For the last 30 years, this year makes 31, a group of us travel to the Lake Tarawera for what was once a weekend of gaming, but has now grown into a six day event. For those not familiar with New Zealand geography, Lake Tarawera is about 20 kilometres east the city of Rotorua (roughly 230 km south of Auckland, where most of our group live). This year we will all head down in early October and will play five games covering the: Russo-Japanese War, Franco-Prussian War, Napoleonic Wars, War of Spanish Succession and an ironclads game from 1866.
For me personally the logistics of this year's event are bigger than usual. First, I am supplying armies or parts of armies for all five games for the weekend - all of the RJW figures, the Bavarian contingent for the WSS game, French and Prussian units for the FPW game, some Prussians for the Napoleonic game and the 1866 ships. All these fill up seven plastic cabinets holding a total of 25 drawers, plus three boxes of ships. Second, I have an array of scenic items required for my RJW game - fields, haystacks, a monastery, farm buildings, gun positions, a large box of entrenchments, another of wire entanglements. Some of these have been made especially for these games. The boxes of figures and terrain are stacking up in the spare room, despite the protests of her indoors. None of this is a problem, except that I may struggle to find space in the car for the beer and wine supplies!
Some of the purpose built items for the games...
The gabions for the WSS game
The paddy fields for the RJW game
Of a much bigger concern is that in late July I suffered a major hard disk failure, on which was all the information for the RJW game, including scenario and rules. I also lost all the rules and record sheets for the ironclads game. There were backups on another drive, but not current. Most of the data is probably recoverable, but data recovery costs money and takes time, neither of which I have to spare at present.
All is not lost though. Luckily I did have a PDF copy of the scenario and the two sets of rules. Reformatting them into an editable format was a relatively quick task - it what I do every day for a living after all. But the record sheets for the ironclads game is another story altogether. This is not only because I also lost the spreadsheet with all of the ship specifications (so I need to go back to scratch), but also because the spec sheets are graphically intense and will take time...and I only have two weeks...and the real world is imposing some real demands on my time!
Oh well, I guess I had better dig those naval books out again!
Tough luck on the loss of rules and scenario materials. Computers can be fickle friends.
ReplyDeleteYour gaming week sounds absolutely fantastic and would be quite an experience! All planned games would be very interesting.
Have fun and a time out occasionally for a game photo or two.
Thanks Jonathan. I should know better...I am sure I will be able to recover most of the data. I dropped the drive and I think the heads have gone out of alignment. The wargames stuff can be redone, but my biggest annoyance is that the Franco-Prussian book that I have been working on for the last two decades was on it. While I have a full back-up of it as of April, I had just finished the final edits - you know picking up the last spelling errors, etc - and now I have to go back through and do them all again.
ReplyDeleteThere will be reports, with photos, of the games in due course.