Never, ever try to write wargames rules when you are not well!

Besides having to deal with the fallout from the recent deterioration in my father's health, my wife and I have – in the light of our recent retirements – been doing some serious reassessments of our lifestyle.

The latter has included the opening moves in what looks like turning into a serious de-cluttering of our house and a rationalisation of our possessions. (Regular readers will remember that I had undergone a similar process with regard to my toy/wargames room after I stopped working last year.) So far the main living room has been given a very thorough cleaning and the storage sections of display cabinets have been cleared and reorganised. The number of objects in them has been reduced, with the surplus being put aside for either resale or donations to local charities. Likewise the large number of audio cassettes we owned and had stored in our dining room has been passed on to someone who is going to sell them on our behalf. (There was no point in keeping them as we have no means of playing them!)

Usually I find the process of cleaning gives me time to think about wargames designs, and it was whilst I was cleaning the windows in the living room that I re-designed – in my head – the Close Combat mechanisms I used in my PORTABLE WARGAME rules in the hope that the new alternatives would meet the needs of those players who found the existing mechanisms to be counter-intuitive. What I had not realised was that by the time I got around to turning those thoughts into actual words I would have begun to come down with a very heavy cold.

I know that there are quite a few people who think that writing wargames rules are easy. You take something from here, something else from there, add a bit of this, et voila it is done. This may be true for some wargames designers … but it is not true for me. I agonise over things like consistency in terminology in a set of rules, so that something is not referred to as a ‘unit’ in one paragraph, a ‘base’ in another, and a ‘stand’ in a third. In order to do this one needs to have a clear mind … and as I have learnt in the past and relearned yesterday, you should NEVER, EVER try to write wargames rules when you are not feeling 100% well and are unable to concentrate upon what you are doing.

I thought that what I had written in the alternative Close Combat mechanisms I added to the PORTABLE WARGAME website yesterday made perfect sense. The feedback I received pointed out an error that I should have picked up when I proof-read the rules and that the rules were somewhat unclear and could lead to misinterpretation. Having looked at what I had written it is obvious that the feedback is absolutely right. I shall re-draft the alternative Close Combat mechanisms as soon as the cold has begun to abate. In the meantime I am going to try to find something fairly mindless to do that does not require much concentration.