Category Archives: Books

Portable prezzies

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Since I’ve been such a good boy this year, Santa delivered some prezzies a little early. What a good sport!

My old pal Ian Taylor of the East Neuk Irregulars was a Spanish Civil War aficionado. As a result the SCW has been on my mind of late as a potential project. Thankfully Bob Cordery has recently re-released Arriba Espana which now includes rules for playing the SCW with his Portable Wargame system. I’m particularly taken by the huge range of warring factions in the SCW but I admit I’m a complete greenhorn when it comes to who is who. I’d seen Bob’s La Ultima Cruzada recommended as a top-notch SCW sourcebook, so thought it would be a timely addition to my reference library.

And why get two, when you can have four? I must admit Bob’s The Balkan League came at me from left field. But in it he presents rules for matrix games, which is an area I haven’t explored yet, so will be interesting to see what’s what where that’s concerned. And Portable Naps? Well, in for a penny, in for a pound!

I’ve certainly got plenty to tuck in to this Christmas. May Santa be equally as kind to you. All the very festive best!

Portable Wargame: Retreating house rule

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I recently finished reading Donald Featherstone’s Advanced War Games (1969). I think it’s only fair to say that it’s a bit of a hotchpotch of wargaming ideas from the early years of the modern hobby. Having said that, I’m glad I’ve read it. Not only has it has helped me appreciate the pioneering work that Donald and his contemporaries contributed to the hobby, but it’s been a palate cleanser of sorts. When you strip things down to their nuts and bolts and see things with fresh eyes, it can help you build anew.

Donald presents extensive morale rules – 19 pages in all! There are tailored morale tables for Ancients, Medieval, 18th century, 19th century, colonial and American Civil War, each detailing the various factors which could be applicable during that period. However it was some of the possible outcomes that I was particularly taken by; troops retreating in good order and those retreating in disarray. These feature in military history time and time again, yet there seemed to be no rule to help actualize this in one of my current wargames of choice, The Portable Wargame by Bob Cordery.

In The Portable Wargame, retreating is one possible outcome of a unit being under fire – the other being the degradation of their Strength Point value. But when a unit retreats, the direction that the unit is facing seems to be left up to the player in charge of that unit. Given the choice I’m sure no-one would want to have their rear facing the enemy when there’s a chance that they could follow up, but history tells us that this could and did happen.

So here is a simple houserule for The Portable Wargame to determine the direction that a retreating unit is facing, when the quality, condition and situation of the troops are considered, inspired by the distilled ideas of Donald Featherstone.

Portable Wargame: Retreating

When a unit retreats, roll 1d6 to see if it’s conducted in good order.

  • If the retreating unit makes its target number, then it retreats in good order and does so facing the enemy.
  • If the retreating unit fails to make its target number, then the unit is routing and faces away from the enemy.

Target numbers:

  • Elite: 3+
  • Average: 4+
  • Poor: 5+

Modifiers to the dice roll:

  • Friendly Commander with the retreating unit: +1*
  • For each friendly unit in good order that’s on the flanks of the retreating unit (within 2 hexs of the unit’s initial location): +1
  • If the retreating unit has already lost half or more of its SP: -1
  • If retreating from artillery fire: -1

* If using Commander ratings as described on p39 of The Portable Wargame, then you could use the following:

  • Good Commander: +1
  • Average Commander: +0
  • Poor Commander: -1

The Franco-Prussian War by Michael Howard

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Well lookee here! A new edition of Michael Howard’s “The Franco-Prussian War” has just been published. I’d been holding off on buying the previous edition because it was around £25. But at over 500 pages, that’s probably not unwarranted. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only had a new edition been released but also that it was a bit less of an outlay.

For those of you who aren’t aware of this tome, here’s the publisher’s blurb…

In 1870 the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck ordered the Prussian Army to invade France, inciting one of the most dramatic conflicts in European history. It transformed not only the states-system of the European continent but the whole climate of European moral and political thought. The overwhelming triumph of German military might, evoking general admiration and imitation, introduced an era of power politics, which was to reach its disastrous climax in 1914.

Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War is widely acclaimed as a classic and the definitive history of one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts in the history of Europe. Evoking a palpable sense of the struggle and the high stakes of the war, Howard analyses the tactics, political dynamics, morale and actions that determined the course of the conflict. He also describes the crucial role played by key figures in the war, including Bismarck, the Prussian military commander Helmuth Von Moltke, and the French generals MacMahon, Chanzy and Trochu. He also sheds fascinating light on how difficult it was to bring the war to an end, with extremists in both France and Prussia pushing to prolong the conflict.

A tour de force of both European and military history, The Franco-Prussian War is a superb account of this dramatic and hugely important conflict, ideal for the student, historian and general reader alike.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Bertrand Taithe.

I’m delighted to say that mine’s is in the post!

On Fairy-Stories

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“On Fairy-Stories” is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written (and entitled simply “Fairy Stories”) for presentation by Tolkien as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on 8 March 1939.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories

Tis a bit weird that I somehow happened to be reading about this 80 years to the day that it happened, and only a stone’s throw away.

Pax Pamir: The Great Game?

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Thanks to The Men Who Would Be Kings I’ve developed an insatiable fascination for the North-West Frontier. Recently I’ve been compulsively reading Khyber by Charles Miller and have been thoroughly captivated by the farce, tragedy and international intrigue of the Great Game. Khyber’s sub-title in the front pages of the book is “The Story of an Imperial Migraine”… says it all really! I got my copy of Khyber for £2.78 and I would happily have paid ten times that for the riveting read. If you’re looking for an entertaining traverse through the NWF then do pick it up.

Anyhoo as luck would have it, I stumbled across Pax Pamir on Kickstarter. It’s a boardgame I’d never heard of before, but it looks like it captures the spirit of the shenanigans of the Great Game in Afghanistan. If this sounds like your bag, you can find out more about it here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1243243962/pax-pamir-second-edition

Arthur Machen

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“Arthur Machen’s stories of the supernatural twitched the veil between our own world and an underworld populated by gods, demons and malevolent ‘little people’. His themes were visions, dreams and madness and his novel The Hill of Dreams was described on publication as “the most decadent book in the English language”. Machen was also responsible for one of the great myths of the First World War – the story of the ‘Angels of Mons’- and he has inspired generations of horror writers and film-makers, from Stephen King to Guillermo del Toro.”

“Machen spent a solitary childhood roaming the hills and woodlands of his native Monmouthshire. He became fascinated by the history and folklore of the border landscapes and the idea that this was a ‘thin place’ which touched supernatural borders too. As a writer he returned to this area again and again in stories which revealed abduction, possession and routes into dark underworlds. By contrast, his other favourite place was London and he was probably the first horror writer to set terrifying events in everyday, suburban settings.”

“Writer Horatio Clare grew up in the same Welsh landscapes which so haunted and inspired Machen. On the 150th anniversary of his literary predecessor’s birth, Horatio Clare hunts for Machen and his supernatural familiars in a North London necropolis, a fairy-haunted wood and a nightjar-haunted hill. And he meets an artist whose work was already full of malevolent Machen-esque faeries long before she discovered that Arthur Machen was actually her great-grandfather.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0368kp6