Assorted Wargames Nostalgia

This post really is just a collection of bits. I was going through a file of old paperwork connected with my wargaming past – nothing very distinguished, but I was reminded of a few things. Sadly, the accompanying photos for the first item were lost ages ago, during the hostilities which followed my split with my first wife (which almost certainly serves me right).

(1) Waterloo Day – yes, today is the 199^th anniversary of Napoleon’s Really Bad Day, and one of the items I found in the file was a sheet of scribblings from a 160^th anniversary Waterloo game I played at my old flat in Marchmont, Edinburgh, with some friends [that’s 1975, ladies and gentlemen]. The first thing that struck me was that, of the players involved – Philip Snell, John Ramsay, Dave Thompson, Alan Low, Allan Gallacher and myself – I am the only one still alive. Good grief – I hadn’t thought of that before. The game was considerably scaled down, but still used inappropriately detailed rules (around about this time I started using Charles Wesencraft’s rules, with all distances halved, but June 1975 is just a little early for that, so I guess we were using a hybrid game which was mostly Tunbridge Wells [George Gush?] with some bits of South-East Scotland WG thrown in). This was probably one of the last biggish games I staged before I started painting hexagons all over my tabletop – we hadn’t thought of Old School yet, though there was definitely some creaking associated with our enthusiasm for what we naively regarded as increased realism.

One thing I remember fondly was that Allan G was supposed to bring the Prussians, since otherwise we didn’t have any, but he actually turned up with Russians, since he didn’t have any Prussians either but hadn’t the heart to tell us. Thus this particular version of the B of W was notable for an unusual lack of authenticity in the OOB. The battle staggered on all day – eventually we agreed that the Allies were beaten, and that was that – we caught the last orders for drinks at the Bruntsfield Hotel and got into the obligatory justificatory arguments. We had decided that the [P]Russians would arrive after 2pm as soon as Wellington threw 11 or better on 2D6 (or “two dice”, as we would have called them at the time) at the start of his turn. As soon as they arrived, Napoleon would start rolling dice each turn, and a French reserve force under Grouchy would arrive on a 9 or better. Don’t ask me where these scientific probabilities came from, but – anyway – it’s academic, since Wellington never managed the requisite dice roll, and his bewildered Russian allies were not called into play, and eventually returned to Dunfermline in their toolbox – I’m not sure if they were relieved or outraged.

(2) Having mentioned the South-East Scotland chaps, I am delighted to have had an email from Mark, in Canada, who knew the notorious George Jeffrey back in the 1980s (rather after I knew him), and was, for a while, a disciple of George’s famed (but little understood, especially by me) Variable Length Bound system, or VLB. This, in theory, is the answer to a great many problems which wargamers have struggled with over the decades, but is reputed to suffer from the slight problem that it doesn’t actually work. Whatever – without making any pre-emptive judgements – I have invited Mark to contribute some notes about VLB, which we have briefly mentioned here before, and he hopes to send me something – excellent.

(3) I found a bunch of photos of my old (early 1970s) Ancient armies, which were dreadfully crude but served me for many years. Now gone – a nice chap in New Zealand bought them on eBay some years ago – their only claim to a place in my heart is that they are – like my Waterloo collaborators – no more. I don’t expect anyone to be excited by my crap painting or my very basic Airfix + Garrison + Atlantic armies, but – if we are to preserve a hallowed whisper for Old School – it is as well to remember that this was the reality. You may notice that my dread of paint-shedding by plastic figures was such that I kept spears and the wobbly bits of chariots etc in the raw plastic, which explains the distinctive vibrant orange preservative obviously employed by the Celtic chariot builders.

I am still quietly pleased by the onager, which I built from balsa, with shirt button wheels (all right, all right), based on the drawings in the WRG’s nice little book. Purists will protest that the Romans did not have shirts, never mind shirt buttons.

Note early view of The Cupboard - I didn't have so many figures in 2001

The occasion commemorated by the first few photos is my first wargame in my present house, New Year 2001. The room is what was the dining room at that time, which has subsequently become the downstairs shower/toilet (so wargames in the bog almost took place here), and my opponent was Malcolm Turner, who – now I think about it – is also dead now. Maybe it’s me then? That will have cut the queue of people wishing to visit Chateau Foy for a wargame, I would think.

The remainder were taken 5 years ago, when I was proposing to sell them.

(4) I also found some vintage, typed casualty tables I derived from the kill rates in Bill Leeson’s reprint of Von Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel rules, which I am still poring over. These may be too dry even for the standards of this blog, but I’ll see if there is something useful which could be put here.

I think that’s probably quite enough of all that…

Hooptedoodle #138 - All the Rest have 31, except February

"It's weird - you know, I could swear it was a Sunday…"

Yesterday was Sunday, and I was woken early by the sun shining in the window and the birds (no respecters of late night World Cup-viewing schedules) making a racket. As I lay there, it occurred to me that we are close to Waterloo day.

One thing about Waterloo which is important (or seems so) is that it took place on a Sunday. Is there not a reference to the priest at Plancenoit insisting on ringing the bells for morning mass? Whatever, it was a Sunday – you will struggle to find any description of the event which does not mention this.

This year 18^th June is a Wednesday, and next year – the 200^th anniversary – will be a Thursday. So, in my half-awake state, I reasoned that somehow or other I should be able to reconcile the 4-day slippage over two centuries. If I failed, there was always the chance that I would drift off to sleep again, so how could I lose?

Righto – concentrate, I told myself.

Your standard year is 365 days, which is 52 weeks and 1 day, so that gives you a 1 day slip forward each year – and then there’s leap years. OK – no problem – every 4^th year we get an extra day, so on the face of it that’s 5 days forward every 4 years (or 2 days back, if that’s easier – which it probably isn’t). Aha – snag. I was vaguely aware that something funny happens at the end of each century – leap years aren’t so straightforward as this. I realized that this wasn’t going to work until I’d done a little self-education on the nippy question of what happens about extra days at century-end.

[This is a common enough situation – I regularly find that unlocking the window latch requires an expanding series of preliminary jobs until I have to move the entire house four centimetres to the left before I start.]

Not to worry, I reasoned – let’s gloss over the century issue for the time being, and see how far out I am. Then I can check the details and balance everything up. At this stage I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. OK – 100 years is 25 lots of 4 years, which (as I had already decided) means a total slip forward of 25 x 5 days, which is 125 days, which is 17 weeks 6 days, which is a slip forward of 6 days or a slip back of 1 day. That’s not too difficult, though the birds were putting me off a bit. This means that my crude version of the leap year rule gives a backward slip of 2 days in 200 years, which would move the anniversary of our Sunday battle to Friday.

Drat. We already know it’s going to be a Thursday in 2015. I’ve lost a day somewhere – or have I gained a day? At this point I decided

(a) it’s less confusing if I always count the slippage forward

(b) I’d better get up and switch the computer on. Not knowing what happens to leap years at the end of a century is not too pressing a matter if it only affects us once every 100 years, but clearly this is a gap in my toolbox.

First pseudocode rule I found was reasonably simple, even at that time of the morning:

if year is not divisible by 4 then common year


else if year is not divisible by 100 then leap year


else if year is not divisible by 400 then common year


else leap year

But then I found that it isn’t as simple as that – and we get into Gregorian and Julian calendars, and all sorts of alternative calendars, some of which I have never heard of. I think that my world conforms to the Revised Julian, and the full definition for this is:

The Revised Julian calendar adds an extra day to February in years that are integer multiples of four, except for years that are integer multiples of 100 that do not leave a remainder of 200 or 600 when divided by 900. This rule agrees with the rule for the Gregorian calendar until 2799. The first year [in which] dates in the Revised Julian calendar will not agree with those in the Gregorian calendar will be 2800, because it will be a leap year in the Gregorian calendar but not in the Revised Julian calendar.

This rule gives an average year length of 365.242222 days. This is a very good approximation to the mean tropical year, but because the vernal equinox year is slightly longer, the Revised Julian calendar does not do as good a job as the Gregorian calendar of keeping the vernal equinox on or close to March 21.

In fact, I believe these two versions both give the same answer for this particular problem – i.e. 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was. So let’s look at this again – 2 x 25 lots of 4 years, each 4 years giving us 5 days slip forward, is 250 days, which is 35 weeks 5 days, but in fact the year 1900 should not have been a leap year, so deduct 1 day, giving 35 weeks 4 days. 4 days forward from Sunday gets us to Thursday for the 200^th anniversary, which is correct.

Thank goodness for that. Since there was no point in going back to bed at this point, I got sidetracked into reading about exactly when centuries end, and I leave you with the following statement from The Times of 26^th December 1799, which does not seem to invite further comment:

We have uniformly rejected all letters and declined all discussion upon the question of when the present century ends, as it is one of the most absurd that can engage the public attention, and we are astonished to find it has been the subject of so much dispute, since it appears plain. The present century will not terminate till January 1, 1801, unless it can be made out that 99 are 100... It is a silly, childish discussion, and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated.

Foy’s Almost-Summer Prize Competition 2014 – Awards Night

Thanks very much to everyone who sent an entry. I am very impressed – and mightily entertained. Because I was concerned that it might be too difficult, I think I was perhaps a little too generous with the clues, but my compliments to those who identified the right location and the associated Napoleonic event.

I received a total of 17 entries, of which 10 were correct, or at least on the right lines. The supersleuths used Google Search, Google Earth – some cunning devils even stalked my whereabouts in the month of August through my blogging activities, so there is a pervasive whiff of Google throughout.

A couple of entries provided an exact location – down to street corner level, which is scary, and the quality of the answers provided was generally so good that a lot of weight fell on the big proportion of points available for (subjective) entertainment value. Again, the standard was really very high, though I am a famously unfair and waspish marker.

Special mention must go to Rod, who provided a hilarious and very detailed explanation of why the location was Goole (in Humberside), but thus lost marks for accuracy.

Otherwise, in no particular order, I must applaud the very fine, well-thought-out entries of Steve the Wargamer, Edwin King, Ivan Fairchild (“Ivan the Tolerable”), Ludovico and James Saul, before coming to my final short list of three. These were all truly excellent, and I’ve spent a couple of days agonising over the ranking. Eventually it was a very close call indeed – thus the runners-up are Pyotr (stupefying accuracy and amusing explanation) and Johnny Rosbif (not so precise, but pulled out all the stops on the comic explanation), but the winner is Ubique Matt, whose overall score just takes the prize by a whisker(!).

If Matt can email me through my Blogger profile with postal details, I shall arrange shipping forthwith…

The photo was taken on the corner of Leopoldstrasse and Neurauthgasse in Innsbruck, Tirol, Austria, in August 2011, looking slightly west of south. There are a few misleading items (Italian and German car registrations, and the Italian-owned Agip garage, which threw a couple of people). The big clues are the Austrian-style church, which appears in a couple of old paintings of the battle, and the odd tower in the distance, which is the ski-jump from the 1964 Winter Olympics. Between the camera position and this tower there is a steep hillside which was the scene of the Battles of Berg Isel in 1809. The number of these battles is three or four, depending upon whom you ask. The first three were notable because the Tirolean partisans under Andreas Hofer (he of the whiskers) gave a series of salutary whuppings to the Bavarian regulars (who must have been puffed out with the climb). The fourth is seldom mentioned since the Tiroleans lost that one.

Hofer, on his night off

The blog post from 2011, describing my visit to the place, and showing pictures of the panorama, is here. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who took part – here is Matt’s winning entry:

Very interesting set of questions/challenges on your blog. With reference to your comp, you're standing I believe on Brennerstrasse near it's the junction with Neurauthgasse looking south, in Bergisel, just south of Innsbruck. This was near the site of the Battle(s) of Bergisel. [Ed: Brennerstrasse is the continuation of Leopoldstrasse, on the other side of Neurauthgasse, so this is certainly close enough – within the burst circle…] 

Using my Google fu powers and a bit of luck - I looked down your blog roll to August last year to find out where you had gone on your holidays and saw that it was Austria. The ski jump seemed vaguely familiar (I eventually recognized it the one near Innsbruck as I've stood at the top of it during a mad dash around Europe in my youth - how people can launch themselves off those things I'll never know).

Using Google Earth I traced the line of the street directly back looking for the church and Agip petrol station (seen on the photo) until I spotted the likely site of where you stood (Brennerstrasse near Neurauthgasse) to take the photo.

With reference to whiskers all I can think of is Andreas Hofer, who had a particular impressive set of whiskers himself. I know there's a monument to him in Bergisel because we saw it and none of us had any idea who he was at the time (this was before the dark days, before we all had mobile phone with internet access). So we asked around to find out who he was, interesting chap.

Hooptedoodle #137 – Cereal Packet Giveaways

This started off with me reminiscing in an email to Old John about the cut-out masks you used to get on the back of Puffed Wheat packets when I was a kid. So this is straightforward, aimless nostalgia, purely for its own sake.

I’m not an expert or a collector, but I suppose I must have spent many weeks of my life at breakfast times over the years, staring at cereal packets – maybe months. Nowadays my attention tends to wander a bit, but this is partly due to the messages on the packet being mostly dedicated to telling me why I should buy this stuff, disregarding completely the fact that I have obviously already bought it.

There was a long period when all cereal packets had to be themed into some popular TV character, or some cartoon personality they had generated for their own advertising – which at the time I thought was a bit limp, and probably is a useful guide to the point in history when kids were no longer expected to have an imagination. There was also a pseudo-health period – where else could I have learned that the cereal I was eating contained traces of Niacin, which (of course) is the anti-Pellagra vitamin? Just out of interest, did anyone ever have Pellagra? – I’ve always assumed it was very nasty, but I never knew.

No – I’m talking of the fifties [sinister, echoing sound effect]. Out of complete idleness, I spent a little time yesterday looking online for some evidence of some of those memories – naturally, the world of Google is swamped in US examples, probably because Americans are better than we are at nostalgia and because it rarely occurs to them that anywhere else ever existed. I found a marvellous UK site, which is worth a look, here. I borrowed a couple of examples from there, but only to show what a great place to visit it is.

Well I remember the Puffed Wheat “Hi-Hats”, which promised so much yet delivered so little. My first one was the Saturn Space Spy, which was unusual in that it was a full face – most of them were upper face only. I munched my way impatiently through a big pack of PW, gazing longingly at the thing (though I had some misgivings about the fact that it said Space Spy in big letters on the forehead). This is the stuff of fantasy – at no additional cost (as they pointed out), the mighty Quaker company – whose technology was such that every single Puff was fired from big cannons, apparently – had presented me with the opportunity to actually look like a real Space Spy. Fantastic. If you got your mum to give a hand with cutting out the eye holes, and around the sticky-out nose flap – oh yes, and punch the holes for the elastic, and then actually find some elastic – then, at a stroke, your imagination would do the rest and you would instantly - magically - be changed from a kid into a kid with a piece of cereal packet attached to the front of his head.

I believe that I actually cried a bit when I saw the reality of my mask. Even if it had worked, which it didn’t, it would only have worked from the front – although, of course, that is exactly the view I presented in the mirror. The worst of the lot was the cowboy hat. Let’s put this into context…

Cowboy hats were a problem. In fact cowboy outfits were a problem generally. You could buy any number of toy guns, you could play at wiping out the entire aboriginal population of Northern America every day (God forgive us - no wonder we grew up weird), but if you wanted to dress the part you were in for a let-down. Cowboy outfits that you bought from toyshops didn’t look like the proper cowboys in the Tim Holt movies on Saturday mornings – they looked, at best, like Hopalong Flaming Cassidy. I had a stupid black, Baden-Powell shaped hat with a lime green fringe around the brim – lime green? - what was that about? My cousin’s was even worse – it was the same shape, but a festive sort of royal blue, with a cut out tin-foil star on the front – and his cowpoke’s protective “chaps” actually had pictures of cowboys printed on them. Even at 5 or 6, we realized this was a poor show.

You get the idea. Into this authenticity vacuum, Puffed Wheat produced a very convincing looking 2-dimensional cowboy hat that Tim Holt and his chums would have been proud of, and the drawing of the happy boy wearing it, terrorizing his astonished mother and sister, showed that he looked – even from the side – just like the real deal. Although I had cooled on the idea of Hi-Hats after my Space Spy fiasco, I got quite worked up about this one. One Saturday, stuffed with Puffed Wheat, I cut it out, fitted it up, recycled the elastic from the binned Space Spy, took one look in the mirror and it was ditched within 20 seconds. Not only did it look rubbish, but it actually wrapped around the sides of your head like a sweatband – not at all like the illustration. More tears.

These were valuable life lessons, of course – about marketing and about the fact that – in the long run – no amount of imagination will cover up for complete junk!

I remember the multiple series of cut-out vehicles of all types on the back of the Weetabix packets – I’m sure some genius must have designed them, and they were fun, but – again – they were fiddly to make and looked dreadful. One after the other, they were cut out, glued together and binned, I didn’t get upset about them any more, but I was aware that I only liked the process, rather than the end deliverable. The flat wheels, printed on one side only, were an obvious weakness, but in fact the square edges were unrealistic too – in both respects, the veteran car series were better, but the finished product was never worth the effort. It must have served as a good apprenticeship for all these botched toy soldiers in later life, though! I recall that the first couple of series of Weetabix Workshop had a sketch of a boy and his mum looking suitably enthusiastic, but the later ones were more obviously macho and engineering-focused, and mum was dropped - the psychologists were busy, even then.

I also remember something called Mornflake Oats, which I assume was porridge – my cousin collected a most impressive looking village and farm which you could cut out and assemble – on good quality art card, as I recall, but we never had the courage to try to build them. There was a slight risk that if they didn’t turn out well it might be down to us.

So much other stuff – freebies which have become little icons of childhood – red plastic British Foot Guards bandsmen – I started collecting them, but gave up after I got five tuba players on the trot. Of course, if I’d had any mates, I could have swapped them.

I recall little plastic submarines which worked with baking soda, a series of small one-piece plastic racing cars, which must have come with Sugar Puffs (later?), since I can recall that they were always sticky and had to be washed.

I tried to find some pictures of proper Hi-Hats, but failed – I found some American Kellogg’s equivalents, but not the real thing from my own history. Anyway, if you never saw them, they were rubbish. Take my word for it.  

Painting - Mules...

In response to emails from Ludovico, Martin P, Martin S, Louis and Francis, here is the new mule train.  Not hugely attractive, but potentially useful. They are versatile, since they are capable of representing any nation in the Peninsula, or of splitting into smaller trains.

I would prefer it if they weren't all in step, but this is only a toy army, after all.

Painting - a Little Command Tidying-Up

While assembling some heavyweight shipments of soldiers to go away to be worked on by painters who actually know what they are doing, I've also been doing some fiddling away of my own, finishing off some odd figures that have been in the To Be Painted pile for far too long. None of them is going to win any prizes, but it is satisfying to get a bit of the backlog cleared.

First thing I did was finish off my Peninsular War mule train - it's only taken me about 40 years to get around to having one of these. Pack and draught animals are always a bit of a thankless undertaking; since I always put off painting them, I have usually forgotten that they are mostly just a mass of harness and strapping and bits tied on, all of which requires a bit of care to make them look half-decent.

That was last week. This week I have mostly been finishing off some missing generals for my other French Peninsular Army (which is sort of the Army of the Centre, or the North, or Aragon, or any and all of these as occasion demands). Two of these are Art Miniaturen castings, for the cavalry - nominally Generals Treillard (with the white "division" border to his base) and Maupoint (brown for "brigade), and the other is an old Minifigs 20mm OPC figure, who started life as one of several Marshal Neys which I have, and will be a spare General de Division for the Army of Portugal, or anyone else who needs one.

Here they are - glad to have got them finished - feels like more progress than it really is. Once again, my photographs show the blue uniforms as rather paler than they look in the flesh - my camera has outsmarted me again. [I don't mind so much if my camera is smarter than me - it hurts more when I am out-thought by the electric kettle…]

Since the Aragon role is not comfortable for King Joseph (who is the incumbent command figure for this other army), I am also thinking of having an extra figure for Marshal Suchet - the real motivation here is that I have a very nice little mounted ADC in hussar uniform who will paint up very colourfully as Suchet's sidekick, Captain Gaultier, on the 2-figure C-in-C stand. That's down the road a piece - next painting job for me is a group of British infantry intended for digging trenches in the siege game. These will be armed with shovels and pickaxes, and mounted on the house-standard brown "mud" stands (for sieges). After that there is more artillery equipment, and a refurb job on a very elderly unit of Garrison French chasseurs a cheval, who will need some improvised command. Don't hold your breath.

Foy’s Almost-Summer Prize Competition 2014 - the Actual Competition

Here it is – sorry, this is all a bit rushed now, which makes something of a nonsense of my attempt at dramatic effect, but I'm not sure I'm going to get a chance to get back to the blog over the next couple of days.

As ever, if you wish to enter you have to either be a registered follower of my blog or else someone with whom I have regular email correspondence in connection with the blog.

I’ve gone back to an old format for this competition, mainly because it used to give rise to a bigger and more entertaining response! The competition is very simple – please study this photograph, which was taken at around midday in the month of August, on a weekday, and send me a comment (or email, if you prefer) telling me where it was taken, which Napoleonic event took place near here, why whiskers are relevant(!), how you arrived at this answer, and any other thoughts you have.

I’ve deliberately made the photo large, so you can examine it in greater detail. Oh yes – I took the photo myself, so you won’t find it in Google Image. There’s quite a few clues here, but I hope it’s still a reasonable challenge.

Judging will be, as ever, completely subjective and totally unfair – I’ll allow up to 10 points for geographical accuracy, 10 points for identification of the historical associations (including the whiskers) and 20 points for your explanation of how you came to this conclusion, and any relevant observations – thus an amusing explanation of a poor answer may score as many points as a blunt presentation of the correct answer.

If you can get your solution to me by midnight (UK time) at the end of 10^th June I’ll get the details of the winner posted within a day or so after that. I won't publish entry comments received, to avoid people learning from each others’ answers, though I’ll consider publishing any clarifications, in case there are any technical issues….  (yawn)

The Prizes

This is a bit of a grand chuck-out – so I hope it appeals, there are some nice items in here. The winner will receive a parcel containing all of the following:

(1) Paperback of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Napoleonic War Stories (new)

(2) Paperback - The Wargaming Pioneers Vol.1 – edited by John Curry – includes details of Little Wars, R L Stevenson’s games, Shambattle and a pile of other early wargames (perfect, unmarked)

(3) The Napoleonic Wargame – G W Jeffrey (paperback) – (old and read, but sound and clean) – Old School, but not as we know it, Jim…

(4) Warhammer – English Civil War – rules and much more (paperback) – (very good condition)

(5) Napoleon – Matthew Fletcher - Wargames Foundry’s rules-cum-coffee table book about wargaming, which is an entertaining read – lots and lots and LOTS of pictures of their figures, with instructions on how to paint them

(6) Portuguese Army booklet as described in my previous post

If you wish to enter but do not want the prize, please say so and have a go anyway, just for the glory, and you may be the Category B winner – the prize will still go to the best Category A effort.

If you are interested then I wish you all the best, I look forward to hearing from you and thank you for reading my blog!