objects of my attentions were not the Greeks for Mantinea signalled earlier this year, but Carthaginian elephants and crew so that I can play Bagradas without co-opting Macedonian jumbos, and as a way to ease back in with reasonably rapid additions for the table.

Unfortunately, it was quickly apparent that in the three years since I last painted my eyesight has deteriorated significantly. In short, I couldn't see what I was doing. 

I tried again the next day in natural light and I could see details better, but it's still a long way from what I am accustomed to and it has come as a bit of a shock.

I knew that moving from teaching into constant computer work had taken a toll on my eyes, but I put a lot of it down to general tiredness. I didn't realise it had become quite this bad.   

The situation I am now in is that unless I get some glasses sorted, painting will only be possible on sunny days. As I used to do most of my painting at night in my old hobby room, it will take a serious readjustment to make much progress in terms of reducing the 15mm lead mountain. It is clearly time for some re-evaluation.

In happier news, I got Eric Lee Smith's Battle Hymn on the table again. Goodness me, it is a beautiful game.

Heth's boys on the march.

And I also bought myself a new guitar, a Telecaster copy. After the kind of work week when I thought of starting to apply for other jobs, I was told to have a drink and chill out. I did, and did. I'm looking forward to it arriving and cranking up the volume in the den!

To everything there is a season

Goes the verse. 

I was lucky enough to get into wargaming seriously at a propitious time. I had long had an interest in it, had borrowed books from the library as a kid, had played rules-based games with a friend and his older brother, but had never really collected armies, boardgames or rules. When I did decide to get into wargaming in 2005, the variety had never been better, information had never been more freely available, and, because of the internet, wargaming was accessible to a degree it had not been before. I had disposable income (this is before children!), shipping was relatively cheap, and it was possible to collect figures rules and games from all around the world without the cost seeming burdensome. I could buy a 15mm army for the price of a night out. Being in Japan, I could get hobby paints for about US$1. What could be better?

I hoovered up painting guides from helpful people on theminiaturespage.com. I joined yahoo groups to learn about rules. I ordered my first figures through Magister Militum in the UK, then happened upon some old stock sales in the US and picked up masses of Xyston Greeks and Macedonians at $1.80 a pack and Old Glory 15s in the old 50 foot/16 mounted bags for $7 each. What a way that was to kick start a collection!

I discovered Commands and Colors: Ancients, joined the online VASSAL tournaments, and won a few of them. I met my Italian gaming buddies Roberto and Andrea. I wrote quite a lot on Boardgamegeek. 

In Japan where I lived at the time I found fellow gamers Luke and Pat. I was introduced to Phil Sabin's Strategos II (later to become Lost Battles) and joined the yahoo group. There was stimulating conversation, intense discussion (mainly courtesy of the late Patrick Waterson), and a set of rules you could get behind. I became a member of the Society of Ancients. 

It was a brilliant, exciting time. Armies got painted, games were played, articles were written, friends were made. Everything was new and fresh.

I started a blog to record what I was doing, and to write those sorts of battle reports I had loved in the books I borrowed from the library as a kid.

*****

Fast forward to 2022, and the landscape is different. Theminiaturespage is a shadow of its former self. Yahoo groups, those rules petri dishes, have vanished. Figure suppliers have gone out of business, passed away, or sold their ranges to others. Prices for 15mm figures have doubled in the UK in some cases. International shipping has become almost unaffordable. Consolidation of manufacturers and pre-packaged plastics sets appear to be the way the market is moving.  

Blogging has lost a lot of its early zest and joyfulness. Bloggers have quietly stopped updating, have moved on in their lives, or had adverse events intervene. The ever-increasing reach of social media has shortened attention spans. Who wants to read a thousand-word blogpost any more? Who wants to write them? 

As people get older, focus changes. You get a little over-familiar with the actual playing of games and start to think about 'legacy' elements, such as bringing new gamers into the hobby, promoting games that you like, building a following, or changing attitudes. When 'legacy' becomes the focus, the hobby becomes less about sharing your own joy and more about getting responses. If you don't get the responses you feel your efforts deserve, dissatisfaction and frustration find a way in. Desire wanes. 

There comes a point when you have to re-evaluate what it is that you enjoy about the hobby and what is it that gives you satisfaction. Is it playing a game with friends? Is it writing up a report of a solo game? Is it researching and painting armies? Is it writing rules or scenarios? Is it bringing other people into the wargaming? Whatever the things that you enjoy are, you have to find them and respect them, because once aspects of how you practise the hobby start to seem like work, it is no longer fun.

I write this because one of my favourite bloggers, Norm Smith of Battlefields and Warriors, is downing tools for a spell. I'm sure we all feel a bit of sadness about that, but also understand it, because we go through those phases ourselves.

I guess the point of this post and my message to Norm (to all of us, really) is that how we interact with wargaming and what we get out of it changes over time. That's natural and to be expected. There is no shame in it. The important thing is to recognise that a hobby has to be about enjoyment. It can't be about meeting expectations - well, it can be for a while, but that is unsustainable. Enjoyment is what first attracts us, but it is also the easiest thing to lose when we start getting caught up in other, more peripheral, things. 

Wargaming will be here when we are ready to come back to it. And Norm, we look forward to seeing you back writing if and when that again becomes one of those things that gives you joy.

Until then, cheers, and thanks for all your efforts. Much appreciated.  

02/06/1941 - 24/08/2021

Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones. 

 

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again

We all of us enjoy our wargaming, our playing with toy soldiers, our board wargames, and our reading around these kinds of topics.

There is crossover between serious games and hobby games, and many of us enjoy that aspect too. Some of the blogs I follow are more towards the serious end of the spectrum, where wargaming is a job, where it is used to prep military and intelligence professionals, and - perhaps - influence real-world policy, real-world decisions. 

One of the newer, modern boardgame designers was recently asked about an expansion to his game on Afghanistan, A Distant Plain, which would take into account recent developments. I quote here part of his response:

Given the speed of events, I think if anything what we are seeing now is each faction’s game pieces being swept around on the map and scooped up prior to being put back into their ziploc bags.

Game’s over, man.

If you want to carry on, I think you will need a different game.

He linked to one of his previous blog posts, and also to an (as it turns out decidedly non-prescient) article on the then current state of affairs, entitled 'Why the Taliban isn't winning in Afghanistan' (from which I quote below): 

“We must face facts,” remarked Senator John McCain in August 2017, “we are losing in Afghanistan and time is of the essence if we intend to turn the tide.” He is not the only one who has argued that the Taliban are on the march. “The Taliban are getting stronger, the government is on the retreat, they are losing ground to the Taliban day by day,” Abdul Jabbar Qahraman, a retired Afghan general who was the Afghan government’s military envoy to Helmand Province until 2016, told the New York Times over the summer. Media outlets have likewise proclaimed that “The Taliban do look a lot like they are winning” and that this is “The war America can't win.”

Although the Taliban has demonstrated a surprising ability to survive and conduct high-profile attacks in cities like Kabul, it is weaker today than most recognize. It is hamstrung by an ideology that is too extreme for most Afghans, a leadership structure that is too closely linked to the Pashtun ethnic group, an over-reliance on brutal tactics that have killed tens of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians and alienated many more, a widespread involvement in corruption, and a dependence on unpopular foreign allies.

What am I getting at, you might ask?

Well, it is that games and game-models that are lauded for their innovation and perspicacity, whose designers are profiled in the Washington Post, whose hobby games potentially influence real-world decision-making, can still get it wrong. Why they get is wrong is not really my focus here, but it is clear that they get it wrong for reasons which include a) a reliance upon commentators who make incorrect assumptions; b) a game-induced need for simplification which means that factors that appear insignificant (but may not be in real life) are minimised; c) that formulated victory equations which may seem plausible to Western analysts who sit within the military or intelligence paradigms may well not match reality.

So what does this say about wargaming? 

That we should all be wary of it. That it may have consequences. That it is inexact for predicting future events.  

As hobbiests our first reaction to 'serious' military/intelligence-adjacent wargames on current or near-future conflicts is often likely to be "cool, we want to see more of them!" And why not? It seems to validate our hobby, encourages new designs, and perhaps adds authority or cred to what we do. 

But current events show that popular wargames on current conflicts do not necessarily lead to increased understanding or to desired outcomes. And in fact, if real-world wishful thinking is rendered in games as plausible result, may lead not to understanding but to folly. 

It's not a nice pill to swallow. 

The state of wargaming, May 2021

It feels like a long time since I've written anything related to our collective fascination, but now seems as good a time as any to venture back into familiar territory. 

By way of background, it's gone fast, but I have now been here in New Zealand since February 2019. More than two years, but I still do not feel settled, and have not found a satisfying rhythm. Helping my wife and the children adjust to life here has been my primary concern; a very close second to that has been trying to make a success of myself at work (New Zealand being an easier place for me to make a good living in middle age was one of the main reasons we moved here from Japan). Work has gone well in general, but the cost of living here is excessive. Even with salary increases there is not a lot to spare. 

Preoccupations with such things therefore have affected the gaming life. I don't currently paint, rarely browse new rules, never browse figure ranges, and have almost (but not absolutely) given up on buying board wargames. 

This I give for context, but it is not all bad news: there is an active group of wargamers in the area, and I have a couple of old school friends who are interested in playing figure games. One friend is already meeting me for the occasional Lost Battles refight. With luck and planning, multiplayer games may not be too far away.

Additionally, there is the opportunity to test out some simulation ideas in the work environment. The work I do is public sector. Room to use simulation techniques for training, reflection, consciousness raising, etc may present itself, and in fact I've been given the opportunity to test out some ideas in our annual team day, so hopefully that will go well and may lead to other doors opening.

What I don't have is that desire to play solitaire that I had in Japan. I also seem to have lost the urge to paint and the compulsion to write. These may come back or they may not, but wargaming is back to being - as it was in the beginning - no great matter!

It has been good the last couple of days to have a chance to look at other people's blogs and feel a bit of the old wargaming spirit rekindling. I also read over a few of my old posts and it was (mostly!) pleasant to revisit those times and places.

All up, I'm feeling positive. It may a different kind of wargaming life now, but wargaming still does have its place. I just need a little more time to figure out what that place is exactly!