Dear Diary - a rolling 4 months of comment
Fighting for the village
The 8 and 9 AM turns in the campaign have now been played through and a report posted to the Warriors & Battlefield Blog (link below).
We get a couple of actions being fought one at the village itself and the other below it, amongst the vineyards.
I am really liking that everything that goes on in each fight feels like it is important because of the tie-in to whatever else is going on in the campaign.
The post also outlines a couple of admin features that I am using to make the campaign run smoothly and to enhance the solo aspect of play.
W&B Blog Link;
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-village-comes-under-pressure.html
More - more - more
There has been some more campaigning and it has provided some good gaming. It is being written up and will be posted 0500 GMT, tomorrow, all things being equal.
I am taking a few days' break from it now, as a sore back from standing and generally getting excited! is kicking in.
Attention is being turned to a couple of boardgames that I fancy looking at next so the tedious job of punching and clipping counters is underway, plus of course reading the rules without nodding off - joy!
On the figures painting front, I am still chipping away at the next Napoleonic Austrian infantry unit for the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge (ends March 21st) ....... however, the campaign has urgently demanded a couple of mounted Austrian colonels, so they have been pulled from the stash and given a burst of love and attention!
I was saving these and some artillery types to paint as the final submission to the painting challenge, as a reward to myself for just painting white-uniformed rank and file for several weeks, but of necessity, they have jumped the queue and fine chaps they are too, but can they do their job? We shall see :-)
The first set back
The 7 AM turn in the ‘Pursuit of IV Korps’ campaign has now been played out and a record of events has been posted to the Battlefields & Warrior Blog (link below).
The French are relying on a fast and aggressive advance to unhinge the Austrian defence.
What is the state of readiness and commitment of Austrian forces to their rearguard positions?
Information LINK;
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/02/7-am-pursuit-of-vi-korps.html
Into the Whirlpool
Our face-to-face game last night covered The fighting at Rose's Wheatfield 2nd July 1863 (Gettysburg) is the first installment of the tattered flags series. Designed by Hermann Luttmann and published by Blue Panther.
We are given a taste of tactical fighting. Brigades are on the table and they are formed by their constituent regiments, which themselves will be represented by 2 - 4 counters.
The counters are oblong and the map has a grid of points that allows the units to set up and move in a style that, visually at least is very reminiscent of a miniatures game and the designer has produced a system that nicely replicates the free form of a figures game i.e. the grid is much less obvious to play.
For my money, in the goal of getting a figures style game, play felt a bit process heavy and mathsy, more obvious perhaps in the evening when tiredness kicks in.
It does move along at a fair old place and no doubt system familiarity over several playings would help. The system is 2D10 based (so D100 on application) and can be quite swingy over the results range.
Overall I felt the game was a brave stab at the unusual (but welcome) mix of boardgame with a figures feel, but ultimately I thought that at times it was getting in its own way.
I’m thinking that the game probably needs a few plays to start to fully appreciate what the designer is going for. We did think that the scenario victory conditions were hard to achieve for the Confederates, which could be true, or could be that we hadn’t yet grasped the nuance of play.
The Pursuit of VI Korps begins
The Junction Jeopardy campaign by Henry Hyde is now up and running and I have played the 6 AM turn.
The game that will see the first shots fired (7 AM) turn is on the table, so hopefully a series of small engagements will soon start to define the campaign.
The nine little map panels are gorgeous things and I have had permission from henry Hyde to use them in the battle account while recognising his copyright.
Here I have glued them onto a sheet on foam board, so that small flags on pins can be moved around the campaign area. The who thing is rather joyful.
There is now a bit more urgency to get the Austrian unit currently on the painting corks, completed and marching into action.
LINK
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-pursuit-of-vi-korps-6am.html
An important buy
La Bataille de Hanau 1813
Quatre Batailles en Espagne 1809 - 13
Trois Batailles en Allemagne 1806 - 07
Designed by Didier Rouly and published by Legion Games, this series deals with napoleonic battles at a scale of regiments, 250 metres per hex and 30 minute turns.
What makes these a little different is not just that lower scale, but that the system uses counters that are double the usual width (oblong rather than square) so they offer up a visual of units being deployed in line. Flip them over and they show themselves being in column, so there is a strong figures feel of tactical formations at the heart of the engine.
As I quite like transferring moments captured in a boardgame to the tabletop for a figures game, that conversion will be smoother and more intuitive here.
The reason why I have jumped on the three games all at once is that they were published in 2020. There is a new game in the line-up (Wagram) due out shortly and that will likely renew wider interest in the series and one or more of the three older titles may sell out, weakening that sense of series that my collector's mind likes, so I am getting them now before the inevitable happens. They are still available at Second Chance Games (UK).
It does however leave me with the problem of having three different series of napoleonic games now. I can't service them all or at least I don't want to, so at least one series needs to go, if for no other reason than to part fund the purchase of these three new games.
One sticking point for me in my quest for 'the' napoleonic boardgame is that all napoleonic systems that I have dabbled with so far have one weakness (for me) and that is they tend towards the longer play times, which doesn't help our face to face sessions. However I think I will really like the tactical feel that these will deliver.
Of interest and as a total aside, I could likely use my figure rules with the boardgame, that would certainly speed things up!
JdG also takes too long to play, but does have a smaller footprint. I quite like the chit draw for activation - mostly! but I think the orders thing gets messy, with extra markers need on the map something simple like command range would have worked equally well and be easier to implement (like LofNB) . I do like the cavalry rules. I like that both Lof NB and JdG have a wide range of the popular battles and campaigns available. By contrast the new games I have bought do not! I think I will play Hanau before deciding which will go ……. Since it might be that it is in fact the new games that don’t stay ….. I hope not :-)
More information on the Junction Jeopardy campaign.
Quite a bit of work has gone on over the past couple of days getting the campaign ready for play and I have been able to put up a ‘part II’ description over on the Battlefields & Commanders blog that fully outlines the preparation that has gone into the campaign, including orders of battle,
objectives and special rules. We are just at the point when play can actually start and the first shots can be traded.
BLOG LINK
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/01/junction-jeopardy-campaign-part-ii.html
The life of Margaret Beaufort
Margaret Beaufort, Survivor Rebel, Kingmaker by Lauren Johnson and published by Head Zeus, £30.
I saw this in Waterstones just before Christmas and couldn’t make my mind up. Needless to say, when I went back for it, it had gone!
It was back on the shelves yesterday so I thought it worth a treat ... encouraged by Mrs. Wargamer, who picked up Eleanor by Alice Loxton (published by MacMillan).
I have always been interested in the machinations of Lord Stanley, he of the divided loyalty at the Battle of Bosworth 1485. Margaret Beaufort was his wife and responsible for encouraging Henry Tudor (to become Henry VII) to head a successful rebellion against King Richard III.
The battle of Bosworth happens halfway through the book, so the narrative is fixed on as much after that date as it is before and we get to see the flavour of he period, its politics and social constraints, through the eyes and actions of this extraordinary woman, instead of the usual narrative generated by the successive generations of the male nobility deciding things by battle.
The opening paragraph on the book sleeve says ‘Born into a century of conflict as the daughter of the Duke of Somerset and a descendant of Edward III, Margaret Beaufort was married at twelve, a mother and a widow at thirteen, and a player in one of the most violent chapters of English history’.
Seen through modern eyes, that just seems beyond comprehension and her journey of involvement with the levers of power and the fabric of noble/royal connection is no doubt going to bring some fascinating insight into what made the period tick.
In truth - it joins the stash of many things to read :-)
Junction Jeopardy, a Campaign by Henry Hyde
I bought this as an Amazon order for £8.50 plus post. It is also available as a PDF download from Henry’s site for £5.
It sets the scene for a 9 table campaign and is intended as a framework to create do-able campaigns across any period or genre.
I have offered my observations on the booklet over on the Battlefields & Warrior blog (linked below). There is also a link there to a short video review of the booklet by Yarkshire Gamer which will help visually demonstrate what you can expect from the booklet.
It is my intention to use this booklet to start my 2026 campaigning and will be following Henry’s text to do an 1809 campaign with my French and Austrian forces. I have already started a bit of research to set the scene.
I am hoping that it will allow an entertaining re-telling of what the campaign brings - more to follow.
(note - the comments have been re-activated on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog. Please do not feel obliged to comment on either and certainly not both).
LINK
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/01/junction-jeopardy-campaign-by-henry-hyde.html
Small and Solitaire
Firstly can I thank those who e-mailed me here via the contact page to give some thumbs up support - it has been very much appreciated and I must apologise for the delay in answering, as for whatever reason, those e-mails had gone into the Spam Folder, which I only discovered today!
Starting with this post, I have turned on the Comments Section here for anyone wishing to use it. Please, please, please, don't think that commenting is expected, it is just there for anyone that wants it.
On to other things I recently bought the boardgame Iwo Jima: Hell on Earth by Neva Games, a new Spanish company that I wanted to support. The designer is José Manuel Neva. I bought the game in the UK from Second Chance Games.
This is a solitaire game and the mounted board is just 12" x 17", so it is very portable and handy for smaller spaces. It comes in a heavy card box that is half the size of what we might think of as a standard bookcase type box.
It says that it will play through in 90 - 120 minutes and complexity is described as Intermediate, so we shall see. Hopefully this will be getting to the table soon.
EDIT - Okay, so this is interesting. I have received comments on this post, but comments do not show here until after I 'open' up the site with a log in and there I can read the comments in a sort of moderating way I suppose. So it looks like there is an auto moderation by default. There is a thing to tick and that seems to publish the comment. It seems that I get to reply by commenting as a customer rather than as an admin.
Probably best if I do a single wrap up reply when the next post is being
published.
EDIT 2 - In my learning curve of comment management, I have managed to delete Steve. J's comment - sorry Steve :-)
EDIT 3 - It seems that replies cannot be embedded against a specific comment, so when we all comment including me the comment just gets added to the the top of the comment pile and so my replies to you will look out of sync, unless you read from the bottom up i.e read the last comment first.
The views of others
Jon, over on his Palouse Wargaming Journal, has kindly picked up my last post here and created a post for discussion.
So far the post has been well visited and participants have added detailed replies, so the subject is something that holds a degree of sentiment.
It does highlight my point that the same small group of kindly souls, notably all bloggers themselves, are minded to comment and support other people's blogs.
Overall, my main point is being slightly missed in that I am not particularly bothered about getting comments, but rather that in general, in our modern connected world, the wider internet audience themselves do not feel the need to recognise the efforts of a blogger; rather, our modern way is simply to consume and move on without regard for the source—perhaps it is the ultimate consequence of 'free internet'.
Perhaps a sticking point for me is that servicing the main blog consumes hours and hours and I mean hours of my time. The posts there are typically very long (that may be its own problem), but often they do provide the sort of detail and deep read that browsers want if they are thinking about buying a game or breaking into a system or want a coffee break with a detailed read etc., and it is that sort of thing that I think is worthy of two-way exchange... and I mean exchange by those in the wider audience that have gained something from the post, not just the group of bloggers who regularly support each other.
We should all be seeing on our blogs, the names of people in the comments section that are new to us, where perhaps we have pressed a button of interest.
Regardless, thank you everyone for your thoughts to date on Jon's blog and also to the two new followers that have joined my Battlefields & Warrior Blog, together with the several who have joined over recent weeks. I rather feel like I don't want to disappoint!
I must say, I was 100% convinced that my last post here would be my last use of wargaming social media and now I am less certain, so thank you all for your perspective.
LINK
https://palousewargamingjournal.blogspot.com/2026/01/on-wargaming-and-blogging-thinking-aloud.html
Thinking aloud and a reduction in output
It is a common blogging dilemma that despite the work that goes into maintaining blogs, they largely seem to be taken for granted, evidenced for the most part by low comment responses.
There are of course a band of kindly folk who do repeatedly support fellow bloggers, but outside of that, internet etiquette is largely absent.
For my own part for the past 18 months I have had my comments turned off, a chosen liberation that conceals any lack of two way participation. However, for the blogs longer posts, I do visit various forums and 'publish' the post for the attention of users of that forum. Of itself, it helps create interest in the blog postings.
I have just done this regarding my most recent B&W blog post - 'The Ambush of Fouconberg'. I happened to just check back in to the forum to see if any replies needed addressing and noted that at the time of writing this, there are 255 views on that forum and no responses! You would think that based on that number of views there would be perhaps a couple of comments - but no, nothing! Possibly the post was deficient to all who had a peep and perhaps they passed it by, rather than read it - who knows.
[Edit - a couple of days on and it is now over 300 views at that forum, again without any responses. I am still having to return to it daily to see whether any questions / comment need servicing].
[Edit 2 - a few more days further on and there have been 441 views just on that forum and one response, which of course I have replied to].
I'm not being particularly precious about this or taking it personally as the particular forum treats many posts in the same way. It is just an observation that pretty much encapsulates whether investing so much energy in blogging is worthwhile - a moment in time snapshot of effort versus outcome if you like. Sharing should not be so exclusively a one way street .... just my opinion of course.
As a matter of record my Battlefields & Warriors Blog does well, getting between 20 - 30,000 views a month (thank you bots) and I only post roughly once every three weeks or so over there. It is the big back catalogue of articles going back to 2014 that seems to draw viewers in.
My Commanders site by contrast, gets 35 - 40 views a day and since I post here much more often, I think here there is a more solid core of regular viewers who pop in to look at current stuff - thank you. (I should also note that I do get some e-mails of support via my Contact Page there, it is not entirely a dead space - thank you).
But, I think I am still feeling a little jaded from the effort of my 30 page Christmas Newsletter, which I found harder to write this time, compared to those of the past 5 years - that is a self inflicted thing of course.
On top of that, the hosting fees for my Commanders site go up in February - such is life, prices do go up, I'm not complaining about that, but it does create the moment of deciding whether to just spend the money on a couple of games instead.
As a small aside, I also question whether it is all just a little self indulgent, should anyone actually care about what is crossing my table, enough that I am compelled to keep feeding this hungry beast. Would it simply be better just playing for its own sake and pleasure and leaving it at that (ooh that sounds a bit nostalgic - a bit pre internet :-)). Blogging seems to become its own hobby or at the very least a sub-hobby and the distraction comes at a cost.
In a world that feels like it is less kind than it was a few years ago (road use just one example) and a daily news feed that never seems to get much better than grim, I wonder whether the whole thing of 'hobby' has actually become more critically important, to be enjoyed in its purest form, which I see as returning to the roots of gaming for its own absolute pleasure and joy without distraction or responsibility.
Anyway, I am not 100% sure which way to jump, almost certainly I am going to post much less and perhaps stop altogether. The fact it will likely lead to more gaming, tells its own tale I suppose.
Please note, this is certainly not some sort of depressive type response, it is just about a change in directional thinking that has been going on for a while and a number of things having occured around the same time to take me across a line that has been winking at me for some time. I remain grateful for every visit to my two sites over the years and can only hope that many a coffee has been enjoyed while browsing. Kindest Regard Norm.
Fauconberg Fights!
The action that has been outlined here over the last couple of days has been played out on the tabletop.
I managed to squeeze a 28mm game into a 4' x 3½' space, which I know will interest some readers who share space constraints.
I really was in two minds whether to use my own rules for this or whether to revert to Hail Caesar. In the end, I went with my own rules and they did a better than expected job, for me at least, and it has encouraged me to crack on with them and get them into printable form - so yes, more WotR games while these rules develop.
I should like to be painting more WotR unit bases and the figures have been patiently waiting in the queue for some time, but unfortunately the Napoleonics have taken pole position on the painting corks for the presently running painting challenge and I am loathe to break my painting commitment to that particular project while the Austrians catch up to the French in numbers, but I think by April a change of painting subject will be happily embraced!
Anyway, for anyone wanting to see how the figure game played out, here is a link to the Blog Report.
LINK:
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-ambush-of-fauconberg.html
Drafting up WotR Rules
Following the boardgame mentioned in the last post, the 28's went onto the table to replicate Fauconberg's advance into Yorkshire. (Above photo - Somerset, the army commander for the Lancastrian army).
Play is being supported by my own (decades old) rules and I have started a first draft of updating them, calling them 'Men of Piggy Longton'.
There is enough structure from the existing set to get a game up and running and it is going well. There are the little scribbled notes that I am adding to tweak things as play reveals not only weaknesses, but also some new ways of dealing with old problems.
One of the things added from this session is an 'Out of Arrows Phase' to represent the exhaustion of arrow supply. It puts a bit of a cap on archer excess and as with real battles, there will come a point where the archery naturally gives way to the hand to hand fighting.
One done, I will have a go at doing an AAR on the fighting.
