Testicles, lightly grilled with salt, pepper, lemon juice and .......

eaten by other people for their tea!

I like to kid my children when I'm eating Brains' Faggots that they are lambs testicles. This produces the sort of reaction that you might expect. One mans meat, after all, is another man's tea!

Thankfully a Chieftain in Berlin cammo, not a grilled testicle!

I'm saying this not because it gives me a chance to put up a photograph of a grilled testicle, which you will see that I have kindly avoided, but just to show that some people like one thing and others like another. I like diversity, I like people being different and I really like not being like other people. 

This massive preamble means that I am just about to be rude to someone, hopefully not that rude, and that I am feeling better after an appalling couple of weeks health wise. 

Now to the being rude, I have just read the rules for Battlegroup Modern Wargames Rules. They are 100 pages long and will give a battalion battle which can be fought to completion in just 3-4 hours. They were of course written to be fun and even more fun than Challenger 2000 which came before them and which broke the previous Challenger 2 rules.

If you like your testicles grilled with salt, pepper and freshly squeezed lemons then this one is for you. The plus side is that they are free on the internet and have lots of support. They were written by very nice people for the very best of reasons. The bad news is that they look like the old WRG modern rules and Challenger combined. I feel no pain in saying this as I owned both and loved to quote mad stuff about thermal imagining and question whether "that" smokescreen contained any anti-thermal imaging particles, not available to the Warsaw Pact until the early 1990s, and certainly never available to second line Czech motor rifle regiments.

I am saying this because I have just read the tank rules for FiveCore Company Command. They cover 65 years of tank combat and take up what must be four A4 pages. They are even more simple than the AK47 (first, best and only edition) rules which I thought set a new standard. In many respects they are not that different.

"..............it is impossible to give comprehensive listings of how each gun interacts with each vehicle and players will have to make reasonable choices based on their own feelings and research.

If in doubt, a weapon intended to kill tanks should be rated as a Killing Shot. Modify up or down as appropriate.

Examples of Threatening Shots include anti-tank rifles versus most tanks in world war 2, RPG7 versus top of the line NATO tanks today or auto cannon fire against tanks in most any era.

Examples of Overkill include Abrams and Leopard 2 main guns versus T55, Tiger tanks versus Sherman and most dedicated anti-tank weapons against APC's and other transport vehicles."

I quote this in full because I think it goes to the heart of what I want from a game. A simple, but realistic way, of representing a real life situation. In FiveCore, an anti-tank weapon may threaten an enemy tank, with only a very limited chance of affecting it, it will have a good shot at killing it, or it will have a very good (overkill) chance of killing it. In this simplicity we can represent anything from an early ATR to the latest 120mm gun firing fin stablised, discarding sabot, long rod penetrators. 

You may have guessed that Five Core is on my big list of stuff to do. I think it should also be on yours!