Medieval Siege Weapons: Byzantium to India

by on August 12, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The second volume of Osprey’s New Vanguard books on medieval siege weapons is pretty much just like the first: Thompson’s gouache illustrations do a good job of showing some specific examples, while the text goes through variations on terminology and tries to make sense of them.

India probably should have just been left out of the book, as most references are ‘there’s no evidence’. The Byzantines talked about siege machinery often enough, and Islamic writers somewhat less so, but there’s very few known references to siege machines in India. In fact, all but one of the illustrated machines are from Byzantium or the Islamic world, and the one exception is surprisingly enough from Russia. That one is a little unsatisfying, as there doesn’t seem to be any indication that an idea of the size or form of the ‘fire wheel’ (other than the name) is given in the source; that said, the reconstruction given is more logical than anything I’d come up with.

India isn’t entirely absent, and there’s even a mention or two of siege machines in SE Asia, so the effort is there. In combination with the volumes on China, and Greece and Rome, Osprey has probably covered all the pre-gunpowder siege engines of the world. At least as far as scholarship has uncovered mentions of them.

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195 Rocket’s Red Glare

by on August 9, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

For our next game, Tom and I ended up with a small scenario from the new Yanks (and originally from The General), 195 “Rocket’s Red Glare”. The SS are defending the board three village against a large number of American paratroopers backed up by a M36 GMC… and a number of captured panzerfausts. Setup is a little odd, as the Americans get to start in a fairly restricted area (five hexes) on board, or enter on turn 1, and must first decide which troops are doing which. Then the SS sets up, and then the Americans set up the on board troops and prepare for entry.

The Germans have 7 regular SS squads, reasonably good leadership, a MMG, HMG and LMGs, a PSK,  a StuG IIIG (L), a Wirbelwind, and a 105 ART to defend two buildings on board 3 for six turns (and I should point out at this point that we missed the MMG, so I played this with just the HMG and LMGs). The Americans have 12 paratrooper squads, great leadership (four leaders ranging from 10-2 to 8-0, and all but that last have a negative modifier), with four MMGs, four BAZ (two each 44 and 45) and four PFs (normally marked with DC counters, but Vassal has American PF counters, which we used), and they win immediately upon getting Control of Q7 or O10.

I would have liked to set up on top of some of the hills to get good LOS, but the restriction to setting up in woods and buildings precluded that. The StuG and ART were part of the final line of defense, with each one pointed down the road loop near the close victory building. Most of the rest of the setup was scattered through the village, with some outliers on each flank in case he tried to go around everything towards O10. Tom put most of his forces onboard, with the M36 entering at Y1, and a platoon entering at I1.

He started by deploying two of the on-board squads, and one off of I1. He tied a fair number of men up in Prep Fire, but rolled well, and killed a HS in W4 outright, as well as breaking two squads and a 8-0 in the village, though my sniper broke a squad of his in return. This allowed him to occupy the south-west end of the village without trouble, and entering platoon took up positions around N2, while the M36 strayed out of contact with anything else in the west.


Situation, American Turn 1, showing the full board, and my HIP 105mm ART.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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The War of the Austrian Succession

by on August 6, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

My biggest regret about Reed Browning’s book on the War of the Austrian Succession is that he never wrote any other military history. His normal subject seems to be the British government of the early 18th Century, which is probably a bit too detailed for my general tastes (and also, somewhat surprisingly, ’20s baseball).

But this volume is an excellent one-volume history of the war as a whole, concentrating on the military and diplomatic activities of the principle actors in Europe. The New World and India do get coverage, but it is at least as peripheral as the events would have seemed in Europe. For an overview that is more than fair, but the narrative for both theaters felt not fully formed. (Similarly, the ’45 Jacobite rebellion gets about a page, which is fair.)

The main event is more than complicated enough to need all the attention and focus that can be brought to bear. He starts with a good overview of the political conflicts that led to the outbreak of war, and presents the main theaters of the war. However, while the maps follow this outline well, they’re very primitive, and do not have any of the details needed for later in the book.

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Enemy Business

by on August 2, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch came over on Saturday for some gaming, but only Dave was available, so we did a bunch of small three-player games.

First up was Enemy in Sight, which is my favorite of the descendants of Naval War (given the use of captured ships, mix-and-match navies don’t grate on me like it does in all the others). Dave had a very good first round (helped by getting a prize back to port), scoring 69 points while Patch got 45 and I only managed 21. A lot of the odder effects like breaking a line were at the very bottom of the deck, and so didn’t really come up. Dave naturally was the main target during the second round, though I was the one who ended up with his line broken twice (at the same time!) since I had gotten a pretty good force together in the middle. Patch came out on top, despite only sinking two ships and took a small prize to port to take him to 99 points. Dave sank two small ships to get to 86, while I sank four, had one afloat as a prize, and had put another captured ship in my line, ending with 74 points.

Dave had gotten 1st Raters the first two times, while Patch and I had started with nothing better than a 3rd Rate. For the third hand, I started with a 1st Rate, a couple of 2nds, and trailed off to 4th Raters, while Dave was stuck with lesser ships and Patch had a single larger ship (I can’t remember if it was a 1st or 2nd Rate). My first move was an attempted coup de main with good cards: dismast a ship (4R), boarding party with a 2nd rater (which surprised everyone), and use a 2nd-Rater ‘4’ card as grapeshot, against one of Patch’s ships. Sadly, he defended with 2 + 2 Rake, and the even odds ended with no result. However, that set the tone for much of the early game, with lots of larger value shots being used for grapeshot in capture attempts. The second half of the game saw us all down to small lines (Patch was at zero ships on two short occasions), and I couldn’t get any kills as everything was finished off by someone else. However, I had earlier sunk two larger ships, and got a 2nd Rate prize back to port to end at 127 points, while Dave got a 1st Rate prize to port and sunk two ships for 140, and Patch got 5 kills to win at 153.

After lunch, Dave introduced us to Love Letter, which is a very clever small card game. The abilities of the eight card types interact in just enough ways to keep anything from being truly obvious. Dave took an early lead with the first two points, but Patch and I caught up in the four rounds after that. To my surprise, I ended up winning a bit later, especially as I started off with the Princess in the last round, but I managed to knock out Patch early, and got Dave after he guessed wrong.

After that, we went to Family Business, which Dave and I had both played… decades ago, though this set had never been used. It’s not a bad game, though some of the Mayfair art is pretty bad. In some ways, its interactions are less complicated than Love Letter‘s, they just have more time to play out. I actually managed to win the first round, having drawn enough counters near the end to keep my remaining guys mostly off the Hit List while everyone else bought it. We did a second round, and I nearly won that one too, having gotten just about everyone else onto the Hit List, and then used Hit to kill Patch’s one guy off of the List. My guy entering the Hit List as a result then started a Mob War. After a couple turns of the Hit List burning down, Dave used St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to end the game as it killed everyone.

Overall, it was a great day, and everyone had a lot of fun. Enemy in Sight is always great, and I’d like to see Love Letter a couple more times. I don’t know that it’d survive a lot of plays with me, but for now, I’d like to see more. Family Business is probably best as a couple rounds every once a while.

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Jack of Shadows

by on July 30, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve found that the best way to sum up this book is, “It’s a Roger Zelazny novel.”

For anyone who doesn’t really know what that means, I’ll try to explain.

With a world where one half is perpetually day, and the other is night, the populations of both are similarly segregated. Daytime has normal humans and a technological civilization, and nighttime has sorcerers who come back from the dead an unspecified number of times. Magic and technology only work their respective halves of the world, and only mix in the twilight area. There’s some philosophical discussions of looking at the world in different ways, but mostly this is just allowed to make the novel something of a mish-mash, with parts fantasy, and modern day academia.

There’s a secondary-character subplot that never quite comes into it’s own, along with a few more that do. And after wandering around a bit, there’s an epic-scale ending.

And despite the way all that sounds, it works. It’s not great (and is not one of his best works), but just about everything in the novel ties back into his main themes. It doesn’t really come to any solid conclusions, and you could say the same of the action, though things are definitely finished.

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