Blog Summary

Reviewing my blog projects over the past few years has made me realise just what an impact blogging has had on my life.

If asked I would have said that my two major interests were wargaming and hill walking, in that order.   However I now realise that blogging is a third major interest, and possibly should be the first in order of priority.

At present I have three blog projects.

Napoleonic Wargaming is still my major one, though it takes up less actual time.   I post once a week, and it normally does what the label says.  It covers all aspects of my interest in the subject.  

1813 Campaign is a diary of my ongoing wargame campaign.  I post at least once a week, but often more than once.

Jan and Paul in Spain is a record of our hill walking.   We run two U3A day walks each week, one on Monday and one on Thursday.   This has become by far the most time consuming of the three blogs.

I had not really appreciated how much blogging has influenced my two hobbies of wargaming and hill walking.

The whole campaign has been organised to make it suitable for posting on the blog. The maps have been constantly upgraded to show the detail required for the blog.   The whole administration of the campaign has been adapted to record on the blog.   Each wargame move is photographed for the blog battle report.  

But it is our hill walking which has been most influenced by the blog.   I started by taking a couple of photographs on each walk, and posted them in the blog with a written description of the walk.  However I was soon taking twenty or thirty photographs of each walk, so that I would have twenty suitable ones for each blog. The summery was reduced to a  line below each photograph.  I now take about fifty photographs of each walk, and other members of the group regularly send me photographs they have taken for inclusion on the blog.

Each walk takes five to six hours, so Monday and Thursday are devoted to the actual walking.   Tuesday and Saturday are devoted to preparing the blog, the video and the next walk.   All photographs taken have to be weeded and tidied up.   The video is done first and then the blog.   The photographs are accompanied by a short summary of the walk.   The blog also includes a link to the video.   When both are completed I prepare the email of the following week’s walk.

Little by little, and almost unnoticed by me, blogging has taken over a considerable part of each week.   It has also imposed a discipline on both my wargaming activities and my twice weekly walks.

In the summer months, when it is too hot to walk, the weekly Napoleonic Wargaming and 1813 Campaign blogs expand to cover my spare time.   That is why I started work on making videos of my wargaming and walking blogs during the long summer.   When we started walking again in October both suffered in favour of the twice weekly walking blog.

In retrospect perhaps the subject of this blog should be Blog Obsession rather than Blog Summary?

Wellington’s Battles Blog

This was a one off project which was inspired by my visits to Wellington’s Iberian battlefields.   In preparation for those visits I had done a lot of research, and had gathered with a lot of information and maps.  

Although quite busy with my four main blogs, I decided to wargame thirteen of his battles in Portugal and Spain and also Waterloo.  

As with my 1813 campaign these would be wargames, not an attempt to recreate the actual battles.   There were two reasons for this decision.   First my armies were already organised for use in my campaign.   Second my wargames table did not allow recreation of actual battlefields.   I is based on a 2x2 foot scenic squares with permanent hills, rivers and roads. 

Having decided to record each wargame using the blog, I wanted it to be a permanent reference source for anyone wanting to game themselves.   I started a new blog, and again used the Labels system to give access to each wargame.

Each game has a short introduction.   This includes a map, a short background and historical totals of infantry, cavalry and artillery.  There is then my own order of battle and a photograph of the table at the start of the game.  The actual game is recorded in text and photographs.

I started Rolica in November 2009 and finished Waterloo in May 2012.   This may seem a long time to wargame just 14 battles.  But it was always intended to be a break from my 1813 campaign.   As that campaign grew from solo to PBEM I found that I had less and less time for the Wellington project.   But because I already had the maps, order of battles and knowledge of each battle, it was easy to set a game up when I needed a break from the main campaign.

I was quite disappointed when the series came to an end.   I experimented with doing something similar with Napoleon’s battles.  But the problems with the table and my wargame order of battle discouraged me.   However I have recently returned to this subject with my proposed “Nearly Napoleonic” series.  

If you would like to see the Wellington series click on “Wellington’s Battles” under My Blog List on the right.

Campaign Diary Blog

Current Campaign Strategic Map

I started the Magdeburg Campaign blog in April 2009.  

I had spent months preparing and setting up what would be my long running 1813 campaign.    It was always my intention that the campaign would provide interesting battles to wargame.   It was never intended to be a historical campaign.  The aim was to use all of my collection in rotation, and to do so I had designed a campaign which would have five areas.  Three in Germany and two in Spain.   Each would have an allied and French army.   The campaign was designed to be fought in phases.   Each phase would be similar in size to the Waterloo campaign.

The first phase was set in Magdeburg in northern Germany and would feature Marshal Davout v Prince Blucher.   I wanted to record the campaign, and decided to do so by using a Blog as the campaign diary.

I would have a different blog for each campaign phase.   The blog would cover the campaign background, the orders of battle of both armies, a diary of each campaign day and a report of each battle.   I had hoped that this might prove useful if anyone else wanted to set up a similar campaign to provide wargames.

This first campaign lasted two months and provided four battles to wargame.  It took ten posts and has had 5811 page visits.  It worked very well, and provided a good template for all of the campaign phases to follow.

In October 2009 I changed to a PBEM campaign, with ten players each representing an allied or French army commander.   It would continue as such until February 2016 when I reverted to solo again.   During this period the blog provided a daily update of the campaign.   With five areas in play at the same time there was a huge increase in administration, and consequently in posts on the blog.   There was also a permanent backlog of battles waiting to be gamed.  

I enjoyed running the campaign.  It was a big administrative task and constant pressure to complete wargames to avoid slowing down the pace of the campaign.   The aim was to game one campaign day each week.  To do so I had to rely on the players to send in their orders promptly when they received the weekly report.   By far the majority did so, but as always there were exceptions.

However it was the standard of battles which eventually caused me to revert to a solo campaign again.   Most players only took part in one or two campaign phases.  So there was a constant stream of new players entering the campaign.   Each had complete freedom to write daily orders as they wished, and each kept making the same basic mistakes.   Consequently most of the campaign battles were one corps per side.  The uniforms would change, but not the style of game.  

I longed for more complicated battles, and eventually decided the only way to achieve that was to revert to a solo campaign.  I have continued to play solo since February 2016.

The early phases each had their own blog.  But when I converted to PBEM there were five phases on the go at the same time.   All were posted on the same blog, and only changed when there was a major change in the campaign concept.   Consequently it has proved too difficult to calculate how many visits there have been to each, or indeed all, of the blogs dealing with the campaign.   But there have been 69 campaign phases, each an independent campaign.   And in total they have provided 252 battles to wargame.

But far more important the campaign has provided a framework for our wargaming for the past nine years. 

And the Campaign Diary Blog has provided a permanent record of each move and wargame throughout that same period.   Using the index I can easily find any of those 69 phases, and even any of those 252 wargame reports.

You will find a link to the 1813 Campaign Diary blog on the right