Hooptedoodle #37 - Paul McCartney's Bus Pass

Like radio stations the world over, the BBC puts on supposedly topical programmes in the late morning, so that listeners may phone in or text their views. I can see that this is a cheap way of constructing a programme, and has a sort of appeal in that any flapmouth in the country may have 30 seconds of exposure. It has to be a sign of advancing age that I find these programmes serve mostly to increase my blood pressure. I cannot find any upside at all, I'm sorry. They are not informative, they prove nothing, they do not even reflect mainstream views. The people who can be bothered to get in touch will normally be those who care deeply about the topic, often to the exclusion of all else, or else head cases - or so it seems. I find myself leaping to the radio, yet again, to change stations, muttering "Beam me up, Scotty..."

It worries me to find myself shouting at the radio, so I must stop listening to these shows. A couple of days ago, the hot topic was the money which our bankrupt, stupid nation could save by means-testing benefits for pensioners. The example which generated a lot of heat was that Paul McCartney, as a pensioner, is entitled to a free bus pass. What? Clearly Sir Paul is not short of a few quid, and not what you would call needy, but somehow nobody mentioned any of the following:

(1) Apart from the countless dollars he has earned for UK trade, how many zillions of pounds in taxes and earnings-related National Insurance has McCartney handed over during all these years, as the cost of being a paid-up citizen of the United Kingdom?

(2) Is he likely to actually use his bus pass? Have you ever seen him on the number 27? Apart from the overhead of the many levels of bureaucracy required to produce the pass itself, what is the real cost of occupying a seat on a service bus if he did? He would not be allowed on in the rush hour, for a start.

(3) If the UK can't afford to provide piddling benefits to people who have paid their way and are entitled to them, how can we afford complete fol-de-rols like the London Bloody Olympics?

As a footnote on the worthy subject of the Olympics, I wish to phone in my earnest and very reasonable view that anyone who obtains a knighthood for being involved in the schmooze industry which surrounds them, or who makes a private fortune out of ticket scams, should be executed by firing squad, live on the Lottery show on Saturday night TV. Their wealth may be redistributed appropriately.


I thank you.

Solo Campaign – Nearly Time to Get Started

It would be possible to tinker about with details indefinitely, and never get under way - there is something of that in my character. I have to remind myself why I wanted to do campaigns again, and I also have to focus clearly on some of the advantages of doing it solo.

I have been involved with campaigns before, though never on my own, and they always seemed a satisfying way to generate tabletop battles. They were absorbing at many levels and, apart from setting the wargames into a more meaningful context, they also helped to encourage more general-like behaviour - in particular

(1) since the survivors of a battle will be required to continue to play a useful part in the continuing war, it is a good idea to avoid unnecessary casualties; thus the concept of a controlled retreat becomes important.

(2) armies have to be positioned so that the component parts can support each other, without starving each other to death - not everyone is going to be available all the time, and not everyone is going to be on top form.

This next bit is kind of cyclic logic - it isn't strictly speaking the reason why I have grown my armies far beyond what can fit on a single battlefield, but viewing them as the participants in a grander scale, map-based game has almost become the justification for continuing to add to them. I am impressed by Charles S Grant's recommendation that no units should appear in your campaign OOBs unless you actually have representative figures for them. There will be a need for spare, generic bataillons de marche to provide gap-fillers here and there, and some re-use is a good idea in such circumstances, but my army has built up slowly enough for me to cherish the personalities involved, However silly it might seem, it wouldn't seem right to field my 42nd Royal Highland Regt, who are mostly ancient Garrison figures and have had this ID since about 1974, and pretend for the day that they were the Gordons. Obviously I could do it if necessary, but my instinct would be to come up with another unit of highlanders for this alternative role. Given a choice, I would prefer to bend history a little. It's not just that the facing colours would be wrong (though there is that, now I come to think about it...) - it's the feeling of a slight betrayal of some old friends. Does that make any sense, doctor?

A practical example of a historical fudge is offered by my sketched-out, first-cut deployment of the French. My starting point will be loosely based on January 1812 - how loosely is still a matter for consideration. Historically, the 2-battalion Hesse-Darmstadt regiment Gross und Erbprinz should be in the garrison of Badajoz. On the other hand, I am rather fond of my little Hessians, and would like to see them on the tabletop at some point. The siege of Badajoz looks like an obvious early event in the campaign, which probably means that the units in the garrison will never be seen again if the place falls. Given the choice, I'll fill Badajoz with unspecified units (which can develop an identity later if required), and I'll put the Hessians somewhere else.

Another big selling point for a campaign is that everyone (within reason) in The Cupboard can get involved - even the siege train and the engineers and the logistics boys. Not sure about the Band of King Joseph’s Guards, mind you.

I'm running out of excuses for delay. I have a map, I have my fancy new magnetic map counters, and I have rules. Aha - the rules - they're not complete, though, are they? Well no, they aren't, but they are about 90% complete, I would estimate, and this is where the "solo" bit of the solo campaign scores heavily. There are some inherent features of solo campaigning which are obviously advantages anyway - a campaign will generate some battles which are not finely balanced (in fact, many of them will be, realistically, skewed in favour of one side or the other), and some which are not suitable for fighting on the tabletop for some reason or other - in particular, mathematical sieges are going to be pretty much devoid of anything worth looking at. None of this matters a jot for the solo game - there is no need to dignify the evening with an elegant game, supper, all that. One does not even have to look one's best, as the ancient joke goes.

But there's more - if I have to improvise or alter rules where gaps become apparent (and they will), if I have to re-run things that don't work - even if I have to give up and start all over again - then if I am on my own it is not a problem. So my 90% rules will be fine for a start.

There are 3 remaining areas where I have a little work to do before I am ready.

(1) Intelligence and scouting – it is not easy to have any level of Fog of War if I can see from my magnetic map and my spreadsheets exactly who everyone is, and where they are, complete with the minutiae of weekly strength returns, and all that. My approach to this will be that I (as the Great Panjandrum) will know everything, and will have a system for working out the imperfections in what the units know about each other. Each group commander will have orders and objectives, and a personality (historical or not). The Fog system will allow for relative proportions of cavalry, the anti-French bias of the local population, plus a few random numbers to help each local commander to act on the information he has.... Since it is my game, if I don’t like the way it shapes up, I shall cheat as necessary until I like it better.

(2) I really can’t model the whole Peninsular War – I don’t have enough model soldiers or enough brain power, so determining how to scope it and restrict the field of operations is a challenge. My current plan is to declare most of Andalusia out of bounds (by reasoning that Soult is so obsessed with the siege of Cadiz and the irregulars in the South, and so unlikely to wish to help anyone else, that this area is self contained). Similarly, I hope to ignore the East coast area around Valencia and Tortosa, since Suchet and his Spanish opponents in these parts can keep each other fully occupied. Galicia, too can be off-limits for this first campaign.

So, in my cut-down bit of the map, the French will have an Army of Portugal with, instead of the historical 8 divisions, 3 oversized ones, with artillery and cavalry in proportion. The Army of Portugal will probably be about 60% of the strength of the real one. There will be a scaled down Army of the Centre based around Madrid, and (very much a simplification of the real war) a representative Army of the North to look after the forts and communications in Navarre and Biscay.

Wellington will have an army consisting of his First, Third, Sixth, Seventh (one brigade missing) and Light Divisions, each being overstrength at the start. Cavalry and artillery, like their French equivalents, will be scaled to suit the reduced force.

The Spanish field army is not large (since I am choosing to ignore most of the areas where they were heavily involved) but does exist, and there is an arrangement whereby the irregular partisans of Castile, Navarre, Biscay and Aragon may pop up all over the place in their own province – not bound by the normal movement rules – but may not move or fight outside their own patch.

I’m doing quite a lot of work on this bit. I’ll post a detailed OOB when I’ve got it firmed up.

(3) One area of the rules I would like to test out before I start is my in-house tweaked version of Commands & Colors:Napoleonics, intended to cope with very large battles. I have not actually fought a battle with this yet, and would feel a lot more confident if I had that experience under my belt (so to speak). In this grand tactical variant of CCN, “units” are brigades, and there are still some changes being worked on to cope with Divisional artillery, which (at this moment) may be attached to a unit or detached from it in a manner very similar to Leaders in the standard CCN game.

I still have a lot of notes from my attempt to fight Los Arapiles last year, and it should be easy enough to borrow heavily from those to do it again using the CCN variant. I intend to stage that battle in the next couple of weeks, and after that the campaign should be ready to go. If the wind blows in a favourable direction, there should be an outline of the GT modifications to CCN here shortly, plus some kind of report of a Salamanca refight using them.

I do realise, of course, that much of the flexibility and informality which I would expect from doing this solo is seriously compromised by writing it up here, so I hope any readers will accept that I am feeling my way, and will cut me some slack accordingly!

The Funky Chicken - Yet Another Mystery Figure

I'm spending an unhealthy amount of time dredging through the dark recesses of the spares bags at present, trying to find figures suitable for a career change, leading draught horses and carts etc around.

This fellow (there's only one of him - it's a montage) is clearly RHA, and his jacket without tails suggests he is a gunner rather than a driver (a distinction which S-Range Minifigs never got the hang of). What is he? What, moreover, is he doing? From likely date of manufacture, it might be the Funky Chicken, or possibly the Frug.

I thought he looked like a horse-holder, and maybe Alberken or early 20mm Minifigs, but I cannot find such a figure listed anywhere. Maybe he's a conversion, but I don't think so. Anyway, he's likely to find himself leading a limber around in the near future. He's 20mm - skinny little chap, as you see, but wiry.

...and Beads

Many thanks to Willie Morgan and his wife Megan, who make costume jewellery and know about glues. By the way, I think Megan Morgan is an excellent name.

This is the stuff. Evo-Stik Serious Glue. Leaves the tube with a jelly-like consistency, does not tend to string or run about. Stays moveable for 3 minutes, sets hard in 2 hours. Fully cured the next day. It will fill gaps, stick uneven surfaces.

I haven't done all the beads yet, but am working through them. Fiddly fiddly. This requires some care, since the little magnets will happily leap 4 or 5 inches to join a neighbour, or stick to my penknife. You need plastic tweezers for this job. Here you see a couple of finished markers on the laminated master map - a division of the Armee de Portugal in Valladolid, plus a garrison in Burgos castle to keep the supply road open.

Baubles, Bangles

Well, beads anyway. Any glue experts out there? I could do with a little advice.

For my upcoming solo campaign (for which I hope to have a working rules draft in a week or two), I need something pretty good in the way of map markers. My map of Iberia has been printed up nicely at A3 size, and laminated. It is now on the magnetic whiteboard in my office, and I am working on creating very small magnetic markers for the combat groups.

I have thought up a design, the materials are here - all I need now is to assemble them with sufficient precision!

The counters will be 7mm acrylic "spacer" beads (as used in necklaces and friendship bracelets) which are embossed with the letters of the alphabet, and these are to be fastened to some fabulous little 4mm magnets I have obtained. There will be 3 colours of beads - one alphabet for each, to cope with the 3 armies. The beads are 3mm thick, the magnets 1mm.

The makings – a couple of beads, a magnet and Her Majesty’s head on a £1 coin, all laid out on a board marked with 5mm squares. The coin is not part of the design – it is there to give an idea of the size. You probably realised that. On this scale, my finger-ends would look like elephants’ feet.

I'm dithering over choice of glue at present. The magnets are amazingly powerful, so the glue must be strong enough to allow the markers to be removed from the map without breaking and leaving the magnets behind. The beads are rounded and have the letters embossed on both sides; if they were flat on the back, I would consider superglue, but I'm not a fan of using superglue to fill gaps or provide part of the structure. I could use Araldite, but it's messy to work with, and these are very fiddly parts - I could easily end up with the whole lot glued permanently to my workbench. I need some user-friendly glue which will stay where I put it, fill the gaps between the curved bead and the flat magnet, and dry rigid and STRONG.

I have a few ideas, but there may be something out there which is just what I am looking for.

One of the attractions of the beads and magnets is they were very cheap - the magnets were about £5 for 100, the beads came to about the same amount again in total. Slight problem with the beads is you get 150 mixed letters in a bag, so you have to do some quick maths to identify how many bags you need to be pretty sure of getting at least one complete alphabet!

Trouble at t'Mill - Solo CCN with miniatures

The Battle of Fuentelolmo

Last night I played a Commands & Colors (CCN) battle, using my home-brewed tweak to allow solo play. I took the Spanish side, and played the French (no cheating), using a blind hand of Command Cards. Not only did the game go well, it was actually very exciting, which is unusual for my solo wargames - they are often interesting, but seldom gripping. It was finished in about 2 hours, which is good, considering the time taken for photos and talking to myself...

The OOB

French force (Abbé)

Flying column (reserve):
2 bns of (dismounted) 1er Dragons Provisoire, plus 1 Bataillon d'Elite (Line Grenadiers)
French foot battery

Neuenstein's Confederation Brigade
4 Bns

Leberknödel's Vorpommern Brigade
4 Bns
Vorpommern foot battery

Kleinwinkel's Vorpommern Lt Cavalry Bde
1 & 2 Chevauxlegers

[Neuenstein's and Leberknödel's brigades are classed as line infantry, though each also has a small light infantry "battalion" formed of the combined voltigeur companies]

Spanish force (De España)

Spanish regulars
3 bns line infantry, 2 of light infantry
Foot battery

Voluntarios (Pardo)
2 bns light troops, 2 of militia
Volunteer Foot battery

Cavalry (Sanchez)
2 units of Lanceros de Castilla
Perseguidores del General (who are irregulars)

Partidas (Perez - "El Barbero")
4 small "bns" of guerilleros

Portuguese (Otway)
2 regts Portuguese dragoons
Thomar militia bn
Foot battery

The Scenario

Background is that local partisan irregulars under the command of the noted Don Alonso Perez (known as "El Barbero" because of his skill with a razor) have had considerable success in and around the little town of Fuentelolmo, driving out the French garrison. In response, General Jean Abbe has been sent to recover the situation with a couple of German brigades (including the previously untried Pommeranians, the contingent of the Duchy of Stralsund-Rügen), and a token force of Pommeranian light cavalry. His best troops are French, intended as reinforcements for the Armée du Centre, but borrowed to provide Abbé with some grenadier-quality infantry. Abbé is disappointed to discover that his column has been well publicised, and the Spanish forces are greatly stiffened by a line Division under Carlos de España, a good volunteer brigade and even some Portuguese troops under Col Otway.

The French have a numerical disadvantage in cavalry and artillery. The Spanish have some disadvantages in the unpredictability of their troops - the line troops will fight well, but suffer double retreats, the militia/volunteers suffer triple retreats, and any retreat at all by any of the guerilleros will eliminate them. They will come back and fight again, but not today.

The terrain is fairly open, with some small hills, a couple of them very rocky, and some small areas of woodland. The Spanish have taken a position with their right on the town of Fuentelolmo, held by the Volunteer brigade, with support from Sanchez' cavalry. The line troops and the Portuguese hold the more hilly area on the left, and El Barbero's more volatile irregulars are held in the rear of the centre. The intention is to defend the position, and allow the French to attack. Abbé has his Pommeranians on the right, the rest of the Germans on the left, and holds the "flying column" as a reserve behind his centre.

The French move first, 5 Command Cards each, and victory requires 7 "banners".

The Narrative (brief)

The day began tentatively, both sides deploying carefully and weighing up the opposition in each area.

Not for long. On his first move De España played a "Grande Manoeuvre" card, which allows a turn of very rapid movement - there is only one of these in the game, I think. Pardo's volunteer brigade rushed to its right, occupied the farm buildings at San Baudelio and deployed the volunteer artillery company of Avila to very good effect. The initiative on this side was suddenly with the Spanish - their defence had become an attack so quickly that I had some difficulty keeping track of what I was doing!

More lucky card drawing resulted in the French playing a "Counter Attack" card - again a rarity; this card allowed the French commander to repeat the Spanish "Grande Manoeuvre" - so once again troops were running across the table. Now the French reserve rushed to seize the mill at Demonio and its surrounding buildings - they were now opposed only by the guerrilleros, and also offered a threat to the left flank of the advanced brigade of volunteers.

The action was bloody and very evenly balanced. Both sides suffered from having left their artillery out of position as a result of the rapid advances - especially the French - and both commanders must have regretted the lack of horse artillery. Early on, the French suffered very heavy losses as they advanced across open ground in support of the position at the mill, which was gallantly held by the foot dragoons.

The Spanish line troops fought bravely but unsuccessfully to take the mill, and lost heavily - including a serious wound to their commander. De España was rushed from the field, and is expected to recover.

Now the cards turned things around again - the foot dragoons would not be dislodged, but eventually lack of ammunition forced them to retire - the dreaded "Short Supply" card sent them to the rear, and the battered remnants of the Cazadores de Castilla captured the position. Now - belatedly - the Pommeranians came into their own. One spectacular turn of firing from young Major Nyudrev's battery wrecked a Spanish line battery which had been causing considerable damage, and finally Graf Leberknödel led his two fusilier battalions out of the woods to excellent effect - they routed the remains of España's light troops, destroyed an unfortunate Portuguese militia battalion which got in the way, and - taking advantage of a valuable "Leadership" card - captured the Portuguese howitzer battery. Game over - that was the 7th victory banner. The French edged it, 7-5, though they were 5-3 down at one point. It could, in truth, have gone either way very easily.

I don't know why I am so elated - I lost. Losing a solo game is quite an achievement, I guess. Anyway - it was excellent fun. The solo tweak works well and without difficulty - you just have to remember to ditch the "First Strike" card if it appears, since it cannot be used in a solo game.

The Pictures

The Vorpommern brigade on the French right

General view at the start - the town is in the top right corner, the mill in the dead centre of the table. The Spanish forces are set out down the right hand side, with Portuguese cavalry in the foreground

The French "reserve" (ha ha) in the centre

Pommeranians - the Chevauxleger regiment "Herzogin Katrin" - they had a bad day on the left flank

Confederation troops on the French left

Spanish right and centre, on the outskirts of the town

Voluntarios

Otway's Portuguese cavalry - on loan for the day

The ill-fated Portuguese howitzers

Guerrilleros - were successfully kept out of harms way for the most part. Father Francisco working on Divine intervention

The trouble starts here

Spanish central defence suddenly becomes the right flank...

The boys done good - Graf Leberknoedel brings up the Pommeranian fusilier battalions

Now things get really silly - the French are rushing about too

The critical fighting around Molino Del Demonio

Foolhardy - the "Herzogin Katrin" cavalry fancy their chance against the volunteer artillery - Julian Sanchez' lancers are about to make short work of them

Nyudrev Pulls It Off - Pommeranian artillery puts paid to those pesky Spanish 8pdr boys - and not before time

The Joy of Command Cards - you can fight as bravely as you like, but you'll need ammo

"Tulips" - the Pommeranian grenadier battalion "Zum Alten Greif" puffing their way up a hill - they never got into action

The Thomar militia in the wrong place at the wrong time - eliminated (streaky dice)

And that is that. Leberknoedel with the remnants of the IR "Graf von Grimmen" just about hung on to capture the howitzers, and that was the 7th victory banner

More Mystery Figures - any ideas?

Just received these today. I have no idea what they are - spindly 20mm - French infantry (hats are a bit strange). I thought from the little picture on eBay that they were going to be Hinton Hunt Spaniards painted as Frenchmen, but that is clearly not correct. Bases are small, rounded squares - like HH or Der Kriegsspieler, but they don't look like these makers' figures.

It has been suggested that they might be home-cast copies of DK, but I'm not convinced. Anyone seen anything like this before? I have 12 of them, with varying proportions of bayonet.