Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Friday 13 September 2013

All Better Now

Commands & Colors board with 7-inch hexes - official layout at last.
With thanks for messages of sympathy for my dalliance with senility – much appreciated – I am pleased to announce that I have worked extra hard today, and the battle board refurb job is pretty much finished. I have some minor touching up to do to improve two points where the joins don’t quite line up, and to an extent I have proved that a battered old board repainted is still a battered old board, but mission accomplished, I think.

I’ve also wheeled out some of my new scenic plates with roads on, to see how they look – simple, but useable. Genuine C&C devotees will be perplexed by this, since roads do not feature in Mr Borg’s games. However, I have recently been reading Tactique, which is an old Napoleonic game based on Commands & Colors, predating C&CN – this was published in Vae Victis a good while ago. In this game, roads are used – interesting. I am, in any event, giving thought to including road rules in my ECW variant, so – anyway – here you see some roads, which will not win any prizes but are a big improvement on the laminated paper efforts I used in my Battle of Nantwich.


Mr Borg may have already realised that roads don't run naturally straight across the table in
C&C - maybe that's one reason they don't appear?
I’ll leave everything to cure for this evening, then get everything tidied away. You are familiar with the concept of a Portable Wargame – my wargames are Stowable Wargames, of necessity, since I use the family dining room for games. Thus all components must be flock free, easily handled and capable of disappearing into cupboards when required to do so!

4 comments:

  1. It certainly looks good. The grey edge-partial-hex border certainly adds an interesting and pleasing effect.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you - well, the partial hexes have had an uncomfortable existence throughout the 35 years I've had them, lots of illegal squeezing-in (and falling off!) which doesn't help the game, either the flow or the goodwill.

      The border is now the proper place to keep arriving reinforcements, unconvinced ralliers, Command cards and dice cups/trays and suchlike, but I still fancy enforcement of the old Gallacher Rule, which is that any mess, empty plastic cups, unnecessary rule sheets, order sheets (aargh!), mobile phones (AAARGH!) and bits of tat will be chargeable at the rate of one figure base forfeit (opponent's choice) per occurrence!

      Delete
  2. Hurrah! Good job on getting back on track so quickly.

    As for straight roads, they're a perennial problem in Memoir '44. I usually end up shifting things around a bit to make things work (mainly so that I don't run out of curves) when we're doing our own scenarios, but there's only so much of that you can do. Rotating the battlefield along the road or allowing a straight road to be bent in one part is usually how we get around it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes! It looks awfully good to my eyes. Well done. You're much braver than I for tackling hexes like that.

    Best Regards,

    Stokes

    ReplyDelete