Time flies

When you are having fun! 

I have just realised that this little blog has been going for a year. I must admit, I am very surprised. As you can tell from the subjects of the posts, my interests gently morph as time goes by so the fact that I am still here and enjoying this is really cool.

This post makes 45 over the twelve months so not quite one a week but not far off. I didn't set myself a target but this feels about right to me. My blogging activities and my hobby activities are completely interlinked so I can't do both simultaneously. Neither can one exist without the other. One a week is fine, but gaps do occur when real life barges in, especially periods of very heavy workloads like I'm experiencing at the year end.

It has been a real insight to see what I have been doing over the year. I have done some pretty constructive things, making model aircraft and tanks (I know, I am still working on the Shermans), doing some thinking about military power (amateurishly) and documenting my most ambitious project about Tannenburg. All in all, a pretty good year..

Areas of interest for next year? Just glancing round the tip that is my study I see...

• M44 D-Day Landings
• Hold the Line (Highland Charge and perhaps FIW)
• The campaigns of Montrose (in a Stephen Simpson style with extra hexes)
• Finishing Shermans (oh yes) and playing PBI2 before PBI3 comes out
• Completing Tannenberg (even if it is not successful as a game)
• Designing a small game on Neuve Chapelle
• Finishing my own special M44 game on Normandy
• Playing some Flames of War Firestorm Normandy (really)
• Figuring out which WW1 miniatures I will invest in and what rules to buy?
• New Neil Thomas book

And on that note, I can't wait!

Thanks to those of you who have read my blog over the year. I'd be interested if you have any comments on what I have been doing. Nice also to have a follower... thanks all.

I've got an OB..

and I'm gonna use it!

Yes, progress is proceeding at a snail's pace on the Tannenberg project but it is proceeding which can only be a good thing.

Starting with the Germans I have built up an initial picture of the units involved. This has come from a variety of sources including the Nafziger Collection but also the appendices to the Golovine book, The Russian Campaign of 1914.

Evocative picture of German troops resting in East Prussia 1914. Pugarees?

Russians ready for a fight

The Golovine appendices are great because they give numbers of battalions, squadrons and batteries. This gives a real sense of the components of the German army. I must admit that I wasn't expecting to feel any romance in this story but there is something about the thought of the German fortress troops leaving their positions to reinforce the field army that strikes a cord. In some ways it feels almost medieval.

The data in the book seems OK, having checked against my other sources. Golovine makes some interesting points about how the Russian troops were outgunned by the Germans. He makes an argument that German troop superiority was 3:2, largely because of German heavy artillery. This is part of a sequence of arguments that he puts which are intended to give the impression that the Russians on the East Prussian front were not especially superior to the Germans. Norman Stone in his book "The Eastern front" has a good go at demolishing these arguments.

Hey ho, I'm designing a game and not solving the mysteries of the universe so my design assumptions are:

• Germans and Russian troops are broadly comparable. Russian first line infantry were professional and should be reasonably equivalent to German first line troops. Both sides had pretty rubbish cavalry, the Russian just had more of it. The artillery on both sides was professional and competent but the Germans had more heavy batteries.
• The real difference between the two sides are command, control, communications and intelligence and this should be reflected in a number of different aspects of the rules mechanisms.
• In facing one or other of the Russian Armies the Germans are unlikely to be at a disadvantage in numbers, even on a simple comparison.

My first go at preparing OBs and combat factors for German 8th Army and Russian 1st Army are shown here:

I have used the same combat weightings as shown at the tops of the columns for both armies. Obviously the whole of the German 8th Army is not going to deploy against the Russian 1st, but it has sufficient combat power (weight) to be able to take them on at equal strength. I'm interested that I have not had to apply a different divisor to the Russian numbers, the disparity in strength coming partly from their lack of heavy artillery, one of the points made by Golovine. They also lack infantry but have lots of cavalry. I'm worried that the Russian cavalry "corps" is too strong, this contains four divisions. I'll need to think up a different approach, perhaps applying a different factor to the Russian squadrons. 

Next steps are to research Russian 2nd Army and then to examine the reinforcements. Hopefully I'll have some time over Easter to do this.

Extra "Phwoar!"

Its that sort of day...

Yes, I have managed to celebrate Mother's Day a week early and spend most of the weekend working or doing homework. A difficult couple of days so this picture really cheered me up....

This was posted on the M44 forum and shows a close up of the D-Day map for Sword beach. The larger picture of all six maps that I posted doesn't show much detail and I was concerned about what we would actually get. This map reassures me big time that we have a real live workable scenario. My first questions is "does this look like my mental map of the battlefield?" and this does. The second question is "looking at the set up, do I have lots of historical options/problems to deal with?", the answer is again yes. I can see plenty of tension here between the drive on Caen and the reinforcement of the Orne bridgehead.

I'm really looking forward to this release. I have no hope of playing the full six maps, if I'm lucky I might get to play two or three maps, but will need to buy additional soldiers rather than additional base games. Maybe I also need some friends to play with!

Things that make you go "Phwoar!"

Invading Normandy again (but bigger) 

We have not had new M44 kit for some time, the Equipment Pack being the last big ticket item in 2012. We now have a very special release to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day itself and the 10th anniversary of M44.

We had the warning from DoW a couple of weeks ago with the familiar message that was originally broadcast on Radio Londres:

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne

Blessent mon cœur

D’une langueur

Monotone.

This could only mean a D-Day release but what more could they actually do? The hints seemed to show maps covering the whole of the Normandy front with extra pictures of crowds of fat bald old people crammed into a games store playing a huge M44 game. Needless to say the forums were divided.....what did it mean? Was it to be more maps? More miniatures?

Well the answer came yesterday with the formal DoW announcement. Its six really big maps!

The base map for M44 is 13 hexes wide by 9 deep. You can play these in Overlord style with two maps side by side (26 by 9). A larger breakthrough map was was released giving 13 by 17 to enable battles in depth. Now what we have is a ginormous map set giving 78 wide by a generous 23 deep when set up together.

Forum intelligence estimates the size of the whole map at anywhere between 14 foot and three miles wide. Certainly, this qualifies for a Phwoar in anyone's money!

The great thing about this is that you can play single, double or triple etc etc map games. in M44 speak this map configuration must be at least a triple overthrough breaklord!

The scale looks good too as it appears to be regiment/brigade level. There's a whole fist full of gaming here for only what appears to be 30 of our English pounds. Great, can't wait til the release in June.

Mobilisation begins!

First draft counters for Tannenberg

This game is beginning to grow on me. I have been re-reading Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August and started sketching out some of the factors to be taken into account in the rules. Mmmh, that General Francois can't obey an order even if it was wrapped round a brick. That will fun!

In my own head I have a model for what I want to do but developing this and producing a decent and informative game may be tricky. But the momentum is growing and I'm really looking forward to getting this on the table.

I've started work on the counters....

A bit rough and ready at this stage but good enough for a play test.

These counters are generated in Excel with some added pictures, the flag and the Landser and dragoon. The flag is the German naval jack but I like to see iron crosses marching across the map! The Landser and dragoon are cut out of 1914 posters/prints and are a little blurry up close. My intention with the design is to be clear about the type and strength of the unit but to build in some real period feeling while avoiding any copy right issues. Not being a good drawer I'll have to rely on pinching other fellers work.

I'm pleased with the general format of the counters. I developed the Excel model when I wanted some colourful counters for the Minden Games' 1914 Opening Moves, a very nice little solitaire game. There's more about this on BGG. 

Hopefully some more progress tomorrow.

Real life evasion

Return to Tannenberg!

Last weekend's plans for research were stuffed by an inordinate workload. My only respite was the rugby so its a good job England won!

Looking forward in hope to this weekend, I have just competed another round of thinking on sources for the game. Having already got both Russian and British first hand accounts I have now turned up Max Hoffman's memoir of the Eastern front.

Max, left, and chums at Brest-Litovsk 1917

This is entitled "The War of Lost Opportunities" and is available on line. It is a very easy read and one gets a real impression of the man behind the glasses.


Being slightly frustrated by my current sources for the narrative I have returned to Amazon and with the help of a nice gift certificate have ordered today "Tannenberg: Clash of Empires 1914" by Denis Showalter. Denis is an American historian of whom I was unaware until I recently started looking at some books on the Red Army. He has a good rep and I'm looking forward to getting into the detail.

I have also taken the opportunity to look into my games boxes and have come up with both the 1978 SPI "Tannenberg" game and also "When Eagles Fight" from Command Magazine. Both bring back happy memories so I just have to resist them to get on with my design. 

If I'm too tired to do anything sensible tomorrow I'll get the crayons out and play with some counter designs.

Electronic maps...

the learning curve

Why do I need an electronic map when I have a trusty paper one?

Last week's draft map

Well, I will need one eventually so I can publish on this blog but my main motivation is to be able to storyboard the campaign as suggested by Phil Sabin. The scale of the map is around 15 miles per hex so two hexes will represent 3 days travel for foot mobile troops. The key dates are:

• 7 August: Russian First Army enters East Prussia
• 17 August: Battle of Stalloponen
• 20 August: Battle of Gumbinnen
• 23-30 August: Battle of Tannenburg
• 7-14 September: 1st Battle of the Masurian Lakes

This is around 38 days which at, say three days per turn, gives 12 or so turns. Anything longer than 12 turns is likely to be beyond me. This means I'll need at least 12 maps to get a grip on the storyboard and to test out movement rates and combat duration. Ideally. the story board will be on PowerPoint so I can effectively animate the action and use standard unit icons to move around the maps. I know I can do this in PowerPoint so that is the plan.

I have never made an electronic map before. Step 1 is to get some hexes. My hex grid is predetermined by my design parameters (13 by 9) so I generated an SVG file, using an on-line programme, which I then loaded into Paint. 

The rest is trial and error. Here is the map as of today. The only missing items are names and railroads. The terrain and features are pretty standard and you can probably guess most of them without difficulty.

I have to say that I'm quite pleased with this so far. Now I know a few things about Paint, I can make a better job of the final version.

The town icons are interesting and this is a really cool part of the story. I'm with Redmond Simonsen in terms of what information you put on the map. It should be designed for play and should be very simple. However, I'm increasingly interested in "visualization". The things that you play with, toys, counters, maps, model terrain, should be designed to form part of the narrative of the story. This I suppose is a set designer approach and like the theatre or the movies, we should look for style and, perhaps, some necessary exaggeration. I'm not a realism junky so don't look too closely at my toy soldiers, they're painted for effect.

In mucking about on the internet I came across this hand drawn map, obviously from prussianpoland.com!

I don't know the source of this map but it looks post-Tannenberg and may well be a child's artwork. What I really like about it is the characterisation of the different towns and cities and the very nice little drawing of Fort Boyen. I have tried to use some of these little drawings in my map as it helps put the player (i.e. me) back into the early 20th century.

If I'm lucky, story-boarding at the weekend which will lead onto OB compilation.