The Mulligan

In the words of Douglas Macarthur, "I have returned".
In the words of Lois Lane, "I didn't notice you were gone".

Back when this blog started, I wrote "let's see if the laziness that has stalled all my attempts at creating a website has met its match"....obviously not.  

But maybe the second time's the charm, so let's take another run at it. First of all, some catching up. We lost one of our little player triumvirate as he went and got himself happily married. However the remaining duo turned into the nucleus of a small gang, and there's about a half-dozen of us now, meeting relatively regularly, pushing tin and plastic and generally getting on each other's nerves.

We did get 'round to playing the Schellenberg eventually, although not in the exact version we'd been designing as by that time we had already begun to veer into the Seven Years War and Napoleonics. A few of us had a large and beautifully made 20mm collection for the period, and they were quickly repurposed into Volley&Bayonet-compatible stands. Three of us also joined a gaming club (contractually obligated plug: http://www.espairos.gr/portal/ , legally mandated warning: it's in greek) which gave us a large gaming space that -most importantly- didn't also serve as someone's dining room, and came complete with storage space. So off we went, playing everything from Sacile to Fontenoy to Napoleon's brilliant but doomed battles defending France in 1814 (with the occasional non-V&B colonial, WWI or air combat game) .

But the crowning achievement in this whole shebang was the 200th anniversary of the 100 Days. With the befuddled but firm support and encouragement of the rest of the club, in June 2015 we set up and played all four significant battles of the campaign, one on each Saturday, culminating in a Waterloo refight with all told about a dozen players passing around the table and two thousand figures on it. This is what it looked like:

We were very happy gamers indeed.


I got a little bit of gaming burnout after that, to be honest, and dropped off, but the rest of the conspirators kept the flag flying and other metaphors, and they've finally brought me back into the fold. And one of the first things they said was "hey, how 'bout that blog, d'you still have it?". So...here we are. Let's see how it will go- as Ian Anderson once wrote "some things reheat even better second time 'round".