I have been building up and playing with miniatures. The DBM and DBR pages have been updated for the first time in a long while. Also there is a page on storing 15mms. Amazingly I have got around to heeding the requests about the reds files being stuffed and have replaced the zip folder with the map sections. The HTML pages may lack the images (or not) but they are now in the zip as well

The Commands and Colors (sic) series by Richard Borg is a lot of fun. For my sins I have painted figures for all 3 games although these rarely get used as I usually play other peoples sets. The Ancients game took more effort than I had bargained for. I have posted a page showing how I got on.There are also some Memoir '44 pics . I have since flogged the Memoir figs and replaced them all with much the same stuff in 15mm.

I got back from Dixie (Beaufort SC) at the end of July 2003. Missing the 2003 auction was no great loss as the weather was significantly better in South Carolina and I still have quite a pile of unplayed games.

While in the South I bought a few emergency games from boulder games. There is a games shop in Savannah on Montgomery Cross Rd on the way to Wormsloe. I have dropped in 3 times, they have a fair selection of real games but these are not any cheaper than buying by mail. Their main bread and butter seems to be GW stuff. I have a separate site describing my experiences over here in Beaufort. take a look . Chez moi: Temporary yahoo address.

I have bought Piquet and am trying to figure it out. My copy has no cards so I made up the 2 sets; these are customised for the Articles of Faith Pike and Shot supplement. I have put these with the download stuff. One of the files is a Word document and the other a PDF as Acrobat could not handle the combinations in the more complex card deck.

Someone made up very nice ADC2 modules for my 2 DTP games before I went to the USA. As my copies were stuck on a computer on a different continent on a drive that was boxed up for safe keeping they have been out of circulation. I have dug up the files and posted them here. If the author gets in touch I will put his name up here.

Battle Cry gets played a lot as it is short and a good hybrid of miniatures and German games. My miniature armies have not been out of the boxes for years (except for those I have sold and the new boys that I have painted). We can set up and play Battle Cry in about half an hour. I get to check ranges and roll dice and the fluffy gamers get to pick cards. There must be an element of chance because I have only ever won once. On that occasion I managed to draw the all out attack card twice (unlikely but legal). I am usually thrashed even when we play again and swap sides. I now have 2 sets having picked up a 2nd on Ebay at a fair price. For my sins I have painted the bits and made extra lines of hexes to make both boards line up. The Italian game Vive L'Empereur has a similar system for Napoleonics. The rules are on line, We played this out with the Eagle Nappy figures. It all worked OK; slightly more complex than Battle Cry.

The Eagle games look great. I bought them all except Attack but have only played WAR and Civilisation against a live opponent. I left Civilisation in the USA because it is so big and heavy although I am tempted to buy a new copy. The ACW game plays well solitaire despite the armies not fitting too well on the map. I just had to buy the Napoleon game although I am away so it will stay in the attic. Set up it is stunning, you need long arms to reach across the map. The French have more plastic sprues (3 and 1 for an ally) than the others (2 for Austria or Russia, 1 for the others). Together with combat advantage cards that the French start with they are going to be hard to beat. The problem with the Eagle games is the sheer size. The Manchester club meets in a tiny pub, no chance of setting them out. They were most unhelpul when I brougt along Age of Mythology, "Evil Games" they said. I believe that these games have played them in Romiley (MBG). Not the sort of game that you can tuck under your arm in the hope of a quick session. We do not have this problem with Battle Cry as nearly everyone has a copy. No kidding here, we had a gaming session where there were 3 copies in the room and a fourth (my copy) a few hundred metres down the road. With the Napoleon Eagle game playing Battle Cry in the Napoleonic period should be a breeze (see above).

I bought Europe Engulfed for a quite reasonable £55 on eBay from the states; nearly half of this being the postage hike. It arrived safely and I have played the tournament scenario and the full campaign against the same opponent. Rules are pretty obvious ‘roll a 6’ stuff but we missed quite a few of the details. The tournament took a long afternoon and was about long enough. The full campaign was setting us back up to 4 hours a game year and took 3 sessions to complete. I will not be selling yet but am still to be convinced. The game seems tightly scripted; it pays to redo what happened in the war. I left out invading Norway as the boche and was penalised by the Allies taking it; I lost production from Sweden and saw vast resources shipped to Uncle Joe. Similarly it appeared that Crete was worth visiting; the Allies worked that out and beat me there making an assault just too risky. As a contrast I am playing someone else at Totaler Kreig. Here there are options as to who to ally with giving risks and tradeoffs. As this game has been sat idle for a while I tried to fast forward solo using another copy of the game. It took off in its own direction; although I tried to mimic the political ploys events happened that just could not be passed up. You don’t get this in Europe Engulfed; the feeling here is of commanding armies but someone up there decides where they ought to go. Perhaps the Europe Engulfed political rules could be fleshed out. The downside here is the time involved in playtesting the game variants.

The MBG or Manchester Board Gamers are what they seem. They meet twice a month in Romiley, which is South of Manchester, in the North of England. Their home is the Sea Scouts hut that looks as though it was thrown up to shelter bombed out refugees during the last war. It probably was. They hold an auction of games every year on the 1^st Saturday of March although check that as it can change.

Game Assistance Programs

I have written 3 stand-alone programs that will work with Windows '95 or better. Two are battle card players for "We the People" and "Hannibal". Unless I get any feedback of problems I regard these as complete and will not be changing them. They are designed for solitaire play but could be handy for pbm/pbem. The sole player takes the part of the attacker and enters the number of cards drawn by each side. The attacker's cards are visible and can be picked at will. The defender's cards are hidden and will be played to match cards played by the attacker. There is a measure of AI as the defender will play his best card if he counter-attacks. Matches to this by the attacker are automatic. I have slipped in the pursuit tables so you don't have to root for the dice after battles. Ironclads is just finished and may be tidied up - all depending on feedback. The program writes ship and gun data to disk so a battle can be set up and played over without having to put in all the data again. Speed and movement plots are not covered but all the armour and damage results are calculated and recorded. As this requires use of the msflexgrid control it has a set up program to update the user's Windows registry. Due to the size of the program there is a basic set up zip file and the latest .exe version. To update to the latest version just replace the .exe file.Ironclads notes.