Falcata - if you blinked you missed them

My earlier post on Falcata Miniaturas, the Madrid based manufacturer of 1/72 scale white metal Napoleonic figures, has attracted a lot of interest since it appeared - I think it's currently at No.2 in my all time hit list!

I've also had a number of enquiries asking for details of the range, and their current availability. I have to say that I don't really know very much about them. They started production in September 2004 - I am reliably informed that the original intention had been to make the figures in plastic (which makes sense when you see the range of poses), but they opted for white metal - and they seem to have closed the business sometime in 2008. The date is uncertain - supplies to retail outlets stopped, and stock was gradually cleared. Remainder items are hard to find now, though they turn up on eBay from time to time.

The range, sold in packs of 34 castings, was:

FE-01 Spanish Line Infantry

FE-02 Spanish Grenadiers

FE-03 French Infantry

FE-04 British Infantry

FE-05 Spanish Garrocheros & Lanceros de Carmona

FE-06 KGL Heavy Dragoons

and that was as far as they got. Subsequent releases were planned thus:

FE-07 Spanish Guerrilleros
FE-08 Spanish Line Artillery
FE-09 Spanish Hussars
FE-10 British Rifles
FE-11 French Guard Marines [for Baylen?]
FE-12 Polish Guard Lancers [for Somosierra?]
FE-13 British Highlanders

but, sadly, they never appeared.

My Peninsular War Spanish Armies (1) - Nationalists

If you study a modern English-language history of the Peninsular War - and Charles Esdaile's book is a particularly good example - you get an impression of that conflict which would have been barely recognisable 50 years ago.

It seems unbelievable now, but my original plan for my wargame armies for the Peninsular War had no Spanish troops on either side. Laughable might be a better word. There were reasons. Partly it had to do with the availability of suitable miniatures in the correct scale (20mm or old-fashioned 25mm - basically "1-inch" figures), but it is also true that the overwhelming impression I gained from my reading prior to (say) 1975 was that this was appropriate. I had read and re-read Michael Glover's "Wellington's Victories in the Peninsula", and moved on to his more substantial "The Peninsular War 1807-1814" when it appeared in 1974. Looking at it again today, it is remarkable. Considering that Glover freely acknowledges that his main source was Oman's multi-volume tome, it does make you wonder what happened to all the Spanish bits. The narrative strings together the campaigns of the British troops (with some reference to their integrated Portuguese allies) and of the French armies which were specifically engaged in opposing them. Thus there is only fleeting reference to the other French armies (virtually nothing about the crucial fighting between Suchet and the guerrilla forces in the north, for example), and the Spaniards appear only rarely, and in cartoon form. Cuesta is portrayed as a character straight out of Punch and Judy, and the performances of the Spanish field armies are mentioned only when they support the general themes of incompetence and disorganisation. The cataclysmic Spanish success at Baylen is covered in two short paragraphs, and - to restore balance - Castaños is described as "one of the few Spaniards of talent".

You get the idea. This polarised view of history was supported by Jac Weller's "Wellington in the Peninsula" and by what I had seen of the classic work by Napier. The Spanish guerrillas were effective (if distressingly given to barbaric vengeance), but the real war was between Wellesley/Wellington and the French Army of Portugal. This was the received British view of the Peninsular War.

Because of the shortage of pre-1812 wargame figures, I was pretty much committed to the later stages of the war, and I took Salamanca as my period of choice. Admittedly there were some Spanish troops in the Allied army at Salamanca, but they did not play a major part, I could find little or no reliable information about either their organisation or their dress, and the writings of Messrs Featherstone and Co suggested very strongly that no-one would actually choose to command a Spanish force anyway. So though I did pencil De España's division into my proposed OOB, I had no thoughts really on how to set about recruiting it.

Since my return to wargaming this period in recent years, I find that the histories now give a much wider view, and that it is now generally accepted that the Spaniards did much more than merely providing a location and an excuse for the British and the French to fight each other. I have done a lot of work on researching and building Spanish contingents for both sides, still taking my base year as 1812. It is a lot easier now.

The Nationalist Forces

None of this would ever have been possible if I hadn't obtained a copy of JM Bueno's fine "Uniformes Españoles de la Guerra de Independencia", which is a real reference bible. In the scales I use, only Hinton Hunt and Minifigs (I can use some S-Range figures) made Spanish infantry in the British supplied 1812 uniform. Since I was dissuaded from selling the house to raise funds to purchase HH (which, strictly speaking, are a tad small for me anyway), I managed to collect together enough Minifigs SN1s figures to put together some battalions. Partly this was achieved though some swaps which in some cases amounted almost to acts of charity - I am still very appreciative of everyone who helped. Most of my line units are SN1s, with mounted colonels converted from Art Miniaturen Belgians. The Cazadores de Castilla required a double-breasted coat with British light-infantry style shakos, so Falcata French infantry were fitted with Higgins British LI heads. Because I could not get hold of enough S-Range infantry, I also have a battalion of Warrior figures. They are OK, but I'll replace them if I can get more of the Minifigs. There's something about Warrior - if you measure them they should be reasonably compatible, but somehow they don't look quite right. Also, they always have that lunging stance which causes visitors to say, "Ah - I see you have some Warrior infantry - what unit is that?".

Regiments of Sevilla, 2nd Princesa and Jaen, with, in the foreground, the Tiradores de Castilla (left) and Cazadores de Castilla.

I have also added a battery - the gunners are uniformed in the French style - not least because the castings are NapoleoN French foot artillery. The officer is Art Miniaturen.

My generals are as yet unpainted - they are in the pipeline. I would like to add some cavalry, but am still looking for suitable figures. Warrior do make lancers, but they have a touch of Picasso’s Don Quixote about them which makes it hard for me to take them seriously, and Warrior's own horses are too like Bucephalus to fit in. There were (very briefly) some terrific Falcata lancers, available a couple of years ago, but I missed those (of course).

I'm now working on a militia brigade to add to this organisation - 4 battalions plus a battery. Castings are NapoleoN and more Minifigs S-Range, and I hope to obtain a battalion's-worth of Kennington's 1812 American militia, which look to me like a good prospect for a nation switch. I'll put some pictures up here when the militia are painted and ready for action.

Hooptedoodle #19 - Safety in Numbers

Foy's Ninth Law is:

Top-end technology is valueless if you man it with bottom-end personnel.

I'm aware that there has been a regrettable element of flippancy in some of the recent Hooptedoodle posts, and I am determined to get back to nice, opinion-free pictures of painted soldiers as soon as possible, but today's post is brought to you because I feel obliged - duty-bound, even - to share something which may make you feel a whole lot more comfortable.

It might even improve your day.

I know a lot of people worry about security - we know that we are being watched, that our emails are being sniffed, that International Crime is listening to our mobiles. Only recently, the British Daily Mail (bless them) were explaining how illegal immigrants spend their nights trawling through dustbins, looking for documents which we have thoughtlessly left there, which will enable them to steal our identities. That's right - steal them. And how are you going to cope with having no identity? If you were the sort of person who was unguarded enough to speak to a stranger, how would you introduce yourself?

This is a very serious matter. Characteristically, I have been giving it much thought. There is also the worrying possibility that anyone who steals my identity might actually get some use out of it (something which I have never managed) or, even worse, might bring it back to complain about it.

Well, it's a small step, but I have some good news. The credit card companies, at least, are doing their best for us. Last night I set about paying my credit card balance online, as is my habit, but found that the secure part of the website was shut down for maintenance. Naturally I was a little disgruntled about this - I mean, the whole point of the internet is convenience, right? - and, apart from that, I'd even made a fresh cup of coffee specially. However, these things happen, so I left it until this morning, and tried again.

Still no joy. Now an inaccessible secure website is pretty secure, I have to admit, but not being able to pay my bills is tough going. I searched around the website until I found the helpline number for the online service. After some delay, I spoke to a very pleasant, very correct young lady, to see if she could tell me when the online service was going to be back up again, so that I could plan my day around this convenient facility.

You will be reassured - possibly delighted - to know that the young lady would not give me this information until we had gone through my credit card number, my full name, the first line of my address and my mother's maiden name. Now that's more like it, I'm sure you'll agree. If, like me, you were worried about illegal immigrants gaining information about when the credit card company's website will be working, then this will be good news.

It did occur to me that the helpdesk will probably be very busy this morning, with people worrying about what has happened to the website, and that the requirement to go through The Security Procedures with each one may well explain why I had to listen to a few minutes of Mozart before I could speak to the young lady. However, I realised that this was not a helpful thought - just a quibble, really - and that I should focus more on the positive aspects of being protected.

Hooptedoodle #18 - Eric

Michelangelo's "Eric"

By some roundabout route, this short post is inspired (if that is the word) by further thoughts I had on yesterday's piece about provenance, and the general subject of fakes.

My late cousin and I shared a lot of private jokes over the years, most of which were greeted with puzzled stares from outsiders. We played a long-running game called "Not Quite", which kept us in stitches for years.

The theme of the game was things which were not quite successful, or not quite genuine. We started off with "Songs Which Nearly Made It", which included lots of groanworthy items such as "I've Got You Under My Sink", "Two Coins in a Fountain", "Trouble over Bridgwater" and many others. How we larfed. [Bridgwater, by the way, is a town in Somerset, England - it is a mysterious and little-understood characteristic of the British that we view our towns as a source of amusement, which does not mean that we are not proud of them. Whereas in America, for example, it is considered highly acceptable to write enthusiastic, sentimental or romantic songs about Tulsa, Phoenix, Galveston, Chicago, New York et al, in Britain - with the exception of London and (possibly) Glasgow - such mention of local places in songs is guaranteed to cause merriment - "April in Rochdale" was one of my cousin's favourites.]

We moved on from song titles to books, and then to the vast panoply of the world's fakes and magnificent near-misses. Cousin Dave was delighted to learn that Michelangelo's David, in Florence (no, not the one in Sheffield), the most-photographed tourist magnet of them all, is actually a fake. The original is held, sensibly, in a secure location in a museum. Dave thought that it was a little shabby of the authorities not to come clean on this. He felt that they should admit it was a replica or, if that was too uncomfortable, they might claim that the statue in the square was actually David's younger brother, Eric. After a suitable amount of sniggering, we called the statue Eric for ever after.

The point is (or "a possible point might be") that, if countless millions of tourists have queued to photograph, gawp at and pay homage to Eric over the years, then he has a provenance all his own. He is better known, in truth, than his more reclusive brother.

He is one of the truly great Not Quites. Respect.

Provenance and Vandalism

One of my other interests, apart from wargaming, is motor racing - especially the history of Grand Prix racing, and I maintain a casual interest in the actual examples of old cars which still survive. There is always a lively debate about what constitutes a genuine specimen and what doesn't. For example, if someone now builds a perfect 1955 Lancia D50, entirely from genuine 1955 factory spare parts, that does not constitute an authentic historic car, since the entity (and chassis number) did not exist in 1955. Now - just suppose that, back in 1955, Alberto Ascari had written off his works Lancia in practice at Monaco, and the mechanics had worked all night to create an entirely new car for the actual race, using exactly the same heap of spare parts - that would now be a genuine historic car, if it were still around.

Lancia D50 - genuine

Next case: suppose someone wishes to buy, say, one of the 1954 works Maserati 250F cars - the chassis number being identifiable as the one in which Fangio won the Belgian GP (say). If genuine, this is going to be worth an absolute fortune. However, if the car has really had a full life as a competitive car, and then has subsequently been maintained and raced in Historic racing, then it will have been fettled, patched, repaired, and renovated for 50-odd years, and it is possible that there is not a single part of that vehicle which is original - except maybe the chassis plate! The actual entity, however, is regarded as genuine if it has existed continuously since manufacture. You may recognise the celebrated Executioner's Axe conundrum. This is not entirely a straightforward matter - yes, this is the actual axe which has been used to execute traitors since the 15th Century, though, naturally, it has had many replacement handles and at least one new head over the years.

Move on. A long time ago, I was sitting in the National Library of Scotland, reading an old, leather-bound copy of the English translation of Maximilien Foy's history of the Peninsular War, and was horrified to find that the book was defaced - someone had obviously taken exception to the bold Maximilien's views, and had expressed his patriotic outrage, in pencil, in the margins of several dozen pages. Shaking, white with indignation, I reported this to the girl at the lending desk (not least for fear that she might think I had done it!). She checked the records, and reported back that the book had come to the library from the estate of the 5th Earl of Rosebery around 1930, and that the annotations were almost certainly the work of the Earl, or possibly of his father. In short, the pencil scribbles were part of the provenance of the book.

So much for the ramble around the subject - now to the point. Today I noted that 10 unpainted Hinton Hunt Line Chasseurs a Cheval have been purchased on eBay for some £260. You may do the conversion into your currency of choice, but that is a great deal of money. I am aware that the value of these miniatures is also influenced by whether they are original issue or the later Clayton products, so there is a definite thread of provenance and authenticity in there, whatever you or I may think of the actual sums involved. Someone has been prepared to pay a certain amount to obtain the genuine article.

Now it gets a little complicated. I have seen, at first hand, some of Clive's ex-Peter Gilder Hinton Hunt Napoleonic cavalry. They are breathtaking - individually animated, some with bases replaced with sheet brass, wire harness and flat wire sword blades added and so on. My personal favourite was a trumpeter of chevauxleger-lanciers, converted from a trooper, with the cord of his trumpet made from plaited wire. So what are these things worth? I know that some of them have been bought and sold within living memory, so a value must have been placed on them. I guess that the fact that Gilder converted them adds greatly to their worth and, like the ex-Rosebery book, the mods were carried out so long ago that they have become an important and essential part of the character of these models. I also guess that, if I had hacked them about myself, the value would be approximately zero. Hmmm.

What brought all this to mind, if you will kindly excuse the jump from the sublime to the agricultural, is that I am currently working on some Minifigs s-range Spaniards. As ever with s-range, I rather like the figures but I really don't like their enormous bayonets. They are very robust, and they are part of the tradition of s-range, but they do look a bit silly alongside figures from other manufacturers. And, as ever with s-range, I find it is Groundhog Day. Once again I have given serious thought to shortening and slimming down the bayonets to improve them, and once again I have chickened out, primarily because these are very old figures, they are expected to be like that, and it would feel wrong to change them.

So - just as on every previous occasion - I'll leave them unaltered, and I suppose that this is the correct thing to do, even though I shall continue not to like their bayonets very much. I'm also pretty sure that Peter Gilder would have just changed them, without a second thought, and he would have been right, too.

Hmmm.

Computers in Wargaming - 4 - Fit for Purpose

Computers. I've been around them for years - I worked with them throughout my professional career, and I've always been interested in what can be done with them, though they don't really excite me in their own right. I don’t build them, I don’t properly understand the engineering and, though I can do (and have done a good deal of) relatively simple programming, I definitely regard myself as a user rather than a techie.

[When I was considering how best to structure this post, I found a comment I had added to a previous posting, which gets across a few of the messages well enough for me to re-use it as a starting point, albeit in smartened-up form.]

Computerisation of my wargames has worked pretty well for me, but not through the use of anything that I bought or that someone developed for me. I am the proud owner of 2 commercially available computer-managed Napoleonic games for use with miniatures, and I don't use either of them. I have Follow the Eagles - Tactical (I think), which is quite thorough, though I don’t care much for its playability, and I also have Iron Duke which is far cheaper, more tweakable and generally more friendly - yet I haven't really used that very much either. It’s OK – I paid for them, so I am entitled to an opinion.

Apart from the inflexibility (and implied threat) of a sealed "black box" system, there is a common mistake that designers make: because they can't help it, because they were trained that way, because this is how computer applications look nowadays, they write nice, Windows-style GUI (Graphical User Interface) systems in Visual Basic or similar, which require a dedicated, mouse-wielding operator to read a screen full of nice coloured text, select things from drop-down menus, set radio buttons, click on defined areas of the screen for choices and actions etc. For a miniatures game, I believe this is wrong. Too much distraction - first off, the classy interface between the operator and the machine is completely cancelled out by the totally useless spoken/misheard interface between the players and the operator; secondly, this is a miniatures game - everyone is supposed to be looking at the action on the table - the computer is, almost certainly, a major nuisance. My own home-built systems are very simple data-capture programs which run on a very small, battery powered net-book which can be handed from player to player as necessary. The only entries are single key-touch (e.g. y/n) type responses to direct questions, plus unit numbers where necessary. That's all. This is a conscious attempt to simplify the user interface to the lowest possible workload.

OK – that is a suitable point at which to introduce the subject of Fitness for Purpose. Let’s take a fanciful example.

If you have to write (say) an automated inspection inventory system for some hazardous environment, where the staff will be working in cold, or damp, or toxic conditions, where they may be climbing on observation gantries, or wearing protective clothing (big gloves, say), it would be a major error to design a desktop type application which requires constant use of a mouse, or a lot of free typing, or which generally looks like the sort of package which accounts clerks spend their days with. The hardware is going to have to be compact and tough and convenient – maybe even specially built – and the input is going to have to be a real lumpen data-capture arrangement, such that they can hit big buttons with their gloves on, do the absolute minimum of tinkering, and read the big numbers without difficulty and without mistakes. They will not want to wait for McAfee to finish downloading an update in mid-job. They will probably not wish to be offered the chance to chat online, unless it is to set off an alarm. It would be a good idea, very early in the design, to brainstorm exactly what the intended users require of their system, so that the builders do not simply default to something they prepared earlier. [Factual digression: I recall a team of very expensive external contractors coming into an insurance office to design a client-server system to support the customer helpdesk. Since they did not understand the business, nor the processes involved in insurance, and since they were in a hurry, they immediately set about producing a re-hash of a system they had previously built for a police force in New Zealand, with some changes in the wording. It wasn’t a success, the business users were upset, and they had to start again.]

If we take a small leap to what we hope is a slightly less hazardous environment – that of the miniatures wargame – the same principles still hold true. As far as possible, we should aim to use the computer only for what it can advantageously do for us. We do not wish it to divert the players’ attention from the tabletop more than is strictly necessary, and we certainly wish to design the input arrangements so that they can be handled on the fly by the players, without burdening them with an unacceptable extra workload, without requiring them to sit down at a side table, without slowing everything down, and without confusing anyone, or making them fed up. There will be some trade-off, naturally – any tasks that the computer requires us to do will obviously take a measurable time – the aim must be that the extra time taken is justified by the convenience or labour-saving which the computer achieves.

The first viable home computers were sold with the BASIC programming language installed. It can be argued that the use of BASIC - a relatively high-level language - was a major step towards making home computers work. It was now possible for a member of the public to purchase a branded box off the shelf of a high street store, take it home and start writing simple executable programs straight away. BASIC was excellent - it read very like structured English, was simple to learn, and yet had a fairly sophisticated command set. It was greeted with great sniffiness by the grognards of computing of the day, since it wasn't "proper" programming. A great deal of commercial programming on mainframes at that time was still carried out in low-level, numeric languages such as IBM Assembler, which were labour intensive and difficult to master, but which produced software which ran very quickly and efficiently. The real practical disadvantages of BASIC (as opposed to the prejudices) were two-fold:

(1) The English-like instructions, though compact and easy to use, are not compiled into a stored set of machine instructions; this means that each time the computer reads your BASIC program, however many times it has run it before, it has to interpret it as it goes along, and create machine-code type instructions for execution. The interpretive process was very slow indeed in 1981 - remember that the chip speeds of these early machines were very low. Thus BASIC programs which required a very large amount of reiterative mathematical processing could run so slowly as to be useless. One way around this was to embed chunks of machine code into the BASIC programs, which would run much faster. Machine code was much nearer to the concept of traditional computing, and was specific to the processor chip in your particular machine, but there was a learning overhead.

(2) There is a maximum size of 64 Kilobytes for the program listing. In the days when programs were stored/saved on audio cassettes, and home-brewed programs tended to be small, this wasn’t really a problem. More sophisticated stuff, like video games, was always written in machine code anyway, so that it would run fast enough to be acceptable.

Fine. I bought a Spectrum in the early 1980s, I started writing software for my wargames, and I wrote it in BASIC, since that is pretty much all there was. In places where the processing was too slow, and sometimes if I needed to save some space, I used some machine code routines (PEEK and POKE – ah, nostalgia). The way this progressed has already been described sufficiently in section 2 of this series of posts. It’s worth observing that, though there were a number of people experimenting and producing software for their own wargames (like me) at this time, I am unaware of anyone who attempted to market anything like this then. Two possible reasons present themselves without much thought – firstly, there was no common view of which rules the game should follow, and, secondly, although the Spectrum was probably a market leader, there was a great variety of makes and models of computer available, and no two could share software.

Then everything to do with wargames went on hold for me for a period of about 15 years. When I restarted, one of my earliest jobs was to transfer the old BASIC programs (I had printed out the listings) onto a modern IBM PC. It made sense to start with a close approximation to what had been working on the Spectrum before the Intermission. Getting the BASIC written, with equivalent function, and debugging it all was enough of a chore without learning a new programming language or rewriting the game rules at the same time. I could start improving/tinkering later.

I got my Ancients game (Camulos) up and running and, since the Napoleonic game used large chunks of the same logic, I spent some time sorting out the Ancients. Since the world had moved on, I started to teach myself Visual Basic, and prepared to rewrite the wargame programs in a smarter, more modern Windows environment. At this point I also started looking at some of the available commercial offerings, and discovered that I was really very unconvinced about the classic Windows GUI front-end, and its suitability for a miniatures game. After buying some examples of games, going down some blind alleys and, really, confirming what I had suspected, I decided to stick with BASIC, though by this time it was called QBASIC. I am aware that this decision may be considered laughable, but if I had rewritten them in another language, I would still have been looking for something that behaved like the QBASIC programs, so I could not see the point of migrating the software just for the sake of it. I improved the programs a lot, designed them to work more efficiently and split them into functional modules. They are still written in QBASIC to this day – and, of course, like all rule sets, they are still being improved!

OK, so what happened to the 2 great problems of BASIC which I noted earlier? Good question.

(1) The processing speed of modern computers is so high that even interpretive, clunky old QBASIC executes with blinding speed. No longer a problem – not even a little bit.

(2) The 64K ceiling is still a constraint. The answer is to split big programs into functional chunks which can call each other and pass data to each other. When one of my battles reaches a decision point, my main Battle Manager program will store all the relevant current information about the battle and all units, and will call the Result Assessor, which starts off by looking for the handover file and loading the saved data.

Note that I am not suggesting that anyone starting now should necessarily use BASIC – my point here is that what appears to me to be the optimal input arrangement for a miniatures wargame management system is handled quite adequately by QBASIC, though the choice of language is obviously up to the programmer!

Here is a screen shot from the Iron Duke game – note that it is a conventional Windows GUI, mouse-driven application.

Here are a series of screen shots from my own QBASIC game – some examples of how the computer directs the progress of the game, stepping through the turn sequence and cueing the action, reporting on events as they occur.

It was a bad day for the 16th Light Dragoons, and especially for General Anson.

Weather checking is a good example of the sort of background task which a computer handles well.

That is really as much as I wanted to say. In my experience, once you are used to the convenience of an automated system (provided it is, in fact, convenient), all the memory work and mental arithmetic of a complex dice game can seem exhausting. My 8-year-old son became interested in my games recently, and so I put together a very simple dice-driven game for him, to get him some experience. When we were an hour into it, he asked if we could play the computerised game instead, since he found the dice a distraction. Now there’s heresy. It is possible, of course, that my simplified dice game was dreadful...

Lastly, to repeat the message which overrides all of this – computers have been useful because they have allowed me to use fairly complex rules without losing the will to live. The option would have been to cut back drastically on the complexity. If the Commands & Colors rules – straightforward as they are - provide games which run crisply, I shall be very happy to leave the computer on the shelf. It is, and always has been, just a tool, just a means to an end.

Hooptedoodle #17 - Sebastopol

I just switched on my mail browser to be told that "Faster is Funner" in the banner advert provided by my Internet service provider. They really shouldn't say these things to people like me, who live in the Front of Beyond and only receive a sub-half-meg service (especially when I have to wait for their pesky ad to download before I can read my mail), but mostly I was distracted by the ad - faster is what? Good grief.

Someone recently sent me the following, which definitely strikes a chord:

"Her vocabulary was so poor that she was, like, whatever".

Anyway, that's not the point of this posting. Matriculus emailed me again. Fine, I hear you mutter, just email him back. Well, it's not that straightforward.

He said, "Interested in the dominoes game. Why is it called Sebastopol, and how do you play it?". First bit of that is easy - I have no idea. It probably has something to do with the battle. Second bit should also be no problem, but before I sent off a reply, I checked online for the official rules of Sebastopol and - you guessed it - the official game of Sebastopol is quite a bit different from what we play. This is a serious issue - I am in real trouble if I have misinformed my son in this matter.

I learned the game which we call Sebastopol when I was about 12, I guess. I can't find any other dominoes game which has quite the same rules, so if anyone has any ideas I shall be most grateful.

Sebastopol, or not

Game is thus. For 2 players, each takes 10 tiles - rest go face-down in the boneyard. Starting player (winner of previous game, or reigning champion, in our house) plays a double of his own choice. If he has no doubles, the other player starts. Play proceeds in 4 directions from this initial double, but there is no need for all 4 directions to be played. No number may be played until the double of that number has been played, so at any moment numbers are "open" or "closed". If you can't play, you may pick up one tile from the boneyard. If you still can't go, you pass, or "knock" (or "chap" if you are in Scotland). If you play your last tile, you have won. If no-one can play then the player with the "lightest" hand (least spots) wins. If the spots are equal, the players go outside and fight to the death with knives. I made that last bit up, to see if anyone was paying attention.

The feature whereby numbers remain closed until the double is played adds a bit of spice to the strategy. You can play with 3 players (7 tiles each) or 4 players (5 tiles).

I propose to brass this out, and continue to call the game Sebastopol, but any better-informed opinion would be most welcome.

Good game - recommended.