And so I complete PA104, catching up (to some degree) on the two year plus hiatus since PA102. I apologise for the shortened nature of some articles – there was simply too much good stuff to mention it all in detail I have not for example mentioned the interesting developments in the We the People games. The clear rules of Wilderness War (the French-Indian War) are limited rather by the geography of New France and by two vital cards, without which nothing. I was impressed by the rules and detail but was it really better than Mohawk? What a pleasure to even be able to consider such questions. In the same genre young Ted Raicer has designed Barbarossa to Berlin which takes Paths of Glory to the Second World War. Always prepared to be ruthless Ted has simply sliced off the bits of the war before Barbarossa thus ditching all the special rules to cover the defeat of France and expulsion of Britain. He has then incorporated in the cards all those Allied plans. The problem is that if they come in the wrong order you can face long periods of inactivity in the West. Still you really can invade in 1943 which is interesting. I have been designing two games Unhappy King Charles a We the People on the ECW. This zips along at a fierce rate incorporating my PIG theories. Given its time frame the We the People system (without the multiple choices of Paths of Glory) works well. This one is off for development with GMT. The second game is a development of War At Sea/Victory In the Pacific on the Napoleonic War at sea called England Expects. The strategic situation of a hegemonic power (Britain) fighting a raiding/invading fleet (France) fits this system admirably. However, I doubt it can work so easily for the naval wars before 1775 where there was a greater equality. England Expects operates a blockade system to try to bottle up the French battleships. Ships can raid commerce (and there is a merchant fleet system that connects this to income from the Excise). There is also the colonial campaigns but all at a fairly simple level (one turn a year) as there are a lot of years between 1793 and 1814. The range of interesting events in imported via the Time Line and we have slave revolts, mutinies and the French selling their own fleet during a war. My other great interest has been my ancient figure rules and Megablitz. I need a bit of time to assemble the latest Zvesda Pikemen so I can fight Successor battles. In 2003 Mike Siggins came over for a three battle day (the games play quickly) and we had a six foot wide Gaugamela and a rather more relaxed Heraclea and Bagradas. Megablitz in a battalion level game on WW2. With the typical size of units being a battalion one can seriously look at Soviet Armies and Allied/German Corps. I have therefore sunk into the joy of collecting obscure and odd units. One simply must field a Romanian Corps, or a few units of Handschar or perhaps the French SAS. I find the basic rules a bit vanilla and am therefore working on a variation of the Breakout Normandy system. The discovery of how I can use a map in Coreldraw to print a dinner table worth of terrain has opened a lot of opportunities. I am aiming to move rather more swiftly into PA105 and to this end you will find a request for more money where relevant. Those of you who prefer to wait and see if I can conquer my procrastination should only send money if the chitty tells you the sub is finished. Whether I succeed or not is a moot point. I found the need to severely limit my access to the Internet in order to move the magazine forward. But this is only part of the process of waking myself up from the downward spiral from my Mother’s death. If I do not manage this then I suspect it is not a question of whether PA keeps coming out but whether I keep coming out. As a monitor of this I am hoping to start a divisional level game on the Bulge soon. I remain amazed how little of what I read I see in Bulge games (though I look forward to trying out Bitter Woods). I wanted a game where American units do not decamp to carefully chosen crossroads but hang on in there fighting until naughty Monty gets them to retreat. We hope to use blocks with one day a turn. Will I make it or will I be found under the snow when Spring comes. Who knows? Back to Perfidious Albion #104 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. 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