Tarragona Campaign

The campaign has now entered the "calm before the storm" phase. Suchet is approaching Tortosa and has discounted reports of Spanish activity around Tarragona. 1st Spanish army has reached Prades, just north of Tarragona, and is waiting for 2nd Spanish army to arrive.

Yesterday was a quiet day for the blog. I had to take a break to visit the local town with Jan to find some chemicals for my pool, which is causing me problems and costing me money. So we did not have our daily wargame move. This is a pity, because the campaign diary is catching up with the first battle, and the campaign will grind to a halt if we can not get the game finished.

Those of you who have been paying attention will recall that we have experienced great difficulty balancing the Spanish v French and at the same time giving it a flavour of Peninsular experience.

Last week we had fought the first two battles of the campaign, and were about 10 days ahead on the diary. The first game did not work well, but I left it and put the problem down to Jan rolling good dice and me rolling bad. However a very similar thing happended in the second game, and the campaign was in danger of becoming a shambles. Even though the campaign is only a framework to produce wargames, I always take the result of wargames direct back into the campaign, and refuse to refight a game because it gives me a problem with the campaign.

We seem to have sorted out the balance now, and this game is going well. But we are out for lunch today, which means we will not game this afternoon either. Its quite hot here in Spain now, and the heat means you have to really slow down. Normally our afternoon wargame is just what we want to pass the hottest part of the day before a swim to cool off. But if we have to fit something new into the day, we have to drop something else off. And this week it has been the wargame.

MInd it could be a lot worse, I am complaining because we have to go to the coast, have a nice meal with a bottle of wine with two friends, and go for a stroll along the seafront at Calpe afterwards. And there was me three years ago, wondering what we would do with all of our time when we retired!