Manouvre

 John came up with this interesting game from 1940, designed to "Fit into your haversack or overcoat pocket" and relieve the tedium of (presumably) the phoney war.

The whole thing fits in this neat envelope, in proper 1940s blue, the same sort of colour as the covers of the various Field Manuals.

For 21st Century purposes however, it goes nicely onto Powerpoint! Each side has eight pieces, but can only move one at a time and they all have to be deployed (one at a time) through your own base. The idea is to capture the enemy base by moving a piece onto it. 

Movement is from point to point, and you can only capture enemy pieces by outnumbering them in in the 'three circle' areas. This all sounds quite straightforward, but given the irregularity of the point to point routes, it is mind bogglingly hard to get your head around, so it bears some similarity to 'Go'. Above, my chaps are busy moving out to take the nodal points.

But despite my best efforts, John slips a section through and takes my base. He assures me we've played this before, but I don't have any recollection of it.

Off we go again. I got him this time. It was around now that I realised that the map was a stylised representation of terrain, with the three dot zones being woods/villages etc and the rest being arcs of fire and movement routes. The fields of fire and move routes were determined by the terrain, so a bit like a topological map of a Crossfire table. Thinking in that way, I could more easily work out how to block some routes, support the approach on others etc.

Armed with these insights, time for a third game. John got me again. Even if you understand what it is supposed to represent, there are just so many options that it is easy to miscalculate things.

Three games in an hour isn't bad. What a clever little game, although we both felt that with more experienced players it might suffer from analysis paralysis.