The Week That Was

One of the memes going about these days has the narrator saying he's learned just how anti-social he is because the pandemic hasn't changed his social calendar over-much.  I feel that way about gaming.  Since discovering Tabletop Simulator over a year ago, it's been far to easy to gather whenever my friends and I care to to play just about any game we want.  This week was no exception.

Wednesday was for Velker and I to have at the Vimiero scenario for Blucher.  Our play prompted a lot of questions about whether the British can ever have a corps structure and the reduced-rate activation it brings with it.  The fellow who designed the scenario posted that he hadn't quite thought it through when he designed it, but, in retrospect, would want the Allies to be able to activate as a corps.

The result of the game was a very narrow win for my French.  A fun, tiny scenario that could easily have gone either way.  Also, almost unsettling to have a scenario with only two momentum dice per side.

Saturday Noon was a make-up game for the Battle of Vitoria for Commands and Colours: Napoleonics Velker and I missed the previous weekend.

Saturday evening was a full-house (six player) game of Commands and Colours: Ancients featuring the first round of our five-round Second Punic War tournament -- the Battle of Lake Trasimenus.  It was a terrific battle with the Carthaginians down 2-9 going into the last few rounds only to pull out a remarkable 11-9 victory, most of the points coming in a single turn.

And we even managed to get the second round of "The Emperor's OTHER Hat" Blood Bowl tournament off the ground.  My humans -- the Verdant Bay Immortals -- managed a tie with an ably-lead team of Skaven.  The tie has left me, in the early going, at the top of our standings.

Best of the new week.

Do I Pretend I Don't Notice How Long It's Been...or Not...

I'll imagine it's like I never left.  Probably for the best.

When last I wrote here, the world hadn't been swept by this wretched disease and we had just come back from visiting the battlefields of the 1809 Bavarian campaign.  I had, however, been hosting "Saturday Night Fights" for the folks at the Armchair Dragoons and others.  Since then, the YouTube channel has climbed to nearly 450 subscribers and we regularly get busy crowds kibitzing our games.

Here are just a few recent ones:

This was the first of three epic games of Wagram using my now-preferred Blucher system:

It wound up a fairly decisive French win after a great 12-hour punch-up.

This is the first of our two-part Friedland game using the same system.  You'll notice that it uses my larger 30mm figures in big blocks.  Wagram proved just to big for the system to handle it.

And this was our run at the classic Memoir '44 scenario "Tigers in the Snow".  Rare as a hen's tooth and terribly expensive on the after-market, I think it's actually the lesser of the two scenarios in that pack, the other being "Market Garden" which we're convinced the Allies cannot win, but is a good time nonetheless.

More recently, I've continued to build scenarios for Commands and Colors: Napoleonics as my son and I try to play every published scenario on the anniversary date of the battle.  Last week was ridiculous from that perspective as the week started off with Heilsberg and went -- without missing a day -- through to Wavre, which is here:

Mid-June is certainly campaign season if nothing else.

Finally, these were, of course, the #WaterlooDays which are special to all Napoleonic gamers.  In honor, we finally got our good friend and fellow Dragoon Bob -- he of the mighty 'stache -- to play a game with the group.  We fired up and recorded the first several turns of likely my favorite boardgame, Napoleon's Last Battles.  Despite a freak Summer storm taking out our power and setting matters back an hour or so, it was a really good time and I was reminded how much these simpler games can capture truths about these battles.

Oh, and yes, we've started our second Armchair Dragoons Blood Bowl tournament.  I took second in the last one -- a six-team round-robin.  My Verdant Bay Immortals did not shame themselves in their first outing in the new tournament, earning a 2-1 win against a team of stunties.

A lot there, then, and much more to come.

Thanks for stopping by for the ride.