72 Samurai and Other Things

I suppose it is only fair to show a little bit of what is happening on the more wargaming front, after last week’s extra musing on various, arguably more peripheral subjects. So here we go with some things more directly related. And some things which, you could say, are simply fluff.

First off, you can see above the revised campaign map, with all the pins transferred from the old Eurasia-only map. I have not yet populated Africa, but you can see it on the lower left of the picture. Some of it is necessarily sketchy, of course, as the civilisations were largely non-scribal, so there are no real records until the Europeans arrived.

The first printed version of the map was too large for my cork board, and so this is the condensed version, printed out of six sheets of A4 paper and taped together, as you can see. I could have got a larger cork board, I suppose, but that seemed a bit excessive. In fact, this map is the same size as the old one; it just has Africa added to the lower left, as it happens, although the original did have North African states on it.

You might wonder, after last week’s post about the Atlantic World and the slave trade, where the Americas are. Well, I have a cunning plan, I think. If you look closely on the left-hand edge of the picture, you can see some larger boxes. These are labelled ‘Spanish America OBZ’, ‘Caribbean OBZ’ and so on. The ‘OBZ’ part stands for ‘Off Board Zone’, and is an idea I nicked from a board game, I think, although do not ask me which one, as I cannot recall. If you examine the map more closely, you can also see various other off-board zones in Siberia and the Pacific. The idea is that units in transit across these areas can be represented on the map but not intercepted, as these zones are a good deal larger than the usual province-sized boxes.

The idea, then, is to have separate maps of the different OBZs of the Americas, to which forces can move via the on-map off-board zones. I should note, I suppose, that some OBZs have disappeared from this version of the map, specifically the East and West Africa zone, and the Indian Ocean. But I can map the Americas, probably in less detail, and include such things as the fact that the Portuguese sailed from Portugal to Brazil and then round the Cape of Good Hope, rather than down the coast of West Africa, in order to get to the Indian Ocean. Who knows, maybe my Aztecs and Inca will get a run out as Aztecs and Inca, rather than as substitutes for some other forces.

Of course, I would not be a wargamer without accumulating more toys, and an order arrived the other day from Irregular. I had been getting concerned (as you do) that my resources of Japanese were a bit thin after the great rebasing. And so I have ordered some more, and you can see some Samurai resplendent in their undercoat, with faces painted. I was going to do some more but, frankly, it is simply too hot, and the paint is drying on the brush.

In the storage box lid you can see more Japanese, Ashigaru of various hues and some cavalry. Still in the plastic bags are various items, ranging from a couple of trees to a bunch of singly mounted Indian officers, who will be roped in to act as order markers for the sub-continent if the powers there ever go to war, and also will be useful for the Ottomans and Africans. At least, that is the plan.

There are also some Indian maharajas on elephants now in stock, to be used as Indian generals, of course, as I have got a bit fed up with the generals being integrated with the elephant bases. I could, I suppose, have simply removed the general figures from the elephant bases and used them, but where is the fun in that? There are also some extra Chinese bowmen and Boxer figures.

Beyond that, I have also been trying to work on some climate, weather, and time rules. The weather is adapted from Charles Wesencraft’s With Musket and Pike, which needs a bit of adaptation to suit multiple climates. I have not got to the detail of that yet, except to note that my Times Atlas of the World describes a large number of different climates.

I have taken over the wind and smoke rules from my naval actions, and the first wargames with these will appear on the blog in due course (my battle reports are running behind the rule development). One consequence of all this is that I am starting to feel a need to track the time and the number of moves in the games. Up to now I have just decreed that night has fallen when, in rare cases, the action dies down.

Thus, I need a means of tracking this. So far, all the tracking has been done on various strips of plastic card with markers on them. These were originally done for the naval games, and so had naval markers which are smaller than my land game markers. Something, then, needed to be done, as my markers were falling off the tracks.

And so, above we have my new, shiny, ‘tracking table’. Working across, each move constitutes about fifteen minutes (thirty, as I recall, at sea), and so the left-hand column tracks two hours. The second column tracks the time on a 24-hour clock. All I have to do now is work out the rough times of sunrise and sunset in the different zones of activity on the map. This should not be too difficult (I hope), and so all I will need to do is work out the time the action starts and go from there.

The third column is the weather tracker. After each 8-move (2-hour) segment, the weather is diced for to see if it changes, and if it does, the change is recorded here. The right-hand column is, obviously, the wind, from total calm to ‘it's insane to be out in this’. Wind direction is handled using a pointer, which I got from Warbases, I think.

Hopefully you can tell that there is a fair bit of development going on in the background here, as well as the wargames. I am not there with the weather and day/night rules yet, nor the climates, but I have the ideas in mind, so long as they are not too long or tedious to implement. Keeping it simple is the watchword, as well as keeping the tracking of the weather conditions easy, as well as what they mean for the game.

For many, this might seem peripheral. Most wargames, including mine, assume fair weather conditions and enough wind to blow the smoke away, but not too much to cause any problems. For my games, this is going to change. I think.