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They're Back!

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After their recent repulse, the rebels have regrouped, moved by the flank, and thrown a brigade over the river but Dominion forces are already  on the scene. I really need to work on the lighting in my room. Taxes, yard work, household taxes, preparations for Huzzah, some local volunteer stuff, and....and....and suddenly I felt like I needed to play a simple, meaningless, solo game. Well I got it set up anyway. Might even be able to play on Wednesday before I get back to Huzzah preparations.

Thundering Hooves in the Valley

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"and on the right the veteran Rossius, Lord of Belmontia stood surrounded by his bold horsemen" Today's game with the Greenwood Wargamers was a live test of Jeff's Huzzah game: Gaugamela!  using the Epic C&C Ancients system. It was good to see some familiar faces on the table. Well good to see the ones around it too but Jeff kindly gave a home to what was left of my 25mm Persian and Greek armies.  Now refurbished and based up for C&C they have joined with his forces and are marching off to war again, a sight to gladden the heart. The game was enjoyable and at one point late in the day we had victory within our grasp with just a little luck but the luck didn't come, Alexander came instead! If you're going to be at Huzzah! and like Ancients, check Jeff's game out!

Three Weeks and Counting

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Three weeks to go. First mock up of the layout. There are more troops on hand than are needed but those selected will be be inspected and touched up before embarking.  First priority at the moment is the table. The convention table will be 12" longer and 6" wider than mine so I have to keep that in mind.  Still lots of work to be done but Saturday is game day in Kingston and this time, I'm just a player.

An Ether Wargame

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Today I "Hungout" at  Rob's place  2,000 km away for a playtest of our Ambush scenario for Huzzah. End Game. The ambushers will retire and the wagons will make it through. Photo by Rob since I couldn't figure out how to do a screen capture on the new version of Google Hangouts. We had a host of unrelated technical problems but we overcame them and managed a good play through and chat. We also tweaked the rules to help them run a little quicker and more decisively in aid of reaching a conclusion within out timeslot. The OB will also be tweaked a little. One month to go!

SuperTuxKart 1.0 release

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It's been a long and winding road for mascot racer SuperTuxKart, but after more than ten years of continuous and dedicated progress, the team has finally announced the release of build 1.0, marking an important development milestone for the project.  As quoted from the official release post: Yes, if you have followed our development a bit, that might be a bit of a surprise. But we have been asked why we don't call this release 1.0, and the majority of us developers discussed this and decided that indeed this release is a major milestone that deserves the big 1.0 number. Indeed a nice surprise and definitely a big step forward with the inclusion of online multiplayer! See more new features in the official release video: As usual you can download the game here . Also don't forget to head over to our forums to provide some feedback to the developers. Code License: GPLv3 Assets License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Well, I did have my doubts BUT.....

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It had to be tried. The Grand Experiment grinds to a halt as the list of unresolved rules questions begins to grow exponentially. I had previously  tried a similar approach using the Square Brigadier but this was going to be less abstract and enable me to fight reasonable recreations of small historical actions like the Battles of Ridgeway and Cut Knife Creek. It took nearly two turns for me to decide that if I added a lot of detail, dealt with all the grey areas  and made a bunch of markers to track unit status etc, it might turn into a reasonable wargame. It was never going to be the sort of fast easy game of toy soldiers that I was looking for though. The armies have now been quickly but gently nudged back into their natural units, the rules adjusted and the battle resumed.   Without pausing for second thought, I shuffled the units back into their usual 8 figure units ( whatever they represent ) . This gave each side 3 small Brigades each of 2 battalions, plus a small ...

Reconnaissance by Fire

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Since my logical mind was having trouble figuring out exactly what my emotional mind was looking for,  I decided to try laying out the soldiers and more or less pushing them around to see what developed and let the rules take shape as I went. So far it seems to be working. 5 turns in, this encounter battle is starting to develop nicely.  Here's what I have figured out so far. None of it is really new to me but it is a slightly different mix that seems to be developing. A. The grid stays. B.  I want the lowest level of unit to fit in a grid square and I want to keep the 4" grid so my basic 54mm "companies"/"squadrons" will be old Square Brigadier  units of  4 infantry or 3 cavalry because that fits regardless of pose. C. I want a  hierarchical organization lie the original MacDuff where a group of companies  plus a commander forms a larger unit which in turn is formed of a commander plus a number of mid-level units. At this point, 2-4 "companies"  ...