A breath of fresh air

November is a lovely month for walking here in Spain, so yesterday we went off into the nearby mountains with a couple of friends for a 10 km walk. Its just about the only thing that seems to drag me away from the computer lately - or so Jan says.

We live in a little village in a valley about half an hour from the coast. But we usually drive into the mountains to walk. And yesterday it was from a lovely village called Tarbena. In the photo above is at the end of the walk with Jan and friend walking down into the village.

The walk was not entirely wargame free. We have just finished the first wargame in the PBEM campaign I am running, and I was trying to figure out how to seperate the two corps after the battle, so that it didn't develop into a sort of running war. Whilst walking the answer came to me, and I could hardly wait to get home.

As soon as I reasonably could we got rid of our walking friends so that I could get on the computer and sort it all out. And by midnight it was all down on paper. Being used to solo wargaming if I encounter a problem with the campaign I can just "botch it". But with ten other players it has to make sense, and I don't want to introduce major changes too often. But this solution is simple and easy to introduce.

The PBEM campaign is based on the maps I use for my solo 1813 campaign. I started the campaign calling each square one days march. But after a battle it would take a full day just to seperate the two corps. During the walk I realised that one square on the map is one square on the wargames table. But the wargames table is three squares wide, so in fact one square should be one third of a day. So in future one square in the campaign will be four hours, so there will be three campaign map moves to one campaign day. This will also present a problem to the corps commanders. If they meet the enemy with only four hours left in a day (or four moves in the wargame) will it be better to wait for the next full day before they enter battle.

The PBEM campaign is coming along really well, and I am very pleased with how easy it is to sort out the few problems which have arisen converting from a solo to a multi player campaign.