DREAM OF THE ROOD, PART ONE

If I had any sense, I'd have had all this finished long ago. A perfect, flowing translation of this fine lyric poem, and all I'd have to do is present it like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat and then proclaim "Behold--genius." I am trying to get a head start on the next project, though, so if nothing else I can have the posts ready on a more reliabe schedule. (I also picked a shorter one.) As it is, I'm kind of working without a net.

Without further ado, a reasonably literal translation of The Dream of the Rood. I took a few liberties, particularly with word order. Old English, left to its own devices, tends to resemble Modern English in its word order--although it sometimes seems archaic ("Not dared I bend to earth"); poets, however, make full use of the inflectional character of the language to sometimes twist up sentences like balloon animals (to modern linguistic sensibilities, at any rate).

I think I've puzzled out the grammatical and content-level "meaning" of the poem. There's no shame in checking other translations after you're done with a translation, I always say, to check your work. I tend to disagree with many of the choices translators make; it's part of the challenge. Since this is my first "public" translation, this is (to some degree) putting my money where my mouth is. Except that there's no money.

Right. The translation:

Lo, I wish to tell the best of dreams, what I dreamed in the middle of the night, after the speech-bearers were in bed. I thought I saw a most wonderful Tree on high encircled with light, the brightest of trees. All that Beacon was covered with gold, beautiful gems stood on the surface of the earth, and likewise five were on the shoulder-beam. There many hosts of angels, beautiful by their pre-ordained condition, watched over it; this was certainly not a criminal's cross; holy spirits there gazed at it, men throughout the earth and all this famous creation--wonderful was this Tree of Victory--also I, stained by sin, wounded by iniquity. I saw the Tree of Heaven adorned with a beautifully shining covering, adorned with gold; jewels splendidly covered the Lord's Tree. Nevertheless through that could I could see the former agony of the wretched; it had straightaway begun to bleed on the right side. I was entirely afficted by sorrow; I was fearful for that beautiful sight. I saw that shining Beacon change its raiment and color: one moment it was stained with blood, drenched with the flow of blood; the next it was adorned with treasure. Nevertheless I, sorrowful, lay there a long while and beheld the Tree of the Savior, until I heard it call out; the Best of Wood began to speak thus:

"That was long ago--I remember it still--when I was cut down at the edge of the forest, removed from my stump. Strong men siezed me there, and then formed me into a place of spectacle, and ordered me to raise their criminals. Men carried me on their shoulders until they set me on a hill; quite enough bad men fastened me there.

"I saw the Lord of mankind hasten with great zeal because he wanted to ascend me. There I did not dare, contrary to the lord's word, bend down or burst when I saw the earth tremble. I could slay all the evildoers, yet I stood still. The young man unclothed himself--it was God Almighty--strong and unflinching, he ascended the high Cross, courageous in the sight of many, that he wanted to liberate mankind.

"I trembled when He embraced me, but I did not dare bend down to earth, to fall to the surface of the earth; I had to stand fast. I was a cross made. I raised the powerful king, the Lord of heaven; I did not dare bend. They pierced me with dark nails: wounds were visible on me, open malicious wounds; I did not dare injure them any.

"They reviled us both together. I was stained all over with blood, begotten from the side of that man after he had sent forth his spirit. I have experienced many terrible fates on that hillside. I saw the Lord of Hosts cruelly stretched out.

"Shades of night had covered with clouds the corpse of the Lord, that brilliant light. Dark shadows went forth under the clouds. All creation wept, mourning that king's death; Christ was on the Cross. Nevertheless some were coming to the Lord, hastening from afar. I beheld all of it. I was sorely afflicted with sorrow, but I bent down nevertheless to the hands of the men, humble and with great zeal. They took him, Almighty God, and raised him from that heavy torture. The warriors abandoned me there to stand covered with blood; I was pierced all over with arrows. They laid him down wearly in limb, they stood at the body's head, they beheld there the Lord of Heaven, and he stayed a while there, weary after so much agony. They began to hew him the sephulchre, these men in sight of the killer, they carved it from bright stone, they set the Lord of Victories inside. They began to sing him a dirge, these miserable ones in the evening hours, after that they wanted to travel, weary from the Glorious Lord. He rested there with a small band.

"We wept there a good while nevertheless, standing in place. A voice went up from the men. The body cooled, the beautiful dwelling of the soul. Then men began to cut us to the ground--that was a terrible fate! Someone buried us in a deep pit. However the Lord's servants, his friends, found me and adorned me with gold and silver.

"Now you may have learned, my beloved man, that I have experienced the work of evildoers, painful sorrows. The time has now come that they adore me from far and wide over the earth and that all this glorious creation prays to this Beacon. On me the Son of God endured a while; therefore I, now glorious rise up under heaven, and I may heal anyone who shows awe of me. I had once become the most severe of punishments, most hated by men, before I opened for speech-bearers the way of life. Lo, the glorious Lord, guardian of heaven, placed me above the trees of the forest just as he placed his mother, Mary, over all men and over all womankind.

"Now I thee command, my beloved man, that you relate this vision to [other] men; disclose with words that it is Heaven's Cross, on which almighty God himself suffered for mankind's many sins and Adam's deed of old. He tasted death there; however afterwards the Lord arose by his great power to help men. He then ascended to heaven. He will come here again to this earth to seek mankind. On judgement day the Lord, Almighty God and with all his angels, will he himself pass judgement, he who may judge, everyone in such matter as they earned from this transitory life. No-one may be unafraid therre because of the command the Lord gives: he will ask the multitude where someone is who for the name of the Lord would partake of bitter death, just as he once died on that Cross. They then, however, will fear him, and will little think what they should begin to say to Christ. Then no-one will have reason to be afraid of him who bear on their breast the Beacon. Each soul that desires to remain with the Lord through the Cross must seek the Kingdom by the earthly way."

I then prayed to the Cross with a joyful heart, with great zeal; I was there alone with a small group. My mind was impelled onto the forward path; I endured many periods of longing. It is my life's desire that I may find refuge in the Cross more often than other men; to fully honor it; this desire is very great in my heart and my hope of protection is directed towards the Cross.

I do not have many powerful friends on earth; they have departed forth from this world's delights, they searched for the King of Heaven; they live now in heaven with God the Father. They remain in glory; I myself look forward to that day when the Lord's Cross, which I here on earth once beheld, will carry me off from this fleeting life and bring me where there is much bliss, the glory in heaven, where the Lord's people are seated at a banquet, where there is perpetual bliss. Then may he place me where I might thenceforth dwell in heaven, fully with the saints and partake in the joy.

May the Lord be my friend, he who here on earth once suffered on the Gallows-Tree for mankind's sins: He redeemed us, and gave us life and a home in heaven. Joy was renewed with glory and with bliss for those who endured fire there. The Son was victorious in that expedition, mighty and successful, that he came with many, a host of souls, into God's kingdom, with joy for the angels and for all the saints who already dwelled in glory in heaven, when their Lord came, Almighty God, where his home was.

I don't claim infalliability here. If any of my readers read OE (or know someone who does), please pass along any accuracy comments; in the forthcoming articles I tackle the translation's style.

ANOTHER NEW FEATURE!

After a reasonably minor rework-and-salvage job on the Blogger template for this thing, I finally got permalinks to work (they're the "#" at the bottom of each post). Blogger says they have permalinks auto-programmed into the templates, but they're lying. On mine, they put the link generator command in the wrong place, and gave a completely bogus command to actually place the link. Hence, clicking on the pound sign before merely dumped you back to the main page. A little cutting and pasting, though, made everything better.

COMMENTS! COMMENTS, BY GOD

So I figured out a way for folks to leave comments to the various posts. Russ has been kind enough to give 'em a whirl, so I know they work.

The over/under for comments this week: 3.5.

TRANSLATION EXERCISE: THE DREAM OF THE ROOD

So the other day I decided it had been far to long since I had worked on my Old English (OE) skills. I hope to use these skills professionally, so it's important I keep them up to date--and that's hard to do when you're working in the textbook department. To that end, I've decided to run a short series of posts, exposing to the wider world my translation skills in a few dead languages: Old English, Old Norse, Old French, and Latin.

I'm not a professional in any of these, but I get around OK. As in any language, proficiency increases with use, and wanes with disuse--hence, once again, this Ongoing Series. The first of the lot is Old English, with the poem The Dream of the Rood, an Old English dream-lyric. In it, the narrator tells us of a dream where the Cross appears to him, and tells him of his career. It's the earliest dream poem we have (it became a popular form as time went on), and remains the most famous.

The next post will give a fairly literal prose translation of the work (or at least part of it--it's fairly long, after all), along with some various strategies for turning it into modern English poetry. Further posts will show how I try to refine the work, the choices a translator of OE faces, and so on.

To begin with, I'd like to say that I'm pleased that I remember as much OE as I do. Vocabulary is the rustiest--nothing some flashcard work can't cure--but I've maintained my command of the syntax and inflections nicely. Looking up vocabulary isn't too bad if you know how it works in the sentence.

Some books I recommend to all:

The copy of Dream that I'm using comes from Seven Old English Poems. It's a wonderful book for the student, but I confess that it almost makes things too easy--the glossary in the back has literally every word in every form. It's in-print, though, which in OE is relatively rare.

I learned OE originally from an elderly copy of Moore and Knott's Elements of Old English, which is supposedly coming out in a new edition but I can't find it. Meanwhile, the default OE textbook out there is Mitchell and Robinson's Guide to Old English. If you want everything in one package--basic grammar, history, literature study--you can't go wrong with Mitchell's other book, Invitation to Old English. It's very accessible, and teaches OE by stressing its similarities to modern English. If you have a good command of English, and are comfortable with an inflectional language, I don't think OE will be much of a burden for you--and Invitation helps you cover the parts that are different. You really don't need to memorize that much to start out with; if you learn some basic patterns, getting practice reading OE will drive home the endings and the vocabulary. Learn by doing, that's my motto...

For the more ambitious reader, I suggest Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader for a good selection of poetry and prose, and JR Clark Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, but that one may be hard to find. Beowulf is what everyone wants to read, and this is the canonical Anglo-Saxon version. I don't know enough about the various modern English translations to really recommend one; what I've heard about Seamus Heaney's version isn't good, but I haven't studied it.

I'm almost done with my translation, which with any luck should appear tomorrow in the first installment.

ON THE TABLE

No new games this week. Some comments on old ones, oldest first:

--The most ambitious book ever, judged from the title alone, has to be Master Go in Ten Days. It assumes that the reader is a complete beginner, and the back of the book promises that by the end one should reach about 2 or 3 kyu (which is, to use my previous scale, at least a Category 4 player).

Its appeal to me is obvious. Heck, the appeal to everyone is obvious. In ten days, if you have the right books, you can lose ten pounds, learn five new languages, and--we discover--master Go. Evelyn Wood is the only answer...

--Why do I keep coming back to Chess? Why? I stink. I have always stunk. I always will stink. The only opponent I have the chess-self-esteem to face is a computer program, which I have set to "Extreme Idiot" mode, and I still lose half my games. Once I actually blew a winning position--up by a rook, by God--and got myself into a perpetual check. I could make random moves and do bet--wait a minute. I'll be back.

[pause]

Damn. Blew it on my fifteenth move. Back to Go full-time for my Classic Two-Player Abstract Game needs. At least with Go, I have some sort of aesthetic sense. I see a move happen on the board when I'm playing over a game, and I go "Oo!" or "What was that all about?" In Chess, nothing. Move move move move move--then Something Happens, I'm told in the notes. Move move move...draw.

--What the world needs--or is it just me--is a line of games with "German" themes but the attempt at simulation of a good wargame. How about a game that goes into a good bit of detail into what it was like to be a medieval merchant, rather than have clever and evocative mechanics with a tacked-on merchant theme? I know these exist for c*mp*t*r g*m*s, at least I had a few, but I mean something with paper and cardboard. One for the Project Pile.

--To elaborate. I tend to approach history, as I think of it, "structurally"--looking for the underlying systems that, in large part, control everyday life; conversely, looking for how individuals can operate in these structures and modify them (or change them fairly radically). This is also how I think of historical games, as a system of subsystems which interact to create a narrative, which the players (and pieces, I suppose) exploit (and, in some games, modify).

Empires of the Middle Ages is an example. In this game, there is a Lot Going On. Each province on the board (which is Europe and the Islamic coast of the Mediterranean, basically) has a number of different factors associated with it, such as religion, income, and so on. A ruler has a number of different ratings him-or-herself, such as combat, administration, and diplomacy. Bringing in money depends on the administrative abilities of the ruler and the quality of the provinces (essentially). Taking over a province can be done with diplomacy, bribes, combat, or a combination of all of these. You can get as detailed as you want, of course; obviously bringing in wealth from one's holdings is more complicated than the model in EotMA, but at least there's a model there.

--Been reading the rules to "War and Sheep." A lot of French game designers sure do like their chaos, don't they? Looks like fun, though, as the occasional diversion. (Haven't played it. Has anyone out there?)

--I'd pay very good money for a Welsh edition of Scrabble. Never worry about having too few vowels again...

--Speaking of Welsh, there's an excellent site out there for teaching oneself Middle Welsh, which I've been trying to do for a bit. (I want to read the Mabinogion and Dafydd ap Gwilym in the original.) It's based on the course material used by a late UT professor, whose class I never took but I heard was something of a legend. I'd love to get a chance to take a "real" class in Middle Welsh, which is just one of many reasons I'm applying to North Carolina for graduate study this fall.

--Tomorrow's fun project: Translate "The Dream of the Rood."

ON THE NIGHTSTAND

A lightish week; I'm trying to cut down. Most of my reading has been Quicksilver, but I did take advantage of a academic-press remainder sale at the store where I work to pick up a few titles.

The one I've spent the most time on is Dimitrov and Stalin, part of the "Annals of Communism" series published in English by Yale U.P. The other book I have in the series is The Road to Terror.

Both books are translations of recently opened files from the former Soviet Union, each book on a particular topic. Road to Terror is on the Terror years, their leadup and their aftermath, from 1930 to 1940 (focusing on the mid-thirties). Each document (generally a letter to Stalin, cour testimony, a Politburo protocol, etc) is prefaced by an editorial introduction, which also serves to stitch them all together into a larger narrative.

Dimitrov and Stalin is a collection of letters from Georgii Dimitrov to Stalin (and one the other way) discussing the vicissitudes of the Third International (aka the Comintern), which Dimitrov headed. The politics of the Comintern are quite interesting, of course, but the real meat of the letters is how the International dealt with (or not) the crises of the thirties and early on in the Second World War.

The Comintern seemed to never be quite sure whether it wanted autonomous foreign Communist parties, or have them all under Moscow's thumb. Generally it made whichever was the objectively worse decision depending on the conditions on the ground whenever possible (which, I suppose, is hardly surprising). In its advice to Tito, Dimitrov/Stalin urged him to cooperate with another resistance leader who had, for all intents and purposes, started to fire on Tito himself. Then there's the real theater-pieces, such as the draft memorandum of the French Communist Party urging all Frenchmen to cast off the yoke of the French bourgeoisie--after Paris declared itself an open city in June 1940, and most of France had better (well, worse) things to worry about.

Dimitrov's diaries have also been recently published, and I hope to give those a look as well. He's an interesting character; sometime leader of the Bulgarian communist party, he rose to fame in the Reichstag Fire trial (where he, incredibly, got himself found innocent in a German court) and after leaving a German prison made his way to Moscow where he was placed in charge of Comintern.

What also strikes me in the book is how, well, principled it is. When one reads primary sources from totalitarian regimes, especially sources not designed for public consumption, I think we all hope some cynicism leaks through. The eternal question when one thinks about Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, et al is "Could they possibly have believed all this?" Stalin never steps out from the page to tell Dimitrov, when the Polish Communist Party was being purged, "Look. Just have them all liquidated. They're getting uppity again. When we ask them to bark like dogs, I want them to ask what breed." But no; there is always a principle--an infinitely malleable one, to be sure--to justify this or that decision that at best would do nothing and at worst would hurt a war effort.

These books are, of course, nearly required reading for Kakologists (scholars of evil) and students of twentieth-century history (of course, the two overlap considerably).

QUICKSILVER

Just picked up the copy of Neal Stephenson's latest, Quicksilver. I'm not going to post much on it right now; I'm only a few chapters in, but I sense it's going to be at least a worthy successor to Cryptonomicon. More good geek-adventure fun. There are a few more winking references than I'd like, but they're thinning out and what I've seen thus far (which isn't an enormous amount, again; there's 944 pages worth of this thing) is justifying the price of admission and then some.

One thing I noticed, in the introduction, is that Stephenson describes his Baroque Cycle (of which Quicksilver is Part One of three) is a "discursive footnote" to Fernand Braudel. As I fancy myself something of a Braudelian, I find this interesting. I can imagine Braudel writing a novel (just barely), and it'd be an odd one: No named characters, but a cast of thousands toiling in the fields and eating gruel. It'd sell in the millions. (Millions!) Braudel is many things, but an historian of the individual is not one of them. I consider that his great strength and weakness as a historian, and once I finish Quicksilver I hope to expound on the footnoteness of the work. Quicksilver is full of characters, many of whom you've heard of, but in the many details of life I can see the structuralist within trying to get out. There's a lesson in all this for the historian, which I'll discuss later.

Anyone interested in the baroque period, the history of the scientific revolution, or good ripping yarns is urged to give Quicksilver (and Braudel) a look.

OK, ENOUGH OF THAT

Since nobody comes to this page to read about me feeling sorry for myself, some random thoughts:

The wargaming world divides its games, with some judgement calls, into two camps, each driven by a design philosophy: Games wich are "designed for cause" versus "designed for effect." The former seek to provide the players with the same information and choices the historical sides faced, and the latter tends to bend the causes behind the historical event to either provide a narrative as similar as possible to history, or to provide the same surprise or urgency (or what-have-you) that permeated the battlefield. Most games, of course, tend to blend the two but generally a game tends towards one or the other.

Books, it seems, tend to do a similar thing to a greater or lesser degree. The World of the Shining Prince does not dwell too much on the causes of Heian ascendency or decline, or what forces shaped Heian aristocratic society. He doesn't ignore it completely, but Morris's main thrust is quite squarely on describing for the reader the society depicted in The Tale of Genji. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, by Robert Lopez, expends relatively little effort describing the nature of the Commercial Revolution itself, and the thesis of the book is to explore the causes for the revolution. Both are excellent books, but try to do different things.

I'm not sure what the academic/literary analog of the "German" game would be. German games tend to be light on theme in almost all cases, and instead focus on a clever game system. Wargames tend to be more conservative in their game rules, and often are minimally elegant (but not always). I suppose the Oulipo authors would be the Clever Ones of the writing world, trying out new and different forms of writing, setting challenges for themselves. The most famous example is Georges Perec's La Disparition, written entirely without the letter "e". It was translated--also without any "e"s--as A Void, and the novel really does work.

Of course, all the above says is that my little Game--Book correlation shouldn't be taken too far.

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I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Apple's music store for expanding its selection of Zydeco. Hard stuff to find in St. Louis...

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Does anyone know where you hit a computer so it really hurts, and it can think about its misdeeds? I'm having some major Javascript issues right now that didn't exist before, and I've tried most of the rational ways to fix it, and I'm taking suggestions on how to deal with computers irrationally.

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I've always thought that the most interesting wargames are those that present some sort of thesis, where the designer puts some original thought into what was the most important part of a conflict and how it should be addressed. When I'm not so tired I'll think of some concrete examples, but I know that Paths of Glory--considered by many rational people to be the greatest game ever--had a fairly strong one...but what was it?

Getting tired...will return later.

ASPIRATIONS

(This one isn't going to be even as amusing or interesting as my posts usually are, and no games are involved.)

I was listening to "Dirty Sticky Floors" off Dave Gahan's solo effort. Gahan and I were doing the same kind of thing: Looking around ourselves, saying Has it really come to this?

Gahan's situation was, of course, rather more dire than mine. The odds of my routine/rut leading to my death are quite small. Still, three questions--How did I get here, what am I doing, and where am I going?

After I graduated from UT, with an academic career with at least as many ups as downs, my plan was to move to the small city of Panevezys, Lithuania, to teach English at a local high school. It sounded like fun, it'd ground me for about two years, and I'd learn a new language and a new culture. Of course, it didn't work out--as D-Day approached, it looked less and less like a program that could, say, get me home after the appointed two years, and the job itself looked sketchy. It was then that I realized that I left UT with a fouled transcript, no skills, and nothing other than a pipe dream to fall back on.

OK, I say to myself. I suppose there's nothing to do but get a part-time job and prepare for grad school. Grad school! Where better to escape real life, I thought, than go back to school? Honestly, though; with a History degree, there's not much else for one to do. So, I hunted around, filled out two dozen job applications, and after two (2) interviews, took the one offer I received: The Wash U Bookstore. Not a bad place, but it didn't/doesn't pay so hot--but hey, I'm only going to be here for less than a year, right? Grad school beckons!

I got great GRE scores, both on the general test and on the English Literature test (which I took on a lark), and duly applied to a brace of--English literature programs. I was going to be a medieval langauges and literature student. The only problem was my writing sample--I had none. I had not, in fact, taken a serious literature course since my Freshman year. I dithered and dallied and procrastinated twenty different ways, until literally the day before the applications were due I sat up all night and typed out a thoroughly miserable essay on, as I recall (I destroyed all record of it), the treatment of the Classical heritage in medieval Arthurian legend.

Most of the schools returned my application as soon as they opened it, but it wasn't until the very very end until the last school--Emory, bless its heart--rejected me. I suppose I was on some sort of waiting list for Emory (and Connecticut, which took about as much time as Emory to decide), and I just didn't make it. Do I wish I had made it? In light of future events, it's hard to say. I'm not 100% sure I'd have made a good critical theorist; I just don't have the patience for most of it, I don't think it deals with anything real anymore. (Terry Eagleton seems to agree with me in his latest book, After Theory, which I am eagerly awaiting.) If I could have avoided theory, though, and just immured myself with old books and old languages, and written on various correspondences...I'd have loved it.

I should have taken my extreme difficulty in writing that paper as a sign. When everyone finally rejected me, I took a week off from work (thanks, Shelly, for letting me take vacation on an hour's notice) to cast around for a Plan C. Of course, I said, I should have applied to history programs.

Indeed I should have; I love history and I have a good analytical mind for it. I begged St. Louis University to have pity on me, and I was accepted as a non-matriculated student. I was taking three graduate seminars the following Fall semester, and with this experience--coupled with the professors' letters of recommendation and the seminar papers as writing samples--I'd be a shoo-in somewhere.

And, until the last possible moment, it looked like I was. I was excelling. I was spending countless happy hours in the library and at home, reading books and taking notes. Every week I did the assigned papers. I was learning Old Norse. It was great, some of the happiest academic moments of my life since my freshman year at UT. And, then, finally, came the time to write the seminar papers, which was appalling. I finished exactly one, which was terrible and at any rate vanished into a black hole in a SLU computer lab and I had no real version of it to turn in. The other profs, of course, were entirely unwilling to write letters of recommendation for me, and my applications all died on the vine.

Dr. Treadgold, Dr. Gavitt, and Dr. Acker--thank you, and I'm sorry.

Lucky for me, I have a job. It's not very good. I have wonderful coworkers and it's nice to get a discount on books, but, really, when you make what I do it's not a very good job. Thank God I live the rent-free life. If I had any sense I wouldn't be buying all these damn games and books and saving up my money instead.

But I don't have any sense, as displayed above, so here I am, surrounded by things I love and a life I'm not so thrilled with.

I look around, and I'm not sure what to do. A grad school try...again? I dunno. If I can miraculously write a bang-up article in history, maybe. Maybe it's been long enough for some schools to not care so much about one's letters of recommendation. I have no academic ones left; I can't ask Dr. Carver to write one last lousy time after the last three letters he wrote (for the Lithuanians, for English, and for History) all were wastes of postage. I could go to Library School, be an archivist...I'd be good at that. I'd also be a good historian, dammit, if I could just learn to write at great length. (Stop laughing!)

I know one thing for damn sure, though, I don't want to be sitting around in retail for my whole life.

My latest pipe dream is to become--wait for it--a feature writer for Texas Monthly. I always liked that magazine. I'd like to have my own monthly column--call it "The Rambler"--where I'd expend, oh, 7000 words or so just...rambling. Talking about myself, the good books I've come across, travels through Texas (you know, to keep with the magazine's theme), maybe do some light Actual Journalism, just talk about stuff. Be kind of a Gen-X Gregg Easterbrook (sans Cheerbabes) crossed with Hunter S Thompson (sans intoxicants) crossed with Ron Rosenbaum (sans Ivy-League education). It'd be great, wouldn't it? Sure it would, come on. And then, when I get really big, they fund a major book project, called The Rambler Goes to Europe.

Or not.

Maybe some day writing about games will be a big business...and I'll be there...

Ask me what I want
Easy that's just more
How long will I wait for you
Twice as long as I did before
Standing in the freezing snow
Maybe you left I just don't know
I'll soon be lying on my own
On some dirty sticky floor

BAD CRAZINESS

I always knew Lyndon LaRouche was crazy.

[ed. note: This post is designed to increase readership by inflaming the passions of LaRouche supporters.]

I just never knew how crazy, until I found this page, which is a collection of question-and-answer sessions he had with his "Youth Movement." Click on any one of them, and note the...odd questions. How could Wallenstein have changed history? How can classical ideas be conveyed through dance?

What?

Now, granted, it'd be nice to see some of the real Democratic candidates answering these questions in a debate format. ("OK, Senator Kerry, you have two minutes to answer this question: 'Does destiny, or fate, exist?' The other candidates will have one minute to respond.") But still.

A: Who in their right mind joins the LaRouche Youth Movement?
B: What impels them to ask LaRouche these questions?
C: What's the deal with Gauss's 1799 paper?

These Q/A sessions don't answer questions so much as raise them. Feast your eyes on them...

ON THE TABLE: SUPER-DUPER-EXTRA-SPECIAL BONUS EDITION

Went around to a flea market hosted by the local game merchant. I hadn't had much luck before with these things, but this time I somehow struck gold--four old SPI games (and by "old" I of course mean "older than me"), namely Strategy 1, Patrol, Chariot, and Korea: the Mobile War. Good stuff, and I paid a good price for them--the secret, I think, is to buy from guys whose wives are with them, so there's pressure to clear out the "clutter" to the first buyer with the slightest interest.

These are all the old-style SPI "flat tray" games. My question: Whose lousy idea was the flat tray? Sure, it presents a big surface for a splashy cover, but you can't really show off the cover since they're so thin, the bottom of the trays falls off almost immediately, and these can't have been cheap. Making boxes for games is no trouble; these had to be designed and built specially for SPI.

The covers are neat, though, when they're done right. I love the cover on Korea, for example. I just wish they were a little more practical and durable...

MORE ON THE BULGE

I've given the Ardennes 44 rules the once-over, and it's much less imposing than I first thought. Eighteen of the rulebook's forty pages are scenarios, notes, and (the part I most appreciate) an extended example of play. A worthy addition to the stable...

Reading the victory conditions for both sides, I started thinking that defining "victory" for the Germans, especially, is a tricky theoretical problem. I mean, the "objective" of the assault was Antwerp, but the Germans were no more going to make it to Antwerp than to New York, and everyone on the ground knew it. Even taking Antwerp would have had no appreciable influence on the strategic outcome of the war, probably. The usual thing in the game is to nominate a certain number of landmarks as victory conditions, and if the Germans control n of them they win.

A quick scan of the shelves downstairs located two of my other Bulge games.

Tigers in the Mist (TitM) I've mentioned earlier. I bought this game when it first came out, as a desktop-published effort. I lovingly colored in the rivers and the color-coded areas, and played the bejabbers out of it. When GMT reissued it in a (ahem) rather more professional treatment, I snapped it right up. It's still my favorite; a true gamer's game. I think irregular areas (or point-to-point) is a better way of doing things than simple hexes, if they're done right, and this is quite certainly done right. I suppose it's less precise, but this game--where every area is a town, or some other named feature--gives me more flavor. It's maligned in many circles ("Candyland" is the most famous epithet) because of the generic nature of the units--each one only has a single Combat Factor associated with it, rather than more fine-grained data--but at the end of the day, it provides players with the same problems the Big Games do, the battle plays out in a recognizable fashion, and the rules are nine pages long.

The other game I found down there was Battles for the Ardennes from Decision Games (a reprint of an old SPI title). Rest assured that the counters look crisper in the game than they do on that page, at least on my computer. This game is big--the biggest Bulge game I have. The rules are relatively straightforward, though, and getting into the game isn't a major problem. It has two advantages which, in my mind, put it in good standing:

--First, the game also provides counters and rules for the 1940 attack through the Ardennes. I'm not sure why this hasn't been more popular; 1940 provides an interesting contrast with the 1944 game. There's less power running around, for one thing. It'd be an interesting test for a system to see how the two campaigns run differently, and I appreciate that this one attempts it (and I think it does well for itself).
--Second, for the main Bulge scenario it lets the German player choose from a variety of different operational plans, rather than the same Wacht am Rhein. Depending on which is chosen, various units may never appear or (sometimes) appear earlier. In "Operation Luxembourg," the Germans lose some units as the main thrust of the operation moves farther south. In "Spoiling Attack," the victory point schedule itself changes, and the goal is merely to stop the Allied attack and hurt them enough to earn a tactical respite along the line.

The size of the game keeps me from playing this one too often, but I've enjoyed the experience. One thing I like, presentation-wise, is that while the map hexes are large (designed for 5/16-inch counters), the counters themselves are small (1/2-inch). In a game where counter density can mount quickly, this is a useful touch as it keeps the stacks manageable.

Other games...

I have Bitter Woods around here somewhere; I can't seem to find it. I also can't find Bastogne or Bust, which presumably is also in a box of un-unpacked games. The game i'm most curious about is the card game that came out on it--Nuts! Almost coincidental with the release of Ardennes 44, the newly reanimated Pacific Rim Publishing came out with Iron Tide, which is bidding fair to be the first game from PRP which is actually well-designed, playtested, developed, and actually available from the publisher. I'll believe it when I see it. The Gamers came out with Ardennes, which I briefly owned but soured on for reasons I don't really recall but I'm sure they were entirely capricious. I like the Bulge games it seems most wargamers don't like so much, and the ones the others like I'm not so thrilled by.

On a different scale altogether, I also have Avalanche Press's offering, Battle of the Bulge, in the Panzergrenadier system. Any lurking fans out there of Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader should give this one a look. The graphics are great, the scenarios are plentiful, the rulebook could stand some improvement (it is, after all, an Avalanche Press title), but after two or three turns you'll hardly look at it again. A tremendous product. Avalanche is also coming out with their own Bulge game (on the operational scale), and it claims to have one map and only 280 counters--which is less, even, than Tigers in the Mist. I'm waiting eagerly for that one, too--APL, over the next quarter, is coming out with a scary number of games I want. Their Bulge game, then Soldier Emperor, their Pacific Theater game (with, one hopes, the real rules for their version of Third Reich), and they've signed Rob Markham on to crank out one game after another...good stuff awaits.

MEDIEVAL REPLAY

A neat replay of a game of Medieval (the cardgame designed by Richard Berg, reviewed earlier) is on Consimworld. Not as much discussion of game mechanics as I'd like, but it does provide a nice narrative. I may have to try one myself sometime...

ON THE TABLE, ME HEARTIES

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I thought I'd go through my St. Louis warehouse of games and see how many games I have with pirates in them. I haven't gotten far. I found only one with pirates as its main theme--namely Blackbeard, a game with the classic "problem" of having more atmosphere than game in it. It's one I've always enjoyed, though; it's an excellent solitaire game (in fact, if you play multiplayer it's essentially an n-way solitaire game) and you get to, you know, plunder stuff. It reminds me of the classic Sid Meier's Pirates, which remains my all-time favorite game and I wish my family saved the old Mac SE so I could still play it (Pirates...Dungeons of Doom...Universal Miltiary Simulator...all my favorite computer games were on that one. Ah, for the games of yesteryear).

A vastly larger number of games have pirates in them. Imperium Romanum II, which I have not forgotten, has the Cilician (and other) pirates. Europa Universalis has a number of pirate counters, as does Soldier Kings, which players can manipulate to make life difficult for the other players. (Well, try to manipulate, anyway.) Pirates make for interesting times in wargames between "real states," since they're a combination of privateers (independent contractors in the nominal control of a major power) and out-and-out pirates who are out for themselves, which translates to "out for chaos" for the major power players.

Which leads to an interesting question. The Talk Like a Pirate Day website has a page of German pirate talk; how did French/Spanish/Dutch/Etc pirates talk? I'd imagine that the major source of information would be whatever movies the French/Spanish/Dutch/Etc have made on pirates over the years, of which I know none. Suggestions welcome.

The only game purchase of the week is less piratically-inclined, namely Ardennes '44, the latest from GMT Games. I have a reasonably burgeoning collection of Bulge games; I've long wanted to do a little comparative study of them. (OK, this idea has existed ever since the comparative study on the Atlanta and Peninsula campaign I discussed a while back that appeared in Against the Odds. I think someone might beat me to it, though.)

This is GMT's second game on the Bulge, the first being the wonderful Tigers in the Mist. I suspect I'll play the latter more than the former; this latest one is "heavy" whereas TitM is "light"--Ardennes has quite a few more rules and counters, takes longer to play, etc. I've been looking for a "definitive" study of the battle, though, which keeps me coming back for more. (I expect I'll break down and get a copy of Wacht am Rhein when it comes out in the same vain hope.) What I do like about this game is that it continues the trend of using 9/16-inch counters, which just seems like a nice size. Not as unweildy as 5/8-inch counters can be, but easer to handle than 1/2-inch ones.

Are wargamers picky? Survey says "yes, with a vengeance." When a hobby gets this picky about 1/16 of an inch on little pieces of cardboard, you know we're getting over the edge.

Physically, it's a nice package. The map is clear and nicely-done, with divisional insignia of the major players around the edge. It doesn't exactly scream "snow" for me (the way Command Magazine's treatment did), but I like it. I've seen so many Bulge wargame maps that it's like reading an old favorite book; I know where the counters go, I know where the major fighting can be, I know where the forces are going to be channelled. This is one of those games I may, in fact, never play, but I bought so I could look at the game, think about how it goes together, and think about how its mechanics were chosen to model the Bulge, rather than any other conflict. I love "generic" games which allow one to play any of a wide range of battles (such as the Panzergrenadier series, which gives you some reasonably generic maps and a bunch of counters for the Germans, US, etc, and lets you do a whole slew of scenarios, and do-it-yourself is an option), but I also like how designers meet the challenge of depicting the various unique aspects of this or that battle in a game, raising a game above the ordinary.

At least "studying game designs" is how I justify buying all these games I'll never play.

ON THE NIGHTSTAND

A relatively light week (I suppose), again dominated by medieval economic history--two books of which I'll touch lightly on later. Two "nonspecialist" books of note.

Amazon.com gave me a stern talking-to the other day about my utter lack of driving sales to their door. They did review my site before authorizing me as an "associate" (they said), so they can't possibly have expected much. I even said I mostly read esoteric historical stuff. No cause to complain. I'm expanding on the theme here by recommending Domesday Book.

Not quite 1500 pages long, this translation of Domesday is, I presume, the only in-print English translation of the work. It has its charms as bedtime reading for all of us, I daresay. For most of humanity, reading about how many plows a particular farm has--and then reading about how many plows the next farm over has, and on and on to infinity--can nearly induce narcolepsy. Then there's me, and that tiny slice of humanity that cares, really cares, how many plows Azelina in Arrington Hundred has to tend her property. (Two.) I'm not sure why I'm wired this way, but I am.

It's a book which has long been admired if little-read. David Hume liked it, describing it as "the most valuable piece of antiquity possessed by any nation." He's quite right, too, even if we quibble over the definition of "antiquity." Taking down all this information, even in a land as relatively small and well-equipped with roads as England, must have presented a logistical nightmare. Much of Domesday was out-of-date as soon as it was finished, of course, as this took years and much land changed hands between the beginning and end of the project, but it's still an amazing thing. Its importance has persisted--the last time it was used as evidence in a land-title court case was 1982.

This was put together by Alecto Historical Editions on Penguin's behalf, to go along with Alecto's fascimile edition of Domesday, which I feel I absolutely must have. (Of course, I suspect that every single copy of this limited release is in a library, and cost $1 zillion anyway. I'll stick with pining for the OED.)

The other work of immense historical import I bought this week--and, unlike most of my "reviews," I've actually finished reading this one all the way through--is Glen Baxter's latest (I think), Trundling Grunts.

I've been accused of being obsessive over comics, and it's probably true, testified by my encyclopedic knowledge of my favorites--Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Mutts, Get Fuzzy...and a few esoteric ones, such as Snake 'n' Bacon and Glen Baxter.

I don't quite have all of Glen Baxter's stuff, but I'm working on it very diligently. He works, for the most part, in one-panel "gags" (if we can call them that); sometimes they're connected in a sort-of narrative but generally not. That said, Baxter certainly does have his favorite themes, and Trundling Grunts provides us with plenty of examples. There's only one Bizarre Fetish--the one on the cover--but plenty of cowboy modern-art appreciators, cricketeers, footballers in extreme situations, dates gone horribly awry--only one wimple reference, though, which is a shame.

I love his stuff because of how they encourage one to wonder at what bizarre backstory produced the scene, and what could possibly follow it. (The Far Side did this well, too.) For example:

A man, sleeves rolled up and a well-worn hat on his head, is lugging a wheelbarrow through a door from one indoor room to another. Within the wheelbarrow is a huge mound of some unidentified granular stuff with a coal shovel stuck in it. The look on the man's face betrays confidence and pride in his work, and he seems to be looking out at some kind of group (of which the reader is a part). The caption is "Unfortunately, lunch was served almost immediately." A brief gag, but what sells the scene to me is the door through which the man walked: There's a huge bite out of the edge of it, splinters going every-which-way.

What kind of lunch is this? What's in the wheelbarrow? Who is eating lunch, and where are they? And, of course, what caused the door damage?

OK, it's not Steve Martin talking about how he lost his girlfriend at a party (one of my favorite bits ever), but it has a very dry, English, subdued sense about it that everything is Not As It Should Be. The Amazon page has a couple of samples which give an idea of his visual style; it succeeds because it's distinctive, not because of any particular technical mastery--as with all good comics, I think.

I mentioned in a previous On the Nightstand that I liked the first 5-and-a-third pages of The Land of the Shining Prince, and now that I've read just about all of it I redouble my recommendation. It's a wonderful book, full of literature (Genji, of course, but also The Pillow Book and less well-known Heian works) and of history. It advertises itself as being about the court life of Heian Japan, and while the book has many details about that subject--the light's best there, after all, and it's essentially all Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon wrote about--it goes rather farther afield, discussing the patterns of life for those who lived outside Heian, in the vast "wilderness" of provincial Japan. The sense one gets reading about Heian court life is that it was something like the courtiers at Louis XIV's Versailles, only vastly more so. (And with, shall we say, a rather more robust monarch at its head.) Life virtually did not exist outside the court; to be appointed governor of some province was about the same as being exiled to, I don't know, Nebraska, and to visit some shrine only a few miles from the capital was a major psychological and transportation undertaking.

The book is very vivid; anyone with an interest in tenth-century Japan would do quite well to read the book.

The two "academic" titles I picked up recently on medieval economic history are Robert Lopez's The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages and Georges Duby's The Early Growth of the European Economy. I won't go into too much detail here yet about them. They're both bouncy narratives of what went into the twelfth-century takeoff in the European economy, and what the state of economic life was in the so-called Dark Ages.

(They're not the "Dark Ages" anymore; one only sees "the so-called Dark Ages" nowadays. I agree that they weren't so dark as all that, but can't there be a whole new name?)

I suppose an interesting question would be, "How scholarly are these books?" Put another way, I'm wondering what kind of standard one should hold these to. Academic and scholarly writing can be hard to identify by sight; simply being boring and pretentious can be a reasonable guide, but in some blessed circumstances can also be a red herring. There are even some academic works with pictures in them (color, even), so that can't be it. My operating assumption for years was that academic works had footnotes; Commercial Revolution, though, has no footnotes at all and Early Growth has hardly any. It's the "hardly any" that I have the most trouble with; it gives the impression that everything not footnoted is in the common academic domain and so banal as to be beyond question. (My favorite footnote in Duby is when he cites this one Hungarian economic journal; my suspicion is that he was showing off his language capabilities--or, at least, the capabilities of his graduate students.) I happen to think the book has its problems, and makes claims that at least deserve a reference to some kind of evidence. (More on this later; I'm working on a page-by-page exegesis of the thing.)

Still, both of these books are generally considered scholarly and both are referenced with abandon by journal articles and book authors (both of which have footnotes, so we can tell). I've not quite been able to perceive the dividing line between a non-scholarly book (AKA "a book for the mentally deficient, the amateur, and the undergraduate") and a scholarly one (AKA "a book one might expect to find in the better homes"). I suspect that once I do, only then will I be escorted, robed in white, to the inner sancta of academia.

APRIL 55 BC

First off, roll to see if winter ends: A five, no luck. Winter ends next turn, and not a moment too soon for all of us waiting to see what happens in Gaul and Spain.

A mild turn. Just about everyone is sitting tight and waiting for something--winter to end, ships to come, Crassus to come, etc. The Gauls split up their Belgae stack so they can forage. Caesar makes his way to Lugdunum (in this period merely a Roman fort, not a city). Pompey takes one of the legions from Tarraco and moves a few hexes towards the main body of his troops fighting the Galicians. Everyone else sits tight.

This wouldn't be a heck of a great game to play with the full complement of six players, let me say that right now. The Parthians don't have much to do--they can't recruit new units, only replace old ones, and their whole strategy early on is to wait for Crassus, hope to kill him, and then do what you can against the Empire after that. The Eastern forces are way too strong to begin with to risk battle early; besides, with attacks being (relatively) inherently risky, there's no reason not to lure Crassus deeper and deeper into your own ground. (Which, come to think of it, is a feature rather than a bug for this situation.) Still, with fewer players one guy is all the barbarians, which I'd think would be more fun. The Parthians get to be active right around the time the Gauls start being really ground into dust by Caesar.

I could have had the Gauls attack during the winter, but attacking across rivers--as they'd have to do--is almost suicide. I feel like I should have been bolder with the Galicians, though--they could have taken a swipe at one of Pompey's stacks, but I was too conservative--if it fails, then Pompey's halfway to victory. I want Pompey to have to risk an attack here. With the Summer season starting (defined as "not winter"), there should be a lot more movement and excitement.

ON THE TABLE: SUPER-EXTRA-SPECIAL-BONUS EDITION

Arrived home from work today to find a package from Mesomorph Games, to wit, the cassette tape box full of Piecepack stuff.

I've been dimly aware of the Piecepack mini-phenomenon for some time; basically, it tries to be to board gaming what the standard 52-card deck is to card gaming: a set of generic pieces with which any number of games may be played. It's a neat idea, and I can see the appeal. It reminds one of a card deck in that it has four "suits"/colors (Fleurs-de-lys (blue), Suns (red), Moons (black), and Crowns (green)), but from there it goes deep into boardgaming territory. There are four pawns in each of the colors, and each suit also has a die--the sides being 2 through 5, a blank, and an "ace." There are also six tokens and six tiles in each suit, also corresponding to the sides on the die. The back side of each tile is a four-by-four grid, so by turning all the tiles over you could have (say) a 24x16 grid on which to play games. (Or less. I mean, whatever. They're your tiles, after all.)

One can make one's own Piecepack set, but I decided to plunk down for Mesomorph's set, which is very nice. Handiwork is evident in the sets--pen lines on the backs of the tiles, and marking direction on the tokens, for example--and while the wood is a very nice touch I do wish that the look were more uniform. I can imagine, for example, some gaming miscreant "memorizing" the backs of the tiles and tokens, thereby ruining some of the element of surprise if these were turned over for some game or other. A plastic "tournament" set, while less aesthetically pleasing, would be a good addition to the Piecepack universe. (Although perhaps we may want to wait for tournaments, first.)

I was inspired to get a Piecepack when I heard about the latest Piecepack Game Design Contest. (Details are here.) I like contests, I say to myself. The prizes are neat, and most of my gaming is solitaire anyway. Hmmm...

I do like contests; I also have an idea germinating for the Hippodice contest this year, tentatively titled The 3,547th Game Where You're a Trader in the Middle Ages. Still in the embryonic stages, but details are welcome if anyone asks. If this gets anywhere at all, I may politely ask for beta testers.

Too early to tell yet if the Piecepack is going to catch fire or dwindle, but it won't be for lack of available games, I'll say that...and I do hope to add to the pile by December 8th.

MARCH, 55 BC

OK, so I got two turns in this weekend. Let's see what the week may bring...

Two corrections from last post. I gave myself two mulligans on movement, as I misread the map and the mobilization rules. Caesar didn't quite make it to the alps; he moved to Augusta Taurinorum, in Cisalpina. Crassus, for his part, did not go to Ravenna but to Ancona.

This is a taxation and mobilization turn, which means that the powers get new units and we have some random events. Mobilization first:

The Gauls take two light infantry and put them back in Brittany, and a Supply Point for the big stack closest to Caesar's men.

Caesar raises two second-rate legions in Augusta Taurinorum, two light infantry in Mediolanum, and a Cavalry unit in Nicaea.

Pompey builds two second-rate legions in Tarraco, two light infantry in each of Saguntum and Corduba, and a cavalry unit in Carthago Nova.

Crassus builds two first-rate legions in Ancona, one in Itrium, and two fleets begin building in Ancona.

Cicero had a lot of his thunder taken by Crassus, who gets first pick of the Italian mobilization. Still, he builds four second-line legions (two in Rome, two in Neapolis), two light infantry (one each in Perusia and Rhegium), and two fleets in Neapolis.

The Parthians sit tight, as they've hit their mobilization limit.

The Random Events are one of the few major optional rules I'm playing with, and they look like fun. The results of the rolling:

--Bad harvest in Africa Proconsularis
--Cicero gets a windfall of 24 talents of gold
--An assassination attempt on Crassus fails; his side's morale takes a slight hit
--The Baleares revolt under Pompey! Four light infantry units take control of the islands, denying Pompey their one talent tax base and a port.

(What a random event, eh...I wonder if/when Pompey will ever get around to retaking the place, as it provides him with next to nothing. I may make retaking the Baleares a victory condition for him.)

(If the assassination attempt didn't fail--i.e., if I had rolled a 6--the whole eastern part of the map would have been thrown into a tizzy. I almost wish it happened.)

The movement phases were uninspiring. No combat, just shuffling. One of the bigger and more out-of-the-way stacks of Gauls spread out so as to better forage (thereby saving their precious supply points). Caesar left his new units behind to act as a reserve for his Gallic campaign, and as a stick in case Cicero/Crassus starts acting up in Italy (or, better yet, leaves it tantalizingly underdefended). Cicero awaits clear weather to sail for Macedonia. Crassus awaits his ships so he can go to Parthia, which is awaiting Crassus's arrival. Pompey moved to Tarraco, where he is about to take command of the Galician expedition.

SPORTS NOTES

The disappointing Longhorns loss generally comes later in the season than Week 2...oh well. And the Cardinals continue to sink.

On the other hand, watching Notre Dame get turned into ham by a great land-grant state school always warms the cockles of my heart. Hail to the victors!

LITHUANIAN BASEBALL

I was thinking about a few things tonight--one of them the difficulties involved in starting up a baseball league. When I was planning to move to Lithuania after graduation, I checked out some sites on the local sports scene--both to kinda brush up on Lithuanian and for fun. The major sport in Lithuania, of course, is basketball, but I was surprised (sort of) to find a fine site for Lithuanian baseball. Baseball has been in Lithuania longer than I thought, but looking over the standings and statistics, I saw all the hallmarks of a young league: lots of errors, lots of lopsided scores. I mean, some of these folks just sucked, and some of them looked like hall-of-famers in this league (meaning they'd probably make fine additions to any college team in the US...maybe). I really liked the enthusiasm that the adherents put into the game--at least that visible from the site--and I thought to myself, Man, if Panevezys has a team, I want to be on it.

I never quite made it to Lithuania, of course, let alone onto the team. But I imagined being on the team, and with my steel-trap baseball mind turning the Panevezys Dukes into a powerhouse of the European Club League, taking the national team to the Olympics, and coming a close fourth after a thirteen-inning loss to Cuba in the bronze-medal game.

Then I thought back to one of my favorite games, Ironman Football. In that game, you play a franchise owner in the early NFL, trying to put together a good team and keeping the league together, with the financial equivalent of bobby pins and glue. The great thing is that you can change the rules (within reasonably broad limits), instituting revenue sharing, say, or changing the value of the extra point. You draft players, play out the games, try to get folks to come to the games, pay travel expenses...it's great! (Buy it now! I don't think it's going to be reprinted after the small print run goes away.)

There were some plans afoot to make a version of the game for the baseball Negro Leagues, but I'm not sure anything came of that. I have half a mind, though, to try something with Lithuanian Baseball. Not changing the rules of the game so much (although to some extent--a mercy rule? seven innings?), but building a sports league from the ground up. Starting with an abandoned lot and some bats made out of axe handles, put some teams together and see what you can do...

If business is slow this week at the store, as I expect it will be, I may have enough time to throw together some Alpha rules and components. It'd have some challenges that don't exist so much in a football game--I'd like some simple rules for park effects, for example. The games in Ironman football are very simple, and are by no means the centerpiece of the game (which is budgeting a franchise and negotiating with the other players); I'd like the games in LBL to be simple, too, but allow one to maintain (if they so desired) some statistics on the individual players (and we know how much baseball fans love statistics).

Lithuanian Baseball League: One more for the project pile...

FEBRUARY, 55 BC

Enough prologue.

I think I've managed to internalize most of the rules--at least most of the ones that have come up--so I should be able to do a few turns a week, at least. Of course, this first turn sees relatively little action--since it's, like, winter and stuff--so I may have a false sense of optimism here.

Anyway, the turn order is this:

Gauls
Caesar
Pompey
Crassus
Cicero
Parthians

This turn, along with what they did (which isn't much), I'll give a sense of their position and what their basic plans are. I can also send anyone who wants one a photo of a part of the board, if you'd like it a little clearer what's going on.

Some general statements...I'd like to get Egypt into the game, but I'm not sure how. Right now, it's neutral but Cicero (since he controls Rome at the beginning) gets to import the grain. If the level of grain getting to Rome falls below a certain level, corn revolts can take place, which would be the motivation of somebody (I'm thinking Crassus) to try to take it over. If someone invades Egypt, it gets a randomly-generated army to defend itself with, which can range anywhere from Extreme Badass to Basically Luxemburg. If Crassus knocks out the Parthians--don't count on it--I may have him take on Egypt in an attempt to cause corn revolts for Cicero.

The Triumvirs are basically going to try to deal with their Assigned Barbarians first, then go after Cicero/each other, whichever they run into first. It may also depend on how big Cicero can get his army and where he can put it.

On to the turn...

The Gauls go first. Caesar has a line of forts in central Gaul manned by very good legions and a good subordinate, Licinius. There is also a small stack of Gauls allied to Caesar in Brittany. I'll call them Vichy Gauls for now. The Free Gauls are mostly along the Channel coast, with a few in the interior towards Germania. They're all too far away to attack Caesar--only two hexes away, but it's winter, Gaul's covered in forests and mountains (not a "clear" hex in the whole place), there are no roads, and it's winter--meaning, basically, that it's almost impossible to move in Gaul right now.

The Gauls decide to, for the most part, coalesce themselves. There's a fleet, a leader, and some light infantry in Britain--I move them over to another stack in Gaul proper. Since it's winter, there's a risk that the fleet sinks, but it passes its die roll. Over in Brittany, a small stack with a good leader joins a large stack with a mediocre leader, and move south one hex (using all their movement allowance--like I said, it's rough going) to take a whack at the Vichy Gauls.

Combat's fierce in this game. In most wargames, when there's a battle somewhere one side loses, I dunno, 1/4 of its strength and retreats, and the winner loses maybe 1/8 and advances. None of that namby-pamby bloodless fighting here. In IR2, usually one side gets completely wiped out, and as often as not the winner loses half his units, it seems like. (Slight exaggeration for the winning side.)

Morale's a big deal in this game--everyone starts with about 100 points (Caesar and Pompey, a little more), and when you run out, it's game over. If you're in combat with someone with 50 or more points than you, you get a combat malus. Morale is a Good Thing. It goes up and down, mostly, with your fate in combat. If you don't attack anyone (in summer), morale goes down. (Nobody minds not campaigning in winter.) If you lose a battle, it goes down. If you win, it goes up. It also goes down for the units you lose (the bigger the unit, the bigger the effect). The Gauls won the battle (+2) but lost two light infantry (-2), so their morale stays put. Caesar loses morale for his allies, who lost the battle (-2) and lost two light infantry and a fleet (-7) for a loss of -9.

In this, the first battle of the war (at a site later called Darioritium--Dariotorix or some such in Gallic, I suppose), the Vichy Gauls get obliterated and the Free Gauls lose two light infantry units--over a quarter of their force.

The Gauls then check for supply. Again--it's winter, the whole place is forests, and there are virtually no cities: It's hard to stay in supply. The units along the coast--those in "port" hexes, anyway--are supplied automatically. The others check their stacking strength (heavy infantry is four points, light infantry is one point, etc) against the forage capacity of the hexes they're in (which is Way Low right now). Most of them have to spend a Supply Point (which is carried in baggage trains and move veeerrry sloooowly. These are going to feature prominently in later campaigns, I'm sure), of which they have a limited supply but what are you going to do?

The Gallaecians--which I henceforth shall refer to as the Galicians, since that's what they are in English and it's easier to spell--also move in this phase, and toy with the idea of taking a swipe at one of Pompey's lieutenants, but it's too risky--they need the whole stack to do it, and if they lose, that's the ballgame and Pompey gets a head start at winning the game. The Galicians take a pass.

Caesar has a less active turn. All his armies--which are within forage limits--pass, and Caesar himself just starts moving towards them to take command. He doesn't get particularly far, what with the weather, moving from Luca into the Alps.

Caesar's plan is--since it worked in real life, right?--to defeat the Gauls and move south, hope one of Crassus and Pompey dies, and make an "alliance" with the other to defeat Cicero, then turn on Crassus/Pompey. Caesar has by far the best troops, and he's the best leader--but he doesn't have much of a tax base yet. He needs to settle the Gauls' hash quickly, then start wresting control of recruitment provinces from Cicero/whoever. (Only certain provinces can provide the Roman armies with troops, and then only certain kinds, and in certain quantities per year. Italy can provide the most per year--several good legions, some light infantry, lots of fleets--whereas Crete, for example, can produce only one archer unit a year.)

Pompey also has a mild turn. He moves from Luca along the Mediterranean towards Spain, where he hopes for a swift victory over the Galicians. Then what? Well, he needs to at least have Caesar not take a stick to him for a while while he sees what he can do in the Mediterranean. Africa's thinly defended, as is Sicily, and can provide a nice jumping-off point for attacking Cicero. Or Crassus.

Crassus doesn't even move himself much. He has two major advantages over his Triumvir rivals: he has loads of money and can recruit in Italy. The disadvantage, for the moment, is that most of his troops are a zillion hexes away, bracing themselves against the Parthians and awaiting his arrival (although whether he'd be a better leader than Cassius, who is already over there, is another question). Crassus stays in Italy to raise some legions and some fleets, and plans to join his assigned front in late summer or early fall with some stout units in tow. In the middle east, of course, Winter doesn't have any movement effects, and it's all cultivated and easy to supply units, so that's a plus.

The minus is that the Parthians are over there, and in a lot of, like, mountains and stuff. I've decided to play with some optional rules that make sense to me--relevant here is the rule that gives the army with the most missile units a bonus in combat, which of course includes horse archers.

Crassus also moved some units and a leader around in Italia--including two unseasoned legions--to Itrium, which has a port (for quick getaways) and is in rough terrain, to provide a base to raise units from in Italia that's hard to conquer.

Cicero has major problems. His advantage is that he is in nominal control of the best, richest, and most populous provinces in the game. He also starts with virtually all of the Roman fleet. His disadvantages are that he and his subordinate leader kind of suck as combat leaders (certainly compared to Caesar and Pompey, eh) and he has virtually no army--all the legions are with the Triumvirs, leaving Cicero with some light infantry auxiliaries. Cicero has to raise an army quickly, before the initial truce wears off between the Roman factions. The thing is, with only two leaders, he can only raise units in two provinces (you can only raise units in a province where you have a leader), so Cicero has to send himself or his only other leader elsewhere to raise units, and that's going to be tough for a little while. When winter goes away, and naval transport isn't as difficult, somebody's going to Macedonia, since that's the second-best recruiting station in the game (after Italia) and it keeps an eye on Crassus.

For the time being, though, he does nothing. The fleet, with Cicero's other general (I need a name for this guy--it's a generic leader in game terms), is in Neapolis waiting for the storms to die down and head to Macedonia. Cicero, with some other units, stays in Rome where he senses he's needed.

The Parthians await developments. Their units are all "light," which means it's easy for them to forage. They're in striking distance to some of Crassus's detachments and allies, but the odds suck so they sit tight.

The Parthians need some luck to win. Part of this "luck" comes from the fact that Crassus needs to attack them, so they can do the Fabian thing and try a Carrhae. (To mix metaphors slightly.) Even historically, though, they couldn't fulfill their victory conditions (retaking some Asian provinces), so they've got a tough road ahead of them.

---

I've been reading some other sites about IR2, and they seem to not much like the "lose morale for not attacking" rule. A lot of them discard it entirely. I don't want to do that, at least not for everybody. I'm modifying it like this:

If it's a summer turn, and a Triumvir has a Barbarian unit to attack (of their assigned Barbarian), he must do so or suffer the penalty. If all the (surviving!) Triumvirs have defeated their Barbarians completely, if they don't attack each other or Cicero in a summer turn (assuming, 'course, that the truce is no longer in effect), they take the penalty.

Cicero and the Barbarians don't have to attack anybody ever to avoid the penalty. I mean, their whole game plan was to watch everyone else beat themselves into submission.

Flavor text coming, but I may wait another turn or two.

CORRECTION!

OK--the Plutarch I'm reading isn't actually translated by Dryden, but by a committee with a Life of Plutarch written by Dryden stuck at the end. No matter; it's still the livliest translation I know of. Still recommended...

OH YEAH

Also:

1. I'm working on a nice Esperanto post. It'll be one of my shorter ones...
2. Many thanks also go out to Great Hall Games, which also links me on their homepage! Good stuff.
3. I like writing in outline format.
4. Feedback welcomed.

GOOD EVENING, AND WELCOME

My readership seems to have increased by leaps and bounds today, judging from the email "in" tray. Many thanks to Russ, who gave it a nice plug in the latest Russcon Report. Two notes:

1. I get a game! Woohoo!
2. I'm "esoteric"! Woohoo!

I get a game and a nice compliment in one link; I feel like declaring victory. What more can one do in life?

Anyway, with any luck some of y'all will be sticking around. I typically update this blog on the weekends. The major regular features, "On the Nightstand" (book notes) and "On the Table" (game notes) come on Friday, usually. Every so often there will be a weekday update, generally to comment on some news story or to update the game replay in progress. The last game, Blue vs Gray, sped along nicely--it's a clean, relatively simple game. The current game, Imperium Romanum, has yet to see its first replay post--it's a kitchen-sink game full of nuances (read: lots of rules) and historical flavor (read: lots of rules). I'm quite confident I can get a few months of game-time in this weekend.

Two comments inspired by mail:

1. Fans of Britannia should be sure to drop by Dan Becker's website, where he has an extended project to produce a deluxe version of the game, which I think you'll agree is practically the coolest thing ever. That and his trebuchet, and trebuchets are welcome additions to any home.

2. Apologies go out to anyone who feels they should have been notified earlier of the blog's existence. I kept the initial press release's distribution fairly low early on, given two factors:

A. I wasn't sure that many people wanted to read immensely long blog posts on mostly academic books and wargames, and
B. I wasn't at all sure I'd stick with this blog as long as I have. My willpower is weak and my attention span is short--evinced by the dozens of books I haven't finished, papers I haven't finished, games and figures I haven't finished...I'm amazed I haven't just gotten up in the middle of a post and just walked aw

ON THE NIGHTSTAND

Most of my reading has been taken up with re-researching my Great Statement on medieval economic history, tentatively titled How Everyone who has Written on Medieval Economic History Sucks and Why There's Only One Man Who Can Save the Field, Ahem. The title could stand an edit, but it's just for the drafts. I'm going to avoid discussing the paper, or its bibliography, for a little while yet, but it's going well: Having exhausted the patience of my local friends and coworkers expounding my theses, I went out to a nearby park, found a horse in some riding stables, and in twenty minutes I knocked it stone dead from boredom. Academia, here I come!

To break up the monotony, I have been (of course) reading other books. Chief among these has been the magnificent Joseph Epstein's Life Sentences, which is (um) also magnificent.

(I could have written that better, probably using some kind of set notation. It's been a while--a very long while--but the idea is to have the function "magnificence" apply to both the function "Joseph Epstein" and to Life Sentences, which is also a term in the "Joseph Epstein" function. So, something like

Magnificence([Joseph Epstein] [Joseph Epstein(Life Sentences)])

is what I'm aiming for, but I think I missed both it and the proper way to express that. A shame.)

The beauty of Life Sentences is that, unlike most of the other books one might find in a Literary Criticism section, he actually makes you want to read the books he's talking about. During my very brief sojourn as a would-be academic in medieval literature and critical theory (sure proof that, mental-health-wise, I ain't cured yet), I read my share of Important Books on Important Books, and it made me never want to open a book again. The "best" ones were what I call Studies Studies books, or books that talk about books that talk about books. I was very behind-the-times in my critical approach in that while I was fascinated by the reception history and theory of books--i.e., why it is that they resonate like they do (or don't) in their audiences--I'm also interested in the historical, cultural, and personal milieu in which the author operated. To hold both of these opinions simultaneously is a sure way, I discovered, to have one's applications round-filed at the nation's mid-major graduate institutions of higher learning. (It also didn't help that I called things "books" and "short stories" and "poems" and "cereal box nutritional information summaries" rather than "texts," which is a nice neutral term that doesn't privilege, say, Siddhartha over the phone book.)

Life Sentences is a series of essays on great and slightly-less-than-great authors and essayists. It begins with a discussion of Michel de Montaigne, which immediately led me to go out and buy a copy of Essays (this translation being that preferred by Epstein, and besides the guy's name is "Screech," which has to count for something). The next essay is on the great Greek/Egyptian/English poet C. P. Cavafy (which I invariably pronounce "Cafavy"), and, luckily, I already have a copy of his works, and so should you. Up next: VS Pritchett, who (as do all these folks) sounds like a wonderful writer and interesting personality, but (sadly) his collected essays are no longer in print. Next chapter: Fitzgerald. Yeah, I need a copy of Gatsby, I've been putting that off too long.

I skipped ahead, poorer (and richer, I like to think) by the essay, to "The Man Who Wrote Too Much," which very nearly performed the superhuman task of getting me to buy and read The Man Without Qualities, the immense, unfinished, rambling work by Robert Musil. It's supposed to be the third leg, as it were, of the early twentieth-century novel pantheon/table (along with In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses), but I can't but agree (based on my scant reading of it) with Epstein's characterization of the novel as "modern literature's most impressive failure." Owning this book, for a literary type, is akin to an engineer owning a picture (or video) of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shaking itself to bits, a powerful reminder of the forces at work and the disasters that can lay before us. It's an impressive attempt, though...maybe a better analogy is that admiring The Man Without Qualities is rather like admiring Scott's expedition to the South Pole. Musil came so close to putting together a timeless masterpiece, but still ended up freezing to death because he didn't have any dogs.

I'm going to work on this analogy and get back to you.

Reading about Montaigne, and reading Montaigne,

(Or, if you prefer: Alfred(Read([Montaigne] BookAbout[Montaigne])))

I started thinking about how Montaigne would be the perfect blogger. No, seriously--the blog is the perfect outlet for one to talk about one's strengths, passions, interests, opinions, work--essentially, it's a place to self-obsess and write to a vaguely-defined audience. Did Montaigne really do anything else? Granted, his essays aren't day-to-day things, but if MikeMontaigne.blogspot.com existed I'd sure read it for his 7,000 word article about food, which would turn into an extended digression on the history of medicine, which would have its own digression on the Peloponnesian War. It'd be great. Moral: The blog is only as good as the blogger. Which bears keeping in mind.

I've bought some other books this week, but I haven't read enough to really comment on them yet. (Although I really, really like the first five-and-a-third pages of The World of the Shining Prince.) I suspect I'm not the only one out there eagerly awaiting the upcoming Neal Stephenson opus, and I hope to give that a nice, full review when it comes out.

Until then, back to reading fascinating (really!) books on pre-industrial economic conditions.

ON THE TABLE

First off: I'm going to do some turn replays for the First Triumvirate this weekend, I swear. Been doing some research--to that end, I recently purchased the Dryden translation of Plutarch's Lives. Modern translations are, of course, excellent. They make Plutarch sound like a Modern, which is of course not bad (after all, he was a modern once upon a time), but Dryden makes him sound like a Great. It sounds all neat and old and portentious. Volume II has Pompey, Caesar and Cicero--did Plutarch do Crassus? I don't think so offhand--and is recommended reading for the First Triumvirate lay reader/gamer.

Anyway, it had been a light week for game purchasing, again (except for a mail-order item which has not yet arrived and will be commented-upon when it does), until (glory be) I discovered in my paycheck today that I had been given a (v. mild) promotion and pay increase. Woohoo! That meant, of course, getting a game, so I went down to the Hobby Shop and bought an old(ish) game I had been biting my knuckles on for some time: Summer Storm, Clash of Arms Games's big box on the battle of Gettysburg.

I'm always intrigued when I run across a game which is the only--or only sizeable--game the person designed. There's not much of a middle ground; either the game's hideous (and he never designed again out of shame/publisher disgust), or else it's a magnificent labor of love, with personal touches all over it. Summer Storm is very much in the latter camp. It was designed by Rick Barber, the great artist for Clash of Arms (among other duties), who does my favorite maps (well, him and Craig Grando at Against the Odds). CoA's Landships! is one of my favorite games anyway, but the terrific maps of WW1 trenches--and the extremely detailed counters he also did--pushes the game into another realm.

A lot of gamers don't notice the maps, or at any rate don't pay them much mind as long as they're not terrible--clean lines, clear print, and no clutter. GMT's maps are, for the most part, a model of the Nothing Wrong map--they're great, they're functional, but I don't feel like they add anything to the game. (This is not an indictment; I have several maps which certainly do detract from the game. Rise of the House of Sa'ud comes to mind...shiver.) Rick Barber's maps, on the other hand, are suitable for framing. I love a good map, probably in large part because ever since I was about ten I've been a compulsive map-drawer, and I like to think I've become rather good at it myself. I've drawn, gosh, thousands of maps over the years--large and small, finished (few) and unfinished (essentially all of them), colored and uncolored. I entertain fantasies of becoming a professional map artist for some fantasy RPG publisher, but then I remember that I could make just as much money selling lint door-to-door. So I like a good map.

And, folks, if there's a better map of the Gettysburg Battlefield--anywhere, never mind in games--I don't know what it would be.

Rick Barber lives near Gettysburg, and the amount of time, effort, and passion he put into the game is immediately obvious when you open the box and--as most gamers do--lay out the map on the nearest (large) flat surface. For starters, it seems as though every damn thing on it is labeled. Did you know, for example, that marching along the Harrisburg Road northeast from Gettysburg you pass, in order:

Kuhn's Brickyard
J. Crawford's orchard
The Almshouse Run creek
The Adams County Almshouse itself (which is a complex of seven buildings, it looks like)
G. Weismantle's farm
Joseph Benner's farm, across the Rock Creek
A little road to J. Kimes's place

...and on and on and on. Each of the above is penned in and labeled. I've spent the past fifteen minutes poring over the map, immersing myself in the world of this little part of Pennsylvania, ca. July 1 1863. This page from Consimworld gives a few pictures of the map and counters, which (I daresay) don't do it justice.

(I'm told that the artist labeled his own house...I haven't found it yet, though!)

I've owned this game for all of five hours, so I haven't gotten much of a chance to play it. Its neatest feature, at least to me, is that the (campaign) game starts on two smaller maps, where the players play a double-blind game to determine how the battle takes shape. Lee can come down different roads, the armies can meet in other places and in other ways--you don't put your units down on the battlefield tactical map until the two sides can "see" each other. Obviously this isn't perfectly foggy, since the players have to call out to each other (in the absence of an umpire) what hexes something's entering, but I suppose that this, at least, could have been known to some degree of certainty in the real operation.

Buy it for the maps, stay for the game, that's what I say.

ON THE TABLE: SUPER-EXTRA-SPECIAL-BONUS EDITION

Just picked up the Settlers of Catan travel edition. How cool is this?! I'm a complete sucker for miniaturized things of any kind, but this is fantastic. It's not a perfect translation of Settlers--I wish there were a way to mix up the location of the desert--but it's ver' nice. I'm almost to the point of trying to play this thing solitaire just so I can fiddle with the teeny-tiny plastic settlements and cities. A must-have! The Mayfair edition--which is in English, unlike the link above--has hit the distribution channels, so shoot Great Hall a line for your copy today.

THE NEW GAME

Let's go and make Wargame Serials a new staple of MRaTLU (catchy, that), and start a new one.

The next game up is the First Triumvirate scenario of Imperium Romanum II, designed by Albert A Nofi and published by West End Games back in 1985.

While all wargamers--and wargame designers--are history buffs, very few are actual professional or academic historians. There's a sense that gamers aren't "serious" about history, and this was drilled home time and again by one of my history teachers at UT, Dr. Lamphear--every other class, it seemed like, he'd take another potshot at wargamers. Wargamers, to Dr. Lamphear, were the perfect antithesis to serious historical work and study, folks who--to use one of his lines--wanted to give Alexander a Sherman tank at Arbela.

Two notes:

1. Most wargamers either frown on such anacronistic mixings, or at least see them as fun diversions (but never as "real history"), and
2. Alexander sure didn't need a tank at Arbela. The Persians did, maybe.

Anyway, there are a few exceptions to the rule. One of them is Warren Treadgold, the prominent Byzantinist (whose magnum opus, A History of the Byzantine State and Society, I recommend heartily to all) whose first published game, Holy Roman Empire, designed with the help of Richard H. Berg, is coming out at some point in the next year or so from Phalanx Games. Another is Albert A. Nofi, who has written widely and well on a wide range of military history topics, and for several years was one of the premiere game designers, and Imperium Romanum II is one of his best-regarded achievements.

IR2 seeks to do nothing less than portray all the major (and not-so-major) campaigns of Rome from the Republic's death rattle through Justinian. It's not a "game," so much, for many of its scenarios--Nofi makes no attempt to balance the scenarios in either historical or game terms ("the Macer player wins if he manages to survive a single battle"). This, perhaps, reduced its popularity at the time, but as the years have gone by solitaire play has become more popular amongst gamers than playing face-to-face (mostly for lack of opponents, rather than antisocial tendencies), and I think this game is due for a new audience.

I first played this game--I forget which scenario; we didn't come close to finishing--years ago, when I was (I think) a sophomore in college and had just discovered the Austin gaming scene. After a Saturday meeting of the Austin Boardgamers Group, a few of us went to this guy's house (forgot your name; sorry, but thank you) where, ably assisted by his collection of small noisy dogs, we tried to get through a scenario. It was rough going; only he had ever played before, I think, and explaining the rules to us just found us in a morass. It was something like 1 AM when we finally started, and...did we finish a turn? I forget.

That said, I was sufficiently intrigued that I acquired the game at my first opportunity, but I've never gotten a chance to play it--until now.

With the valued input from nearly half of my readership, I've decided to go with the First Triumvirate scenario (as some readers may remember, I mentioned this earlier). The game has six "major powers:" the Gauls, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cicero and the conservatives, and the Parthians. Gallaecia (NW Spain) is an active minor power controlled (in game terms) by the Gauls, but I think essentially (as I'm everybody) they'll be independent. Egypt is a neutral minor power to start with; whoever has Rome can draw grain supplies from Egypt for a price, as long as Alexandria is either under his control or neutral.

The various Roman factions begin the game--Feb. 55 BC--in a fragile alliance, the exact start of the Civil War being provided by a spark outside any player's control--i.e., a roll of the dice.

The game lasts, reasonably enough, until one side wins. The various victory conditions:

Caesar: Eliminate a whole bunch of Gauls (300 strength points), be the sole Imperator (the others being Pompey, Crassus, and Cicero--i.e., his Roman opponents. Don't get hung up on refering to Cicero as "imperator")

Cicero: Be the sole imperator

Crassus: Kill 100 SP of Parthians and be the sole Imperator

Gauls: Hold their starting areas, and take over Narbonensis and Cisalpina

Pompey: Conquer Gallaecia and be sole Imperator

Parthia: Hold their starting areas, and take over Armenia, Cappadocia and Syria

Again, each post of the replay will have a gamey description, followed by a Noted Historian's take on the proceedings. I may play around with the latter bit, and have more than one historical "voice" giving commentary--a Roman historian, perhaps a Gibbonesque character, some modern (and postmodern!) types...I also hope that, considering the enthusiasm of some of my readership for this period, I may have some non-me (even not-my-alter-ego) commentary.

I may have a rule screw-up here and there--this is essentially a first playing, after all--but I have high hopes for this. Now, downstairs to set it all up...

(A note on the rulebook. It weighs in at about 24 pages, not including commentary and bibliography, which strikes me nowadays as being pretty darn long. In the store today, though, I glimpsed this beastie, which is 196 pages. 196. I'm too old--or is it "too young"?--for that.)

ON THE TABLE

Three new toys this week:

Norseman!, from Simulations Canada

SimCan always seemed to do good stuff, or at least interesting stuff. I look at the back cover of the rulebook, which details their other games, and there's not a single one that isn't intriguing in some way. I have one other game of theirs, Jihad, on the rise of Islam.

This one is about the Kingdoms of the North Sea and their development from 900-1050. It's a game for (ahem) 2 to 78 people. In a "real" game (of six or less players), everybody gets a kingdom or two--Scotland, Ireland, England, Norway, Wales, or Denmark--and tries to keep their Jarls and whatnot under control. Raid your neighbor! Conduct long-distance trade! Revolts! Unruly nobles!

There's a lot going on in this game, which may have something to do with the fact that after having read the rules twice, this game makes absolutely no goddamned sense whatsoever. Try again later...

Rus, from Simulations Workshop

This completes my collection of the major "Britannia"-style games, which is one of my favorite series. The basic idea is that you have a geographic entity--Britain for Britannia, Iberia for Hispania, India for Maharajah, and so on--and each player has under his control a series of invading peoples. Each "tribe" gets its own victory points, and you add up what each one gets you, and there you go.

(It makes more sense if you play.)

Anyway, Rus is a game depicting all of Russian history from 200 BC to 1584. If you're the Red player--say--you start off with the early Slavs, who become the Eastern Slavs later. Then you get the Sarmatians, Merya, Bulgars, the Kievan Rus, some Scandinavians, and the Teutonic Knights. (The Scandinavians came to Russia all kinds of times. The Green player gets Viking raiders of his own.) Blue starts with the Krivichi, then the Magyars, Huns, Pechenegs, the Principality of Novgorod, Suzdal, the Poles, and Kazan.

How can you not love this stuff? Definitely on the "To Play" pile. Instead of Norseman. I'm told it's unbalanced, but hey: That's what solo play is for.

North Wind Rain, Against the Odds magazine issue 5

Gosh darn I love Against the Odds. It's one of three major magazines-with-games out there today. I like two of them--Vae Victis and Against the Odds.

ATO is a magazine geared towards the real geeks of the historical gaming hobby. It focuses on how mechanics and design work to depict history, and what their defects are. Take this issue, for example. I haven't played the game--it's gorgeous, though, like all their games; check out the website above--but I've read most of the articles. The highlights:

"The Seven Days and Atlanta: Similarities and Differences" is possibly the most interesting game-related article I've read in a very long time. The meat of the article is a discussion of how various games treat the Seven Days and Atlanta battles, what the mechanisms employed do well or poorly, and what the campaigns themselves might say about how future games should be run. One comment that especially caught my eye is his suggestion that the hallowed wargame convention of giving the defender a benefit in fighting for a city may not be warranted--there are a lot of aspects of city fighting (at least in the Civil War) that do not confer benefits to the defender. It's a complicated issue, and one I hadn't previously considered.

"Simulation Corner" in this issue was written by John Prados, and deals with him thinking aloud as to what kind of game mechanics should be employed to simulate the CIA's Project Success in Guatemala. I'm not sure a game can come out of this, but I'd buy it if it did...

Ben Hull's "Grand Tactics of the Mid-17th Century" is not strictly game-related, but it's hard to read this article and not think about his recent game, "Sweden Fights On," the battles of which he discusses in some detail.

It's good stuff. Fascinating articles, beautiful games, and some of the best layout work I've seen in a magazine. Worth every penny.

ON THE NIGHTSTAND

Kind of a light week, I think. Most of the books will be coming up later; a lot of crunchy historical material. For now, just a few "Why I Bought This Book" articles of the type we've all grown fond of.

Histories: French Constructions of the Past, edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt

It was French structuralist historiography which made me the "Academic" historian I am today, and if you need any further reason to avoid this book--especially if you hope to become an academic yourself--you need read no further.

Kidding, of course...but it's quite true that I never considered studying history to be anything other than an excercise in trivia accumulation until I was assigned to read much of Fernand Braudel's magnum opus, Civilization and Capitalism. I had long dabbled in archaeology, and was fascinated by how folks lived: What they ate, how much they earned, the nuts and bolts of daily life. Braudel was the first historian who made this his primary concern--at least in many of his works--and this intrigued me to no end.

My next extended brush with French structuralist history came, inevetably, with my interest in medieval historiography. A great many of the finest (or merely the most famous) medievalists in the twentieth century are French--Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Marc Bloch, Jacques le Goff, Georges Duby (my bête noire, who shall be dealt with later)...great names.

The interesting thing about them, I learned, is that for many of them there was an ideological process of historical work, which in some cases tended to overshadow the need to be a rigorous historian. The most famous example of this is Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. I think everyone should read it; it's a magnificent story beautifully told. It's about a small town--Montaillou--in southern France, which was a hotbed (in several ways) of Catharism. The book details the spread of the heresy, and how it affected the personal lives of the villiage's inhabitants.

That said, it's a quite flawed book. It draws on only one source--the incomplete records of the Inquisition sent to root out the heresy and the associated transcripts of the trials and interrogations. This document seems to be one that needs to be handled with care. First, consider the quality of the testimony the Inquisition might have produced, and how it might have produced it. Second, the transcript was made as follows:

1. The Inquisitor asks a question in Latin.
2. The question is translated into the local tongue.
3. The answer is translated into Latin.
4. The next day, the whole works is written down in Latin.

My major complaint with the work is that it's simply not cautious enough with the source (there have been many other complaints lodged against it).

But like I said, it's beautiful.

The rise and fall (?) of French Structuralist historiography is, I think, one of the major untold stories of twentieth-century academia. It, and its major journal, Annales, reigned supreme. Montaillou was a worldwide bestseller--for a while in the US, cheapo editions were for sale in supermarkets where they sell romance novels and pulp lawyer novels today. It was hot. Le Roy Ladurie boasted of getting any kind of tail he wanted promoting his books/himself. (I'm not kidding. He led of a speech with his tales of conquest once.) These were rock stars, especially in France. Now, not so much. (The intellectual sex symbol in France these days seems to be Bernard-Henri Levy. Le Roy Ladurie, I suppose, has grown old less gracefully.)

This book--and it's a thick one, with hardly any margin space--collects, by my count, a zillion articles and book extracts which show how postwar French historiography evolved--its titans, its squabbles, its ideological spitting contests. My only complaint is that it centers itself on post-1945 historians. This shows the transition from Structuralism to Poststructuralism nicely, but I don't think Structuralism can really be understood unless you go back to Bloch and Pirenne [He's Belgian! --ed.] in the twenties and the work they did. Still, it's the only book of its kind in English (and if there's one in French--or Swahili, heck--I don't know about it).

The week's two other titles are also medieval:

Medieval Economic Thought, by Diane Wood, and

A History of Business in Medieval Europe, by Edwin Hunt and James Murray

These two make a nice set, I thought: The Ideal vs. the Real. I haven't had much of a chance to read either of them yet; I expect this to change. My plan is to bounce these two books off of each other and see what happens. They overlap pretty well--Economic Thought goes from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, so it's not perfect, but I think the main thrust of the argument should hold nicely.

The question that comes to mind, when I think about how I'm approaching these books, is: What effect does economic thought have on economic practice? The Greeks had only the barest inkling of "economics" as we conceive it, and the Best and Brightest detested manual labor and trade as being beneath the life of a gentleman, but then again the Greeks were the most ambitious traders of the age (with a nod to Phonecia).

Another thought: What effect has linguistic study (I'll include philology here) had on language? I think there may be a similar dynamic at work. I don't know myself, though...

The Cambridge Medieval Textbooks are great little things, by the way. They're recent, they're by reasonably prominent people, they're footnoted out the wazoo...major time savers if you're studying a topic they cover.

CHESS NOTES

The two games I've invested the most time and money in over the years have been Chess and Go, the twin towers of abstract games for the past several centuries. I have somewhat more books on Chess than Go, if only because--well, there are more books out there on Chess. Despite all my efforts, my abilities in both games are risible (although I'm probably better at Go, if not by much. I have, for instance, won serious games of Go before in my life).

I recently finished my most recent Chess book purchase, Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess, and I'd like to discuss it for a bit, and give it a patzer's review.

First off, the back-cover blurb on the book is worse than most. This book no more discusses "advanced, highly strategic play" than it discusses the Ming Dynasty. I mean come on: It starts off with how the pieces move and rumbles on for 350 pages of reasonably large text with diagrams. There's just no room for "advanced, highly strategic play" and the book's audience wouldn't understand it if there were any.

About the audience: This book is aimed towards the first- and second-largest markets for chess books. There are several market classifications out there for Chess instructional material--from largest to smallest:

1. Folks who cannot play Chess
2. Folks who play Chess so poorly the pieces disintegrate rather than face the prospect of being touched by such players
3. Folks who think they're good at Chess, but aren't
4. Folks who are actually kind of OK at Chess

No other group is large enough to worry about. That said, a lot of advanced material gets put out every year, mostly about what to do after move 15 in the Sicilian Dragon, and these books are about 450 pages long and have very tiny print indeed. These books are most useful to folks in a putative Class 5, but are bought mostly by people in Class 3.

(I'm a Class 3 Go player, and a Class 2 Chess player. I'm a Class 5 Taj Mahal player, and that's about it.)

Anyway, Ultimate Guide is for Classes 1 and 2.

It's written in the form of a dialogue between a Teacher (let's call him "Bruce") and a student, who comes into the lecture having heard a bit about Chess from his classmates, doubtless, who have been playing Chess at lunch hour.

I say that, because that's how I first became interested in Chess. My senior year in High School, we got a transfer student--Matt--who was a Class 4 player, and for some unknown, unknowable reason he touched off a chess craze throughout the school. Class breaks were silent as we sat hunched over our boards in thought. Looking back on it, it was less like Alekhine analyzing a position against Capablanca than a seagull analyzing the Space Shuttle, but there you have it.

This guy was also the head of the (newly-founded) Chess Club, and the school's chess instructor. His most common pupil was a kid named Mike, who was incredibly dense and I'm now told is a public defender in St. Louis County. Figures. Anyway, Mike was determined to Learn Chess, and thus cornered our local grandmaster (snort) every chance he got. The tutor (Matt) would sit across from Mike, set up the pieces in the opening array, and always began the lesson with Basic Opening Principles. He had a unique way of making Mike learn. It didn't work, but nothing the other teachers did worked either:

MATT: OK, Mike, what did I tell you about the opening?
MIKE: I should work to control the center squares.
MATT: Right. What else?
MIKE: I should try to move each piece once before I move it again.
MATT: Right. What else?
MIKE: Knights before Bishops.
MATT: OK. Let's try it. Make a move.
MIKE: [moves the King's Knight to rook three--Nh3]
MATT: NO! [Smacks MIKE upside the head]
MIKE: Oww! What was that for?
MATT: OK, look. Does the knight occupy or attack the center from there?
MIKE: [hangs head] No.
MATT: OK, put the knight back on g1.

And so it would go, with Mike making a hideous move and getting negative reinforcement from Matt for the duration of the study hall.

I never had a real teacher, myself, even being a Mike to someone's Matt. The best advice I got was from a solid Category 5 player I knew in college, whose only lesson for me was "Stop hanging your pieces." Sound advice, that.

So I'm going to review this book--Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess, in case you forgot--even if it kills me. The style of the book--the way the paragraphs are written--can be kind of obnoxious. Lots and lots of puns (God help us if Pandolfini takes up Go). That said, the book has one shining virtue: The student asks the same questions I do. "I have an idea," goes a typical Student entry. "why don't I [make this or that hideous move]." At which point Bruce steps in and, more gently than Matt, upbraids the Student and points out how that particular move hangs a Bishop.

I can't not recommend the book for Class 2 players, although for Class 1 players the later chapters may be a bit much. Stylistic issues aside, it answers the questions this patzer has about very ordinary positions. I do wish it had gone a bit more in-depth about how to think about a position--how to analyze--but there are other books for that, and this is really a fairly inexpensive volume and worth every penny for the terrible chessplayer.

(It's lines like that that'll keep me off the backs of books.)

There has been a recent upswing in "Socratic" Chess books, I've noticed. Andy Soltis has had a couple, the most recent being Grandmaster Secrets: Openings. That one was better-written, but also for a player a skosh more advanced than Pandolfini's audience.

I THINK THAT'S THE BALLGAME

I think the lesson of this game is "Alfred should never take the Confederacy in real life." Honest to God: That's the worst run of luck I've ever seen. It took forever for the CSA to get a real general, while the Union had Grant from the start. One hideous die-roll after another. Confederate card-drawing luck improved markedly starting with the turn Lee came out, but the die rolling never came. I'm surrendering on behalf of the Confederacy.

For the record, I do think that the CSA has something like a 1/20 shot of winning the game in some fashion in "game" terms--mainly by doing something heroic in the West and hurting Northern chances before the election--but I don't think it's worth it. I do hope it provided interesting reading, though, as I certainly enjoyed writing it.

Any suggestions as to which of the following games to do next?

--Imperator/Ancients: A campaign game of Ancient history, using the "Ancients" game to run the battles
--Soldier Kings, a game on the Seven Years War worldwide
--Medieval, an aforementioned card game
--100 Years War, a game on (guess what) at one year per turn
--Britannia, a game on the history of Britain from Way Early to William the Conqueror. Or perhaps one of the others in the series? I have just about all of them, I think: Maharajah (India), Hispania, Rus is on the way...
--Something else. Hit me with a topic

Lee was unable to bring his army back under control. Morale was at a low following one defeat after another, and over the few days after the disaster at Goldboro the Army of Northern Virginia melted away under the strain of desertions and defections. Lee surrendered to Grant, who graciously agreed to allow Lee and his army to leave without being disturbed, after they laid down their rifles. As news of the defeat spread west, other Confederate forces melted back into the countryside.

While the Federal armies were nowhere near the new capital at Atlanta, Davis and his cabinet could read the writing on the wall and once again hit the rails fo the nearest port. It would be some time before Grant could reach Savannah, and the cabinet elected to try to flee to Europe via a blockade runner. Once at the port, at the last minute they split up their party, and their belongings, on separate ships so at least somebody could get away.

Davis's ship was caught by the first line of blockading navy ships, and was sunk after a brief exchange of cannon fire. It was not discovered that Davis was aboard until after the survivors had been rescued and some of them--including Davis's secretary, Burton Harrison--told the Federal navy men about their illustrious shipmate. Davis was never found and was presumed drowned.

Judah P. Benjamin, the secretary of state, and Attorney General Watts escaped the blockade and settled in Cuba. Both died there, having established a rum distillery which remains operational to this day under the Castro regime, and under its former name: "Rebel Rum."

The other members of the cabinet were all captured, either trying to run the blockade or shortly after landing in England and France--which were less warm to the Rebel cause than they believed. All were pardoned in a general amnesty in 1873.

I don't think anything else I say about the postwar settlement would be taken well, so I'll pass...

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

OK, let's roll some dice for the Battle of Goldsboro.

Grant has 41 SP to Lee's 24, so Grant gets +1 on the red die. (Rebel Yell only works on the attack.) Rolling...

Uh-oh.

6 on the red die (can't be any higher), 4 on the white die. Defender routed, with normal casualties.

So the CSA takes an extra casualty step, i.e. 8. The North takes 5. The Union takes Goldsboro.

Lee's scouts reported that his adversary Grant had camped at Goldsboro, and hastened to meet the invader and check his progress. On a dark, foggy morning in March, the opposing forces blundered into each other.

For six hours the two sides blasted away at each other, and it was amazing that the Rebel morale held as long as it did. Grant's forces were well dug-in, and Lee's Army of Northern Virginia took a ferocious pounding for the entire day. When Lee finally sounded the retreat, his army was shattered. His army stretched along the road to Wilmington for miles, shedding materiel along the side to pick up speed.