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Friday 22 May 2015

Miniature Wargames with Battlegames Issue 386

June's issue of MINIATURE WARGAMES WITH BATTLEGAMES magazine arrived in the post yesterday afternoon, but I have been rather too busy to read it until now.


This is a special Waterloo issue, and the articles included in this issue are:
  • Briefing (i.e. the editorial) by Henry Hyde
  • World Wide Wargaming by Henry Hyde
  • Forward observer by Neil Shuck
  • Shocking tufts!: The continuing tales of a wargames widow by Diane Sutherland
  • Fantasy Facts by John Treadaway
  • The march on Madrid: Gaming the Spanish Civil War: Part 3 by Andrew Rolph
  • Napoleon's final gamble: The Waterloo campaign of 1815 by Steve Jones
  • Hougomont and La Haie Sainte: Two epic struggles on the field of Waterloo by John Franklin
  • Siborne's greatest victory: Restoring Captain Siborne's masterpiece by Siona Mackelworth and Cymbeline Storey
  • Tchaikovsky meets Morschauser: A battle game for balletomanes by Arthur Harman
  • Citadel Heights refought: The reprise of an old friend after 56 years by Charlie M Grant
  • Hex encounter by Brad Harmer
  • Send three and fourpence by Conrad Kinch
  • Recce
  • The Battlegames Combat Stress Appeal report by Henry Hyde
As I am currently working on my own Waterloo project, there are plenty of articles for me to read and re-read in this issue. In addition, Arthur Haman's Tchaikovsky meets Morschauser is a little gem of a game that appeals to me because of its use of some of Joseph Morschauser's game mechanisms, and Conrad Kinch's adaptation of the famous Blasthof Bridge scenario from CHARGE! for use with COMMANDS & COLORS: NAPOLEONICS just cries out to be tried out. I also enjoyed reading the third and final part of Andrew Rolph's series entitled The march on Madrid.

2 comments:

  1. Bob
    Just to round off the March on Madrid business I thought I'd let you know how the campaign turned out.

    In the end I had to fudge it slightly as, at the final battle to capture a bridgehead over the River Manzanares, the Nationalist player completely missed an element of his victory conditions. Consequently he successfully took a bridge over the river but failed to stop two or three Republican units cutting him off. Broadly speaking both sides' main effort missed each other. It was therefore a technical Republican victory but not a good ending to the campaign.

    So I slightly reset the game to set up the successful Nationalist bridgehead and wrote some new victory conditions representing the requirement to clear the supply lines to it. The game saw repeated Republican attacks on both banks of the river where the surrounded 4th Bandera grimly held on. That unit's comrades meanwhile attacked outside the city and cleared the lines through to the bridgehead. It all came down to the last throw of the die on the last turn of the game. The 4th Bandera had suffered 70% casualties and need to pass a morale test. It failed and the last Republican attack of the campaign had retaken the eastern bank of the river.

    A much more successful game and a fitting end to the campaign of, in the end, seven linked games.

    Cheers

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rumblestrip (Andrew),

    Thanks for outlining what happened during the last part of your campaign. It sounds as if the end result was a cliff-hanger and brought the campaign to a more than satisfactory conclusion.

    All the best,

    Bob

    PS. Sorry for the somewhat tardy reply but your comment has only just appeared in the 'Comments' folder of my blog.

    ReplyDelete

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