1 . I heard that the PIQUET authors were developing a naval game along PIQUET lines. Every turn, all ships would move some minimum amount, and when one of the PIQUET cards was drawn, it would enable the player to select a given ship and change course or speed or whatever. In the March issue, I mentioned a naval game based on the DBX series. This had been published in the British glossy, WARGAMERS ILLUSTRATED. Here, when a die is tossed, a pip can be used to control a ship, and all ships unable to be assigned pips simply 'cruise' along, i.e., float along, at 2 inches per turn. I can see it coming... a host of rules soon to appear in MWAN and COURIER, all based on exhaustive naval pip theory and analysis. 2. Some of you may have noted that the re-subscription rate has been lowered. PW's main outlay now consists of mailing costs... we no longer meet at the church, so we have no monthly rental fees to pay. As guardian of the PW treasury, it's a pleasure to see it relatively fat and happy (although relatively inert and immobile), sitting in the summer sun, instead of being constantly drained each month. When your subscription is up, you'll receive a notice that the re-up fee is currently down to 10 dollars for the year... now there's a bargain up with which you cannot pass. 3. All these years of browsing through the internet, and it's only lately that I signed on to a series of news groups. These are sites which offer an exchange of ideas on specific topics. My interest is miniatures wargaming, and so I naturally congregated to those sites featuring such information. Most of these sites offer a chronological record of every input of every contributor... and they may number in the thousands. And, unfortunately, most contributors have nothing to say, but contribute simply to see their name in print, which means that tracking down the various messages is frustrating, since it results, about 70 percent of the time, in nothing fruitful. The internet has always puzzled me. Who's actually paying to broadcast the millionbillion-zillion bytes of encyclopaedic information across the aether? The stock answer is 'the advertisers'... but there can't be that many advertisers. Back to PW Review April 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon 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