1. In December of last year, I sent two articles to Duncan Macfarlane, the publisher of WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED, the British glossy. One was a review of Scot Holder's PATRIOTS AND LOYALISTS, a set of rules for the American Revolutionary War, and the other was a set of skirmish rules, similar to those I had described in the pages of the REVIEW. Finally, after sitting on my input for some seven months, Duncan chose to publish my awardwinning (I know they're award-winning, since I granted the award myself) skirmish rules in his issue of September, 1999 (No 144). As of this date, the review of Scot Holder's effort is still in the can. It's an interesting choice of priorities, since Duncan is a British outlet for Scot's rules... one would think he'd want to push the rules set before he publishes some dinky skirmish set. Of course, it might be the fact that my rules are award-winning that played a key factor in his choice. 2. Paging through the November/December 1997 issue of MWAN (No. 90), I came across a letter to the editor with a note concerning DBM/DBA. The author, Chris Roberts, states that he was unhappy with the ability of the stands in the game to bounce back and forth through tens, yea hundreds, yea thousands, of melees, and show no ill effect... that there should be either a wee bit of disorganization or some sort of combat loss after a stand is in combat with the enemy. Chris proposed that a unit that recoiled should be given a temporary '-1' in combat if it immediately made contact in the next half-bound. The winning stand, the one that caused the push-back, didn't suffer at all. And the recoiling stand, if it could remain out of contact, would lose its '- 1' and be as good as new thereafter. Give a weak half-hearted cheer for Chris! As good as his idea is, the lad didn't go far enough. What is the matter with these DBM players? Whatever happened to 'realism'? Aren't there such things as 'permanent' losses? Why only 'temporary' losses? Sometime in mid-'98, the REVIEW published an article in which it was suggested that each time a stand in DBM engaged in combat, it took a permanent loss... a '-1' was, thereafter, always subtracted from its combat value. After engaging in a few combats, therefore, for all practical purposes, a stand would be exhausted, and of no further value in the fight. This was Fred Haub's contribution to an otherwise doltish DBM game we had set up in which the stands, the combat elements, bounced off each other during the battle, back and forth, time after time, interminably, with no diminution in combat strength. What's interesting to me is that although there are a lot of comments and suggestions on the DBA-DBM-DBR series, none of them speak to above issue. Let's face it, in the ancients world, there was no such thing as exhaustion... blocks of men fought and fought and fought until, due to an unlucky die roll, they all lay down and died together. Thus let it be written, and thus let it be done. Back to PW Review July 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 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