The game reached its inevitable conclusion, although it took a little bit longer than I thought it would. The French had played an event card (*) the previous week which meant that their best division could carry on after its morale was all spent, and carry on they did. Together with one of their cavalry units they caused a couple of British units on the left flank to rout. The focal point was however on the British right flank and there the Light Division advanced steadily and the day was won.

Things I would have done differently include arranging the units of the Light Division differently and possibly continuing the cavalry's move from flank to flank instead of pausing it for a while. I shall have a chance to test the first of those next week, because following another couple of turns of map moves (I think we're now half way through turn 8, but please don't rely on that) Wellington's army will now face off against Soult's.

I know everyone is interested in whatever rule changes occur. This week's related to morale losses following losing a melee. There was a certain amount of robust discussion around this as it seemed to appear from nowhere. James' justification didn't really consist of much more than saying that it was what he had written down and therefore it must be right. Fair enough, that will do me. And it is, of course, the same for both sides.

* These cards are part of the campaign structure. Personally, I'd include them in the base tabletop rules as well. I didn't like much about Soldiers of Napoleon, but I liked the event cards.

 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.

 "Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities." - George Eliot

I've been doing August stuff, including a trip here:

But there has been some wargaming in the background. We had a somewhat bizarre game of To the Strongest!, with some very lopsided luck, which was clearly just that - luck - and not something inherent in the rules. Soldiers of Napoleon, however is a different matter.

I am definitely cooling on this game and considering that I started off lukewarm that is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from the fact that it is not designed as a multi-player game, but there are four of us. We seem to have ended up playing the author's suggested approach, which is basically two games side by side. It's crap (*). We seem to be sacrificing much of the pleasure of social interaction - which is for me at least a big part of why I do this in the first place - for the sake of the purity of the rules. It all seems a bit arse about face to me.

My main problem though is with the flawed arithmetic implicit in the rules. James recently passed me a copy of WRG 6th edition so that I could look at the siege rules. The writers of these appear, to me at least, to have attempted to achieve 'realism' and bugger the playability. Thankfully authors of more modern games tend to do it the other way round, concentrating on finding mechanisms that are easy to use and which move things along smoothly. I play a lot of boardgames and in that sphere one need do no more; it's usually all abstract anyway. When wargaming though one needs/wants to add chrome to make it a reasonable facsimile of what one imagines the historical period was like. Authors don't always seem to me to be able to manage the interface between their neat, simple mechanisms and the chrome. I previously wrote about some nonsensical effects of this in Blitzkrieg Commander 4.

One example from SoN relates to skirmish fire. Now skirmish fire is hard to get right in a set of rules. We tried any number of ways with Piquet and never produced anything particularly worthwhile. The version we ended up with had the sole merit that it sometimes allowed French columns to close with British lines. In SoN units can throw out their light company which then appear as two skirmish stands . You can then fire these with a dice per stand at a longer range than volley fire. If you fire at another unit which also has its light company out then you lose a dice. So far so good. Standard units hit on 4,5,6 and save on 4,5,6, so two units skirmishing against each other would both have an expected value of damage caused of 0.25 disruptions (the term for damage caused in SoN) each time they fire. It's not very effective, but worth doing because units with no disruptions get a bonus in combat. 

Some units, for example those of the British Light Division, qualify for a third skirmish stand. This seems reasonable; specialist troops get a 50% bonus. In practice of course it means they get two dice when firing at a line unit with skirmishers, so that's actually a 100% bonus. And this is where another rule comes into play. One can only save the first hit caused, so the ability to cause two hits is very powerful. I'll let you do the arithmetic for yourself, but it turns the expected hits of these units against a standard unit to 0.625, i.e. a 150% increase. What makes it worse is that these units also tend to be elite (not the term used in the rules) and can both hit and save on 3,4,5,6. If we consider our match up of one of these units versus a standard unit, both with skirmishers out, we find the standard unit's expected hit has dropped to 0.167, while the specialists' has increased to 0.889. Were these units really five times better? It seems unlikely to me.

Add in other facets of the rules, in particular the ability to concentrate of multiple units' fire on one target, and you end up with a game that is dominated by the skirmish fire of certain formations - I'm looking at you again Light Division -  and frankly isn't that much fun. 

* And, incidentally, quite a lot worse than our own quickly cobbled together approach which we tried first.

 The lack of postings here, and the fact that medieval cattle raid hasn't been played yet, are of course due to scorchio. Indeed the only reason I am writing this now, is that the cumulative effect has all been too much and I have retreated indoors. This is not to say that there has been no wargaming. We completed our second game of 'Soldiers of Napoleon', about which rules I have nothing to add to what I have said previously. We shall have a go next week with move distances tweaked to match the specific size of table and bases, and I shall report back. It was fairly sweaty in the legendary wargames room on Wednesday, but nothing to compare with the sauna that was the Old Chemistry Theatre at Nottingham Trent University on Saturday for the inaugural Lard Workshop (*).

The Workshop, which took place alongside the BHGS Britcon show, was organised by Don, my old (very old) school friend and bandmate, despite which it was a great success. I for one thoroughly enjoyed it, and had a blast. And no one could say that it wasn't excellent value for money. For £15 one got a £5 voucher to spend with the traders, a free sandwich lunch (which was rather good I thought) and to play two games; what's not to like? The one thing wrong with it was the heat, plus it was very noisy. So the only two things wrong with it were the heat, the noise and the fact that the toilets were a long walk given that middle aged men need to visit fairly often. Having said that, there were a couple of gamers involved who clearly didn't have prostates, which was the first time I've seen so many female wargamers since, well, since forever; another good thing.

I was travelling light and didn't bring a decent camera, which I regret because the eighteen games on offer were all worth photographing. There was a Far East set game of Chain of Command (possibly run by Richard Clarke himself; I wish I'd taken some notes as well as some pictures) which had more terrain crammed on to one table than I can remember ever seeing before. Very sadly I only took one photo of David Hunter's game of 'Infamy, Infamy', which I played in the afternoon, and that is very far from doing the table justice.

I'm playing the chap at the front left, tasked with getting my men along the road to a camp manned only by some unreliable slaves. The game was set in the civil wars of the early first century BC and, while I didn't get anywhere near the camp my Gallic ally and I had killed enough Italian rebels en route to win the game. I had played Infamy once, pre-publication and pre-pandemic, and despite reading through them again was feeling a bit lost at the start. However, as the game progressed I found it all began to make sense (**). Maybe I should get the chariots out before I forget it all again. 

You've got to love a measuring stick

I took more - and more useful - photos of the game I had played in the morning, Sidney Roundwood's 'Flashing Blades'. It wasn't hard to get a larger amount of the action into the picture because everything happened in a 2ft x 2ft square. It's not obvious from the above, but it's mounted on a Lazy Susan (£14 from Amazon according to Sidney) and players seated around the table can easily turn it to allow them to move their musketeer. Because the Mousquetaires du Roi, opposed inevitably by the Cardinal's Red Guards, are what this cracking little game is all about. The rules are not yet published (***), but they are in a pretty polished state already. The rules have quite a lot of the boardgame about them - and I mean that in a good way - and produce a result that, at least in our game, was a positively cinematic narrative arc. I loved the game, almost, but not quite, with the same passion that James has for SoN. And that was only a little bit helped by it being one of my characters, Monseigneur d'Eclair, who rescued the Comtesse de Chablis from the scaffold and spirited her away.

D'Eclair leads la Comtesse away through a crowd of Parisians

* If you are going to Google that, then I would try to be precise in your search terms unless you genuinely wish to find out the best way to render lard, which is a very different thing and quite possibly smells even worse that a hot room full of wargamers.

** Except perhaps the close combat rules, which are, shall we say, convoluted.

*** Next year possibly, depending on the rest of TFL's publishing schedule.

 “Remember, there are more people in the world than yourself. Be modest! You have not yet invented nor thought anything which others have not thought or invented before. And should you really have done so, consider it a gift of heaven which you are to share with others.” - Robert Schumann

James has given a big thumbs up to Soldiers of Napoleon, as you may already have seen. We've now played three times (i.e. one and a half games) and I still get the impression I'm the least enthusiastic of the four of us. You can't read too much into that; apart from anything else it's an inescapable fact that someone will have be in that position. The context is important as well: we're clearly still not playing them as written; it has become obvious that the text does not adequately reflect what the author and his play testers actually did in practice; and even when one has the rules correct - whatever that means - one still has to get one's head around the best way to play. Picking up on that last point, I'm fairly sure we've been playing the skirmisher rule correctly from the beginning, but it was only last week that I suddenly had an epiphany as to how one used it in practice (*).

I agree with James that the way skirmishers are handled is elegant and makes sense. We had tried something a bit similar with Piquet, but for whatever reason didn't quite arrive at the same rule. On the other hand I think the event cards could very easily get a bit samey each game, because there aren't that many different ones. If one is lucky enough to get the ones that target the other side's artillery or commanders early on, when the situation is less sensitive to what card you play, then they will always get used; later on in the game they probably won't. As for the Big Battle rules as written (**) they are even more pants than the 'How Goes The Day' mechanism. 

One of the issues we had, and which led to the sort of calm, rational, evidence-based discussion so often seen in the legendary wargames room, related to infantry attacking buildings. A lesser man than your bloggist would point out that the answer received back from Warwick Kinrade - namely that units must adopt a special 'attacking buildings formation' - was precisely what I have been saying about the same situation in Piquet. But, as I hope you all realise, I am better than that.

* Apparently you put them out at the front of units and they shoot at things.

** Or to be precise, as James says they are written; I don't own a copy and haven't read them.

 We played the second half of our initial Soldiers of Napoleon game last night. I don't own a copy of the rules, but both James and Mark do. When I arrived they were both observing that they had re-read them since the previous Wednesday and were engaging in mutual congratulations as to how we had got absolutely everything correct despite it being the first game. Now, one doesn't have to be as big a cynic as me to realise that this was all a bit of a hostage to fortune. Inevitably enough, a series of errors became steadily apparent throughout the evening: saving throws against artillery (there aren't any), what happens when you fail to pass a morale test to charge home (you fire instead, which I rather liked without being able to justify it thematically), the way reserves arrive (not intuitive at all, but makes sense once we'd bothered to read it), and too many others to mention. In the end we called it a draw and decided to start again next week. Mark and I had nearly won by then by throwing everything into a cheesy attempt to achieve one of our hidden objective cards and accept that quite a few units would evaporate in the process. It came down to the need to throw a 4,5 or 6. I threw a 2.

James wondered whether the rules had been written around how the playtesting group played the game rather than it being fully thought through as to how anyone picking them up cold would do it, which I thought was quite astute. But, having said that, we all changed our approach over the two evenings and no doubt will do so even more next week. We're going to try the big battle rules - main difference apparently being that each player has their own hand of cards - and use a larger playing area. I hope we drop the 'How Goes the Day?' bit, because it's pants; not the idea as such, just the manifestation of it.

 And I'm not talking about the weather which, at nineteen degrees and raining, is about par for high summer in a normal year in the lower Wharfe valley. Last night there was a full turnout in the legendary wargames room: Peter (*), James (**), Mark (***) and me. We had a first game of 'Soldiers of Napoleon', a new set of rules which are creating a bit of a buzz.

And the verdict: they were all right. I got the impression that the others were more enthusiastic than I was, but it all has to be interpreted in the context of us almost certainly not playing them correctly on this first occasion. I like a card driven game, so that aspect was good. It uses a system whereby each card can be used in a variety of ways, but only one can be chosen each time you play it. It's a very common mechanism in boardgaming, but I'm not sure whether I've ever come across it in wargaming before. I also quite liked the relatively simple idea it uses to encourage one to switch successive activations from one command to another. Combat resolution seemed very bland and I was bemused by artillery being so underpowered and vulnerable on a Naploeonic battlefield. The biggest disappointment was the much vaunted 'How goes the day?' concept of one playing a small section of a larger battle with what happens elsewhere affecting what's happening in your sector. All it actually amounts to is rolling dice every turn and the winner getting some victory points.

We shall carry on next week, with the biggest challenge being to stop James introducing house rules before we've even finished the first game.

* Who I'm very pleased to say looked well after an unavoidable absence.

** Who seemed a bit out of sorts; perhaps it was the heat.

*** Who was wearing shorts. I know one can't expect everyone to live up to my standards - I always wargame in a tie and sleeveless sweater - but really!