Sunday 27 September 2015

Sheep herding

For good or bad, I have been culling my old wargame magazine collection.  While I had indexed all the articles - yeah, yeah, anal ain't it? - I thought much of the paper/contents and thus storage space is of adverts for companies and products long since gone or articles I have no interest in (few as those may be) I had magazines subscriptions that are some 40 years old!

One of the kept articles was this rather humorous one of rules for sheep herding by Derek Henderson and Rob Le Vesconte.  Inspired by the rules - quite good and simple - I just had to, had to did I, to make the required pen, paint up the sheep and dog (with his previous location marker of a gloss brown lump on the ground) and the shepherd (an ECW artilleryman with added bend wire crook)

How can one not resist the lure as suggested in the introduction:
"If you find you are the wargamer given the flank to guard and no-one attacks there, or you simply find yourself up against an opponent who takes twice as long to move his troops as you do, then this game is for you.  Simply grab yourself a shepherd figure, a flock of sheep, fours fences to make a pen, and a dog and indulge in a little rural pursuit in some quiet corner of the table"

Note: I wish I had this set up during some of those extremely boring convention mega-games in which I suffered through in the past and now which I try to avoid!

my little rural pursuit newly made

Highlight of the rules are: "Sheep drift":  "If a sheep's move is halted by an immovable object (wall, house, French Grenadiers etc) then move....."

Unfortunately in my sometimes manic ripping up of the magazines and cutting of the UK A4 paper size to the North American sizing, I failed to keep in which issue I kept this article.......