Further down Lilliput Lane – more eBay adventures

The inflow of collectable cottages is stopping – there are still a couple of items in the mail, but I am running out of enthusiasm and storage space at about the same rate. Interestingly, this week a couple of the “Sue” ladies (see previous post) were named Amanda and Carol, which I suppose is acceptable, but two of the sellers turned out to be blokes, which was more of a surprise, and (even more interestingly) I had my first eBay Lilliput Lane-related problems with these same male sellers.

Picture at the top is of a pleasant group made up of four David Winter Tudor cottages and a Lilliput Lane church, complete with passing cavalry unit to give the scale comparison. Nothing earth-shaking, but the most expensive building on display here is the church, which was, I think, £3-something. I am contemplating a forthcoming ECW campaign in a hitherto-undiscovered part of Lancashire, which involves a couple of decent-sized towns and a possible siege or two, so buildings of this type are most welcome.

My eBay adventures were instructive, and not particularly tedious, so I shall relate something of my dealings with the male sellers.

Case Study No.1 – Adam

Adam listed a single lot of two David Winter cottages, starting bid £0.99p, with a pretty hefty shipping charge of £9.50. Blinking at the P&P, I put a maximum bid of £1.25, and got them for 99p, with no other watchers, as far as I could see. Did the PayPal thing straight away (before I forget!) and looked forward to seeing what sort of velvet-cushion-accompanied-by-dancing-girls delivery service I got for my £9.50.

It was perfectly standard customer drop-off by Hermes, which for a parcel of this weight costs £3.98. Adam is obviously one of those eBayers who likes to load the shipping charges and put in a cheap starting price. I’m not sure that eBay actually disapprove, but I do – I’m not keen on this practice at all.

Just for the hell of it, I sent Adam a polite note (and at this point I had fulsome feedback from him, but I had not yet done the feedback for him, so I had a tactical edge), emphasizing that I had no grounds for complaint, since I had agreed to the purchase, but could he please explain the shipping cost.

I got a rant by return. Adam went on at considerable length about the unfairness of the fees charged by eBay and PayPal, the cost to him of doing the packing and travelling to the courier, and how I could hardly complain getting two such fine cottages for this amount of money. He also explained that if I wanted a postage discount I should have asked for the shipping on the two cottages to be combined, and he would have considered whether he could afford it, which is, basically, straight bollocks, since the two items were a single listing, and were combined already.

Tiring of Adam, who was less fun than I had hoped, I withdrew from the debate and left sort of sketchy feedback for him. If the cottages had been £5 for the two plus £5 shipping I would have been perfectly happy – as I am, in fact – so he’s correct, in a daft sort of way. It is a shame that he seems to get so little fun from his eBay involvement – the Sues do much better in this respect. One of them, bless her, sent me a lollipop with her business card – now that is classy.

Case Study No.2 – Colin

Colin is not a lucky man. I purchased another David Winter house for very little from Colin, paid for it, and got a notification that the item was mailed 1^st Class on 21^st July. By the 28^th there was no sign of it, so I sent Colin a friendly note to say that I wasn’t unduly worried, but thought I should let him know.

I got a lengthy reply from him, to the effect that he had, unfortunately, been involved in an accident the previous week, and had been hospitalized, had had an adverse reaction to the painkillers he was prescribed, and was in very poor shape indeed. He had arranged with his father (who is elderly, an army veteran, and suffers occasional lapses of memory) for the week’s parcels, which were all packed and ready to go, to be posted, but it had all gone wrong for various further reasons.

I sympathized with his misfortune, told him I’d be delighted to get the package whenever he could manage it, and not to worry about it. There was a faint whiff of Foy’s Seventh Law about the explanations, but no matter.

True to his word, Colin emailed me the following day to say that he had battled his way to the post office, and the parcel should reach me the next day. And so it did, and I was very pleased with it, though I was surprised when I found a note offering his repeated apologies for the delay and the “mix-up” – the note was inside the packing, next to the miniature house. No problem at all – pleased with the item, very cheap purchase, but – would you undo and then re-wrap an already-complete package to put in an apology? No? – neither would I.

You don’t suppose he had just forgotten, surely? No – of course not. To be on the safe side, in future I deal only with eBay sellers named Sue...

I am still looking forward to receiving a very attractive, period town hall of suitable proportions, which I obtained for very little, though it is No.68 of a limited edition of - I can't remember how many, in fact. You get an idea of what kind of an outsider I am in this field of collecting when I tell you that I am thinking of how best to prise said town hall off its handsome wooden plinth. Proper collectors the world over would wring their hands and weep at such an act of desecration.

Heavy on the Cute – the World of Sue

More Confessions of a Closet Lilliput Lane Fancier

English windmill, Sir?

My recent coming-out as a browser of Lilliput Lane listings on eBay has landed me a number of excellent items of ECW scenery, and has been quite an education. I am, I sincerely hope, a fringe player here, but I have seen enough to be intrigued and sometimes horrified by the real deal.

Here’s the technique – enter “Lilliput Lane” and some other promising key word like “manor house” or “smithy” or “church” in the eBay search field, and have a look at what’s on offer. Don’t look at the prices at this point or you will run for cover, screaming. Find something you like the look of, and skip through ads for this item until you find one that gives physical size, so you can check it’s OK for scale (usually the serious retailers will give a full spec and lots of photos, but their prices will be off-putting).

Or a very serviceable manor house for ECW, for £2.25? 

I use 20mm wargames figures (Les Higgins, Hinton Hunt, SHQ, Tumbling Dice), and I deliberately use underscale buildings – the most suitable of the Lilliput Lane items work out at a slightly smallish 15mm scale, which is good for me. Having identified a suitable candidate item (and I like “retired” items best – current catalogue stuff and recent releases are dominated by heavyweight pro dealers, and therefore are too dear), I do a specific search on that, and then list the items by price, cheapest first, and the unknown, perfumed, faintly purple world of ladies’ eBay opens before me.

There are some astonishing bargains, and some of them still have boxes and certificates (which are wasted on me) and many of them are pretty much perfect. There is a whole alternative reality out there of ladies who deal in secondhand party frocks (size 14) and shoes (silver, stiletto heels, worn once only) and assorted gifty tat and shelf clutter, especially LL cottages and chromium plated photo frames. These ladies live in Basildon, or Bournemouth, or Slough, and they are – almost all of them – named Sue, and they are all lovely.

The Sue thing is quite amazing – almost an essential qualification; I did buy a nice little half-timbered cottage, perfect, for 99 pence from a lady whose eBay ID was molly*moppet or similar, but I was relieved to find that her real name was actually Sue, so that was all right. She was brilliant – postage fees were exactly correct, the care of packing and the amount of bubblewrap were well in excess of what I would have done for 99 miserable pence, she posted it the same day and left me nice, gushy feedback which was so extreme that for a brief moment I glowed with my supreme status as an eBay customer, until I checked and found that all her buyers get the same message of love and appreciation.

Preston Mill - the real building is at East Linton, in East Lothian, about 6 miles
from where I'm sitting; Montrose could well pass this way...

Why Sue? The Contesse and I discussed this briefly, and we reckon that Sue was a very popular name in Britain for baby girls maybe 50-something years ago, and that this is the typical age at which ladies achieve their lifelong wish to sell used party frocks and ornaments and gush at total strangers. And God bless them all – I have no complaints.

The price spread is astonishing – I bought a flawless (though unboxed) Claypotts Castle for £2 or something the same week that a dealer was selling it, used and "rare", as Buy-It-Now for £32.99.

Convincing Lonsdale-area farm; watch out - some of them have hidden Land Rovers 

I’ve had a couple of disappointments – paid £1.25 for a David Winter mansion house which turned out to be just over an inch tall, but that can go into the local charity shop – some nice lady will be delighted to buy it, I’m sure, and stick it on eBay. Mostly everything has been very pleasing. You have to be selective – this is a huge, bewildering topic area when you start looking around – and you have to watch the sizes and the close-up pics, but the number of items and the choice is staggering.

Storage is an issue – the buildings are quite heavy and will chip easily, and are maybe not just what you wish to have lying about your bookshelves, but careful use of bubblewrap and old shoe boxes should take care of that (I can send the shoes to Sue for auction). I’m going to stop browsing the listings now – I’ve got some very decent items so far, and there are a couple more in the post.

Cornish tin mine - could just as easily be a Scottish lead mine

One word of warning – stay away from the collector forums, for that is a twilight world and you may become frightened. That is where you get into the debates about why the original version of Lupin Cottage (retired in 1987) is worth so much more than the later version (though I cannot tell the two photos apart) and why we all have to put our names down for this year’s special Members-only Limited Edition Piece, Windsor Castle in the Snow, which will (of course) be a magnificent investment to leave to your grandchildren (who, as I am beginning to understand, will get Sue to sell it on eBay for 99 pence).   

Background Artillery Project - More Siege Guns

Just the thing to rattle the roof-tiles - the brown bases are my house standard for
siege equipment and engineers. I can't remember why, but it's a standard, isn't it?

A little more progress - the British 10-inch howitzers mentioned here back in February have now been painted and have met up with some gunners. The howitzers themselves are from the old Hinchliffe 20mm range, the gunners are mostly by NapoleoN, with a couple of Falcata castings thrown in (including the officer in the bicorn, who might be Captain William "Beefy" Tonkiss of the Royal Artillery).

This little lot represents 2 x 6-gun batteries, which is rather more 10-inch howitzers than the British had available in the Peninsula, but they look nice. The real things were given up as a bad job after the gunners ignored a "maximum elevation" instruction and wrecked the gun carriages at the First Siege of Badajoz - as far as we know, they went into storage until the Crimean War…

A small, sadly routine tale of dommage from the preparation of these: the howitzers are on hybrid carriages, which have little garrison wheels at the rear. One of these little wheels escaped while I was gluing things together, fell on the carpet and disappeared without trace. Remarkable. After the necessary amount of swearing, I cut my losses and assembled the batteries with a gunner standing right in front of the missing wheel, so you can't see that it is not present. I know it's not there, and the gunners probably know, but we won't tell anyone else, will we?

Another step towards getting the fortress out for another siege game; still need a better set of trench sections and a revamp of the rules. I've been sort of hoping that the Picquet-related "Vauban's War" would have appeared by now, but no sign of it yet. I shall hash on with my own ex-Chris Duffy efforts.

San Marcial - C&CN in a Wider Fitting

View from behind the Spanish left flank - these are the voluntarios that Freire
was very concerned about - they held the position, despite a couple of scares

Last Saturday Iain visited here, and we played a C&CN game - the published scenario for San Marcial (Aug 1813) stretched for an expanded board, with rather larger forces. Because of the bigger table, we also used the Battlelore amendment to the command rules which I described in a previous post.

Iain has very kindly sent me copies of his excellent photos, so here they are, just to prove the event actually took place, with my thanks for his camera work.

The scenario consists of Clauzel's corps of Soult's French army, crossing the Bidassoa to attack a Spanish force under Freire on a line of three ridges at San Marcial. True to the original battle, the French fought vigorously and determinedly, but the Spaniards held out, the Victory Points margin eventually being 10-3, which includes 3 extra points for Freire for hanging on to the three hills and - in any case - rather flatters the defenders.

The action is primarily one for infantry - I included a cavalry presence in both armies simply because - well, you have to really, don't you? The French had a 3:2 superiority in artillery, but had little opportunity to bring it forward into action; the Spaniards, on the other hand, had their guns on the flanks, which caused a lot of damage to the attackers. The Spaniards fight well enough if they stand their ground, but the retreat rules for the Spanish army in C&CN are harsh - especially the voluntarios units, which are classed as militia - so getting them to stand their ground is the heart of the matter.

General view from the French left

Those voluntarios, on the Spanish left ridge

Some of Reille's Italians attempting to flush the Legion Extremena out of a wood

Lots of Higginses - Lamartiniere's French division, on the right

More Higginses - the Dragoni Napoleone

French advance under way, all along the line - keeping the momentum
without much artillery support was a problem  throughout the day

Villatte's Confederation Germans, on the French left, ford the Bidassoa, but
are already suffering from the Spanish cannon

Lamartiniere, at the San Marcial village, sets about those stubborn voluntarios

Spanish line infantry wait calmly for their moment

Spanish hussars (Extremadura) mostly stood watching - converted Hinton Hunts

The Italians now have the wood, but are starting to wonder if this is such a great idea

At this point Villatte's Germans on the French left are struggling to progress, the
Italians in the centre are running out of steam and Lamartiniere's Frenchmen at
the far end are fighting hard but getting bogged down

The voluntarios have yellow markers to denote their militia status, but the
beggars wouldn't run...

French cavalry supporting the Italians, but there were no broken troops to harry - it was
not a good day for cavalry

The Germans still struggling to get a hold on the other side of the river - a lot
of those bloody red markers in evidence

Final view - Freire's men still on their ridge, with plenty of fresh units if needed

Hooptedoodle #143 - Foy’s Thirteenth Law: The Optimal Number of Spares

This was nominated as an addition to Foy’s Law’s by Iain, which probably suggests that he was as bemused by my thoughts on the subject as by the rest of the Laws in the series. Not discouraged, I have decided to publish it, as another small effort to share my painfully-gained wisdom with the world. It is the least I can do, I feel.

Foy’s Thirteenth Law states: It is a good idea to have spares available for useful items, but only a few; over a certain number, the overhead of management and organization of the spares outweighs the benefit of having them, and the spares themselves will tend to disappear until the optimal number is achieved.

Exotica

This originally came to my notice in the rather specialized field of guitar picks (or plectra, as we called them in the Roman army). I have managed to maintain a shadowy alternative life as a musician and arranger, and always carry at least one pick in my pocket (to be precise, I carry it/them in my left hand trouser pocket, with my penknife, as opposed to my right pocket, where I carry my loose change – these things are important, I think). Picks are not very impressive items, and are easily mislaid, but arriving at a gig without one is not recommended, so a little care is worth the trouble. Also these things are increasingly expensive – I have acquired a taste for Claude Dugain’s little sculpted masterpieces, which come in at around £8 or more a hit; since the softer ones (ebony, coconut shell) wear out fairly quickly, this is a bit of a consideration, particularly if you are unfortunate enough to have to use the UK distributor.

This Optimal Number is not known at the outset, but you become aware of it as the number shrinks, mysteriously, from what you think it might be to what it really is. I have sometimes tried to analyse this – I haven’t got very far, but it goes like this:

1. I need to have at least one good pick with me at all times – I might be forced to call at a music store, I might get a sudden phone call from the Howard Alden band, telling me that Howard has been taken ill – anything is possible. 
2. If I have one good pick with me, I will be careful with it. I am unlikely to leave it in the music shop, or in the wrong trousers, or on the bookshelf, or on the music stand, or just drop it somewhere without noticing. This is because I will regularly (nervously) check my left pocket to make sure everything is in order. Penknife? – yep. Pick? – yep – I can hear it clink against the penknife.
3. But one pick is a bit risky – a spare one will cover me for accidental loss or breakage. So two is a better number than one, but being forced to call on the spare would put me back to one, which is not ideal, so maybe three would be even better.
4. Hmmm.
5. If I were going on a week’s tour (unlikely these days, but one lives in Hope…), I might feel justified in putting, say, six or seven picks in my pocket. Now you’re talking. Idiot proofing.
6. Not really. When I am pick-rich in this way, maybe I get careless, maybe my routine pocket-check is unable to detect a difference between (say) six and (say) five without a special, extra count. Maybe something more sinister happens.
7. Whatever it is, I will find that my seven picks very quickly become three, at which point I get worried enough to pay attention and check more carefully, and stop the rot. 

What is this? One day a future generation of archeologists will find a random layer of Dugain picks, and will assume that they are the claws of some unknown creature, or the jewels of a religious leader. Where do the things go? How do they know to do this?

Three is the optimal number for my pick load. No picks at all is obviously useless, one is a bit risky, two is a bit better, three is good, anything more than three will tend to reduce itself back to three again quite quickly. Three.

I quietly filed that away as a fact which is invaluable only to me, but in the last year or two the Contesse has started using reading glasses. She tended to mislay these fairly frequently so – since she is lucky enough to require a prescription you can buy off the shelf easily and cheaply, she began to buy spare pairs of specs. One in the car, one in the handbag, one on the bookshelf, one on the coffee table, one on the bookshelf, one in the kitchen, one on the bedside cabinet, one on the bookshelf…

Just a minute – where are they all? Foy’s Thirteenth strikes again. As I move around the house, I see an apparently endless stream of reading glasses, and yet the Contesse will be looking for a pair at that same moment. The Contesse, I hasten to add, is not unusually careless or disorganized – I feel that she has merely, unknowingly, exceeded Foy’s Optimal Number of Spares.

A statistician or a moron – either of these – might expect that an increasing number of spares would mean that they would be spread more widely through the house/car/handbag, that a random walk around the place would turn up more frequent examples, which implies some sort of even distribution, or simply that the more likely places would tend to have more spares in them.

Further study is needed, but I don’t think it works like this. We don’t usually lose something because we can’t remember which of a finite number of sensible places we have left it in (which is already sounding a bit dodgy), it is because we have put it down somewhere daft while we were distracted by something else. Thus a greater number of spares simply means that they will occupy more daft places – places a sensible search would not look for them on a first pass.

Some kind soul will suggest that the reading glasses should be attached to neck-cords. This seems a reasonable idea, but has not proved to be a well-received suggestion – in fact I have to say that my own reading glasses have such a cord, and in my case it simply means that I am often searching for a lost pair of reading glasses with cord attached, so it is not necessarily the answer. We are still unsure of the Optimal Number of spare reading glasses, but it seems pretty certain that the number of spare pairs we have (if we could find them all to count them) is greater than this.

Work continues.

Commands & Colors – the “Battlelore” Tweaks

Battlelore; the big guy on the left suggests this is not the Wars of the Roses

There should be some kind of regulation against old fools like me quoting things they do not understand – I had never heard of Battlelore until a couple of weeks ago, but I am assured that is huge and well-established. As everyone on the planet apart from me is probably well aware, it is a board-cum-miniatures game designed by Richard Borg and launched in 2006, which uses his Commands & Colors game system and is set in a world(?) of fantasy and mythical pseudo-history, and very good it looks, though it is not really my cup of tea.

Why is that, then? Why do I have this unreasonable prejudice against fantasy and sci-fi wargaming – is it simply that I am old and lacking imagination?

Well it might be, to be truthful, though in fact I am not really prejudiced against these categories of gaming. In principle, the idea of fighting games which do away with the limits imposed by recorded history and its technologies (and life forms) is exciting, and I can well understand why they have such an appeal. My doubts about them – the reasons they do not rock my boat – are entirely personal, and probably do not stand up to very much examination, but here they are, for appropriate mockery:

(1) A lot of this is based on cult movies or books – which is not in itself a criticism (after all, a lot of my wargaming is based on cult books written by Charles Oman and Donald Featherstone, amongst others), but many of the ideas and themes become repetitive and derivative. For example, someone who goes to the trouble of creating a fantasy world which is very obviously a crude and inferior rip-off of the works of Prof Tolkien or similar is actually displaying rather a lack of imagination, as I see it, though he may well be driven by a very shrewd commercial awareness. Not a real problem, and if the games are enjoyed by a great many fans then good for them.

(2) My suspicion that the imagination deployed is less than free-flowing is confirmed by the copious documentation for the games and their expansions; giant spiders, now there’s a really unusual idea (yawn), but there are very strict published tables of what these spiders are allowed to do, so play nicely, please. Whoever’s imagination this is, it had better not be yours, and don’t you forget it. Far from being a free-form, open-architecture playground for the creative soul, fantasy gaming is complex, fiddly and beset by heavy documentation which makes 1970s Ancients national championship games look very casual indeed.

(3) Much of it is heavily fashion-dependant, and bolstered by branding and commercial copyright. All those spotty people who hang around GW shops (how did you guess I would get to them eventually?) will mostly move on to other fads, which means that wargaming will become The Thing We All Did Last Year, which means that historical miniatures gaming, for example, might not be high on the list of potential Next Big Things for these guys. 

My cup of tea

Right, that should irritate a few people, for a start.

Iain has been on holiday in Scotland with his daughter, and yesterday he took the time to drive here from Aberfoyle, to say hello and have a quick wargame, which I appreciate very much. Sadly the day was wet and foggy, so the Front of Beyond was not at its most attractive, but the wargame took place. Iain took pictures, so I hope that some of those will appear here in due course.

Laying on a game for an experienced wargaming visitor requires a bit of unaccustomed thought, I discovered. Most of the games I play these days are solo, and the social games I play with friends are usually because I bully them into taking part, so there is not a lot of pressure to make the game balanced or anything. Normally, here, no-one gives a toss who wins, so my approach to scenarios is relaxed to the point of being horizontal. I’m not suggesting for a moment that Iain is likely to be at all precious about the occasion, but I would be very sorry to waste his time – especially considering the travel involved – and he has no previous experience of Commands & Colors, so it would be doubly embarrassing to turn him off completely.

For the first time I can remember, I spent a while looking through the published scenarios – an area on which have always thought that regular CCN players are excessively fixated – to find something suitable. I was also using my widened table, so I came up with a game which was a stretched (17 hexes x 9) adaptation of GMT’s San Marcial scenario from the Spanish Expansion set. To cope with the larger armies and the bigger field, I also adopted a Battlelore tweak for the use of Command Cards (which seemed a good idea, but added to the risk of screwing up the game through unfamiliarity). I’ll set out this tweak, which was the main reason for this post, below, along with some further ruminations on CCN.

The game went well enough. I gave Iain command of the attacking French army, on the grounds that the Spanish have only one strategy – stay put on the hills, hold your fire and roll good dice when the French arrive. In the real battle of San Marcial, Soult failed to dislodge the Spaniards and gave up. Iain’s experience was similar, but my initial reasoning was that at least he would have something to do if he was attacking. No doubt we’ll discuss it further when he gets home from his holiday; he found CCN interesting, not least because it has a character of its own, and he picked it up very quickly despite my stammering explanations, but it will certainly not replace Black Powder as his game of choice.

There will be more about the actual game when the photos become available. Here is the Battlelore tweak for the big game, as promised. One of the characteristics of Commands & Colors style games is that the Command Cards restrict each turn to a small number of units, and for a big army on a big field that can be too piecemeal an approach.

The Battlelore tweak allows you to use more than one card per turn and, unlike the full Memoir 44 Overlord or Epic-sized CCA games, it allows you to work with a standard pack of Command Cards, with a very small amount of amendment (which is especially attractive if, like mine, your brain is full and easily confused).

Battlelore Epic rules applied to C&C Napoleonics

This works with an enlarged C&CN map (e.g. Battlelore Epic standard is 17 x 13) and with a single standard Command Card deck.

Rules:

The Command Cards are of two types: Section cards (which refer to the left, centre and right of the battlefield, and carry an icon showing arrows) and Tactic cards (which do not).

An extra “Epic” card draw deck is created with three Command Cards drawn from the Command deck, visible (and available, in their turn) to both players. If, at any time, when it is first created or when it is replenished to bring it up to 3 cards, the Epic deck does not show at least one Section card, discard all 3 cards and take 3 new ones until it does.

During the Command phase of his turn, a player may either:

Play a single Section card, which may be from his own hand or may be from the Epic deck, or

Play two Section cards, one of which must be from his own hand and one must be from the Epic deck, or

Play a single Tactic card, which may be from his own hand or the Epic deck

At the end of his turn, when the cards used are replaced, the player’s own hand must be brought back to strength, and the Epic deck must (if necessary) be made back up 3 cards, at least one of which must be a Section card.

When playing two Section cards, the orders on both cards are carried out.

When a Section or Tactic card played activates a number of units equal to “Command”, this is the number of cards in the player’s hand, not counting the Epic deck.

Some cards have a slightly modified interpretation:

“Scouting” Section cards offer a chance to draw two cards and discard one of them; this does not apply if the card came from the Epic deck.

“Elan” Tactic card: ordered units battle at +2 dice for the entire turn, and the Command deck and discards are combined and shuffled – the Epic deck should be discarded and replaced at this point.

“First Strike” Tactic card: if this card is drawn to the Epic deck, discard it and draw another card.

Partly as a result of the brief discussion of CCN with Iain which was possible after the game, and various ideas I have been nursing for a while, I may have some further tweaks in mind.

First off, I am now in favour of simply discarding the “Short Supply” Tactic card whenever it appears, and drawing again. I find this card does not sit well with the overall game.

Next, I am not really very comfortable that the role of a Leader in the game is simply to prevent his troops from running away and avoid being a casualty himself. One of the things that I found hardest to come to terms with in CCN is the lack of army structure – any general can attach himself to any unit. That’s OK – it’s the game rules, but it is counter-intuitive based on all my past gaming. To give a Leader a rather more proactive job in CCN, I like the idea of allowing his troops to gain an extra die in combat if he is attached to them, in return for which the Leader casualty test will require only a crossed-sabres result on a single die for a hit. The trade-off is that the Leader adds to the fighting ability of his men if he puts his own neck on the line, but he has a higher chance of being hurt.

I’m not going to do anything drastic about this until I have seen what is coming in the mooted Marshals & Generals expansion for CCN – it looks as though the role of the Leader may be about to be jazzed up a bit, so I look forward to that. It is, in any case, possible to put a Leadership rule tweak in any particular scenario, so I could try out a few ideas in solo games.

The Big Table Takes a Bow

I'm expecting a visitor tomorrow, so I've set up the newly-extended version of my wargames table for a battle. This will be an expanded (17 x 9 hexes) Commands & Colors: Napoleonics session, which is basically a stretched version of the official scenario for San Marcial (August 1813) from Expansion 1 of the GMT game, and I'll use the Battlelore tweak for the Command Cards to facilitate the bigger battle. [If you are at all interested in this rules tweak, let me know and I'll explain it in a further post.]

The set-up - Spaniards on the left of the picture, Gen Freire with the yellow border

View from behind the French right flank - the Spanish hill at this end is held
by a brigade of voluntarios,  who are classed as militia and thus are subject to triple
retreats. There may be trouble ahead

The pictures show the set-up, ready for tomorrow. The French (mostly Germans and Italians, really) under General Bertrand Clauzel will cross the Bidassoa, which is fordable along its length, and try to knock General Freire's Spanish army off a line of 3 hills. 10 Victory Points for the win, and there is a special rule that the side occupying the greater number of hexes of each of the hills at the end of their turn will gain a temporary VP for each hill held. I'm not using the Guerrilla rule for this game, mostly because I think it's rather a silly rule…

The historical Battle of San Marcial ended with the French abandoning the attack, and thus losing on points. We'll see how it goes.