1. A safe return. To England on March 11th and back on April 1st for my holiday -- three weeks during which I saw many friends ... and had too little to visit others! Rather than sum up all my adventures in one big clotted article, I shall write of them in bits and pieces. 2.Wargames Research Group (WRG) has published a grand-grand-tactical Napoleonics rules book: CORPS D'ARMEE by Geoffrey Wooten. The book came out in July 1989... I had never even heard of it until Tom Elsworth pointed it out... and to my surprise, it echoes some of the ploys which the REVIEW has mentioned: officers actually "do something". They are graded, and are used to seize the initiative in the alternate you go/I go game turn. Officers are "at risk" as they dash around the field, and, if carried off, may be replaced from the reserve pool. There is a procedure for a preemptive cavalry counter chargo to intercept a declared enemy charge at an adjacent friendly unit. A unit may "regroup" or "rebuild" in a quiet section of the battlefield, recovering figures lost through attrition. I am normally not a drum beater for WRG, but I must note that the CORPS D'ARMEE book (52 pages) appears to be one of the best written WRG rules books I've seen. The author talks TO you rather than AT and AROUND you. Note that I refer only to the writing style, not the rules themselves ... I've read the book, but not played the game. 3.The Eye Of The Beholder. While at Peter Dennis' house, Peter put on a medieval battle with 15mm figures in which units were given "disorganization" or "D" markers to indicate that something bad had happened to them (interpenetration by friendly troops, taken casualties, etc). The D markers were little half-inch squares of cardboard placed by the unit ... five D markers and the unit was termed ineffective. Upon seeing the cardboard D markers, I smugly remarked to Peter that I would never clutter the table with so obvious a marker on the field. I set up a skirmish game for the kids in the Dennis 25mm Franco-Prussian skirmish in which I noted, using a slip a piece of scotch tape, the name of each man on his base. To make the men more easily identifiable as each had a data sheet main parameters (efficiency and ammunition) were recorded. Peter took one look at the men and their tags and stated: "You're using markers!" I blinked... it took me a fraction of a second to realize that Peter was right! Here were these little 25mm men, some 20 of them, all marching up and down the field with great big signs dragging behind their rear ends as identifiers. To my mind, these huge signboards, big as sledges, had been acceptable ... while Peter's little D markers were not! 'Tis truly amazing, the way one sees the world through one's own rose colored glasses. 4.Lynn Bodin's estate is being auctioned off for the benefit of his family. A huge number of figures and books as available. There are 28 pages of listings, arranged in blocks or lots, and each lot will go to the highest bidder (assuming the bid is equal to, or greater than, a preset threshhold). The auction will continue until June of this year. Back to PW Review April 1990 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1990 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com