Oops again

No sooner am I drifting from the mid 19th century by almost 100 years into world war 2, than I go the whole hog and leap several centuries – welcome to Bronze Age to Baroque does SciFi! – maybe.

I started the Wargaming Erratic blog in 2019 and aimed to cover my self declared restriction of “Bronze Age to Baroque”. In fact I had determined (for wargamer sanity reasons) to abandon not just my long time interests in world war 2 but also Napoleonics and the Seven Years War – anything after about 1730. The decision has proven to be easier to say than do.

It is not just bookshopping which can sidetrack your latest project (in my case Wars of the Italian Unification 1,2,3 – WOTIU). Strolling through other gamers blogs can be seriously distracting. Of course that is a very enjoyable activity with the vast range of ideas, activity and games being shown.

In this case “wargaming with barks” served up their new project using “five parsecs from home”. Now SciFi wargaming really has passed me by – even my D&D era, now eons gone, did not really depart from ancient medieval themes.

What caught me eye was that this ruleset is for solo wargaming – now that it is something that does fascinate me: Well wargames rules fascinate me anyway, solo rules especially so, because of the potential mechanisms on offer.

As Neil Thomas (author of one hour wargames) says, it is easy to write complex wargame rules while simple ones that constantly work are very challenging to compose.

In Five Parsecs from Home (FPfH) the movement and combat mechanisms themselves, look simple with the narrative derived from the wider aspects of character and weaponry for example.

So it is the case that two player wargames rules are more easily composed than solo rules when it comes to creating that unexpected and surprising element, which is at the heart of so much enjoyment in wargaming.

So far I have bought the book and had a quick speed read.

It looks very interesting and is a complete package including all your necessary rules plus both scenario and force generators.

Solo wargames much depend upon narrative to provide the variety and surprise in any game. It looks like this ruleset offers that potential in spades?

Finally solo wargames work just as well with live opponents – often just simply leaving out some rules is all it takes. So maybe you actually get two rulesets for the price of one!