Scots Wha Hae

 Most of Donald Featherstone's old but classic Wargamer's Newsletter is available online at fourcats.co.uk. A very characterful read from the early days of the hobby, with Featherstone's sense of fun and variety. My most recent read from the series is the December 1967 issue. It has a brief profile of one of my favorite wargames writers, Peter Young. It also includes a Hundred Years War battle report and one-page ruleset that I decided to try.

I don't have Hundred Year War figures, but I do have a couple Paperboys books by Peter Dennis that would do: Castle Assault and Wars of the Roses. I picked the former, which covers the turn of the fourteenth century - Wallace, Bruce, Edward I, etc. There are also a selection of Welsh, and a page representing Robin Hood and his Merry Men. There is also a beautiful but complex castle model, which I suspect was the reason one of my coworkers bought this book for me. She's just as creative, we tend to feed off each others' ideas, and she may be hoping I would build the thing for one of her library displays. I haven't dared yet.

Anyway, the rules, like most of Featherstone's earlier output, are basic 1-figure-equals-one-man. This can be tricky with multiple-based figures like the Paperboys. I've tried tracking casualties on a paper chart and by laying dice next to units. In the first case, I have to keep turning from the table to mark them; it breaks the rhythm. In the second, the dice either get picked up by mistake and rolled, forgotten and left behind when the unit moves, or are jogged when the table moves. (I'm clumsy. I also have cats.)

Then I noticed that the space between ranks of a two-rank Paperboys base is just right to fit a six-sider.

This won't work as well for the narrower gaps in a three rank base...

But two six-siders will still work. 

Men-at-arms bases in the Castle Assault book have twelve figures, while knights and archers have six. I'll only require enough for a single base per unit. They will be turned as casualties mount, and at every multiple of six or twelve, a base will be removed and the dice reset. At a small scale, this ought to work alright (she said, suspiciously)...

For starters I now have an English army of eighteen knights, three dozen spearmen and two dozen archers.

Building these guys is very relaxing, especially if you're watching an appropriate movie to put you in the mood. Problem is, the easiest-to-find movie on this topic is Braveheart... so I instead watched several Rifftrax episodes, including Hawk the Slayer, which puts me in the mood to run a fantasy RPG rather than a wargame, and also several episodes of Sharpe.

Which makes me want to pick up the Wofun Peninsular War set.

I plan to run this "battle" as a solo game, but it would probably work well for kids if I could talk my coworkers into letting me run a wargame. Will probably have to wait for a good DnD session with a mass battle for an excuse to put them on the table. Though playing with the adult historicals group would probably work too - they've been generous and willing to try my "old-school" interests on occasion. They've been having live games the last few months, with apparent success; I'm still a bit cautious but will probably venture out there by the end of summer. I've promised to run a game late in the year, and possibly one or two next year. And the games I sometimes bring along are usually small and quick palate-cleansers after our huge, bespoke bashes.

There I go rambling again. Like I've said, this blog is more a stream-of-consciousness for my own benefit than for readers. But I am grateful for what few thoughts, pro or con, are provided. It's been a long year without live gaming!