100%Blade! It's your turn!
I've spent the last two weeks in beautiful (?) Carlisle, PA, home to the US Army archives. I'm technically a semi-employee; I have a dress code, I come in at a certain time, leave at a certain time, and get a lunch break, the works. It's a three-week special internship, for which I am paid from a private grant. It's supposed to give me a running start to my dissertation, and it's certainly done that. For one thing, I realized that I'm really researching a navy story, not an army story...but there's still plenty here.
My favorite unit that comes up--often--in my study is the Mississippi Marine Brigade. This could easily be considered the worst unit in the Union army. They were stationed on a largish number of boats commanded by BGEN Alfred Ellet. The idea was that they would sail to a hotspot, put the boats close to shore, lower some gangways and send hordes of cavalry ashore to deal with the problem. In practice, the MMB were essentially vikings. The difference between "Rebel cavalry" and "probably innocent town" were a little fuzzy to the MMB. As was discipline. In one memorable incident, the marines (who should not be confused with the US Marine Corps of today) at a prearranged signal staged mutinies on board all the ships to ostensibly protest rations, but I can't help imagining that they just wanted to go pirate. In the end, nothing happened to them after order was restored. But they're an interesting approach to the problems of occupying a vast waterway.
So that's been my life. No gaming has been done, but I did get two games delivered here for...some...reason? Anyway, I now have the new Pegasus edition of Top Race, which completes the set for me. (I'm not going to try to get all the Top Race editions.) Probably my favorite racing game system; I'm eager to try this out. I also got a copy of Royal Palace, under the theory that I should own any game I can win. (If I stuck to this, and made it ONLY games I've won, I'd have a vastly smaller collection...)
What I do have here is my Combat Commander kit. Mr. Cranky has expressed a desire to try a wargame again, and this is the one that has been settled upon. It's one of my favorites, so why not? I'm putting together a scenario with relatively small numbers of units on a relatively terrain-free board, to minimize rule-age. I like that you can do this easily with CC; I know that it's part of a large series of games, but still. I love the rules, and I love the scenarios, but the simplicity of putting new, balanced scenarios together seals the game for me.
