Friday, January 9, 2015

If I'd known I was coming here I coulda taken a shortcut.


Today's game not quite 1/2 way through. The rules differences are not obvious from a static picture.

When I began this WWI bicentennial thing I was picturing a generic toy soldier game  along the lines of a 40mm version of my late 19thC Square Brigadier which was of course initially inspired by Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame (Eg see the game shown below.) and thats what the last, very enjoyable, game was played with.

A cardtable game from a year ago.

Last summer the sight of the glossy 40m toy soldiers on the table got me thinking briefly about Charge! and my old "With MacDuff" Colonial games  but that approach appeared to require more figures than I wanted to paint and I  couldn't figure out how to merge that sort of game with the grid which I find useful so I put it aside.

As I wrote yesterday, the thought came back and I suddenly glimpsed what seemed a workable way to merge the ideas. Six enjoyable turns into a test game today, I realized it was working even better than anticipated. I stopped to tweak a few bits and simplify the  sequence.  A while later I hit update, reopened the file and 90% of the updates had disappeared. Grrrrr!!!

So, instead of finishing the game, I copied the page to Google Docs and reentered the updates. The formatting went whacky again when I copied it back but there is a lot to do yet anyway. If I'm not mistaken this will take over the niche that has been empty since I gave up on MacDuff and 54mm Colonials will be asked to  cover a wide variety of scenarios, missions and troops over the next decade.

But first I need to ensure that the basics do work. The game will resume in the morning and I'm looking forward to it.

2 comments:

  1. Dear Ross,

    There is very little this "moldy-oldy" knows about using computers - at least the super modern kind. But one thing I do remember from years of typing tests and such is that when you are working always save your work as you go. You might want to make your revisions in Word or something similar and save it to your files as you go than open the page where the revisions need to go. You can then highlight, cut and paste from one screen to the other. I've had good fortune with that procedure.

    BTW, your table looks terrific - again. Enjoy the game.

    Jerry

    P.S. keep saying to yourself, "I must save as I go...."

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  2. Jerry I am a longtime devotee of saving and back up copies. Blogger does constant automatic saves on posts but not on pages for some reason so I update as I go. Working in something else doesn't eork eell since blogger goes out of its way to screw up the formatting which is why I used to rely on a link rather than a page.

    Not sure whst happened here but I suspect I might have confused a preview with the live window and closed tge wrong one or accidently opened 2 live windows and saved a 5 minute older version over the newer one or maybe just hit the wrong button on the screen. I'll never know for sure and since it was only a small blip won't be losing sleep over it.

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