World In My Claws

by on May 15, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Part two of Mating Flight picks up slightly after the first book ended. Trest was conquered at the end of the previous book, and there’s plenty of problems as they don’t realize it yet.

Related problems are actually something of the central pillar of book two, even though its peripheral to the central conflicts of it. It’s a neat trick, and done well here.

This book handles the bulk of the twelve-year period of the flight, and the time scale stretches out as there is less immediate excitement and more long-term projects take over. This also happens as the various dragons settle down with a better idea of who they are and how they want to relate to other people.

And this very unconventional mating flight comes up with unconventional answers. It is something of a celebration of found families, among other things.

The mating flight itself provides a nice mechanism for coming full circle, as it comes to an end, and the members of the flight arrange their official positions as adults in draconic society. This helps round out the novel in a very satisfying way, and hold things together for the conclusion. Overall, this is a great duology to get.

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France 12-12

by on May 11, 2025 at 1:57 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After our refresher course in C&C: Medieval, Mark and I went back to the Simonitch ZOC-bond games, and tried out France ’40. It’s two scenarios and a conjoined one, and we did the Sickle Cut scenario, which starts on May 13, as the Germans cross the Meuse.

Mark had the Germans, and presumably played more cautiously than he should have, though it certainly worked out towards the end.

Getting across the Meuse is probably best done with help from the scenario rule that lets the Germans use multiple air units on one combat for the first turn. However, we missed that, and Rommel didn’t even need to re-roll as the 7th Panzer got a 5 on a 1:1 for a DR2 to advance over the major river. Similarly, the 6th Panzer had a 2:1 (boosted to 3:1 with air and no opposing artillery) for a A1/DR2 that forced a fortress brigade back. Similarly, the pair of green divisions near Sedan were defeated and forced out, one with a D1.

This was also the major rules goof of the game, as we didn’t notice until a turn or so later that crossing a major river stops all advances, even with a road bridge (which we generally didn’t have here either). So there were also some advancing combats to make things even better for the Germans (which was at least good practice on that mechanic, which we haven’t gotten use nearly enough in other games).

All this meant that the French line pretty much dissolved between Sedan and the central Ardennes. I had to leave the south-central plains open, and merely start anchoring a new line on the Aisne.

For the second turn, an assault on the center of the Dyle Line produced an EX, but an attack just north of the Ardennes got a D1, prying open that area, especially when a breakthrough to the south produced a DR2. An EX took out one of the defenders of the Aisne, but the 2nd Panzer declined to advance, and the Germans lost more tanks to a DRX near the Maginot Line. The main German problem in the south became a lack of supply since there was no clear road west.


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Radetzky’s Marches

by on May 5, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Despite the title, this isn’t focused on Radetzky. (But it is a great take off of Johann Strauss’ celebration of the campaign.)

At the start of 1848, revolution swept through Paris—again. And this time, much of the rest of Europe caught revolutionary fever as well. In particular, much of northern Italy went into a ferment that became the First War for Independence, and this book is focused on the military aspects of this.

It really helps if you have some grounding in the period and the Austrian army. There is a small glossary in the back that explains, for instance, that “FML” is “Feldmarshall-Lieutenant”, or Lieutenant General, but in the text it’s never explained, while the abbreviation shows up many times there, and again, the glossary is buried in the back (and there’s a lot for it to be buried beneath). Thankfully, I’ve read enough Napoleonic materials to know this already.

The main part of the book looks as if it should be a detailed, but readable, history of the campaigns of 1848 and 1849, but that’s not really the purpose. There are a decent number of maps, but not enough for some detailed movements over terrain thoroughly unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers. But, this is really a detailed analysis of the campaigns. Not only do we get detailed descriptions of many of the battles and skirmishes (quoting eyewitness accounts where possible), but constant referrals to losses as recorded in unit histories and returns.

So, this is actually a very detailed resource, and if someone wanted to, say, design a wargame on the subject, this would be an excellent one-stop starting point for a design. Added to this detail-oriented history is the fact that there are twenty-one appendixes, mostly giving orders of battle and numbers of troops of various armies at various points.

As a readable history of the First Italian War of Independence, it is lackluster. The writing is not up to helping you juggle all the details that get thrown at you. As an advanced study of a subject already somewhat familiar, I imagine it would do much better. But a more casual reader needs to at least be cautious.

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The Long Pursuit

by on May 1, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Stephen Douglas was a very able speaker and politician on what turned out to be the losing side of history, is mostly remembered for being Abraham Lincoln’s foil (or more properly, the other way around). Enough so, that basic history textbooks will go into the Lincoln-Douglas debates, even though they don’t have time to mention much else about him.

This book goes all in on this, tracing both careers from their initial arrival in Illinois, to Douglas’ death in 1861.

It’s a good idea, and you certainly learn a lot, but their careers are not quite as tightly coupled as needed to make it the best format.

So, it’s a pair of parallel biographies at the general history level. There’s not a bunch of detailed analysis of their lives and speeches, but all the basics are there. Morris seems fairly evenhanded in his treatment, though he shows Lincoln coming off far worse in the main Lincoln-Douglas debates than you generally hear in less detailed books. Certainly, Lincoln is shown with many of his problems here, though I think some more attention to the change in tone of Lincoln’s politics going into the 1850s would have been very useful.

Of course, part of the lack of digging into detail is that everything leading up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act is about a third of the book, while the remaining two thirds concentrates on the fallout over the next six years. This keeps it from being the extensive background book you might expect, and undermines the “thirty year struggle” idea given in the subtitle.

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California Missions

by on April 27, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked this book up mostly for the reproductions of a series of sketches of the California Missions. In 1856 they were already largely abandoned, and would soon decay into a ruined state (and by the text, this had already stared), but it’s a great resource so show what they had been like.

These were all done by Henry Miller, who did them as part of his journal of a trip from San Francisco to San Diego. He had arrived in California in 1850 (from Germany, by way of New York), and started a butchery business, and ended up as a powerful cattle rancher, eventually controlling some 22,000 square miles of land.

At this point, his fortunes are not so grand, and he made his solitary way down the state with a single mule. According to Belleorphon Books’ introduction, the text has been cut down (generally keeping just the part dealing with his travels), and there were previous editions of the sketches produced in very rare editions, so this is now the main accessible account of his journey.

The text itself is interesting, especially for someone that knows the names of places that would not grow up into large urban centers for quite a while yet. The illos are the main point though, and are great reference. It’s not produced to be a big expensive volume, and is a great value for what it is.

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