Pocket Panzers

Although most of my wargaming career has been dominated by WWII wargaming, particularly Chain of Command, I'm a little ashamed to say that I've played just two games of Chain of Command this year. It's been a while since the blog has had any WWII content, so here's a few photos from a game we had Monday in which we finally returned to the brutal battlefields of the Eastern Front.

As the sun rises over the vast forests of the valley, Florian Vanderventer sits by the fire in his shirt-sleeves and studies a hastily penned message. Despite the roving bands of hostile natives and Frenchmen in the area, a courier managed to arrive with the note, having been dispatched from Albany a few days before. The militia captain notes with annoyance that the letter is addressed to "Capt. F. Venderventer," — these English colonists never could spell the Dutch "Vandeventer" correctly, and his father usually dictated his business correspondence rather than penning the dispatches himself. And it was a message from his father, one about business, at that. Requesting his input in a pending transaction concerning the fair rate for fur trappers in his father's employ, as well as the relative market prices and how the fighting with the French had affected them. Florian's father expressed concern at the fighting north of Albany, without asking after his son...

  When TooFatLardies published John Savage's Old West gunfight game What a Cowboy earlier this year, I was eager to make a jump to a new period and a new ruleset. I've played my fair share of Bolt Action, Chain of Command, and Sharp Practice, and was just starting to get into Warhammer 40K (more on that later).

"I'll never be one of those wargames bloggers that neglects the blog for months at a time, especially in the middle of a campaign series." - me, April 2023 Well, we saw how that worked out. Instead of boring you with the reasons for my absence, I'm going to just get on with the next entry in our French and Indian War campaign using Sharp Practice. I'll save the excuses for a hobby post somewhere down the road. I haven't been wholly unproductive, but very scatterbrained.

In the dim hours just before the sun rises high enough to illuminate the forest floor, the group of French colonial troops sit dejectedly in their camp, licking their wounds. A few of them gnaw at pieces of pork in the gunmetal light, cutting from the sow they'd hauled away from Little Eden the evening before and roasted. Their sergeant broods, honing his tomahawk impotently with a stone. Moccasined feet approach from where their Huron allies had been gathered smoking nearby. At their head, the French leader spies his native counterpart. The older indian looks big and beefy even draped in his red blanket. Hardheart tugs his knife from the sheath around his neck and hacks off a hunk of pork, biting it fiercely and swallowing. "Today. We take more from them," he says flatly. The Frenchman hardly hears him at first. "We should wait for new instructions, we've done our bit," the sergeant grouses, running his thumb along the blade of his hatchet. He doesn't t...