Wednesday Whinging

Tuesday games had to move to Wednesday this week and started much later to boot. We finished with Schotten-Totten, a strangely themed card game by the prolific designer Reiner Knizia which was later re-themed and made more complex as Battle Line. I have owned it for a while and was glad to finally get to play it.
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I have a German version of it and am unaware if there is any rational explanation for the odd theming of clan warfare between stereotypical cartoon Scots. I'm not sure whether the Scots are terribly happy to see themselves as bare buttocked, kilt-wearing beligerent bagpipe-stranglers but they know where to find Reiner if they want to take it up with him. Meanwhile I see it really as a nice little abstract filler.

One of our two games of it, which entails a string of "battles" for marker stones between groups of cards in sets of three, was the only game I won all day so I'm grateful to Dr Knizia for that at least. Is anything worn under the kilt? No, it's all in perfect working order, to quote the late Mr Milligan.

As in other recent weeks, the other games were Memoir '44 (both sides of an all infantry scenario) and A Few Acres of Snow. In the former I had some terrible luck as well as playing badly, in the latter I just played badly I think. At any rate I got trounced once again by the French despite trying a completely different strategy from last week. To be fair Crabro had stopped his stomping on Boston and tried a completely different strategy himself.

I need to do some homework before next time, although I did at least win one siege this time. The Memoir scenario pitted French resistance groups with the additional flexibility in their firing and retreating rules but only three figures per unit against ordinary German units. Unfortunately, given that there was no armour present, I kept rolling tanks, tanks and stars...lots of tanks...

A very enjoyable day again anyway.