As I ponder what to do for my next campaign, the postman delivered a couple of books to keep me occupied.
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| A recent post delivery |
I have had a flick through "Battle of Britain - Wargame 1066" by Peter Dennis with rules by Andy Callan. The paper armies look really impressive and are done in such a way to minimise fiddly cutting. I have no plans to start on these yet as I have to complete my Hundred Years War figures, but they will be my next project.
I am looking forward to reading "Tabletop Wargames - A Designers' & Writers Handbook" by Rick Priestley and John Lambshead. It says it is written so you can read a chapter on its own or read through them in order. I suspect I will dip into the chapters individually and see how it goes.
Meanwhile on the wargaming front I fitted in an AWI game earlier this week. As is the norm for me now I let the dice to generate the terrain position. To help select the troops, each side divided up their army into three forces, then used playing cards to select two of the three forces which were able to be fielded in the tabletop. The third force presumable could not march to the guns in time. When setting up the table, the force with the most cannon or least light troops had to be in the second line.
At the moment I continue to try and settle on my Sci-Fi rules. Currently I am trying to modify the activation and combat rules as I am not totally happy with them. More about that progress later and on to an opportunity to show some pictures of Peter Laing's AWI miniatures in action.
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| Start of the game |
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| British Advance |
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| Americans retire in order |
Sorry, I posted this over on AWI rules post by error - here it is again.
ReplyDeleteThe AWI interests me at the moment as I am trying to merge my ACW and Napoleonic rules to a more generic horse and musket set that will also cater for AWI. So I shot over to your rules. I like them. One thing does spring to mind (I discovered this when tinkering with square) ... I like the fact that artillery fire direct ahead at a width of 3 bases, this is exactly what I played around with, but there is a blind spot for artillery on the diagonal. Regardless of which square side they face, they cannot cast their fire to any distance along the diagonal. I thought a lot about this and could not get around it without also including a diagonal facing, which immediately meant more rules and an extra layer of visualisation for fields of fire. I could have gone to a fire lane 5 squares wide, but that just seemed to undermine other things.
Your table is looking very smart and I look forward to an AWI AAR.
I initially limited the artillery from shooting diagonally as on a smallish table they could dominate too much of the tabletop. I took the view if artillery were on a flank they should be limited to shooting at the opposition forces on that flank. This then led to the facing a square side and while abstract does seem to work for me so far with AWI. It has been a while since I wrote up an AWI game.
DeleteYes, I think for Wargames, to err on the side of restriction (especially on a small table) creates more interesting nuances and is more tactically interesting. Wargamers mostly need a restraining hand on their shoulder because of that unrealistic all seeing eye that we have.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see your Peter Laing AWI figures in action again. In a future post, I was wondering if you could show sme closeups of your various Peter Laing units. There is a small group of Peter Laing enthusiasts that would love to see the PL AWI figures up close.
ReplyDeleteI will try and get some close up photos this week. Regards, Peter
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