Seduced by Morschauser

I spent most of the morning finishing off cutting up and shredding the remaining laurel branches that had broken off and fallen down during the recent storms. I then raked up all the dead leaves that had also come down ... and now I have a large green wheelie bin full of leaves and shredded laurel branches and a largish pile of laurel logs.

By the time I had finished I was feeling rather tired and did little else before lunch. After lunch I helped my wife to try to sort out the information she had acquired concerning her father's army career. We used a variety of different documents provided by the Army Records Department as well his Pay Book and Soldiers Book. None of the documents showed a complete breakdown of where he was, what unit/formation he served with, and the places he served in throughout his service. In the end I used a spreadsheet to enter and sort the information, and we finally have a slightly less confused idea about his army career, although there still appear to be some anomalies and quite a few gaps.

Towards the latter part of the afternoon I decided to try to do some more work on my combined OP14 and ITCHY AND SCRATCHY wargame rules ... but despite my best intentions I was ‘dragged’ away by a recent addition to my collection of articles written by or about Joseph Morschauser. This happened because the VINTAGE WARGAMING blog had published a copy of Joseph Morschauser's contribution to the 1966/67 edition of Donald Featherstone's WARGAMERS YEARBOOK and I had printed off a copy of what he had written.

Over the years I have been transcribing and saving all the relevant articles that I can find. As a result I have a small but gradually expanding archive of Morschauser's work ... and this afternoon – as a consequence of reading the latest addition to my collection – I made the mistake of sitting back and reading through everything in the archive, with the result that I did very little work on anything else.

One thing in the latest article did make me sit up and think. It was the following paragraph:

I have been playing around with grids and small war game boards for some time now and have finally developed a workable and interesting method of conducting full-scale battles on a 3 by 3 foot board lined with a 3 inch grid. To push things to the limit so to speak I have designed this one for use with 54mm troops figuring that if it were possible to fight a full battle with these on such a small board any other scale would work.

Visions of some of my Britains 54mm figures being used on my small tabletop suddenly came to mind ... as did the idea for a 'Very Little Wars' game! I even went into my toy/wargames room to see if I had a large enough piece of green felt on which to mark out a 12 x 12 grid of 3-inch squares before sanity returned and I decided that I needed to try to get one project finished first before I started another.

Yet again I had almost been seduced away from what I should have been doing by Morschauser!