The Hour of Peril

by on January 13, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

If you read up on the start of the Civil War, you will doubtless come across the fact that Lincoln ended up sneaking into Washington DC before his inauguration. This is after he is presented evidence that an attempt will be made on his life as he passes through Baltimore.

This shows up in many books, but always leaves the question of whether there really was such a plot hanging. In the positive column, enough evidence was presented for Lincoln to change his plans, despite great reluctance to do so. On the negative, nothing actually happened, and no one was ever charged with conspiracy to murder the president-elect.

Stashower doesn’t really spend time arguing the case. At the end, he goes into some of the troubles. Instead, he lays out what happens day by day, as Allen Pinkerton’s detective agency gets called in to investigate a “deep-laid conspiracy to capture Washington, destroy all the avenues leading to it from the North, East, and West, and thus prevent the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln in the Capitol of the country.” on behalf of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. With time running short, Pinkerton sends lots of agents to Baltimore, and engages in various short-cuts that are against his general rules, and uncovers a plot against Lincoln instead.

The first part of the book is actually a short biography of Allan Pinkerton himself, and therefore introduces much that the general ACW reader will not be aware of, such as his involvement with the Chartists, which shows him as far more in sympathy with the working class than he’s generally given credit for (the strike breaking that the Pinkertons are known for actually happened a couple years after his death, but the odium attached to him, rather than his sons).

At the end, Stashower has an extended epilogue that goes into what happened to nearly everyone involved afterwards. This uncovers a personal feud that started during the main events, but erupts decades later, and turns into a denunciation of Pinkteron’s claims on the plot, which has muddied things in histories ever after. Stashower shows the chain of events that led to this, and retroactively puts the rest of his book on firmer ground.

The central figure of the plot seems to be Cypriano Ferrandini, an ex-Corsican barber, who had stated his secessionist views loudly enough to be brought before a Congressional committee shortly before Pinkerton became interested in him. We have descriptions of the charismatic Ferrandini putting together the plan and having volunteers to pull slips out of a box, so no one could know who had been chosen to do the deed.

This sounds incredible, though it wouldn’t sound so incredible at the time. The final problem is that most of Pinkerton’s contemporary records were lost in a fire, so most of what we have are accounts written later. Stashower doesn’t ever explicitly say it, but he definitely believes that the plot was real, and the epilogue does do a good job of showing the likelihood of it.

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Terraforming Braggart

by on January 9, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

So after way too long, we finally had a group game day back on the 28th, and we even had a full spread of all five of us. I had been thinking of giving Charioteer a a second try, but I got a copy of Terraforming Mars for Christmas, and we tried that out instead.

I’ve been aware of the game… which made me the second-most knowledgeable about it. Patch has actually played it a few times, so I didn’t have to study all the rules. We went with the basic standard game, and the Beginner Corporations (they really should have been called Starter Corporations), even Patch, since he’s never actually played without any of the expansions before.

Physically, the biggest problem is cube management. Instead of writing things down, you have cubes on tracks to show what your current production in a number of different items. Patch’s group has some 3D-printed overlays to hold these cubes in position. Without it, you have to be a bit careful that nothing gets bumped while using bunches of other cubes to keep track of your current stocks. I’m thinking dry-erase might be more efficient… if it wasn’t for all the currency cubes flying about. Separate cube types for the six different commodities would increase the overall number needed, and be more fiddly to work with. There’s no great solutions for it all. (Having all the player tokens be translucent is a nice touch, though.)

I lucked into Research Outpost in my opening hand, which gave a -1 to all other purchases for the rest of the game. I then set up a number of cities with cards, dropping my energy production to zero for a while before it picked up again late game. Patch put a nuke in the middle of my city park to prevent a later forest getting me points for the end. Dave had gotten Pets and a similar card early, which gave him nice bonuses from my city building. Jason and Mark mostly ended up building a bit around the developing sea.

I managed to grab a number of the track bonuses (extra power generation from rising temperature, etc), but my actual terraforming score stayed static for the initial game, and I was worried about it until that started moving me up.


Midway through, a bit short of lunch break. I’m green, Patch is blue, Mark is grey, Dave is red, and Jason is yellow.

The game ended with generation 6, as everything tipped over into final position in fairly close sequence. There’d only been one award funded (Banker, by Patch) and no milestones. Patch figured I’d probably go after Mayor or Builder, but I never felt like I had the money to spare for them. I felt pretty cash-strapped for the second half of the game, with iron and titanium partially making up for it.

Final standings: Patch won with 46 VPs (31 TR), me and Jason tied at 39 (30 and 31 TR respectively), Mark had 38 (29 TR), and Dave had 35 (27 TR).

After that, we had some spare time, and played a couple rounds of Braggart. Patch hadn’t been here for that before, but certainly enjoyed it. I did well in the first round, generally getting some good brags off and avoiding most of the problems. I also got a Bar Fight off near the end to boost a low-points brag. I’d hoped for more chaos, but only had one other brag out there. Both of us just had the minimum two cards, and I kept one and traded one in the random shuffle. I won that round with 49 points; Dave had 31, Patch and Jason 30 each, and Mark had 12.

The second round was far more even, and I think we all suffered from just not being able to get good sets together. Patch won at 30 points; Jason and Mark tied at 29, and then me and Dave tied at 28.

Overall, it was a great day, and way too long since the last time we got together. Everyone enjoyed Terraforming Mars, and it needs to get back to the table.

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The Coming Fury

by on January 5, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Bruce Catton’s centennial history of the ACW makes certain to go into some background. The opening act is the Democratic National Convention in 1860. Place: Charleston, South Carolina. Favored Candidate: Stephen Douglas.

However, there’s a wing of the party that is determined to throw the script. Among them, President Buchanan was determined the nomination should go elsewhere, and radicals like William Yancey saw a chance to force the South out of the country. In the end, the convention broke up after most of the southern delegates walked out rather than endorse a platform that did not take a very hard line on the extension of slavery. Months later, the Republican National Convention also goes off script, with a relative unknown being nominated in place of favorite Senator William Seward.

That’s the first chapter. The final one starts with McClellan’s campaign in (future West) Virginia, and then moves to the Southern armies in Virginia, and the two Union forces just north of the Potomac. Pressure is on McDowell to move south and prosecute the war, but the army isn’t really ready, and after some hours of fighting, all cohesion is lost, and the army collapses, routing en mass back to Washington DC. The Rebel army isn’t any better, and is too thoroughly disordered in victory to pursue.

In between, we have three hundred fifty pages of the drift to disunion and war. This includes the initial “feeling out” of states towards succession, followed later by the actual acts themselves. As this progresses, the various states demand various bits of federal property, located in those states, to be handed over. This mostly happens for various reasons (there just not being any federal troops to hold most of them, among others), but there are exceptions.

Fort Moultrie, guarding the Charleston harbor is nearly indefensible from land, but not entirely so, and Colonel Gardner started sweeping away built up sand and dirt from the outer walls. An attempt to recover arms from a nearby arsenal caused a furor that saw him replaced. Major Anderson was now in the same barely-tenable position. But, there was a better option; Fort Sumter, in a more central position of the harbor was just finishing construction. Anderson had been asking for instructions for some time, and eventually realized the orders he did have gave him the latitude to move out there under the circumstances.

While slow in coming, those orders came from an administration whose character was also changing. As the South left, so too did parts of Buchanan’s cabinet, leading to a more pro-Northern group, and Lincoln’s inaugural promise “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts” really starts as the previous administration starts looking for ways to resist succession. The entire crisis over Sumter gets extensive coverage, along with related topics such as Fort Pickens in Florida.

It is worth noting that the first volume of Catton’s trilogy looks at about a year, and still leaves the bulk of a four-year war to the next two volumes. For the overview it is, there’s a lot of detail about the immediate lead up. Of course, you can always reach further back, and he studiously avoids going into anything earlier than early 1860. There is precious little about the Mexican-American War, nor the political crisis caused by the Wilmot Proviso and its defeat that put the current political players into their positions. And that’s fine, there’s more than enough here to go through as it is, and it is an exciting recounting of events gathering force until the first real clash of arms wrecks two armies, and very different conclusions about the course of the war are seen.

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2025 in Review

by on January 1, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

In the wider world, it has been a year of self-inflicted chaos. At home, there’s been a fair amount of chaos as well, for very different reasons.

On a technical end, two computers had failures that took valuable hard drives with them. I need to do more backing up of my data….

Once again, Fox Den is on schedule, with another twelve issues of Campaign out. #111 (the last issue) is due to go out May 1st. After that, I need to finish up a few things that would have been mid-month releases if I’d devoted the extra time and energy; namely Panzerfaust #51, Designing Wargames, and the last three issues of Guidon. That will still take me through near the end of the year, and I need to see about getting Grand Army out, as well as getting on to the republish of No Turning Back.

The blog is about the same. I’ve been occasionally scrambling for a post, and did have a two-day slip from the four-day schedule mid-year. I put out nine Paradox reviews this year, covering about fifteen months of releases, and have another four in the can. However, writing on those is currently at a standstill. Part of the reason for this is that Europa Universalis V is so good that I’ve been spending a good amount of time on it over the last couple months. RPG posts have been limited to one GURPS Dungeons & Sorcery spell collection and a review of Monsters! Monsters!

One side effect of the problems here is there was very little FtF gaming. The regular schedule with Mark and Patch is still going, but other than that, there wasn’t much. That said I, did try out a few things; of the new (to me) board games this year, most disappointing was Rebel Fury. I do like pieces of it, and want to like it, but I have too many problems with the combat. Oldest try-out is Renegade Legion: Centurion (ongoing), which show’s FASA’s common mix of great high concept, good ideas, and things that need a complete rework. France ’40, Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East, and No Peace Without Spain, are new members of series I’ve played before, and The Little Land is part of the Company Scale Series off-branch of GTS. That leaves Congress of Vienna as one other non-series game, and that was more ‘learning’ before putting it in front of the group; involved, but probably worth it. Finally, we just had a group game on the 28th, and tried out Terraforming Mars. Overall, that’s probably the best of them though ACME, No Peace and France are all very close contenders. (By the way, my ACME post got reworked and featured on Inside GMT!)

Meanwhile, there’s been lots computer game playing. Steam shows that despite coming out at the start of November, EU V took second place in time, and wasn’t that far below Stellaris. I had a few other new for me games: Tunic, is a nice adventure game, but far more Dex-centered than I expected (it’s meant to be akin to an early Zelda game), so I got stuck after the first real section. Age of Wonders: Planetfall is a… SF conquest game. That is, take the usual fantasy conquest genre of the AoW series and do SF instead. It works, but also goes for the same pre-built provinces with a limit on how much you can control as Endless Legend. This means I didn’t enjoy it much, and I’m now worried about AoW4. Finally, Atlyss has been a big surprise. It’s a solo/multiplayer action RPG; to a certain extent, there’s not a lot to it, being under development from a one-person show. But, it actually does combat and progression well, and is surprisingly fun.

Final Fantasy XIV has had a good year for me. Smudge and I are still struggling to get everything we want done, but we’re getting closer. Patch 7.4 just dropped a week or so ago, and we’re near to the end of the story there. I’ll probably have a writeup in a month. (I’ve been posting about FF XIV more regularly because of the lack of other posts ready to go….)

I’m down to two outstanding Kickstarters (Free Stars and Empire Builder: Europe), but both should be really close to delivery. Looks like my game spending was $460 this year, higher than I thought. Next year may not be any better, since GMT is threatening a couple of preorders in the first half of the year (Army Group South and Thunderbolt).

Reading went well, with me hitting 47 books this year. Massie’s Dreadnought is the best non-fiction book this year, but that was a reread that I’m glad to have finally gotten to (Catton’s The Coming Fury is also very good). The best new non-fiction would be Atkinson’s The Fate of the Day, but the field is less crowded than I’d like. Notably, The Training Ground, The Prize, and The Homicidal Earl were all good books with problems. On the other hand Sumption’s The Albegensian Crusade and Figes’ The Crimean War are both recommended. Over in fiction, I think The Cartoonists Club is the only non-series item I have to really recommend. I read the second and third Star Trek: Picard prequel novels, and Rogue Elements does get a recommendation from me. Caliban’s War is both too similar to the first book, Leviathan Wakes, and better done for The Expanse. Past that, there’s a number of series books I got to that competently carried forward the series without deserving a particular note, past already-written reviews.

I am still trying to be active on Bluesky and post links to most of my blog posts over there. Follow me to get notifications of reviews and games played.

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Dorylaeum

by on December 29, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Jason came over Sunday last week for a long-delayed FtF game. We had decided to go back to Men of Iron, with Jason wanting to get into the Infidel set. After a bit of indecision, we went with the first scenario, Dorylaeum, from early in the First Crusade, where a crusader vanguard gets attacked. Reinforcements eventually start showing up from the main body, but to begin with there’s two wings of knights, with a bunch of footmen crammed into a camp against a very large wing of medium cavalry (30 units!) and some supporting wings.

Jason took the Seljuks, who went first with Arslan’s three lines of cavalry, who pretty much eliminated the front Crusader line of Robert of Normandy’s knights (only one retired), forcing retreats and disorders all over the place. Thankfully, he failed continuation and Bohemund of Taranto’s knights galloped to the left and fell on the Seljuk flank, forcing back part of Gazi’s horse archers, and eliminating about three units. Two of the knights got disordered in the process, and Bohemund ended up dangerously out in front from repeated attacks. I got continuation to start redressing Robert’s forces, but there was still much to do as initiative passed back to Jason.

Flight points started piling up for Jason as he took losses. The knights do well against… well, almost anything else. But certainly as long as I could avoid getting disordered, charges and counter-charges are very powerful, and the main problem for me was just the number of units that were all getting to go at once, and get on the flanks and rear where I couldn’t countercharge.

The real problem for me was the area near the banner filled up, and I was having trouble clearing it, since it requires rallying, and then a separate activation to move, and I felt I needed to move the banner before that even. To help out, I moved forward the Norman foot under Stephen of Blois. Being largely pikes, they were useful as long as the Seljuks were agreeably in front, but I should have refused my flanks more. (That probably wouldn’t have been enough, but it could have helped.) In short order the infantry was getting cut up, and my flight points started catching up to Jason’s.

Afterword

We had to call it around there, with both of our flight points in the 20s or so. I was higher, but the limits are 45 to 75, so at this rate I should get a win. I had gotten above him in flight points (part of this was losing a leader), but it was looking likely we’d stay close the entire way, and the lower limit for the Seljuks would force Crusader win.

I’d only just recently made the reinforcement roll, so I could start bringing in more groups of knights. And I was going to need them. Jason had pressed on to the camp, and was starting to hit the Sicilian Norman foot under Tancred, as well as some of the retired troops. Sorting that out before a collapse might have turned into a problem, but there was still a few of Bohemond’s knights around to hit them from the rear, if I could get them going.

It’s a good scenario, though the low ability scores on the Seljuk wing commanders mean that the action is going to be concentrated on the main force (Jason got something like two continues all day). It shows off both what the knights can do, and how much trouble they can get themselves into with a numerically superior foe.

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