Nugget 378: An apology

As regular blog readers will know, I recently posted out the latest issue on THE NUGGET to members of Wargame Developments. It was not until last Friday that I was made aware that it contained a major printing error that both the printer and I had missed; namely, that half the pages had been printed upside down and in the reverse order!

The printer is already re-printing the issue and I hope to collect it later today, and I will post it to members with the next issue – NUGGET 379 – during early April.

I apologise for this mistake. It was avoidable – I should have checked them before I posted them out – and I have learned my lesson … as has the printer!

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This is only the second time in forty-six years that there has been a problem with the production of THE NUGGET. The first time was back in the very early years when the then editor – the late Dr Paddy Griffith – sent me the original text by post … and the Royal Mail ‘lost’ it! Because he had not made a copy, he had to reproduce it entirely from scratch.

This was before the era of personal computers and THE NUGGET was put together using a typewriter to produce the text in columns which were then glued to sheets of paper that were photocopied and manually collated and stapled by me.

Wow! It was a very labour-intensive operation back then!

My top three blog posts

In light of the recent massive increase in hits my blog has achieved, I decided to see which are my three top blog posts. The results were somewhat surprising. They were (according to the blog's stats summary):

• Thursday, 16 July 2015: Le Chant L'Oignon (The Onion Song) lyrics (41.8k* or 50.6k*)

• Saturday, 20 February 2016: Simulating gunfire in naval wargames: Fred Jane and Fletcher Pratt (13.7k* or 18.4k*)

• Tuesday, 25 April 2017: Travel Battle: A review of the latest offering from Perry Miniatures (10.1k* or 20.9k*)

If the upsurge in hits was purely down to AI bots 'visiting' my blog, I would expect the peaks in the above graphs to all be towards the right-hand side (i.e. the past few months) ... but my second most read blog post peaked when it was written and has not experienced a recent spike.

Interesting ...

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As I write this blog post on Saturday evening, the number of hits are as follows:

• Today: 20,656 hits
• Yesterday: 56,694 hits
• This month: 194,457 hits ... which is a daily average of 27.780 hits
• Last month: 998,902 hits ... which is a daily average of 35,675 hits

This would seem to indicate that the recent upsurge in hits is beginning to tail off ... a bit.

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* What I do not understand is why each of the blog posts featured above seems to generate two different view totals. On the summary, each has a total that indicates the number of views it has generated ... but when one looks at each post separately, that figure is higher. I have looked on Blogger for a reason for this, but I could not find anything to help me resolve this conundrum.

I should not read other people's blog posts ...

I am waiting for the delivery of my final order from Irregular Miniatures before I can add a Russian-style nineteenth army to my Belle Époque project. In the interim, it was my intention to playtest the latest draft of my PORTABLE BELLE ÉPOQUE WARGAME rules with a Sahel Hadendowi vs. Oblele battle ... and then I read Tradgardmastare's THE DUCHY OF TRADGARDLAND blog.

The particular blog posts that engaged my attention were WONDERLAND OR THE JOY OF MODEL SHOPS, THE ARMY OF TRANSILVANIA, and OPPOSITION. These were about his recent purchase of a box of Strelets-R ROMANIAN INFANTRY figures ...

© Alan Gruber (AKA Tradgardmastare)

... and a box of their ITALIAN ARMY IN WINTER DRESS (STALINGRAD) figures.

© Alan Gruber (AKA Tradgardmastare)

He has painted up the former to be soldiers in the army of Transilvania – his early twentieth century imagi-nation – and the latter will be their opponents, the army of the Duchy of Volare Cantare.

Now, I have loads of painted 20mm World War II figures sitting in boxes in my toy/wargames room, I have a suitable set of simple rules already written, and I have enough Hexon II terrain to hand to fight a battle or two ... so why don't I use them?

It would be stupid not to ... wouldn't it?

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I finished writing this blog post and had uploaded it for publication before I went looking for the figures I was going to use. It was at this point that I found a box of painted 15mm figures that Carl Luxford gave me back in October 2022.

Inside the box were a number of Askaris and European officers, native and Arab troops (including cavalry), and native bearers.

I got the figures out ... and immediately realised that I had to assimilate them into my Belle Époque collection tout suite!

As a result, I have put my plans to fight a battle with my 20mm figures on hold for the time being.

It would be stupid not to ... wouldn't it?

I don’t believe it! A million hits in twenty-eight days!

I looked at my blog's hit counter this morning ... and suddenly realised that it had gone past eleven million hits! This means that my blog has had a million hits in twenty-eight days ... something that I find very, very difficult to believe!

Have those pesky bots been at it again? I certainly can’t find any evidence that they have, so why has my blog become so popular? All I can assume is that it might be down to AI in some way.

Whatever will happen next?

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11,000,000 hits!

It was only the at the beginning of February that my blog’s hit counter reached ten million hits … and it has now just passed eleven million!

• Ten million hits: 3rd February 2026
• Nine million hits: 16th December 2025
• Eight million hits: 4th October 2025
• Seven million hits: 26th July 2025
• Six million hits: 6th September 2024
• Five million hits: 20th January 2024
• Four million hits: 8th November 2021
• Three million hits: 6th December 2018
• Two million hits: Unsure
• One million hits: 25th December 2015

Yet again, I would like to say a very big THANK YOU to my regular blog readers. Without your interest and comments, I doubt that I would ever have reached anything like these many hits.

Here's to reaching twelve million hits … which at the present rate, could be very soon!

Thinking about the my Portable Belle Époque Wargame rules

In reply to a comment by Neil Patterson about his recent battle report entitled LITTLE GREAT WAR: KAVKAZ CAMPAIGN EPILOGUE, Archduke Piccolo stated that:

One change to the rule set I will make is to increase the machineguns 3 Strength Points. At 2SP, they are too brittle. ... I'm thinking of increasing the MG range, too, to 4 grid areas instead of 3, one more than rifle range.

It might not be such a bad idea to reduce to 2 grid areas the effective range of rifles (and MGs too maybe) whose targets are in any kind of cover. This on top of the existing penalties.

Part of the tabletop battlefield featured in Archduke Piccolo's recent battle report. © Archduke Piccolo.

Interestingly, I have been thinking about this very element of my draft PORTABLE BELLE ÉPOQUE WARGAME rules ... and although I had come to slightly different conclusions, I am now having a re-think.

Nugget 378

I collected the latest issue of THE NUGGET from the printer (Macaulay Scott Printing Company of Welling, Kent) on Friday, and I hope to post it out to members today.

As soon as I can, I will send the PDF copy to the webmaster so that members can read this issue of THE NUGGET online.

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IMPORTANT: Please note that this is the sixth issue of THE NUGGET to be published for the 2025-2026 subscription year.

If you wish to subscribe for the 2025-2026 subscription year and have not yet done so, please request a PayPal invoice or the bank transfer information from the Treasurer or follow the instructions on the relevant page of the website.

Quintin Barry's two-volume history of the Franco-Prussian War

Over the past few weeks I have been reading - for the second time - the late Quintin Barry's two-volume history of Franco-Prussian War.

The first volume covers the outbreak of the war until the surrender at Sedan and the collapse of the Second Empire.

The second volume covers the period from the proclamation of the Third Republic until the end of the war, and includes the Siege of Paris and the foundation of the German Empire.

I have found these to be well-researched and admirably written in a style that told the history of the war in an easy-to-read way that still managed to include the sort of  level of detail beloved by wargamers. This is hardly surprising as - according to his obituary in the Law Gazette - he spent ten years doing his research before he wrote this work.

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THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 1870-71 was written by Quintin Barry and published in paperback format in 2025 by Helion & Company (Volume One: ISBN 978 1 8067 2104 7; Volume Two: ISBN 978 1 8067 2105 4).

February has been an 'interesting' month

The last twenty-eight days have been a bit different from what passes for 'normal' these days. The reasons for this are as follows:

1. I celebrated my seventy-sixth birthday. (Yes, I am really that old!)
2. My blog achieved ten million hits ... and I see that it is close to reaching eleven million!
3. Sue's car needed to have its hybrid battery refurbished, and this required it to taken to Northampton and back.
4. It then developed a fault with its tyre pressure monitoring system which required new sensors to be fitted to each tyre ... and two new tyres as well!
5. Over the course of several days, we moved the contents of our large offsite storage unit to a much smaller one ... and I rediscovered all sorts of useful wargaming bits and pieces that I had forgotten about.
6. I delivered a talk about the history of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (the RACS) to a local community group.
7. One of my favourite wargame manufacturers – Irregular Miniatures – announced that they were closing down and I had to send them what will be my final order in a bit of a hurry.
8. I achieved the goals I set myself at the beginning of the year.
9. I became embroiled in an ongoing 'discussion' with the Debt Collection Department of Royal Greenwich Council over care cost invoices from 2024 that I paid the day I received them! (I have proof in the form of screenshots of my bank statements and a letter from the Adult Care Department that said my case was closed and that all payments for care had been made.)
10. I have had two bouts of 'gastronomical illness', in quick succession, the second of which I am still recovering from ... and is the reason that I have not made any blog posts over the past few days.

That's quite a lot of things to deal with over the shortest month of the year! Hopefully, March will be a much quieter month!

Nugget 378

The editor of THE NUGGET sent me the latest issue on Sunday and I sent it to the printer (Macauley Scott Printing Company, Welling, Kent) on Monday morning. I hope to be able to collect it later this week and post it out to members of Wargame Developments by next weekend.

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IMPORTANT: Please note that this is the sixth issue of THE NUGGET to be published for the 2025-2026 subscription year.

If you wish to subscribe for the 2025-2026 subscription year and have not yet done so, please request a PayPal invoice or the bank transfer information from the Treasurer or follow the instructions on the relevant page of the website.

Latest news from Ian Kay of Irregular Miniatures

I recently mentioned that Ian Kay of Irregular Miniatures was retiring and that the company would cease trading towards the end of March.

Since then, the company has been inundated with large orders and Ian has had a rethink and has announced that they won’t be taking any further orders after 1st March.

Ian Kay's latest announcement regarding the last day on which Irregular Miniatures will be able to accept orders.

As I stated in my earlier blog post, I wish Ian a long and healthy retirement and hope that someone will buy Irregular Miniatures as a going concern … and that the sale provides Ian with a sizeable nest egg for his well-deserved retirement.