David Fox This is splitting time with the big 'ol Ebro game, whose rotten English takes me back to the excesses of Marshal's early La Bataille stuff. As I said, looks like Europa shrunk to battalion level, but we shall see. It did lead me to check out Thomas' mammoth THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, a masterful history but at 1100 pages he needs to cut down on the detail. By the way, did you know that Scottie Bowden just finished a book on Austerlitz ? (CHV: Why does he need to cut down as well?) Thought that would keep you laughing. Let me know what you thought of the Vae Victis Loire game, too. (CHV: To hear is to obey O Little Master). I must say that I was truly embarrassed by the length of my Zorndorf review-- 5 closely spaced pages, is this boy serious ? I must learn to write shorter than that. As penance I shall now go read the English "translation" of the La Battala d'Ebro rules. There, now I feel better. I feel obliged to defy Nicholas Barker and stand up for GDW. For what was essentially a Frank Chadwick one-man band they did manage to produce some excellent and quite innovative games, with Citadel and Avalanche standing out in my mind. Lobositz and Beda Fomm are both small classics, while Traveller was an interesting alternative to a raft of Dungeons and Dragons clones. True, for every Crusader there was a Belter, but I think the gems far outweighed the dross. I hope that Frank now has more time to design games for other folks without having to worry about supporting the dead weight of a faltering game company. Fortunately I am a big Patrick O'Brian fan, so at least I'm not a wet and a weed. (CHV: But Dave me old fruit, the pedestrian language, the obsessive littering of naval knowledge, the paper thin characterisation, it's hardly a work of enduring value is it?) For anybody who was interested in Age Of Rifles, SSI has just released Age Of Rifles Campaign Disk #1 that adds campaign games on the Indian Mutiny and the War of Italian Unification and battle scenarios that include Adowa, Aliwal, the Little Bighorn (there's those darned Sioux again), Modder Hill (CHV: I thought it was river?), and Sobraon. It sells for only $15 in the States, so as a value it cannot be beaten. Speaking of value, and just to show how much I know, the boys at Clash of Arms are claiming that Home Before The Leaves Fall has already sold out. I just cannot understand why so many people would want to spend $100 on a top-heavy, overblown game on the Battle of the Marne. I am happy that it turned out to be a success for Clash, as I was afraid that it might be a back-breaking disaster, but now I fear that other companies will be encouraged to start slapping $100 price tags on their games. Please do not make the mistake of thinking you've got a captive market here, fellows. CHV:. The Ebro game is a Wristage Wrampage from a Spanish company called (confusingly) Vae Victis. No comments on the Loire as yet my copy is in the possession of the Sales Director of one of my companies (so probably in Atlanta as I write). Ed Wimble By the way, did I read [David] Fox correctly in a recent review in Perfidious Albion, when he quotes Nosworthy that in all his studies he could only find three instances of bayonets actually crossing in the Napoleonic Wars? If so, I find this a bit odd. Seems to me places like Ligny, Plancenoit, Mockern, Liebertwolkwitz, Aspern, Essling, la Moscowa and Eylau not only included bayonet work but biting and pulling hair too. And wasn't the other wound suffered by Napoleon, himself, a bayonet in the thigh (Toulon)? Maybe I read him wrong. If so I stand corrected. CHV: The existence of a terrain feature is certainly important in "fixing" both sides long enough to come to bayonet range. A more interesting question is how often in the open both sides got to the bayonet. As I understand the concept one lot is going to be advancing with deadly intent and the others must either counter-charge Ed Wimble I looked [David's] review over again this morning. I was off a bit. Brent's words, or the way [he] quoted him, were that there were only three instances of "shock" combat that he could find. Some may think this is splitting hairs, but, define it as you will, I do not think charging into a village, up a street, into a redoubt, a woods, a chateau, across a bridge, into a granary or a church, can really be called anything else. With regard to the use of the word "melee" in the "La Bataille" games: I never really thought that causing a unit to disorder and lose an increment of strength as the result of an assault across open ground represented 100 men bayoneted or clubbed to the ground. This result for me reflected losses caused by the confusion inherent in flight (the act of disordering while the enemy takes the ground you just left). Now a split melee result such as a 1/3 or 3/2 is another matter. In these cases you have a trading of casualties and no one disordering away. Frankly, I agree with you and Brent here (if such was your assertion that "shock" combat over open ground rarely resulted in casualties, and not as in the instances mentioned in the preceding paragraph). However, one can interpret these casualties in the same way I interpreted the losses with a Disorder result; that is, as the desire to flee and the orders to stand tug on the ranks of attackers and defenders, formations start to disintegrate. These losses, then, represent the partial disintegration of the units while the units themselves manage to hold their ground, barely. Actual losses in "La Bataille" games never represented killed and wounded men (the various publishers would never have thought to refer to men as increments of strength, just not the ethos one wishes to invoke.) Increments represent increments in effectiveness (Simtac got this all wrong when the used the standard abbreviation of company, or coy., in their effort to obscure the origin of their system. In fact, if these are companies that are represented, their counters are grossly inaccurate, since the average British battalion in the Peninsula should have twice as many, or thereabouts, as its opposite in the French army. Be this as it may, their coys end up being identical to our increments as far as the numbers go, and, therefore, cannot be companies.) When a unit loses two increments out of six, it is that much closer to ceasing to function as a unit, that's all. I once figured out a ratio to estimate real casualties as opposed to what the loss of effectiveness represents. I do not remember it just now, but if you multiply your losses in infantry increments by 16% you'll have something like the number of wounded, and 10% of that number added on to reflecting the number of killed. A full battalion of, say, 6 increments, completely reduced would only yield in actual losses 96 wounded and 10 killed in action. Of course, the number of "missing" would usually be equal to this total. These numbers could double or even triple given the right circumstances (such as standing in front of, or in the shot path of, a grand battery for several hours. In this case the casualties are accrued gradually. The unit does not have any great instance of confusion that shakes off a hundred men at a time, who then rejoin the colours after the shooting stops.) Regarding the reading of reviews: You know, I'm starting to believe that the only people who read these things anymore are people who have more than a foot in the industry. Everyone else seems to have moved to Disneyland. Dave Peashock Issue 94 was a long time coming, but I enjoyed it very much even though I did not understand many of the obscure (for an American) references to English history. Payback time for the industry's fixation on marginal American Civil War battles? CHV: No, payback time for all that money my father lavished on my education - poor man! Matthew Hartley As primarily a miniatures wargamer, who Role-plays and boardgames as a side interest, PA is my only source of news and reviews on the board gaming world. From the comments in PA, it seems I am not missing much by ignoring The General, S&T, and Command. Vae Victis sounds interesting but since I was forbidden from taking GCSE French due to spectacular inability and massacring the language with a Yorkshire accent, it is closed to me. Does anyone do translations of the game rules for those without Internet access? I must admit to being vastly underwhelmed by the current range of computer games. Pretty and pretty mindless for the most part. I agree that the potential for high-quality gaming (proper fog of war - whoopee!) is very high, but nowhere is it being realised. Some of Dr Turcan's efforts are interesting, but the interface is lousy and the games are slow. I too am utterly bemused by the continued use of hexes, why? I may be overly jaded with computer games and computers in general, since l spend 90% of my working day staring at VDU screens my enthusiasm for using them in my leisure hours is limited. I think that the death of boardgaming at the hands of computers has been overstated. The social aspect of boardgaming cannot be reproduced on computers, even with gaming by e-mail. Family games which have transferred to computer (Monopoly etc.) don't appear to have seriously affected the family boardgame market. Solitaire gaming will be immeasurably advanced when (eventually) good quality games appear, but ultimately I think players will want to sit around a table and play games with human friends. The Withering may well reduce the numbers of producers, new games, and alter the format of games but this downsizing may not be an entirely bad thing, if (okay, a big if) as a result of commercial pressure, companies start producing games people want to (and can) play rather than overly-large boring, slow, crappy ego trips. To judge from PA, there is a vast amount of dross out there, so some market discipline may be a useful corrective. I guess this rather optimistic view is based on the notion that publishers know what a good game is when they see it (or even - gasp - play it), and publish the dross anyway because we are stupid enough to buy it. Or are games publishers like aged rock stars who've had their quality control brain cells switched off? CHV: Richard Berg responds to this sort of stuff by saying that whatever we say we want, what most folks want is overly-large boring, slow, crappy ego trips. This he "proves" with sales-figures (contested by retailers like The Duke of Vicenza). This reminds me of the story told by Derek Cooper, the foodie, about going into a fish-shop in the Seventies: DC (for it is he): Have you any monkfish? Aged Crone: No, there isn't any call for it. Why only yesterday someone else asked me for monkfish and I said, there isn't any call for it! Since not many people produce good short games and most gamers (see Great Brown Noses last issue) need to develop ego-enhancing reasons for playing the games they elect for a "big" game which must be "better" than a smaller one. Richard is adept at dressing his games in the motley of history to provide this service to his customers. Of course those of us of the Chaotic Front respond in kind, we pick holes in and sneer at the big game's history thus making it hard for the publishers to claim the quality they need to sell. Its a life-unt-death struggle out there in gamer-land). Ian Drury Ludicrous deadlines to meet for this autumn's publishing programme have left little time for gaming, though the WD conference stimulated a frantic burst of activity to finish off the stuff I had foolishly promised sometime around Christmas. Fortunately, the 1916-18 battalion attack game (western front) was considerably eased by the purchase of both the British (early 1917) and French (December 1916) company tactics manuals. I'm using a combination of a gridded board with 15 mm toy soldiers which, after years of experiment, seems to meld visual appeal with a practical terrain system. (My previous 1916 game Hommes Soupes involved several shovel full of earth on to a table, creating a suitable Verdun moonscape for a motley bunch of AirFix Poilus). I bought Nosworthy's Napoleonic tactics book once it appeared in paperback. Hope to read it soon. How is Quatre Bras coming along? My 1745 game has tilted further in favour of the Hanoverian regime, after new details of government deployment came to light. However, a very bold and lucky Jacobite can still pull off a victory from time to time, and they often get tantalisingly close to success. Fall of Eagles set for more development now I've captured the proceedings of last year's conference at Leeds. First time I've seen anything on the Turkish manpower crisis...looks as if we really did nearly win at Gallipoli. Oh dear. Good to see you recommending Hollwig's WW1 volume, (did you see his excellent Luxury Fleet) -- it really is hard to cast German strategic war aims as exactly who is the German government becomes so confusing after 1915. Makes the Tory party look coherent and united. David Fox Origins was a real groove. My goal one year is to get more than 9 hours sleep total over three nights-- by Sunday morning I was pretty ragged. Mark Herman's ACW game is just about done, unfortunately it's more Hannibal than it is We the People, but maybe that's unavoidable when dealing with the more complex American Civil War. I thought Ben Knight's Battle for the North Atlantic card game simply smashing. It works best with 4-6 players, can be learned and played in half an hour, but is a real wide open game that requires intense player interaction. Both are due out from the Hill by the end of the '97, so their wargame line-up is suddenly improving. I'm sure that Starship Troopers (a tie-in with the American movie to be released in November) and Princess Ryan's Space Marines will erase any gains they make, of course. As I mentioned, I bought Leuthen about 30 seconds after entering the convention hall. Great looks, four maps but few counters so she's quite mobile. I'll review it for BROG and PA. (CHV: that's what you think you Potsdam Grenadier!). Rob Markham's Paschendaele game is a huge mess, so I'd advise you not to get too excited about it. He is working on smaller games about some battles from the War of the Roses, Barnet and Towton I think, so they could be more your line. The Gamers sold 160 copies of DAK in three days, which just shows that Americans will buy anything if it costs $100. Back to Perfidious Albion #95 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. 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