1. I received the pre-convention booklet for the HMGS 'FALL IN!' held in November at Gettysburg. Two things caught my eye. a. The pre-registration fee for the convention, i.e., mailing in your registration, was noted as $10 for an HMGS member, and $20 for a non-member. If you registered at the door, the fees were: $20 for an HMGS member, and $30 for a nonmember. I thought these fees were a wee bit excessive... perhaps I'm living in the past, when both the pre-registration and the pay-at-the-door fee was only $5. b. As more and more games get published, the authors are reaching, or perhaps over- reaching, for names for their rules systems. Most authors search for the 'double-emphasis' title, titles that roll trippingly on the tongue... such as FIRE & FURY, KEPI & BAYONET, BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER, CARNAGE & GLORY, SLIMEYS & LIMEYS, and so on. In the convention booklet was a set of rules for the colonial period, a skirmish set, called MATCHLOCKS ON THE WARPATH. I immediately asked myself... did matchlocks go on the warpath? Another interesting name for an ACW game was GIVE 'EM THE COLD STEEL. It appeared that these two authors, at least, were scraping the bottom of the barrel. 2. In a past issue of the REVIEW, I mentioned that British television was going to produce three wargaming battle re-creations, and I recently had a chance to see the end product. The first battle took place at Balaklava, the Crimean War. The two sides, British and Russian, each had their own operational headquarters room, complete with maps and tokens to display their troop movement. These headquarters staffs saw only those troops, allied and enemy, which they could actually see. At the umpires' headquarters, the main center, the entire display of all troops of both armies was visible. Dr. Paddy Griffin acted as head umpire, and Arthur Harman acted as chief dice thrower. Paddy would get a message from one side or the other, and deliver it to the main center, where Harman would mutter a few words about the advisability of the move, toss his dice, and determine what the outcome of the troop movement was. For example, in the re-creation of Waterloo, the British General (a real active-duty British General) playing Wellington decided to rush to the front lines to bolster his troops against an overwhelming French attack. Harman read the orders, and stated that the General didn't do too wise a thing... true, he had placed himself in the front line, but (a) there was a chance he'd get shot for his trouble, (b) he lost all knowledge of what was going on in the rest of the battlefield, and (c) the troops with whom he placed himself, didn't speak English... these were the Dutch-Belgium and Hanoverians, and according to Harman, these last asked each other in gutteral German: "Who is this big nosed Brit who just joined us?" Balaklava turned out to be a British victory, following historical precepts. And so did the ECW battle of Naseby, which the Royalists won. But, I must sadly report, the British lost at Waterloo... which was rather embarrassing to the active-duty General in command of the Brits. Of the three battles... Balaklava, Naseby, and Waterloo... Naseby was the most boring. There was little troop movement because the forces started out rather tightly packed. There was much more movement in the other two encounters. Each re-creation was a full 50 minute program, and I (and everyone to whom I spoke) could see lots of room for improvement. For example, whichever member of the television staff who had chosen the tokens which were set out on the maps, chose poorly. He had selected some bulky plastic tokens from an old boardgame... rectangles were used for infantry, circles for cavalry, and triangles for artillery. Not a miniature was to be seen. On the 3-D display at the main center, the hills were evidently sculpted of styrofoam, and some of the troop tokens had pins in the bottom, so that they could be firmly placed on the terrain. Other tokens had no such pins, and when they were placed on a slope, they quickly slid to the bottom. Poor planning. The editor of the magazine MINIATURE WARGAMES, Ian Dickie, acted as the television 'historian' for the three battles. In the battles, the staffs of both sides were, for the most part, retired British generals. But the person who won the most kudos was the television presentor, a woman named Angela Rippon. She acted quite knowingly about what was going on, asked the right questions at the right time, and moved the program along. Paddy said that very little was actually scripted for her, and everything she said was essentially off the cuff. All requests by the generals-in-charge were honored seriously, no matter how anti-historical they might be. For example, at Waterloo, the French General (Napoleon himself, evidently having read the history books) sent a message to Grouchy to stop fiddling around with Blucher and march to the battle site immediately. Via Paddy, the message went forth, and the reply - issued by the staff at the main center - indicated that Grouchy was taking his time about disengaging with Blucher and getting his troops on the road. Expressing a great deal of impatience, the French General then sent a message to Grouchy, sacking him, and sent Ney off to find Grouchy, and take over his command. Ney and his troops never arrived on the battlefield, but since the French won anyway, nothing was lost. As a wargamer familiar with the background of the three battles, I found that despite the gaffs, the three programs were quite interesting, and I was able to follow the goings- on of each command. But I could see that for a member of the general public, the presentation would be fairly confusing... in fact, boring, as the little tokens were pushed back and forth. Back to PW Review September 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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