New Books

A few weeks ago we played a refight of the Battle of Barnet using DBA v3.0. We all actually enjoyed it and a few us were fired up enough to order the rules. Being in Australia we have to go through an official stockist, and supplies were, and apparently are, erratic. We got one club member to do the ordering (because having multiple copies sent to one address was cheaper than having them sent out individually) but with one thing and another it turned out that it would be easier to wait a few weeks and just have them collected from Cancon at the end of January.

So that's what happened. The ever-excellent Caesar went to Cancon and picked up copies of DBA 3.0 for everyone else. So I now have a copy. It's been interesting trawling through it and seeing how the armies I have, which I've been using under HOTT for the last few years, come out in it. I've read elsewhere that the new Fast/Solid mechanism makes Dark Ages warfare quite interesting under this edition, which is good as the bulk of my armies fall into that category. I've spent some of this afternoon tweaking and rejigging a few armies as we're planning on a DBA session on Thursday evening, and I want to try some of mine out.

I found a few minor typos, of course, and was frustrated to find that the enemies list for one of my armies (81c, the middle period Sub-Roman British list) doesn't seem to be complete in that it includes what are obviously enemies for the Armorican part of it, but not the British part. There are armies which list it as an enemy (Pictish, for example), but it's not reciprocated. Still, I worked it all out in the end, and have four armies ready to go for Thursday - Sub-Roman British, Welsh, Saxon and Pict.

The title of this piece says 'books'. The DBA rules are one. The other came from the fact that people at work know I'm a wargamer. A colleague had just come back from holiday and had bought a book in a remaindered bookshop which he hadn't enjoyed. Was I interested in it? This is it:

This is a book that I've had out of the library more than once, and it's an excellent account of Australia's contribution to the air war in World War One. So, yes, I was more than interested. He gave it to me - he'd only paid $5 for it anyway. Nice.