I realised this morning that it's over a week since I played a game of any kind, which explains why this blog has been uncharacteristically quiet.
Various factors have contributed to this. The primary one is that I have too many things that I'd like to be doing, so I have been paralysed into inactivity. I want to do more Portable Wargame stuff, I want to play around with Squad Hammer a bit more, I have the rules in 'One Hour Skirmish Wargames' to try out, and I even want to play around with a HOTT project I have floating around at the back of my mind. With to many option I am simply opting to do none of them.
I have based a few figures with a view to doing a new HOTT army, so that's progress of a sort.
Extra factors include the fact that it's been stupidly hot this past week or two, and in a house without aircon that saps my willingness to do anything much at all (although on the plus side my wife and I have discovered, and watched prodigious amounts of, 'Longmire'), plus we've been busy at the weekends with various odds and ends, and I even missed my to go to a local music festival (it rained).
I have managed to read the two ECW histories I got for Christmas. I kind of picked them at random, although I assumed that the Osprey Essential History would give me a reasonable overview, which it did. Blair Worden's 'The English Civil Wars' is pretty light on the military stuff, but whilst I found some of it heavy going actually did a great job of covering the complex religious and political shenanigans of the times, so added a lot of context to the Osprey volume. I think I made a couple of good choices, and now feel I have a better understanding of the background to the conflicts now.
Anyway, I have promised myself that I will force myself to play something in the next couple of days, just to kick-start my gaming. Go me!
Probably a bad time to have sent those ideas for Clobberin' Time to you, then! I'm sure you'll work through the hiatus soon. The ECW is a very convoluted conflict, but there is great opportunity to some real flavour in building armies. Montrose's campaign in particular is quite spectacular, and if you haven't read much about him I recommend CV Wedgewood's biography if you can find a second hand copy.
ReplyDeleteThose changes are excellent - some good ideas in there which I know I was working on a while back. I need to reread the card activation system, but I thought the sub-plots were well done, and I like the idea of things carrying on between games.
DeleteI've fiddled around with ECW stuff for the past couple of years, so have picked up all kinds of random details about it. Reading a couple of short general histories has puled it all together for me a little. I do this a lot - play around with specific details of something, then read the broader stuff later.
The good gaming thing about ECW is you get lots of scrappy skirmishes like the battle of Stratton and smaller, all easy to translate to a gaming table.
ReplyDeleteAt some stage I thought I'd put together a set of paper troops on smaller square bases for use with Pikeman's Lament and use that for some smaller skirmishes. My units are currently single-based, with mixed pike and shot.
DeleteYeah, I can get this way too. Analysis Paralysis.
ReplyDelete