Greetings, Wargaming Bruthas! After a very extended break, the column is back - with a new title, thanks to Ron Dillie of Traverse City. Ron conceived the name in a heartbeat while I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't think of anything. Good job, Ron, it's got a nice military ring to it, don't it? And you guys probably all thought I'd come up with something almost phallic, didn't ye? Wait a minute! Raising the standard! Why somebody with a devious mind could think - Ahh, forget it. Joseph Matthews' great rendition of Leaning Napoleon will stay, thank you very much. Hal bequeathed it to me when I first started a column for MWAN several years ago. I've always liked it, and afler reading the story about Joseph in Hal's last editorial, old Leaning Nappy is well worth keeping. You'll also notice the text is much neater, due to the fact I've joined the 21st Century and started doing this on a computer. I was always embarrassed about my lousy typing skills before, and the computer does a heckuva job of making me look far more competent than I am. Wished I'd done it years ago. Over the last few months I've been very lucky to spend a lot of time of the hobby, in terms of painting, gaming and doing the same with my son as well. Mike has always been a painter and model-maker at heart, but he's never been really interested in gaming until we seen Starship Troopers. After that, we painted up a bunch of Warhammer 40K that look amazingly like Starship Troopers and bought bags of plastic spiders from a gag-gifl store. A couple of very simple rules and in no time we were blasting bugs to clear a path to the escape ship. He loved it, his sister also loved it which kinda cheesed him off, and his cub scout den loved it. It's a great game for initiating young novices to the great hobby, as it was exciting, suspenseful and easy to learn, plus we were only killing bugs, so it was hard for any parents to be turned off by it. I managed to paint a whole lot of 25mm figures. I did over 400 American Civil War Old Glory- First Corps - Dixon models, around 150 Franco-Prussian models, about 300 WW 11 figures, and around 100 Sci-Fi types. My big collections include Franco-Prussian and American Civil War and being anal retentive, I'm on a big campaign to tighten up the loose ends of troops laying about. I'm finally at a point with raising the children where I'll be able to close down their toy room and build shelves to house and display all this stuff I've accumulated. Figuring there's no sense in having it if you can't look at it, my dream has always been to fill our added on room with shelves and display cases of museum quality. I started out with this goal about eight years ago, but as I was taping and pasting the newly laid drywall, I watched my son lead his friends and peers on a tour of the room saying,"......................and this is where my new toy room will be." After reflecting that his combined Christmas and birthday haul was greater than the gross national product of some third world countries, I had to agree he had a valid point. Keeping all the kids toys in that room paid off greatly in terms of having a single place to store all their treasure hoard, but now my son and daughter are moving out of their common room and into separate rooms. Taking all their toys with them, this frees up the new room for it's original purpose. It's kinda scary how fast the time passed, as I recall telling myself when the decision was made that it would probably be around a decade before the dream could be realized. It sure seemed like a long time then..... All the gaming has been a pleasure as well. The club continues to go great guns, and I've put on a couple of WW II games down there. Herb Gundt and fellow Hoosiers trekked north from Indiana and partook in still another WW II game, although I think we spent more time eyeballing each other's toys than we did playing. Truthfully the WW II game had bogged down somewhat, as it was intended as a skirmish game, and I've added far more troops and vehicles than will ever be necessary. Along came Dave Rollins of Battle Creek, who invited me over to his house for a pleasant one-on-one game of Arty Conliffe's new WW II rules, Crossfire. There's a couple of interesting new concepts with these rules, in particular the idea of movement and firing being determined by initiative, and the way command and control is handled. Very simply, one side moves and fires until it looses it's ability to do so, and then the other side moves and fires until it looses it's ability, or initiative. Firing and movement is dictated a lot by a platoon or company leader, who controls the squads and platoons by their presence. Unlike a lot of command/control rules, Crossfire makes sense to your gaming mind, and seems to enhance rather than restrict the play. The rules make you think in terms of tactics, and as the book says, most any decision you make can effect the outcome of the game. Firefights feel like firefights, as the initiative can pass back an forth like a ping-pong ball. I was impressed. Try to get yourself into a demo game of Crossfire and see if you like it. My prediction is that Crossfire will sweep WW II gaming, and other versions will be forthcoming for other time periods ala DBA. For instance, I've got a bunch of Desert Storm troops and vehicles that have been sorely needing a set of rules.... Well, Wargaming Bruthas, I've got a confession for you. When I first started this column, I promised to discuss burning hobby issues, albeit tongue in cheek. There's a problem though. There just doesn't seem to be any burning hobby issues. At least it sure doesn't look like there is from here. Attendance is up at gaming conventions. More products are available than ever before, in a quality never before seen. New magazines are out - for instance. what do you think of Old Glory's La G/oire? About the only thing detrimental I could say is about the ridiculous high prices of some of these products, but that would just make a bunch of Hal's advertisers mad, so we won't talk about that. (Watch how many nasty letters I get for just that one sentence alone). To me it pretty much looks like we're in the Golden Age of Gaming, so I guess the only issue is - How do we make it better? To that end, I'd like to hear what you think about the chance of success would be for a wargamers' retreat in the US, as there are in Great Britain. They seem to support several, while I've only heard of a few attempts in the States, and nothing that had any long life to it. Could we do it, or are we too spread out over this large country to sustain such a business? If we tried it, where do you think the hest location would be? Someplace like Gettysburg. Or a metropolitan area like Chicago? How much could be reasonably charged? Should it be for one day, or the entire weekend? Are we the kind of people that would take to this kind of gaming. It would be interesting to hear from some who've attended retreats in Europe - or the US - or better still, from someone who's tried such a business in the US. I tend to think that no matter where you tried it, you'd only get local gamers those within three to four hours driving time - and I think you would tend to get the same gamers all the time. While it seems a good idea at first, I think you would quickly use up your market, unless your retreat became very well known and popular at the same time. Please send me your thoughts. I've thought about doing this in the past, and have discussed it with others, but I'd love to hear all your objective or subjective comments. Who knows, maybe we'll start a crop of clubs throughout the country. It'll become a rage with the general public. People like Sixty Minutes will do specials on us. This could be very big. Til next time, Wargaming Bruthas. Back to MWAN #94 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1998 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com