Little Wars, the Tennessee Campaign & a touch of sadness.

An image from the front. Little Wars at Confess.
Note the camera shake. Our photographer was under fire at the time.
(Image: Valkine)

The last few weeks have been relatively busy. Confess in Sligo was very pleasant and a great deal of Little Wars were played. The players enjoyed themselves and we got a few games under our belts without missing out on any of the delights the con had to offer.

Two points struck me the night before heading down to Sligo with all the impedimenta of Little Wars upon my back. Firstly hills are big and hard to transport and secondly woods are big and fragile. The fix for these two problems were relatively simple.

Use whatever comes to hand for hills. There was a large collection of boardgames at the con and their owners were quite happy to let us use them as hills for the duration of the game. The gaming public can generally be relied upon to provide scenery of that type to the Little Wars player "on the road". My trees, were if I say so myself, a triumph. I have a collection of standard wargaming trees, but I can't say I was particularly enthused about dragging them down to Sligo. Also they were HO scale trees and looked distinctly shrub like next to the 1/32 figures that we were using. A cunning plan was hatched and a supply of green card purchased.

The result was trees that were light, transportable, looked suitably toy like and joy of joys could be knocked over with a nerf pellet without much trouble. The players took to the opportunity for deforestation with all the innocent joy of a bully kicking a small ginger child from one end of the school yard to the the other.

Little Wars was a success, I'm just looking forward to trying it on a larger scale. Not necessarily with larger forces, but with a larger playing area, which will give more possibilities for maneuvre and other such sly and underhand French tricks.

In other news, the Tennessee campaign that we're playing at the moment is rolling along good oh with no final victory for either side in sight. I lead the Union to a mediocre victory, where having gained the upper hand in the strategic shenanigans before the battle, we failed to turn that advantage in numbers and command into a decisive victory. I've gone over the battle a few times in my head and I'm still at a loss as to what I should have done differently. Normally, I can look at a battle and point out where it all went wrong. In this one, we won, but not alot went right. The victory cost us rather more than I liked and the rebels acquitted themselves rather well considering their initial handicaps. Beyond observing that Bellona was not kind when the dice were rolled, there's not much more I can say.

One sad thing that has happened has been the theft of some dice from our local club. Myself and a friend have run a variety of Second World War games at conventions over the last few years, using a boardgame called Memoir44 adapted for miniatures. We've had a deal of success and have run a variety of campaigns using this quick and adaptable system; including the Finnish-Soviet war of 1941, Stalingrad, Kursk, Tarawa, Guam and Gaudacanal amongst others.

The game relies on a set of special dice marked with differant symbols to resolve fire. Unfortunately, it seems likely that those dice were stolen from our local club some time ago, I didn't notice at the time as I haven't played the game in quite a while. Other gamers have noticed kit going missing, which is why I suspect theft rather than loss. My buddy is working up a new set of dice using some blanks, but what really saddens is that someone we know and have perhaps gamed with has taken these.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I've always felt that there is a certain freemasonry amongst wargamers, a sense of fraternity that unites us, even though we differ on just about everything else. It batters my heart to think of that being abused.