Since interest in my offer of my copy of Piquet's Field of Battle (2nd Edition) was limited to start with, and has fizzled out a couple of days ago, I've decided to default on the stated Terms & Conditions, and close now.
This was pretty much what I had expected - Piquet devotees will mostly have invested in the 3rd Edition already, so the enquiries I received were from people who were interested to have a look and see what it's all about.
Apart from a couple of comments which come under the general heading of "banter", I received four serious requests. As always, I had asked for some far-fetched or otherwise entertaining reason why each applicant deserved to receive the giveaway, which, as always, no doubt delighted me more than the contributors. I have to say, everyone did themselves proud; specially mentioned is Neil, who eloquently expressed the hopes and trepidations which a possible acquaintance with Piquet generated; however, the winner is the famous Chris Grice, author, celebrity, eco-warrior and all-round good egg, who produced a detailed and impassioned explanation of how he is having his house altered to allow greater scope for domestic wargaming, which would be helped enormously by the arrival of some rules which lend themselves to solo gaming.
A postal package will be arranged forthwith, if not fifthwith - thanks to everyone who took part or thought about doing so.
My goodness, thanks very much! Are you sure you won't get a rush of last-minute entries?
ReplyDeleteThat was a surprise - I've just dipped out of a Zoom meeting at work on the grounds of Luddism (I'm no expert and it was my first attempt, but isn't there supposed to be sound?) and was looking for something to cheer me up. Apart from a cup of tea, obviously.
Short progress report on The Magazine. It's ground to a short halt again due to an errant electrical cable causing a trip hazard at the top of the stairs. Part of the aforementioned booby-trapping of the cellar access, I daresay. I have no idea what this cable is or even if it is connected to anything, it disappears into brick wall at both ends, so I'll have to turn off all the electrics in the house in order to cut it and put in an extension piece so it can be tucked away safely. Interesting job in the dark.
Anyway, thank you very much again - really looking forward to giving these a try.
My pleasure.
DeleteMind how you go with that cable - many years ago, my cousin Edward (who lived in Wigan, in case you like extra detail) found an unexplained cable in his cellar when they were getting the boiler repaired, and found out that it went next door - the beggars next door were running a cable off his meter! He didn't like the neighbour anyway, so he reported them to the police and to the local electricity board, who sent round some inspectors, and found that in fact the situation was the opposite way around - the previous owner of his house had connected to the neighbour's wiring, so it came off *their* meter, and had done so for about 15 years. Luckily nothing was now connected to this extra feed. (Cousin Edward was unable to show his face at the pub darts evenings until many months later)
That's interesting - might have to try that. The person who wired (or rewired) this house was a true artist - such imaginative use of coloured wire deserved a Turner Prize. All this was hidden under the boxing-in on the stairs and ripping it all out revealed a number of similar mysteries but this is the only one liable to leg you up as you descend the stairs; the rest have been safely secured to the back wall.
DeleteCongratulations Chris! I am one who considered entering for the generous offer but having been somewhat traumatized by my first playings of Piquet many, many years ago, I just couldn’t overcome my trepidation. A cat having jumped onto a hot stove will not jump onto a hot stove again, nor a cold one. Perhaps I should have jumped?
ReplyDeleteHi Jon - I'm not going to say anything you don't know already, but the Field of Battle series appear to me to be a lot more pragmatic than the original Piquet. A number of the base mechanisms and procedures are still present, but once you are acclimatised that's OK - bottom line is that FoB involves less relentless admin than the original, and feels less like acting out a game scripted by someone else! I played a series of games on a visit to Ireland a couple of years ago, and enjoyed them thoroughly, but I was playing with real experts, and the game really galloped along. Without that confident game management, I've struggled to develop the same flow - I guess it's to do with experience!
DeleteThanks Jonathan. Well I've heard good reports and bad but never played them myself so I thought Tony's kind offer was a good opportunity. I'm a terrible rules-tinkerer anyway but it sounds like these give a good framework for solo play where you actually want some of the decisions taken out of your hands.
DeleteJohnathon, you went farther than ne. Watching a game when it was first published was enough to put me off while praise by enthusiasts only made me more gunshy
DeleteChris,
ReplyDeleteThey’re well worth a try out. Especially good for solo play.
Tony,
At least you’ve made someone’s day - always nice when Christmas comes early
Hi Graham - yes - early Christmases-R-Us. Another plus for the Piquet rules family is that they are deliberately intended as a tool-kit, so you can simplify or adapt as you wish. I run a rather simplified regime on the "Leadership" and "Army Morale" cards, and have a crafty rule-of-thumb way of keeping track of how many Initiative Points have been spent in the current turn/initiative. I also use an old billiards scoreboard to keep track of remaining Army Morale Points, which is hardly a simplification, but it works for me! One disadvantage I seem to have is that I have some strange type of dice-lexia (as it were), meaning that I have to look carefully at the D10 and the D12 before I can tell which is which, so my games require the dice to be lined up in order, in a special little rack, so I can just pick them up - mind you, it keeps things nice and tidy...
DeleteI did have a serious go at learning the original Piquet game, nearly 20 years ago, plus the Les Grognards supplement, but I got bad headaches trying to understand the Horizon Movement system (variable-length turns - shades of George Jeffrey). Well, I guess I understood what it was intended to achieve, but I came up short on visualising the philosophical and time-travel aspects of what happens if the enemy opens fire part way through your horizon move. Just too stupid, I guess, but that's nothing unique to these rules.
I don't have this dice recognition problem much, but many do. Try having standard colors for your polyhedral dice. For many years it was yellow for D4, Orange for D6, Green for D8, Blue for D12, and white for D20. Now days maybe red for D10, but whatever. You can have one side use opaque versions and the other some variant like clear, speckled, etc.
DeleteHi Peter - that's clever, but I would worry that for me it is something else to remember. I am a dreadful fellow for improvising some new, fiendishly brilliant house convention to solve some problem or other - downside is that I do it so frequently that the world is full of half-assed solutions to problems I can't remember having (I stress here that I am describing my own improvisations as half-assed, not yours!), and the sheer number of them means they get forgotten. I stare in bewilderment at a little box full of specially-prepared yellow plastic counters with numbers on them, for example, and wonder what the blazes they were for!
DeleteMy special racks for the polydice work well - in fact, each cell in the rack is labelled with the type of dice which is supposed to live there - more OCD happiness. It also encourages me to keep loose dice off the tabletop, which can never be a bad thing!
I have come to accept that Piquet-family games (which in my case means FoB3 and Vauban) require polydice in two colours, and that's fine. Since I have no background in games which have a tradition of such dice, there was a time when I regarded the polydice rather as an overhead, a very fiddly way of achieving something which could have been done more simply in another way, but I have grown out of that phase now.