ECW – The Arquebus Rules

So what are the Arquebus Rules, then, Foy?

Well, since you asked, I’ll tell you.

They are a hybrid, and an incomplete hybrid at the moment. Arquebus was my working title for the framework of a computer program I wrote last year to manage solo ECW games played under a set-of-rules-yet-to-be-defined. Initially, as you may have read here before, the idea was that the underlying rules were to be Clarence Harrison’s Victory without Quarter, which I liked the look of for a number of reasons, and which I had tried out during a visit to the Kingdom of Old John last year.

Whatever your thoughts on computers in wargames, one spin-off of automating the game management is that you soon become aware of gaps in the game logic if you try to put a set of wargames rules into a computer program. So let’s see – if the melee winners fail this morale test to control the pursuit – what happens? – oh – look at that – it doesn’t say. So what exactly do artillery do if someone charges them? – well – gosh – it doesn’t say. Etc.

One big advantage of using someone else’s rules is that they have been playtested before, and you have a good idea in advance whether they work or not. VwQ is a bit different – there are people who have played them and use them and like them, but there is also a fund of recommendations for adding the missing bits – including some from The Bold Clarence himself, who has never pretended that the rules were complete or anything other than a work in progress.

So I set about redrafting VwQ for my own purposes, to plug some gaps and fix some things I wasn’t comfortable with and then – since I’d started doing it this way – I took the opportunity to simplify a couple of fiddly bits, and amend a couple of the tables to suit my own ideas. The final straw was that I eventually replaced VwQ’s trademark, card based Activation system with something else – I discussed this in an earlier post.

At this point, though the game still employs some of the mechanisms from VwQ which I have liked from the outset, much of it is changed. The overall package is definitely not VwQ, and I decided it made more sense to make a clean break, and call my evolving rule set Arquebus, if only to keep my head straight – same as the program. I acknowledge my debt to some other games, but it is a hybrid.

Briefly, I adopted an alternative Command and Activation system which I found in some of Mr Featherstone’s recently-published rules – which may or may not have close relatives in Warhammer, Blitzkrieg Commander and Bloody Barons. It ticked a lot of boxes – intuitively, it seemed reasonable, it hung together well from a completeness point of view, and it was cute enough to borrow without shame.

Well, I’ve now tried it out, and it was tedious. Clever or not, it required extra work, and I found it to be mostly irritating – slowed the game down far more than it improved it. So I’ve replaced it with a much simpler, dice-based system which has close relatives in the Portable Wargame family, and in at least one iteration of Ross’s Hearts of Tin, and even in some earlier ideas of my own (surely not?). Since this is now Arquebus we are talking about, and thus mine own, I may well replace it yet again next week – I’ll see how I feel. I am giddy with the possibilities…

The rewritten rules for Arquebus are beginning to stabilize – I have now reached a stage where I am polishing the wording, checking that I have covered everything. Once the game works, I will continue with the computer program, but make no mistake – Arquebus first has to perform tidily as a dice-&-rulers game without a computer in sight, or I shall keep working on it until it does [famous last words]. Thus there is a latest-version rule booklet (I believe I’m on Version 0.21 – which is the first amendments to the substantially changed 2^nd edition) and I was thinking that I might make it available if anyone is interested – I’m still not sure about this – it is a tweaked version of VwQ, though the tweaks now outweigh the VwQ bits, and it is not really designed to cope with anything more than the way I like to play my wargames. I’m thinking about it. The world is full of half-baked rulesets that don’t quite work – why add to the heap?

He's what? - he's redrafted Table 3? - bloody hell...

Once I’m comfortable that it works – at least a bit – I’m happy to provide copies to anyone who wants one. Hang on a bit. If someone feels moved to ask me why I don’t just be a sensible fellow and use Forlorn Hope or similar, please don’t – we’ve done that bit already.

Righto, Foy – so what happened to your Commands & Colors based ECW game?

Nothing – I have been using it and it works pretty well. As I mentioned before, I also need a more tactical game for small actions – where the Commanders can amuse themselves forming column of march and carrying out flank attacks and all that – this is where Arquebus should come in.

And it’s guaranteed hex-free, in case you care.

Hooptedoodle #104 - Jeff & Steve

Three Hooptedoodle posts on the trot is usually a sign of something or other, but on this occasion it is merely that we have been busy, preparing for some visitors who will be staying with us for a few days, so I haven’t had the opportunity to complete the paperwork for Weeks 33 and 34 of the Solo Campaign – that’ll be sometime later this week.

Today’s post is nothing political or barbed (I hope) – merely a note to welcome our new friends Jeff and Steve, who arrived this morning and seem to be settling in quite nicely. These are not the aforementioned visitors, as you see – they are Comet goldfish. My son Nick has been reading a lot on the subject, and promises that he will look after them carefully and faithfully. Certainly we have plenty of equipment and jars of special stuff bought in, so if that is a measure of how well they will be cared for we are off to a good start.

My feelings about pets are mixed. Over the years I have had a dog (great when I was 12) a cat (who was a much better friend than I expected) a budgie (a miserable creature – it didn’t do anything interesting except bite anyone that came near and screech deafeningly when there was music on the radio or the hoover was switched on), and that’s it, really. I dearly love to see birds and animals in their natural environment, but I’m too selfish or something to make room for one in my house.

I recall the thoughts of Dali on the subject of animals. He said, I think, that he wasn’t very interested in animals in general, apart from the rhinoceros, which had “divine crenellations”, but he liked them when they were suffering. Dali kept a couple of ocelots at his villa, and he used to get his slave girl hangers-on to walk them around the swimming pool and occasionally throw them in, to promote this state of natural grace which he admired.

Of course I disapprove. Dali was, in any case, a posturing old goat, as geniuses go, so I’ve always dismissed that as a gag of some sort.

Dali with Babou

In this part of the world, there is a slow but constant influx of wealthy townies, coming to discover the people they really are in the country. Although I arrived here in a similar manner myself, I laugh long and loud as the newbie country gentlefolk work through the checklist of things they must have in order to qualify. The Aga stove is too obvious to mention, as are the Land Rover Freelander and the green wellies (implication of horses), and there are certain high-end clothing manufacturers who cater for phoney lairds and would-be horse-breeders of this type. The standard-issue Labrador is usually an early arrival as well, and the dogs always have pretentious names – not at all like Jeff or Steve.

Over the years I have known some astonishing names for pets. My own cat was named Jim, exactly because we had a neighbour who bred Siamese champions, and all her cats were named after Aztec gods, or figures from classical history – or worse. I remember that something called Countess Lucretia got stuck in our garage once, and she also had a dreadful cat named Neoptolemus who used to dig up our flower beds as part of his toilet routine. Given an air-rifle, I’d have put a pellet up his regal backside every day until he got the idea.

I ribbed Nick gently about the lack of daring in his choice of names for his new fish, but he was quite comfortable about the matter. I also mentioned it to my hairdresser (as one does), and she assured me that her daughter named her goldfish Gail and Brian, which also seems a bit humdrum, but probably reinforces a point.

Maybe kids are just less affected in these matters. Perhaps, also, a pet who is a friend should not have a threatening name. Even I can see that Thor would be a daft name for a goldfish. So – yet again – I shall try to have the good grace to learn from a child, and accept that Jeff and Steve are OK. They, of course, do not realize that we call them anything at all – I’m not certain that they realize very much, to be honest.

I hope they are happy here.

I’m interested in this idea of names for pets. Do they reveal things about us that we would be better to hide? Do we name our pets to impress people? What is the best (or worst) name for a pet you have come across? No prizes, but I’m interested, and it might be a good laugh.

Hooptedoodle #103 – Saving the Planet – once again

My new car is not so new now, but I am still very pleased with the fuel economy compared with its predecessor. Like a lot of modern, “intelligent” cars, it has a display on the dashboard of how many miles it estimates you have left in the tank.

Now I know how this works – a sensor detects how much fuel is left, and a computer program works out your current rate of consumption based on the fuel metering, one number is divided by the other and there’s your answer.

It’s a funny thing. I know how meaningless is the instantaneous read-out, but it can have a most positive psychological effect. This morning I drove into the village, cruised fairly gently down to the station carpark, did my messages and drove gently back – Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on the stereo and everything very mellow.

The mellowest bit of all was that the “miles before refuel” reading was 130 miles when I started off, but was up to 150 miles when I got back. What a brilliant feeling that gives you! – somehow, I’ve gained something for nothing. It’s almost as though someone has sneaked some additional fuel (free of charge!) into the tank while I was out.

I’m all in favour of this – however stupid it might be, it really feels like an achievement to have gained those extra miles, to have cheated the oil companies. I like it.

When I was a kid we had a standing joke about finding a circular bicycle route which was downhill all the way round. We knew it wasn’t possible, but it was a fun idea. This is somehow related – we could try to imagine driving gently enough so that we never needed to fill the tank again.

I’m working on it.

Hooptedoodle #102 - Uncle Arthur

First thing to know about Uncle Arthur is that he wasn’t my uncle at all – he was just a friend of the family. Has that practice disappeared? I had a few uncles of that sort – maybe in those days it would have been too awful for kids to have called friends of the family by their first names, but Uncle X was OK.

Anyway, Arthur and Mrs Arthur lived in the flat below us. Very shortly after VE-Day, my parents got married and rented an enormous Victorian flat in Princes Park, Liverpool. Immediately afterwards, Austerity arrived. My dad was told by Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (he was the chief radio and RADAR service engineer for the Port of Liverpool at the time) that all overtime was cancelled indefinitely, his wage dropped to about a third of what it had been and he was now stuck with a big flat he couldn’t really afford.  Soon after that he had a new family that he couldn’t afford, either – that’s how it was in those days.

Arthur had never made commissioned rank, but had served in the RAF, a gunner in Bomber Command, and on the arrival of peace and the Brave New World Arthur was one of the lucky few who were offered a career which was beyond their obvious qualifications. Arthur was sent to night school to learn to be a teacher – which involved exciting stuff such as chemistry, which he had never got to play with before. Arthur got a bit hung up on the chemistry course.

My mum and dad (this is before I was born) used to do a lot of cinema-going, and, when Arthur was in the full ecstasy of his studies, they used to take his wife with them to the movies, and leave him to get on with it.

There are many tales of their delivering his wife home again at the end of the evening, to discover what Arthur had achieved during their absence. On a couple of occasions he answered the door with a demonic grin and a distinct lack of eyebrows – Arthur went through a phase of being fascinated by explosives. One weekend, he and my dad decided to test one of his home-made bombs on a derelict hen-house in the back yard. My dad (being the electrical man) devised a detonator and they set up their experiment one Sunday, placing themselves behind some stone steps which led down to the cellar. They threw the detonator switch, and…. nothing happened. This bomb was by far the largest Arthur had built so far, complete with cocoa tin housing, and the breathless excitement of the occasion was definitely heightened by uncertainty over exactly how much of the neighbourhood it might take out, so a non-detonation was not a routine event. Legend has it that they stayed behind the steps for a couple of hours before they dared go to check what was wrong.

I believe they abandoned that test, and dismantled the bomb.

My grandad was very dubious about the whole thing. “You’ll come in one night,” he said, “and there’ll be a bloody big bulge in the floor – you wait and see.”

Arthur moved on from his studies, and later on – in the time of my own recollection – he had a series of fairly extreme hobbies, all of which involved my dad and led to a crazy competitive element. For a while it was tropical fish – both flats suddenly had enormous tank systems in the kitchen window – I can still remember the Tiger Barbs, Mollies, various kinds of Angel Fish and – above all – Siamese Fighting Fish. There was money in Siamese Fighters if you bred them successfully, and then there was a lot of tight-lipped professional criticism and the competitive bit got out of hand. For a while, Arthur’s Fighting Fish were indisputably better than ours (though, naturally, we disputed it), but then they got a terrible disease and the whole thing petered out in financial loss and fits of the sulks. The most interesting thing that I remember about Siamese Fighting Fish is that if you put a handbag mirror against the side of the tank they would attack their own reflection, which was very bad for the fish but quite a lot of fun nonetheless.

Then it was soup. Yes – that’s right – soup. Our flat (and Arthur’s) was one day full of big earthenware pots, and there were strange soup stocks brewing away in all the cupboards, which involved secret shipments of pigs’ trotters, ox tails and all manner of spices. I can’t remember what happened to the soups, but then we moved on to bread-making (which was stymied by rationing), then briefly it was pickled onions (which is limited in scope, you have to admit) and the next big thing I remember was Pressure Cookers.

Do they still have Pressure Cookers? If I remember correctly, ours were made by the Prestige Company – the idea was that you did your cooking in a sealed pan which had a weight-loaded release valve. Since the boiling point of water depends on the pressure, it is possible to raise the cooking temperature by carrying it out at high pressure, so that application of a heavy weight to the valve meant that you could reduce the cooking time for a stew from (say) 4 hours to (say) 2 hours by raising the boiling temperature. If you cannot see much excitement in this – especially in the context of post-war Britain when there wasn’t a lot to spend your time on anyway – then I am with you all the way.

Anyway, the pressure cookers took on the same competitive edge which all the other hobbies had, but it all ended strangely one day when Arthur decided to try cooking porridge in a pressure cooker. He did a very careful calculation, applied a valve-weight which was well above the safety specification of the pan (you could get extra bits for these around the back of Birkenhead market), and reckoned that he could reduce the preparation of porridge (which his family hated, by the way) to about 15 minutes. Sadly, the valve stuck.

When the calculated time was up, Arthur opened his pressure-cooker in a state of great excitement and was disappointed and mystified to find that it was empty. In fact the valve had eventually freed itself, and a jet of super-heated porridge (which would have killed any life form it contacted) was released, forming a giant oatcake a few millimetres thick and about 1.5 metres diameter, which solidified handsomely on the kitchen ceiling, where it remained for a surprising length of time. Arthur retired from the Pressure Cooking Wars immediately (possibly on advice from his family), and my dad’s pressure cooker fell into disuse shortly after.

More seriously, Arthur eventually won whatever competition it was they thought they were in. He made a success of his teaching career and – despite the contempt that my dad heaped upon him in private – became the first of the two who was able to afford to start buying his own house. He had won – a small but decisive victory – for ever. He moved away to his new house, and my dad found bigger fish to despise.

I met Arthur years later – in my late teens I played for a local cricket club in Mossley Hill, and one of our yearly fixtures was against the local NALGO team (National Association of Local Government Officers) – probably their second team, in fact – and almost all of them were teachers at that time. Arthur opened the batting for them – still larger than life, still terminally cheerful, and very much as I remembered him from my infancy.

He had a daughter the same age as me, who eventually became headmistress of one of the biggest girls’ schools in Liverpool, but all I really remember about her is that she had a very serious accident and wet the floor in Mrs Pritchard’s class on about Day 3 of the first term of primary school – I can still visualize the puddle spreading on the parquet floor - and that brought an abrupt end to our friendship. I mean, there were standards, even in the age of austerity…