Hooptedoodle #24 - Who were you in the 12th Century?

We interrupt the trilogy with a small digression - something that I've been thinking about for a day or so. Nothing scientific, I promise - just something silly to mull over.

Each of us has, or had, 2 (biological) parents, and thus 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents and so on. You have no choice in the matter - that's the way it works. As you go back to each previous generation, the number doubles, for obvious reasons. If we assume, as a rough-but-handy approximation, that 10 generations take about 300 years, then you should have 1024 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents who were alive somewhere around 1700. Go back a further 300 years and you now have over 1 million direct ancestors; go back yet another 300 years - around 1100 AD - and there are over a billion. That is mind boggling enough, but we have hardly started yet - mankind has been around for far, far longer than that.

That's OK - let's stick at the year 1100. 1 billion people required for the family. Now, as far as I can determine, our current best estimate for the total population of the Earth in 1100 AD is only 300 million. That's everyone - all races, all religions, all over the globe. Is the difference between these numbers explained entirely by various degrees of inbreeding?

My assumptions are consciously simplistic, but the principle of the thing stands up. If, as you go back through the generations, you find the odd individual who (accidentally?) occupies more than 1 slot in your upside-down family tree (and this must get more likely as the numbers increase), then a whole section of the tree above him/her disappears, since we only need him/her to be conceived once. That would get the numbers down a bit, and let us not, gentle readers, distress ourselves by dwelling on just how he/she occupies the two slots. And so on. I guess that must be it - there doesn't seem to be another explanation.

Discuss.

Compromise in Wargames - (2) Time: Wellington, Wallace & Gromit

The more I thought about issues connected with time in wargames, the more I started to think that maybe there wasn’t much to say. There are some key decisions to be made when designing a game. Since it will not run, smoothly, by itself in real time (like a model railway), we have a practical need to replace continuous action/movement with a series of step turns, each representing an interval of time; perhaps these will be alternate turns, perhaps (if someone finds a way to do it) the intervals may be of varying length to suit the situation, the intensity of the action – however this is done, the compromise is similar. The shorter the intervals, the more closely we approximate to continuous action (like the stop-frame animation techniques used in Wallace & Gromit, my very favourite pieces of Plasticene). Very short turns will also reduce the problem of determining the exact timing of events (volleys etc) during the bound, but will also give a laborious, fiddly game. That is all pretty clear, but very short turns will also accentuate one of the great philosophical mysteries of wargaming – why doesn’t the real time represented by the elapsed turns add up to something realistic?

Here’s a quote from the Wargames Research Group’s then-shiny new Wargames Rules 1685-1845, published April 1977; bear in mind that these represented something of a change of direction for WRG, switching (correctly, in the cause of playability) to alternate turns, and abandoning their trend-setting combat factor table system:

Time Scale - Each bound can include action comparable with that possible in 80 seconds in real life. However, the bound overlaps both the preceding and succeeding enemy bounds, so that one friendly plus one enemy bound also equals 80 seconds. As this, multiplied by the likely number of double bounds in a game, gives an unrealistic duration for a real battle, we assume that each bound also includes a variable amount of delay. We therefore recommend assuming for campaign purposes that a pair of bounds represents half an hour.

Eh?

This, remember, is from game designers and rule writers who were not noted for ambiguity or mincing their words – the same booklet specifies exactly how big a marsh is allowed to be, for example. If the WRG, no less, were as woolly as this about how time elapsed adds up in the game, then this is very serious recognition that the matter is not straightforward.

I’ve referred to this before in this blog, and the discussion generated a comment from Ross Mac which has played on my mind ever since. With a grateful doff of the hat to Ross, and with my own rather clumsy paraphrasing super-imposed, the observation refers to the Battle of Waterloo: something like a quarter of a million men spent a long summer’s day within a few miles of each other; any one of the infantry units could have marched right across the field in a couple of hours – so what the blazes were they doing all day?

To an extent, this demonstrates how little intuitive understanding I have of what a real battle was like. The only reasonable answer is that, by and large, most of them must have spent most of the day hanging around, doing very little other than being in position, implying a threat. Very obviously, all over the field, lots was going on, but any one of the participants in the ranks must have spent most of the day waiting – waiting for the ground to dry, waiting for the other lot to do something, waiting for orders, just waiting.

Another thing which I find difficult to fathom – though I enjoy trying to unravel it – is the widespread disagreement we find in accounts of what happened, even to the extent of published exchanges of umbrella-rattling letters between colleagues who were within a few hundred yards of each other. I am writing about the Napoleonic Wars here, remember, one of the best documented periods of history – an astonishing proportion of the survivors left eye-witness accounts, and yet there is still huge debate about what order events occurred in, who did what, exactly where they were and so on. There must be many examples we could pick on, but one which has always intrigued me in particular is my old chum Marmont’s career-spoilingly bad afternoon at Salamanca on 22nd July 1812.

Realising that the brigades on his left have got themselves out of order and left some gaps, Marmont calls for his horse, with the intention of heading out there in person and sorting them out, when he is wounded by a shell, which spoils his concentration more than somewhat. In his memoirs, Marmont (who has a little dignified ass-covering to do on the subject of his performance that day) estimates it was 3pm when he was wounded. Foy, who was less than a mile away, estimates it was between 3 and 4. Wellington, however, is said to have spotted this over-extension of the French left while he was at lunch, around 1pm, and sent orders to Pakenham accordingly, which makes it unlikely that it would have taken Marmont a further two hours to spot the problem. Basically, we don’t know. This seems almost impossibly strange to a 21st Century reader – in a modern context the exact moment the C-in-C was struck down would be known without doubt – order sheets would all be headed up with the date and correct time, there would be a paper trail a mile wide from which to reconstruct events, if need be.

This was not the case then. There was no satellite transmission of accurate time, no time signal on the radio – the pocket watches of the day would also add a little inaccuracy. Most importantly, the mindset was different. People thought in terms of a day’s march, “about midday”, “late afternoon” – they would not have understood our modern-day obsession with spurious accuracy of time-keeping. So there is plenty of scope for disagreement between witnesses, in the midst of so much confusion. But there is something more – the confusion itself appears to be related to a certain subjectivity in people’s perception of the passage of time.

Here’s another, more famous quote:

The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.

Arthur, Duke of Wellington, from a letter to John Croker (8 August 1815), as quoted in The Waterloo Letters (1891) edited by H. T. Sibome

So what is he on about? Surely it is a straightforward matter to assemble an accurate account of a battle, even if it is complicated? There are a finite number of events, and each must have occurred at a known time. Time, very conveniently, travels only in one direction, there is only one of it, and it is the same for everyone. Is this true? [In what follows, I am not trying to labour a pun on the word “ball” – it’s just a coincidence!]

I had a long think about this. You can watch, or produce a decent written report of, a football match, for example, because there is only one ball, and the ball is the central point of focus of the game. If you asked each of the players involved to relate exactly what he had done during the match, none of the accounts would be the same as the report of the game, and this is because much of what they describe will have happened “off the ball” – running into spaces, making dummy runs, positioning themselves for a pass which did not come, and so on.

Further, the inter-relation between the individual events in these personal histories would be complex, and might only be apparent in retrospect. This is becoming more like a battle – radio commentators can make a very nice job of describing a live football match; commentating on a developing riot is a different challenge – it is impossible to identify the significant moments without knowing what is going to happen later – and there are too many balls in play at the same time.

Even if you can reconstruct everything that happened, and the timing, building a single, linear narrative of the whole thing is probably impossible, and we have already established that the individuals involved will have different recollections.

Considering my initial doubts, I seem – once again – to have expounded very little at great length. Last time we discussed this problem of tabletop time vs real time, we touched on the subject of Command Activation rules; one of the traditional things which go wrong in a wargame is that we waste an awful lot of time shunting all the units around, including the ones which aren’t actually doing anything. Activation rules are useful because they push you back to focusing on key areas, which removes a lot of the spaghetti from the Western.

Compromise in Wargames - (1) Space, and Very Small Houses

Two beautiful examples of the accepted appearance of a Napoleonic wargame – and very nice too

So I’m just starting to get my ideas sorted out – my milk bottles in a row, as my grandmother used to say – when De Vries emails me and disrupts everything. Milk bottles all over the place. No, he says, you can’t classify everything under the three headings – Space, Time and Probability – because this skips over the most fundamental factor of all, the figures-to-men ratio in the game.

Well, I had intended to include this (let’s call it the “figure ratio”) in the Space section, for two main reasons. Firstly, the “look of the thing” (which, for me, is very important) requires that figure ratio and ground scale in the game are sensibly related, so I have great difficulty separating them and, secondly, I spent quite a lot of time considering the distortions that figure ratio can produce in my discussion of Grand Tactical wargames, and I felt I didn’t have a lot more to say.

De Vries being the man he is, our exchange of ideas got briefly into the realms of Monty Python, but I believe we both think we won the argument. I agreed to spend more time on figure ratio, but I’m going to include it under the heading of Space anyway. Fifteen all.

The Pythonesque bit might as well feature very early in our trilogy – regard it, if you will, as a preliminary cartoon. One approach to fighting a battle for which you haven’t got enough soldiers or enough table area is to fight a much smaller battle – less units on a scaled-down but representative battlefield - and use your usual rules. I’ve done it myself – it can give an enjoyable game, but it will lose something of the original. That may not be a problem, but it should be borne in mind. If your cut-down Waterloo gives the French one regiment of cuirassiers and one battery and a few infantry battalions, it becomes tricky to decide just how to use them. You can certainly play the game, but – apart from certain identifiable bits of terrain – the game has less and less to do with Waterloo as you decrease the numbers of units.

The alternative might be to try to keep the numbers of units up, but have, say, in extremis, one figure in each, and do drastic things to the ground scale. In my view this works rather better, but it looks pretty silly – at this point there’s no point having the soldiers at all; since they are simply representative tokens, cardboard counters would be just as good, and might even look less embarrassing. Devotees of Risk and Campaign and maybe of Battle Cry may be growling at this point.

Now for the cartoon. We debated fighting Waterloo at a 1:100,000 figure scale, with a ground scale of about 1 foot equals 4 miles. Naturally, at this scale terrain features and buildings could be ignored, and each army would consist of a single figure. 3” alternate moves, and if they get within 1” of each other you roll 1 dice each. Highest wins. If it’s a tie, roll again. Loser buys the beers. De Vries was quite proud of this – the game may be adapted to any period or size of action you wish, it does away with the need to do all that painting and so on. He also claims it is extremely portable, though I’m not sure what he means by this. To keep him happy, I promised to include a picture. The point of this, apart from a bit of a giggle, is that extreme distortions of scale change the game beyond recognition. Now perhaps we can get on.

Waterloo at 1:100,000

There’s a vague crossover point between diorama and wargame. The look of the thing versus the playability of the game – where and how do you compromise these? The ultimate diorama, for me, is the model railway – everything is faithfully reproduced, on a 1:1 figure ratio (as it were), at very strict constant scale (HO, N), and it is forever June 1954 (or whatever). The trains do move around, and in real time, though the cars and pedestrians are definitely frozen (once again, note that this means that a still photo will be much more convincing than a movie). I did once visit a wonderful exhibition of an N-gauge West Highland Line (that’s Scotland), in which they had taken some liberties with the length of the runs between stations, but in general it’s all faithful, constant scale.

What about wargames? Childhood games, crawling around the carpet with Herald and Timpo soldiers (in my case), were definitely 1:1 skirmishes. The individual soldiers usually had names, and the game was greatly enhanced by the addition of the odd hedge or corn-stook from my farm set. At one point, I reluctantly had to give up an ancient carpet with a floral border which had been very useful as a jungle – probably for quite a few generations. In its innocent way, this was role-play. It’s intuitively natural to do it that way, I think. Left to myself, I doubt if I would ever have thought of having a figure ratio other than unity, or a ground scale different from the 1/32 or whatever it was that was implied by the figures themselves, and the fact that Crescent Toys’ 1/32 scale 25 pounder did not sit well with the 1/50 or so Dinky tanks I had was only a small cause for regret.

Even for adults, including normal, non-wargaming adults, visualising anything beyond a limited action with a small number of named individuals and the odd Johilco tree is tricky. Look at the Sharpe stories and films – look at just about any war narrative you can think of, and you see that same comfort zone. If you are going to portray the Battle of Talavera or the D-Day landings in a novel or a film, make the battle itself a background, and zoom in on the actions of the key individuals – it’s easier to get involved with individuals. Anything else and it starts to become a documentary, not to mention prohibitively expensive. The look of the thing is still very important, as anyone who watched the old BBC “War and Peace” series, with Borodino acted out by 12 men and a cannon, will be aware.

Over the years, I have come to accept that a rectangular group of two dozen painted model soldiers looks like a battalion. It doesn’t, of course, but the wargames I was raised on made that convenient assumption, and I’ve become brainwashed. It occurs to me as I write this that maybe there’s a distinction there – subconsciously I have tried to make my battles look, not like real battles, but like Charles Grant’s battle games from 40 years ago. I hadn’t thought of that before, but that is maybe as real as it gets.

I’ve absorbed the 1:33 figure ratio, 20 yards to the inch (1 pace = 1 mm) standard-issue game to the extent that I now regard it as normal. It’s a package, and the choice of that package is dictated by how much room we have available, how many figures we have, and how it looks. There it is again – how it looks. Although a 24-man battalion is blatantly unrealistic anyway, we get strangely agitated if, having got the frontage of our bases correct, we feel the figures are standing too far apart to conform to the regulations and tactics of the day. The look of the thing – that’s absolutely central to all of this. Probably, if we were not constrained to fit in with extant rule sets, the sensible approach would be to do this back-to-front – work out your ground scale for reasons of practicality, decide the size of the figures you wish to use, decide aesthetically how closely you wish to group them on correct-frontage bases, and then work out the de facto figure ratio as a last step. To complete the loop, you are probably then committed to basing your rules on the unit rather than the individual, which gets us a bit away from Charge! and similar games. It’s a constant source of surprise to me that all these factors dovetail into such a tight set.

I have no experience of proper skirmish gaming – I should probably have a go sometime. I have a faint (and very unreasonable) feeling that it’s a bit too closely related to my crawling-round-the-carpet days – something I prefer to think I have grown out of, or – literally – risen above, but I’m sure I would find it enjoyable, maybe even liberating!

Around 1977 I spent some time helping dear old Peter Gouldesbrough to perfect his Napoleonic game using the new-fangled 5mm troop-blocks from Minifigs. When I first saw these, and understood what Peter was trying to do, I was really quite excited – the battles looked like 19th Century prints, or would have done if it wasn’t for Peter’s horrible Plasticene hills, and it was like a skirmish game on a vast scale. At an intuitive level, this potentially felt like the right way to do things. That was still early enough in my own wargaming career for me to be able to start all over again with the blocks, and I did consider it briefly, but decided against it for a number of reasons, any or all of which may not stand up to scrutiny (with hindsight):

(1) Already in 1977 the moulds were starting to break up, and I was very nervous about being dependant on the continued production of a single range from a single manufacturer. Makers come and go like the flowers of Spring, and fashions in figure sizes were changing rapidly at that time. I think Heroics or someone had already started producing 1/300 or 6mm figures, which worked out dearer than buying the blocks, and (more seriously) were not really compatible by size.

(2) The little figures were a bitch to paint convincingly. Peter’s figures were not very well painted, and that didn’t enhance the game.

(3) The small size had a lot of advantages, but there were also some very real visibility issues, some of which were a source of much hilarity. It was very easy to lose some of your troops. On a number of occasions one of us would overlook an entire brigade of dark blue troops on Peter’s dark green table. It puts a new dimension into Command Activation. To get round this, the brigades would be accompanied by coloured labels which helped the game but pretty much destroyed the spectacle.

(4) This probably has a lot to do with Peter’s areas of interest, but the blocks lent themselves well – probably too well – to formational micro-management – a lot of time was spent checking for correct intervals in a column of march and so on, and tracking the movement of individual companies with a ruler. To make this easier, of course, we also had 30-second bounds, but that is a topic for the next instalment. Let’s just say that the games were not rivetingly fast.

Having said all of this, I look wistfully now at pictures of 6mm set-ups like Fabrizio’s Torgau Project and I can see the very strong appeal of such an approach. Even 2mm is interesting...

On rare occasions I have seen big dioramic displays of battles in museums – hordes of tiny figures on a realistic battlefield. I have not yet managed to see Siborne’s masterwork in London (are there two of them?), but it’s on my list of things to do before I snuff it. I find these things just wonderful – to simply stand and stare and think “Wow!” for a very long time is guaranteed to make me into a 10-year-old for the duration (though no-one, of course, may be able to tell the difference).

I’m not going to get sidetracked into a repeat discussion of base sizes or frontages, other than to mention – yet again – that one issue with big figure ratios is that the unit depths tend to get out of whack with the ground scale. If you group your figures so that the frontages and the unit sizes are correct then you are likely to find that you have to produce a cover story about the need to allow for intervals and manoeuvre space to justify the unit depths. Maybe this is a big argument in favour of the back-to-front calculation method I mentioned earlier?

One area that has intrigued me for years is the effect of the ground scale on scenery. Again, this is all obvious, but we tend to overlook it. I was brought up (so to speak) on photos of wonders like Peter Gilder’s Waterloo terrain, and such things add greatly to the enjoyment of a game, but we run into a problem as a result of the mismatch of the vertical and horizontal scales. If I have 1 inch tall men (near enough 2 yds = 1 inch) and a 20 yds = 1 inch ground scale then the ground scale is 10 times the vertical – your figures are 1/72, and your horizontal scale is 1/720, which is less than half as big as 1/300. This means that Hougoumont should really look like this:

At 20 yds to the inch, the fact that a division of the Old Guard could comfortably stand in the orchard of Gilder’s La Haye Sainte is a problem. The fact that our innocent little farm building with the detachable roof, which is a satisfying visual match for the figures, occupies the same area as Candlestick Park, or that the beautiful 28mm scale village we bought from In the Grand Manner is as big as Sheffield on the ground plan – these are distortions. Such scenic items are perfect for skirmishes and dioramas, but beyond that we have to be careful.

My personal compromise for this is to use 15mm buildings with my 20-25mm figures. They are still too big, but it’s better (and they’re cheaper!). I’ve thought of using 10mm buildings, but at this point it becomes obvious that the men could not crawl in through the doorways, and a cavalryman is as tall as a church, which is a major offence against the look-of-the-thing criterion. This all makes a lot more sense to me now than it did only 3 years ago, when I was proposing to move to 15mm buildings, and was busy asking people if they thought it would look stupid. I can hardly believe how much I worried about this, but it was a big change for me.

My compromise – these men would be cramped in the 15mm houses

The approach, as suggested by Charles Grant and Charles Wesencraft all those years ago, is that a small cluster of buildings on the battlefield is intended to denote an unspecific built-up area occupying the same space. Unless it is a skirmish, the buildings can be moved around a little to make room for the action, and there is no question of arguing about exactly how many men can occupy a particular building (unless, of course, it is historically necessary). The men are either in a village or not in a village. How they deploy to occupy it is beneath the resolution level of the game.

Compromise in Wargames - Adventures in Space, Time and Probability

This post is the preface to what, with a bit of luck, should turn out be a trilogy.

I did consider doing another off-topic post - I am about to defragment the hard drives on my main computer, so I could talk you through that, or I could describe some problems I've been having with my truck, which might be more exciting. On balance, I thought it was probably time to do something a bit more relevant to wargames, so I'm going to attempt to organise some rambling thoughts into proper, joined-up ideas. If they end up still looking like rambling thoughts then you may imagine their state when they started out.

In recent weeks there have been some good-going comments here on the subject of realism in wargames, and I thought that might still be worth some more attention. So I had a go at standing back a little and focusing on what the problems are, and how we got here. It seems to be much easier to detect that something is wrong than to identify just what it is, or why.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the challenge of playing and devising games (especially sports games) which simulate reality - originally with matchboxes and dice and bits of string, later with mathematical models running on computers. The most obvious, most definite thing I have learned is that there are very clear limits to how closely you can make a game reflect the real world - you always end up making compromises. One of the challenges is to identify where the compromises are necessary - your game, after all, has to be capable of being played, yet the experience is going to be impaired - the game may even be pointless - if the results are blatantly silly. I also learned that the more you change the scale of the thing, the more carefully you have to look at this area.

This scaling problem crops up in all sorts of places. I remember, when I was about 7, watching some epic British film about a disaster at sea, and realising that something wasn't quite right. In the action scenes, a brilliantly executed miniature ship would be wreathed in fake mist and cleverly lit, and in a still photo it would have looked brilliant, but in a movie it didn't work. It was something about the appearance and the behaviour of the water - any fool could tell that this was a toy boat in someone's bathtub, even though we might be pushed to explain just what was wrong. The problem, of course, is that mucking around with the scale of something, reducing it to a miniature version of itself, for example, introduces some nippy little paradoxes. If you reduce the size, you may have to do some other things as well - in the case of the sinking ship, slowing the film down might have helped the little waves look more convincing. As soon as you start reproducing space and time (and a cinema film gets you into time issues), modelling and simulation have to be thought through. I admit I may have been a rather odd child.

Later on - I'm 12 and I'm back at the movies. I took some comfort from the fact that the monster spider in some horror show of the day was impossible. OK - the story was clearly fantasy anyway - even to a child - but I knew that mathematically the thing couldn't exist. The back-projected, blown-up footage of a normal-sized spider which obviously terrified the cast would not be able to move if it were real. This is school maths, it may even be primary school maths nowadays, and I apologise for setting out what is well known and otherwise obvious: if you multiply the linear dimensions of a spider by a factor of, say, a hundred, so that a 1-inch spider is now 8-feet-something across (which is, I admit, a horrifying idea), then - if everything remains in exact proportion - its weight will go up by a factor of one million, but the structural strength of its legs (for example) will go up by only ten thousand times, since this must be related to the cross-sectional area of the components in its legs. So the load on its legs, proportionally, will be a hundred times as great as the original. Its legs could not bear its weight. OK - this does not mean that you cannot have a spider which is 8 feet across (in theory), but it does mean that such a spider would not look like a big version of a small one. This is why elephants do not look like ants.

If you are nervously looking for a means of escape as you wait for a point of some sort to emerge from this - here is the point: changing the scale of something will change its properties and its behaviour unless you do some other stuff as well. I'd like to have a look at a number of aspects of this in the context of wargames - Space (size, ground scale), Time (converting a continuous action into a series of jerky moves - maybe even alternate moves) and Probability (the use of numerical data to produce a "realistic" game). These things are not entirely independent, but it suits me to divide the subject into parts, so I'll address it under these three headings.

Accordingly, the first instalment will be about Space...

Acknowledgements

I'd like to express my appreciation and sincere thanks for a couple of additional nominations for my blog award.

To Fabrizio, whose lovely Torgau Project blog is a favourite of mine, and has often made me think wild thoughts about starting all over again, and doing 6mm instead...

...and to the legendary Conrad Kinch, the worthy proprietor at Joy and Forgetfulness, which is always intriguing, always full of surprises and delightfully off-beat.

Thank you, gentlemen, for the work and good taste you commit to your fine blogs and the pleasure which they bring.

Prof Richard Holmes

I'm really very sorry to learn that Prof Richard Holmes, the military historian and TV presenter, has died at the age of 65. I did not know him, and never met him, but feel I knew something of him from his excellent books.

Hooptedoodle #23 - Dandelions, What Dandelions?

I knew it would happen. If I lived long enough, we would eventually buy a gadget that works.

With all this focus on blog awards and suchlike (well, not focus, exactly) I am once again aware that the one thing this blog is short of is stuff which is actually useful. Well today I am going to make up for that.

I have a friend who emails me regularly and says things like "I enjoyed the posting, but why on earth did you write it?". He also once described one of my posts (the one about bananas, in fact) as "an exercise in pointlessness", a judgement with which I cannot find fault, to be honest.

Anyway - a new world is here - if this works OK, I may start a series of domestic tips of the week - useful things like "how to get bloodstains out of a clown suit".

If, like me, you regard gardening as one of a number of things which take up time which could be spent with your toy soldiers, keep reading.
If, like me, you spend some time each week wondering just how the description "low maintenance" applies to your garden, keep reading.
If you have ever bought a patent gadget to make gardening easier, keep reading - especially if it turned out to be crap.
If you hate dandelions in your lawn (though you might like one if you met it socially), keep reading.

Gentlemen - I have bought a dandelion remover. This is not an advert - I am simply so overjoyed that I am sharing some news with you. The device is made in Finland, and is marketed under the trade name Fiskars. And it works. Mme Foy bought it for me, and it works.

I have a long, unhappy history with dandelions - I have sprayed them with all sorts of stuff, dug them up - no good, they come back stronger. In sunny weather, you can hear them laughing. Well, no longer. This new toy is well made, simple to use, and reliably pulls them up - as often as not with a complete tap root you could just about boil up for soup.

Wholeheartedly recommended - don't say I haven't got your interests at heart. If you want to see a demo - click here.