A Quick Note

Riding off into the sunset….for now….

Good morning all. Firstly, a very big thank you to all for your best wishes in respect of Laurel (aka SWMBO) coming home - it has been really appreciated by us both and provided a welcome boost to my somewhat flagging morale.

We are adjusting to life in the house around care visits - with the physio in due course - and negotiating Laurel’s wheelchair around some particularly tight corners whilst attempting to retain as much paint as possible on the doorframes! She is able to get around downstairs relatively easily by herself although the kitchen and downstairs cloakroom are problematic as they involve a slight drop in the case of the former (meaning her frame comes into play) and a wide step for the latter (which means that telescopic ramps are in use). She will make a full recovery but it will take time and the marked difference in her well being due to being at home is really noticeable - she (and I) is also sleeping far better as well which is a merciful relief I can tell you.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I was feeling somewhat wrung out with everything that had happened over the last six months or so. Well, I took the precaution of speaking to my GP and as suspected a bout of depression was diagnosed for which the appropriate steps will be need to be taken. In this case the suggestion is counselling and meds - the former I have no problem with but I am saving the latter in case my now improving well being suffers a set back. I need to keep my head clear for Laurel and work and not drug fogged as far as possible.

As a result I am going into reading mode for a few weeks - this decision has not changed from previously - so will not be posting to the blog until next month when hopefully life will be back on a more even keel.

In closing many thanks once again and rest assured, I will be back soon.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….”

Exmouth last year. 

The Best - After six weeks and a day in hospital (originally planned as for days….) Laurel is coming home today. I am beyond delighted and whilst she still has a way to go in terms of recovery at least she will be her family and will no doubt be whipping us all into shape in her own, inimitable way!

The Worst - the continuing saga of the Ukraine. This is a whole level more scary than anything else we have seen over the years. 

‘Nuff said.

The Great War at Sea and Other Stuff

Oh yes indeedy! Global in its coverage and a welcome addition to the library

It has been an insanely busy week or so since my last post for many reasons and to be honest, it has really knocked the stuffing out of me.

Laurel may well be coming home soon - there are a number of moving organisational parts to tackle first - which is really great news. She is progressing but still has a way to go but the signs are very positive - needless to say this is a massive boost for all! There have been umpteen calls to be made, all manner of equipment being delivered, ongoing ‘window visits’, running the house and also working full time to contend with.

Work has been really busy as I was redeployed first to one bank and now to another. I will also be needing to head into the city for initially a day a week leading up to three days in time. It is not ideal at present but we will manage as best we can. After all I am not being employed for my sparkling conversation and boyish good looks….

I have done very little on the gaming front since my last post and to be honest I fully expect this to be the case for a while now so I have taken the decision to keep off the blog for a while until I have something to write about - probably until Easter methinks.

To be frank I am feeling pretty wrung out at present and simply cannot keep on at the pace I have been trying to maintain so I need to step back a while to clear my head.

The book you see above I am sure I have owned at some point so I was delighted to be reacquainted with it courtesy of eBay. I have one other general history of the Great War at Sea and also a quite superb atlas (along with the larger WW2 version) so this will keep me entertained for some time and no doubt something will arise from it. Actually, it already has but that will be for another time when my world has settled down a little.

See you next month!

The Portable 3 x 3 Conquest Wargame

An ancient and battered copy of the game Conquest.

The back of the box showing the components.

This is very much a ‘seems like a potentially good idea’ kind of post or in other words a bit of a meander! Mark Cordone has been very busy on the Facebook Portable Wargame group with all manner of inspiring ideas. His latest involved using the pieces from a Chinese Chess set to represent a couple of armies and seeing this got me thinking along similar lines from my own collection. 

The rules and the puzzle book

Some years ago I picked up from a boot sale a copy of a 1975 edition of the board game Conquest designed by the late Donald Benge. The game is complete although the box is battered, the map board is about to fall in half as well as being stained around the edges but, crucially, all the 52 playing pieces are still present. The game contains the rules - in English and Spanish - and a book of Conquest based puzzles, rather like those one sees of chess problems.

The map board. Movement is from point to point and this would be ideal for using on a campaign basis methinks!

Conquest is a point to point abstract game with no dice involved and has been described as being ‘chess like’. I used to play this a lot in the late 1980s with a version of the game that allowed for four players rather than the two in this one. It is great fun in an abstract sort of way. 

The game pieces moulded in plastic.

The pieces are stylised and functional and could certainly work within a conventional wargame if one was not too particular. The ships, elephants and chariots can all carry infantry figures and the object of the game is to occupy and hold the five spaces of the opponents capital. Each turn a player has 20 movement points to use as he sees fit (all units have a maximum movement distance dictated by the type) but the loss of each space of the capital reduces the number of movement points by 4. Opposing pieces are captured by  moving onto their space and removing them as in chess. There are various permutations around this, again depending on the attacking type opposed to the defender. Opponents can immediately recapture a lost piece as long as the target space is within two spaces.

As a game Conquest is very entertaining in a chess like way and the pieces could be readily used for something like the Portable 3 x 3 Wargame if required. The map could be used as the basis for an ‘imagi-nation’ style campaign of some kind for just about any historical or fantasy style setting.

Certainly something else to think about for sure.

One Million Years B.C., Tusk and the Palaeo Diet

What can I say? I saw this at the cinema as a dinosaur obsessed young boy but now as a adult I can better appreciate the historical accuracy, the tender human interest and sparkling dialogue - not to mention a couple of other assets….So we know humans were not around when the dinosaurs were but why let such a detail get in the way of a good story?

A number of bloggers have been dabbling with a set of rules published by Ganesha Games under the title Palaeo Diet - Eat or be Eaten. The subject is basically a pre-historic hunting style game that is ideal for solo gaming or co-operative play. It requires very little in the way of material - perhaps a dozen or so hunters and their targets and if one is not too fussy then happily using cheap plastic dinosaurs would be a great option.

In short, it is an ideal game for those limited in space, time or resources or those that do not enjoy painting vast amount of figures - like me! If I was not able to paint up a couple of dozen cavemen I may as well give up one and take up something rather like collecting antique snuff boxes or similar….

Anyway, inspired by the efforts of the good Kaptain Kobold as well as the legend that is the Jolly Broom Man I took a cheeky look at the Ganesha Games website and before you knew it I had pulled the trigger on a PDF version for a paltry USD 10. As a side note whilst buying PDFs is a great idea it is also more than a person of my notoriously feeble resolve can bear - this is why I try to keep away from the Wargames Vault if I can (and usually fail I should add….).

I actually saw both of these in the double bill you see above and remember being quite freaked out by the scene in She where ‘she’ - spoiler alert - turns into a very old woman. Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress in a double bill at the peak of their powers. More than mortal man deserves!

The first thing that struck me about the Palaeo Diet rules is their size - some 58 pages. They are nicely laid out with some wonderfully whimsical ‘cave painting’ style illustrations and with plenty of caveman style names in use for the examples of play. There are scenarios with some quite tongue in cheek names as well as the inevitable play sheets. It all looks straightforward enough and eminently playable and when I noticed the name of the author I could see why. 

Nicholas Wright has penned a number of Ganesha Games titles including Galleys and Galleons which are a really good set of naval rules for battles in the age of discovery - say the 16th and 17th centuries.

I plan to knock up a modest set up for this using 15mm figures and so I turned to the Irregular Miniatures website as I recalled a similar set of rules from a number of years ago covering a similar genre (although expanded to include Victorian dinosaur hunting) called Tusk and written by Matthew Hartley. Sure enough the rules and the battle packs are still available so with my resistance level at an all time low I placed a very modest order with them. Tusk was expanded to include Sci Fi and Pulp (Tusk 2 The Wrath of Kong and Tusk 3 Steel Tusk) settings and Irregular Miniatures issued a number of expansion figure pack to go with the rules.

Purely in the interests of high quality and detailed research I watched the 1966 Hammer classic One Million Years B.C. starring Raquel Welch which was a real blast from the past. Aside from the dinosaurs - Ray Harryhausen at his finest - and a very dodgy Iguana and a Tarantula it was actually not a bad film. I had forgotten most of it from having seen it at the cinema years ago but it ticked the boxes in respect of certain elements of how we would imagine early man lived - bear in mind I am saying certain elements!

I would have enjoyed watching She again - I did not know that a follow up was made in 1968 but with different actors called the Vengeance of She - and of course She is the inspiration of SWMBO or ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’….

Classic swinging 60’s Sci Fi and the inspiration for the band Duran Duran. 

After having watched this and made some Stone Age style plans I then sat down to watch another classic from the swinging 60’s - Barbarella starring Jane Fonda. Now there is an idea for a game or two…

So my Saturday evening was spent watching Raquel Welch and Jane Fonda with a side dish of remembering Ursula Andress whilst planning some cave man gaming.

As Jack Nicholson said when playing the Joker in Batman….

“Gonna need a moment alone boys…..”

Boardgames, Keyboards and Hospitals

Guess what I shall be reading later then?

Boardgames

Yesterday saw the arrival of my previously mentioned copy of Combat Commander: Europe published by GMT Games and the core set for the system. I am hugely excited about this game and am looking forward to getting it on to the table at some point - everything is currently classed as being ‘at some point’ for a variety of reasons! The game covers infantry combat during WW2 and it has a very ‘Squad Leader with Command Cards’ feel about it. A number of things struck me as I opened the box.

The contents of the box although not my copy!

1. Counters - as far as I can tell all are present and correct but there are two things about them. Firstly, they have been punched out by hand so will need to have the cardboard ‘tufts’ removed. I do not clip counters but I prefer them to be tidy around the edges so an evening session with a scalpel will be in order. They look the part bur are quite thin which I was surprised at given the quality of the counters in Wing Leader: Victories.

2. Maps - these are really nice and I will post pictures of them all in due course. There are six double sided maps showing a good variety of terrain types to fight over. They are printed on paper which will need either Perspex on top or laminating although the latter does create a storage challenge.

3. Rules and Playbook - the former is surprisingly thin (24 pages in all of which around 18 are the rules themselves and even then a substantial chunk is all about explanations of orders, actions, events etc) whilst the latter includes the 12 core scenarios, the all important designer’s notes, a random scenario generator and a reference of leaders and fortifications.

The game itself looks excellent but aside from the three fate decks - German, Russian and American ‘command’ cards - I have to say I am slightly underwhelmed by the production quality of the components. Never mind, they will do the job though!

Keyboards

Pretty much most of the blog posts I write have been drafted on my trusty iPad in conjunction with a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard case. This turns the tablet into a ‘not quite but close enough’ laptop. I first acquired one of these several years ago with my first iPad and basically wore them both out. When I upgraded to my current iPad (with 128Gb) I also purchased another Logitech keyboard. It worked perfectly well but a couple of years ago I chipped a small piece off the plastic surround that the tablet sits in. This had no effect on the use of the keyboard - it was merely a minor cosmetic issue.

My son had noticed this and so purchased me a replacement for Father’s Day (he is a good lad when all is said and done) and so the older keyboard, though still perfectly serviceable, was decommissioned in favour of the newer model.

In many ways the newer model was actually not as good as the original - with the newer version the tablet had a tendency to ‘pop’ out of the plastic holding surround, usually at the most inconvenient moments - and it also felt as though the case was too large for the model of iPad I own (it is fact the correct size). Anyway, to cut a long story short this newer case also repeated the chipping incident of the original one. I was not unduly concerned about this until last night when one of the keys decided to part company with the keyboard. Try as I might I was unable to fix this as one of the connections had broken off. 

The old new keyboard now replaced with the older old keyboard. You can see the small chip on the right hand side at the top and the broken key

You can probably guess what I did next. Yup! I got my old keyboard out of storage, cleaned it up, popped in a couple of news batteries and let Bluetooth do its connecting thing and hey presto! I now have working keyboard that the tablet fits rather more snuggly in, with all the keys in place and a chip that is smaller than the one on the new case.

Hospitals

Big day today. Laurel and I are meeting with the physio, an occupational therapist, a nurse and a pathway coordinator (another nurse) to review Laurel’s progress so far and to get a more formal plan in place for her next steps. It also means that I will be allowed into the building and will able to spend some time actually in the same room with her - none of that lurking in the bushes stuff! 

In order to prepare for this I had to go around the house measuring and taking pictures of any steps, doorframes, bathrooms, toilets, beds and chairs. It took a whole morning to do this and if I have learned anything it is just how challenging our house would be for anyone suffering from mobility issues. 

I am hoping that the meeting today will address the concerns we have and what needs to happen next - my feeling is that at the present time and given Laurel’s current rate of progress - she is improving everyday but probably not enough to be allowed home - is that she may be an in patient for a while yet.

We shall see.

Birthdays, Anniversaries and Hospital Visits

No, not an attempted break in - my son and daughter conversing with their mum courtesy of a hospital window visit - note the intervening foliage, so dense I am sure David Attenborough would have a field day investigating it!

The 13th of February was Laurel’s birthday and also our wedding anniversary. Today is of course Valentine’s Day and tomorrow, the 15th, is the anniversary of when Laurel and I first met back in 1980. February then, is veritable smorgasbord of special occasions.

This year was a little different due to Laurel still being hospital but it did not stop the three of us visiting her with a cake, cards and presents. It was the first time I had seen her since Sunday 30th January just before my bout of Covid. For my son and daughter it was the first time they had seen their mum since the 16th January for my son and the 18th January for my daughter due to the isolation requirement prior to Laurel’s surgery. It was a long time for me and even longer for the two of them.

The centre she is at are not allowing visitors in the building due to Covid but are happy to allow what they call window visits. As you can see from the picture above this was less than ideal for a number of reasons but we overcome the difficulties and managed to spend a couple of hours with Laurel after negotiating a series of bushes (including a particularly thorny rose bush), trying to keep out of the freezing wind and accompanying drizzle. 

It was an emotional visit for all concerned but we all felt much better for it afterwards and of course the boost to Laurel was immeasurable. Her phone was ‘pinging’ non-stop with friends and family sending their love and best wishes and she had also had numerous calls as well. Laurel is improving by degrees and her feeling in the surgery affected areas is gradually returning but she still has some way to go. We are meeting on Thursday with the physio, an occupational therapist, a Pathway representative and a nurse to discuss progress so far and the plan going forwards which is a positive step for sure. One of the nurses blue tacked all her get well and birthday cards on the wall of her room which made for a cheery display.

When we finally said goodbye and headed home my son got an Indian takeaway for our dinner as a treat and afterwards I sat down to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly in a far more relaxed frame of mind having seen my wife at long last looking rather more upbeat than previously.

She is getting there, albeit perhaps not as quickly as she would like!