Spring cleaning ... and Salute 2019

Every so often the feeling that I really ought to have a bit of a tidy up comes upon me. With the change to British Summer Time, the general improvement in the weather, and with Easter just a few weeks away, I decided that I needed to do a bit of Spring cleaning.

Tidying up my toy/wargame room didn't take very long, so I moved on to my computer. Over the years I have stored all sorts of stuff in files, and I decided to sort and rationalise the file structure ... after I'd backed up the existing files onto a removable hard drive!

As one can easily imagine, there were quite a few files of photographs I'd taken during our cruises and a lot of files relating to wargames and wargaming ... including drafts of several sets of rules. Going through them was time-consuming, especially as I found one or two forgotten gems.

Some of photographs will be featured as blog entries over the next few weeks. As to the drafts of wargame rules ... well most of them have been published over the years, but one set that has not been made public, stood out. It was the original version of RED FLAGS AND IRON CROSSES.

A developed version of the rules – RED FLAGS AND IRON CROSSES – TARRED AND FEATHERSTONED – were featured in some of my earliest blog entries and published in DONALD FEATHERSTONE'S WARGAMING AIRBORNE OPERATIONS (edited by John Curry and published by the 'History of Wargaming' Project [ISBN 978 1 4092 8647 9]).

The latter combined:

• A card activation system
• Move distances (converted into hexes) from Lionel Tarr’s rules
• A combat system that drew on that used in Donald Featherstone’s published rules

The original RED FLAGS AND IRON CROSSES were somewhat different, with far more reliance on the use of playing cards to generate randomness. For example, if a unit in cover was hit, a playing card was turned over. If the card was black, the cover prevented the hit from being effective whereas if the card was red, the cover was ineffective, and the unit was hit.

Looking at them afresh over ten years later, the rules do have much to commend them, and some of the concepts and mechanisms I used when creating them might well be the basis of a set of rules that, when combined with elements of my PORTABLE WARGAME rules, I could use for my much-planned solo Eastern Front/Great Patriotic War project.

Its certainly something worth thinking about.

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As regular blog readers will have noticed, today is the day that SALUTE 2019 is taking place at ExCel in Docklands. ExCel is almost directly north of where I live in south-east London, and I can actually see the building from the top of my driveway.

Getting there by public transport would not have been very difficult. I could have taken a bus to Woolwich Arsenal, followed by a journey on the Docklands Light Railway to Customs House or Prince Regent stations via Canning Town. The journey time would have been between forty-five to sixty minutes, depending upon the time I had to wait at various places to catch a connection.

I could have gone ... but I have chosen not to because – due to other commitments – I would only have had just about enough time to get there, queue to get in, spend about an hour looking around, and then have had to come home again. I'm of an age when that sort of rushing about is best avoided, as it is far too stressful, and would have reduced the enjoyment I would have had from going.