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2023 Year in Review

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Thoughts on (review) L' Art de la Guerre

  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. Your army routs when you lose roughl

My Carthaginian Army! also a review of PSC 15mm plastics range for ancients

  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 figures instead.   B

The Battle of Tonkin Bay 1904 (Naval AAR)

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 Gloire Ø   4x torpedo boats Ø   3x destroyers   The Japanese strategy was to advance all squadrons in either line a

Matchlock Miniatures 15mm review

 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 reviews else w

Battle of the Yalu River 1894 1/2400 scale

 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

Chain of Command & Qwixx

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 then I