Spring 2002

Played Rapid Fire with David, good game.

Haven't done much recently. Took David & Graham to Fantizan at Newark - good day out. They now want to go to Salute! Bought two packs of Foundry (!!) Victorian Bystanders. Nice figures and now not that much more expensive than the better 25mm figs on the market (GZG figs are now £1-00 each).

Played a VSF test game using FMA. Reasonably OK. Realised that the game system is very "tweakable". Need to write some notes on this.

Had a frustrating time over Easter. Trying to find a game that I wanted to play! Am I suffering from a surfeit of game systems? Eventually played a game using HAM2 (home grown general purpose Horse & Musket rules derived from Frontier Patrol). Made several changes. Not bad, but then found a game called Napoleonic Easyplay on the 'net by David St. Clair (no longer available?).

New version of "Horse, Foot & Guns" (Phil Barker's horse and musket rules) draft now available, with changes to make Bayonets a better throw against Minie. So now I'm playing a test game in ACW, Battle of Murfreesboro (Stone's River), first day Dec 31st 1862. It all fits on my 4ft * 2ft 6ins table - that's good for a start. Worked quite well - if anything, Bayonets are now too good vs. Minie. I think PB will tweak it a bit more.

David wanted to get some Lord Of The Rings figures, so I split it with him and we bought the whole game (£40) between us. He is very keen and is playing it with Graham and Thomas. Its quite a good set of rules and I like the flexibility of being able to handle anything from a handful of figures to quite large armies. The move sequence is interesting, too. Roll for priority, then high priority moves, opponent moves, high priority shoots, opponent shoots, high priority chooses order for close combats.