Happy New Year everyone. Here's hoping for a better one than 2022.
A few weeks ago I felt well enough to attend our mid week gaming session again, despite still being tired from Covid. Its main legacy along with the exhaustion is a disgusting taste in my mouth all the time, which I could really do without, so I hope it fades in time.
John B put on a matrix game covering Eire in WW2. He runs matrix games in a somewhat different manner to myself and Tim, so I was interested to see how it would pan out.
A Zoom committee game is never gong to be very photogenic, so here is just one picture!
Some people had made a bit of an effort, particular Tim resplendant in his Archbishops Mitre. I had a Churchill Homburg, so you can probably guess who I was.
We all represented the various interested parties, I was Churchill, Jon De Valera, Tim the Archbishop, Diego the Ulstermen, Mark the US, Pete the IRA and Russell the sinister Abwehr.
The game started in May 1940, and obviously Churchills main interest was in getting Eire to join the war, or at least regain access to the ports on the west coast from which we could defend the Atlantic convoys.
Rather than the traditional format of action, result and three reasons, John ran the game as a primary argument (with a couple of supporting reasons) and then goes around the table getting supporting or opposing reasons before resolving the argument. This certainly made the game very interactive and I enjoyed the unfolding narrative, but also meant the turns took an age to resolve as each 'turn' effectively had half dozen sub turns so our ability to influence events through our own arguments was very constrained, it was more about how we responded to other peoples actions.
tbh, I'm not very good at off the cuff stuff and prefer to think about my arguments beforehand, I think this style of play suits the more voluble members of the group. We also only ever seemed to be able to make arguments which affected our own faction and not other people as attempts to e.g. get Eire into the war were just referred to De Valera who always said 'no'. It may just be that I'd misunderstood.
Given that we could only play for our own characters, play proceeded much as might be expected. The Abwehr shipped tons of weapons in to the IRA, De Valera repeatedly said 'no' to ending neutrality, but conversely always failed in his attempts to break away from the Commonwealth and everyone battered the IRA whenever it caused trouble. My one tour de force was reading up on what Churchill actually did in the war about Eire, and it turned out he stopped all the convoys until such time as the Irish granted access to the Treaty Ports so the RN could actually defend them. I shied away from simply taking them back by force as that would have annoyed the Americans. irl this almost caused De Valera to give in as the Irish population faced the same deprivation as the rest of the British Isles from uboat attacks, but in the game Irish supporting members of Congress arranged direct convoys to Eire. They didn't seem very phased by all the US and RN servicemen who would have to die to get them there.
It was certainly an interesting and informative session, and managed to reflect the deep frustration on all sides. After dealing with De Valera, I felt some sympathy for Hitlers complaints after dealing with Franco.
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