Nugget 344

I collected the latest issue of THE NUGGET yesterday, and I will post it out to members tomorrow morning. In the meantime, members can read this issue online.

IMPORTANT: Please note that this is the eighth issue of THE NUGGET to be published for the 2021-2022 subscription year. If you have not yet re-subscribed, a reminder was sent to you some time ago. If you wish to re-subscribe using the PayPal option on the relevant page of the website, you can use the existing buttons as the subscription cost has not changed.

More book PDFs are now available

Yesterday I managed to add three more titles to the list of book PDFs that are available to buy from Wargames Vault.

The books are:

The Portable Wargame

Developing the Portable Wargame

Gridded Naval Wargames

The PDFs are US Letter size rather than A5 size, and the text and illustrations have been adjusted to to make the best of the increased page size.

Testing time

I spent a large chunk of yesterday at University Hospital Lewisham having a bone scan. Sue came with me to keep me company … and to drive me home afterwards if I felt unwell afterwards. My appointment was for 9.30am, and thanks to the heavy traffic on the South Circular Road, it took us over an hour to drive the four miles from home to the hospital. Luckily, we had left enough time to allow for holdups, and I was in the Nuclear Medicine Department just before 9.30am.

I was intravenously injected with a small quantity of radioactive material … and then told to come back at midday for my scan. This was to allow time for the blood to circulate the radioactive material around my body, particularly my skeleton.

As Sue and I had not eaten breakfast before leaving home, we made our way to the hospital’s coffee shop, where we each had a bacon roll and a café latte. This took until just after 10.00am, and as the weather was quite pleasant, Sue and I went out of the hospital’s rear entrance, which led us into Ladywell Fields. This is a large open space that is bordered on one side by the main line railway from London to Hayes, Kent, and on the other by the River Ravensbourne. Besides areas of grass where people can walk their dogs and children can play ball games, there are a number of tennis courts, a children’s playground, an athletics track, and a small cafe.

Sue and I wandered around the park until 11.30am, at which point we returned to the hospital’s main entrance. As we still had about twenty minutes until I was due to have my scan, we went across the road to have a look at the local war memorial.

Next to the main memorial was a smaller memorial to those local men who won the Victoria Cross, and each of them was further commemorated by an individual paving slab.

I was back at the Nuclear Medicine Department by midday, and my scan took just under an hour. I then went out to the car park, where I had arranged to meet Sue. She had used the time I had been having my scan to have a walk around the local area, and after searching the graveyard of the nearby Church of St Mary the Virgin, she had discovered a short row of local shops. Amongst them was a proper bakery, and rather than go straight home, Sue suggested that we might go there to buy something for lunch. We did ... and each of us bought one of their home-made Cornish Pasties as well as a cake, which we took home to eat.

I expect to hear the results of my scan in about a week’s time. In the meantime, I am still undergoing hormone treatment that is supposed to stop the cancer growing any further.

Nugget 344

The editor of THE NUGGET sent me the latest issue last weekend, and I have sent it to the printer today. If they manage to print it as quickly as they usually do, it should be ready for collection by the end of this week, and I will then be able to post it out to members by the beginning of next week.

IMPORTANT: Please note that this is the eighth issue of THE NUGGET to be published for the 2021-2022 subscription year. If you have not yet re-subscribed, a reminder was sent to you some time ago. If you wish to re-subscribe using the PayPal option on the relevant page of the website, you can use the existing buttons as the subscription cost has not changed.

A short progress report

I have been working on converting the remaining PORTABLE WARGAME books into PDF format. I have changed the page size from A5 to US Letter size as this can be printed in A4 size as well, thus meeting the requirements of players across the world.

Doing this has given me the opportunity to make a few changes. These include increasing the size of some of the illustrations and correcting some of the grammatical errors and typos that I missed when the books were first published.

I am currently working on converting more books into PDF format

Although both Sue and I seem to have come down with colds, we have been keeping ourselves busy. She has been sorting out her collection of dolls houses, and I have been working on converting more of my books into PDF format.

I am taking the opportunity to correct some of the more obvious mistakes as I go through the conversion process, and I am changing the size of the books so that they are going to be US Letter size rather than A5 size. This will make them easier to print out as there will be few pages and they can be printed out in A4 size without any difficulty ... or so I am informed!

I will make an announcement on my blog when the books are available in PDF format ... which I hope will be by the end of the week at the latest!

A game of vignettes? Using the Fast Play 3 x 3 Portable Wargame to fight larger battles

Some years ago, the late George Jeffries experimented with a system that he termed the Variable Length Bound. This is defined in the current edition of the Wargame Developments Handbook as follows:

Variable Length Bound

The technique to adjusting the time interval of a game to critical events e.g. If it is obvious that no contact will be made for a period of 12 hours, when the time in the game will be moved on by 12 hours and the tactical situation reassessed there, rather than repeat a standard 1 hour game turn 12 times in a row. A difficult concept to grasp and adopt, because it implies ignoring those units out of contact and moving the elements of a force direct to their critical events, despite the fact that some of these events occur at different times. Best used with a "standard" time slice, but with ways of incorporating multiple slices in a single turn.

Looking at this anew, it struck me that what he was trying to do was to fight wargames where there was an emphasis on the important or crucial events of a battle rather making players recreate its entirety ... including all the boring bits where very little happened!

It further struck me that the Fast Play 3 x 3 Portable Wargame (FP3x3PW) provided a potential way of doing the same thing, with each crucial event being fought out as a vignette within the battle using FP3x3PW.

I looked around for an example of how I could do this and decided upon the Battle of Waterloo. It splits nicely into the following vignettes:

• The attack on Hougoumont
• The Grand Battery opens fire
• The first French infantry attack (including the attack on La Haie Sainte)
• The charge of the British heavy cavalry
• The French cavalry attack
• The second French infantry attack (including the capture of La Haie Sainte)
• The Prussian attack at Placenoit
• The assault by the French Imperial Guard

Each of the above could quite easily be fought as separate FP3x3PW battles, thus giving players the ability to refight Waterloo without having to invest a lot of space, time, and money to do so.

I am sure that other battles (e.g. Gettysburg) could be refought in a similar fashion, and this is an idea that I might well look at in great depth over the coming months. It might even make for an interesting chapter in a SECOND PORTABLE WARGAME COMPENDIUM!

Seventy-seven years ago today …

Seventy-seven years ago my father was in Wismar, Germany. He was serving with 53rd (Worcestershire Yeomanry) Air landing Light Regiment, Royal Artillery, which was part of 6th Airborne Division. They had arrived there on 2nd May 1945 … just ahead of the Russians. He was eighteen years old and had been called up on his birthday in 1944. He remained in the army after the war ended, serving in India and Burma before he was demobbed in 1947.

Thanks to my current medical problems, I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents over the past few weeks. Had they still been alive, my mother would have been ninety-four years old, and my father would have been ninety-five. In fact, he would have been ninety-six on 17th May.

Whatever my future holds, they gave me a great start in life. They both came from humble working-class areas of London (my mother came from Lambeth and my father cane from the East End), but they worked hard to give their children the best that they could. We were encouraged to be as successful as we could be in whatever fields our talents took us into. My brother and I went to the same secondary school (Palmers Endowed School for Boys, Grays, Essex) and both left with good qualifications that enabled us to choose the careers that we wanted to follow.

From my mother I inherited a creative streak (she was a very talented artist and worked for Warner Brothers as an airbrush artist) and from my father I inherited a love of mathematics, particularly geometry (he became a gunner because of his talent for trigonometry and geometry and became an accountant after leaving the army). Thanks to their nature and the nurture I received, I can look back on what I think was a successful career in education and forward to a career as a writer and wargame designer.

Making PDF editions of books available for sale online

I was surprised at both the speed with which Wargames Vault was able to make the PDF edition of THE PORTABLE WARGAME COMPENDIUM available online and the volume of sales it has enjoyed. As a result, I have now made PDF editions of the following books available via Wargames Vault:

The Balkan League

¡Arriba España!

The Portable Pike & Shot Wargame

Restless Natives

With the exception of RESTLESS NATIVES, which is priced at £2.50, the other books are £5.00 each.

As time permits, I may well add further PDF editions of my books to the list that is on sale at Wargame Vault.

Looking at the Portable Wargame grids

Whilst sitting in hospital on Friday waiting for my appointment with the Endoscopy Department, my mind turned to thinking about the standard 8 x 8 PORTABLE WARGAME square grid ...

... and its 3 x 3 FAST PLAY version ...

... when suddenly realised that it was quite possible to overlay one on the other if one was willing to compromise a little.

This is more obvious if I overlay a red version of the 3 x 3 square grid ...

...over a grey version of the 8 x 8 square grid ...

... thus:

I must admit that I am amazed that I hadn't noticed that this was possible before last Friday. As to the compromise ... well the size of the Reserve Areas and Flanks are reduced in comparison with the size of the 3 x 3 grid squares, but as a lot of players seem to favour larger grid squares for their 3 x 3 battles, this seems to me to be a minor compromise.

PS. The need to compromise on the size of the Reserve Areas and Flanks disappears completely if one uses a 10 x 10 square grid for one's 'standard' PORTABLE WARGAMES, thus: