Games at Hot Lead 2022

Hello friends:

On of Canada’s most well-known miniature tabletop gaming events is now in the books, and can be counted a success.   After two years of Covid-induced suspension, the games were back, the players were a little fewer in number and all masked and well behaved.   Congratulations to my friend James and his crew of redshirts for making it a success.  You can read James’ account of HotLead and see his own photos here.  There are lots more photos and videos on the Hot Lead Facebook group page here.

This was the first time I’ve stayed over at the Arden Park hotel, the venue space.  Previously I’ve cheaped out and couch surfed at my friend James’ expense, but this time I went all out and my lovely bride Joy came with me to sample Stratford’s shopping delights and to do some anthropological studies of the wargaming tribe.  She said “your friends are weird but nice”.  Truth.

My own brief account of what I played in and what I saw begins on Friday night with on of Dan Hutter’s signature multi-player rules, where no one is a friend and the guy sitting beside or across from you is probably gunning for you, so best gun him first. The game was set in Somalia during the disastrous UN intervention there in the early 1990s: several factions of Somalis, UN peacekeeping troops, and secretive mercenaries all had their own agendas and bullets soon flew in all directions.  Rules were a very simple and mostly playable version of FUBAR.  Grand start to the weekend.

 

Test of Honour samurai game going down on Friday night, lovely table. 

 Chris Robinson, a friend of the Canadian Wargamer Podcast and normally an historical guy, put on a Star Wars game that looked quite attractive.  It was good to hear that the young players enjoyed it.

 Some of the Hot Lead crowd were playing this impromptu Victorian SF game on Saturday morning, involving big steam powered clanks AND dinosaurs. 

 

Saturday morning I played in this beautiful WW2 game hosted by Joe Saunders of Miniature Landscape Hobbies.  Joe is a friend of the Canadian Wargaming Podcast and a lovely guy. 

 This scratch built railway gun was done by Joe and part of the table dressing.

 

The game was called “Countdown to Launch” and featured the Germans trying to delay the Allied onslaught long enough to fuel, arm, and fire off this V1 rocket.  

 It was quite an onslaught.  The Germans died in droves but managed to fire off the rocket.  I confess that tanks massed track to track are an example of why I don’t personally like Flames of War, but it did deliver a fast game, and at this sort of event, with three hour game slots, you need quick fast games.

 This beautiful medieval game, the Battle of Tewkesbury, was hosted by Ian Tetlow, who always puts on good looking games at Hot Lead.

 

 On Saturday afternoon I played in Sean Malcomson’s “Hard Brexit” ancients game using Too Fat Lardie’s Infamy, Infamy rules.  The object was for the Roman players to move a herd of (unfairly) taxed cattle across this table to safe harbour.  The British, strong believers in No Taxation Without Representation, were trying to stop them.

 Some of Sean’s beautiful ancient British figures.   The British deployed from a series of ambush points.

 Life got quite difficult for the Romans.   Their legionaries stood in line like rocks while their auxiliary reserves ran back and forward plugging gaps and counter attacking.  

The British skirmish cavalry, seen entering here, were annoying but not decisive.   In the end, we ran out of time but called it a British win.  I found these rules similar enough to Sharp Practice that I got the hang of it fairly quickly, and would try them again as an excuse to get some Romans to oppose my Germanic war band.

 

My last game at HotLead was on Saturday night.  Brian Hall, one of our local masters of 6mm, hosted an ACW corps-level game featuring the Battle of Cedar Creek.   Since the battle began in confusion and alarm for the Union, both forces started under blinds, with three of the four Union corps well back from the start of the action and thus the Union in a poor position to stop the Confederate advance. 

 By this point the Union had stabilized a line and were beginning to hold.    The rules were Altar of Freedom, which I found fast playing and quite bloody.   With each manoeuvre unit in the game a brigade, whole divisions were being quickly shattered, but the rebels lost too many men to sustain the assault, ending in an historical outcome.

Since a lot of my playing is solitaire, I found the points bidding initiative system in AofF to be a bit of a turn off, but as Brian noted to me, a card drive initiative system could easily be bolted on to the core combat rules for solitaire gaming.

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Finally, it wouldn’t be a convention report with the usual haul of goodies.  My dear friend MikeB gifted me these Warlord Crimean War sculpts by Paul Hicks for use in my Alt-ACW project, which was kind of him.

Another friend sold me these antique Avalon Hill rules for Napoleonics, which are more of a collector’s item than a viable gaming system, though I gather they were once influential and I will try them out some day.  I gather it was AH’s equivalent of GDW’s System 7 Napoleonics, though the cardboard counters in the AH set were designed to give players a taste of the system and motivate them to buying miniatures.  There are some vintage adverts from minis companies of the era in the rules books.

And I stocked up on tree and basing material.

So that was Hot Lead.   I ran out of stamina after four games in 1.5 days, but as I said goodbyes on Sunday it was grand to see the crowd getting ready for the traditional mass VSF game.  

Huge congrats to James, Elizabeth, and the crew for making this revered event happen and I look forward to returning next year without a face mask!

Cheers and blessings,

MP

A Game Too Far?

My son John was visiting me from BC this summer, and expressed a great interest in my board games collection.   John is a miniatures gamer, and knows W40K like the back of his hand, but he was intrigued by old school hex and counter games.    His birthday was coming up, so I gave him three websites, GMT Games, Compass Games, and Vassal, and told him to pick whatever game he liked that was still in print and had a Vassal module so we could play i by email.   More to follow on that.

I am not sure exactly how many Market Garden games a chap needs in my collection, and to be honest, my collection has a bit of a mind of its own and hasn’t been effectively curated over the years.  

I have four MG games by my count.   One is an Avalon Hill classic, and is a sort of operational/tactical hybrid, focusing on the British defence of Arnham.   Designed by Courtney F. Allen and published in 1981, it featured an ingenious area impulse movement system for its day and spawned several other AH games using the same engine, one on Stalingrad and the other on Monte Cassino.  Breakout Normandy used the same basic engine but at a larger, more truly operational scale. SOA is the only Market Garden game I own that I’ve actually played head to head, and it is a much better played H2H than solitaire.

Hell’s Highway (published 1983) is a strategic level game by John Butterfield, who was one of the stable of SPI designers who went to Victory Games.  John is coming to a gaming convention in March 2019 in Toronto, which is kind of exciting.   Maybe by then I will have actually played this game, or at least peaked inside the box.

I bought It Never Snows shortly after MMP published it in 2012, partly from what I’d heard about it and partly on the strength of its designer, Dean Essig, who has won a hockey sack of awards and has a long and distinguished design resume.    Alas, it is still in the shrink wrap.    Hopefully when I retire I can get to grips with it.

So, going back to my son John - what did he choose, but a Market Garden game?    Holland 44 is a 2017 GMT title, designed by Mark Simonitch, and is an operational, battalion-level game, starting with the airborne landings and ending on 23 September.  As with the other big titles (Hells Highway and It Never Snows), the game is a race to relieve or reduce the airborne bridgeheads before the Allied ground forces can get there.

Notice how GMT recycled some of Rodger MacGowan’s SoA artwork for the back of the box!

Well, that’s all I have to tell you for now.   I am waiting for John to tell me that he’s digested the rules (he is a demon for memorizing complex rule books) and then deciding what scenario and which side to play.   If you are interested in playing Holland 44 with me via Vassal, by all means let me know, I could use the practice.

 

Life Goes On

A dear friend of mine whose husband died of cancer a week before my own beloved Madame Padre passed away last November said something wise to me.   “You and I are still in the land of the living”, she told me, and I have tried to live by those words for the past five months.

 

 The support of my wargaming friends has been wonderful and I have leaned on several of you, as you know.  Thank you all.  I’m in a better place now, and do indeed want to dwell in the land of the living.  I’m eating well, working out regularly, have lost some of the weight I put on as Kay’s caregiver, and am fully engaged at work and as the volunteer honorary priest of my local parish.  A lovely lady, a cancer widow, has entered my life, and made it much richer.

 

So my life has changed in many ways, but some constants remain.  I have only touched a paintbrush a few times since Kay’s death, and I have rolled dice a few times.   I am however slowly coming back to the wargaming hobby via my first love, boardgames.  A few months ago I had the opportunity to take a longish drive to buy five boxes of games from someone’s estate.  They almost went to the garbage dump, but someone had the sense to take them to a thrift store, and the thrift store owner knew someone who got the word out into the local gaming community, so that was a close run thing as someone once said.  Here are some of the games, mostly classic Avalon Hill titles.

It me, reading rules.

Besides the AH titles, there were some happy surprises, including seven of Avalanche Press’ Panzer Grenadier series, which looks like an interesting tactical game in the vein of AH’s Squad Leader.   I hope to explore PG in the near future.  

Currently on the gaming table is GMT’s game Churchill: The Struggle For Peace.   I’m playing i solo, as the Americans, and the other sides (USSR and Britain) are played by decision trees or “bots”.   The game is an interesting take on WW2, and certainly works as a history lesson, but not really sure yet whether it works as a game.   More to follow.    Also, my gaming friend James came by recently for a weekend of miniatures fun, in our ongoing OPERATION THUNDERING DICE series of irregular weekends, so I will have a report on that soon.

So it’s good to be back, I hope someone reads this, and I hope to be more active in the hobby again.

Blessings to your die rolls and paintbrushes,

MP+

 

 

 

What Monster Have I Created?

My learning this week is that I shouldn’t have offered to give this game away.

If you are an old school board war gamer, you will remember that Avalon Hill did a card game based on its popular WW2 game of infantry combat, Squad Leader.   It was notorious for the ridiculously handsome, almost angelic SS guy on the cover.  I’m surprised that image has not been resurrected by the Alt-RIght.    The bits below, including AH’s Pacific War expansion, Banzai!, was gifted to me by an Army friend of mine.  I tried playing it a few times solitaire, and it didn’t really seem that much fun.

This week I offered the game up on a Facebook group called Wargamer Pay It Forward.  The deal is that members can place dibs on games they want, and if they win one, they have to offer a game in return.  It’s a great system.  I had won a copy of GMT’s Labyrinth, a game on the US War on Terror against international jihadism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.   It seems like a good trade to me, as I like contemporary games and am a fan of the thoughtful work done by Ruhnke and his sometime collaborator,  Brian Train.

However, I wasn’t prepared for the 90+ claimants that have put in their dibs for Upfront!  I am fully expecting the number of entrants will top one hundred by the deadline of noon tomorrow.  Yikes.  I think I’ve found a robust random number generator that will do the job, but it will be a big job.  I suppose I could write the names on slips of papers and let Stanley the Cat draw one.  I’ve done it here before.

Blessings!

MP+

 

We're Back ..With A Small Trove of ACW Boardgames

Hello and welcome back to this sadly neglected blog, which I am tempted to rename Dragon Dormant.  Since I returned from La Belle Province de Poutine, all has been well, but busy.  Madame Padre celebrated her third post-chemotherapy bloodtest with very good results, and has decided to celebrate with a new bicycle and a more active lifestyle, so bravo to her.   

There has been a little painting and a little gaming, so some updates coming.  One of the most exciting things to happen lately was this small pile of out of print American Civil War (with one Mexican War title thrown in) cardboard counter type boardgames that came my way.   A friend at the local club was helping to sell off the collection of a gamer friend who had passed away.  I am sorry I didn’t know this fellow, as I think we would have gotten along well.

Three of these titles are from the GMT Games series, Richard Berg’s Great Battles of the American Civil War.  Red Badge of Courage covers First and Second Bull Run, Three Days of Gettysburg was GMT”s answer to Terrible Swift Sword, and Gringo used the GBACW system to treat some Mexican War battles.   I am very fond of the GBACW system, it lives at that Grand Tactical sweet spot for me.   The two titles on the left came from late in Avalon Hill’s existence, from their Great Campaigns of the ACW series, designed by Joe Balkoski, and offer a more operational/strategic scale of treatment.    Finally, at the right is a Clash of Arms game on the Seven Days - I haven’t yet opened the box so know nothing about it.

Below is the seventh game, Lee Vs Grant, another Balkoski GCAWC design, on one of my favourite campaigns, the 1864 Wilderness campaign.   It is currently set up in a quiet corner of the chaplain school library at work, and I am slowly figuring it out on my lunch breaks.

 

 

I know that these games will cut into my painting time, but it can’t be helped, hex and counter games have a large claim on my heart.  If you have played any of these titles, please let me know what you thought of them - your comments may influence which one I take on first.

Finally, because it’s too amazing to pass up without comment, here’s a What If article imagining WW2 German and Japanese battleships at war, because …. battleships. 

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Playing Breakout Normandy: The Curse of Dieppe Revisits Juno Beach

Earlier this year, Mad Padre's Man in Madrid managed to find me a copy of the old Avalon Hill classic boardgame Breakout Normandy, which I had become interested in after hearing an interview with its designer, Don Greenwood, on the Guns, Dice, Butter podcast. I've had some time to set it up and start playing with it, and it gives every promise of being a terrific extension of the mechanic first introduced in Storm Over Arnhem and a good simulation of the the first weeks of the Normandy campaign.
In the game I'm playing solitaire at the moment, I have finished the D-Day landing phases and all has gone fairly well for the Allies -- except at Juno Beach, where a strategic disaster has just been avoided. Initially all was looking good. Air and sea bombardments had suppressed the German coastal artillery (CA), preventing it from keeping any of the attacking units at Juno from participating in the assault. I chose to make the assault with all three infantry brigades of 3rd Canadian Division, while leaving the attached armoured brigade to land as a reinforcement later. Seeing as units involved in successful beach assaults go to Spent status afterwards, and can only be made effective again by allocating precious resource points during the Refit Phase, I thought it would be a good idea to have some fresh units in reserve.

Along the same line of thought, since the only defending unit at Juno is the Courselles coastal artillery, which has been flipped to Spent status during the naval bombardment phase, I decide to attack with only two of 3CanDiv's brigades and leave the third as a reserve. That decision will mean forfeiting the +1 modifier for divisional integrity in the attack, but I figure I have enough advantages that I don't need that modifier.

Disaster. The Germans roll a 5, plus 2 for the coastal defences, plus 1 for the local terrain modifier, plus 3 for the Courselles CA defence value, for a total of 11. The Allies roll a 1 plus 3 for the lead brigade's combat value plus 1 for the supporting brigade plus 1 for air support in clear weather for a total of 6. Not nearly enough. Even had I chosen to attack with all 3 brigades, the div integrity bonus wouldn't have helped. Now my decision is weather to invoke the rule giving up the strategic initiative to the Germans in return for a re-roll of the combat result. It's a tempting option, but I still have to resolve the assault on Omaha Beach, where the Germans have more unspent units in defence and two CA that can fire on the incoming US units, potentially taking them out of the fight and imperilling Allied chances of taking Omaha. The idea of losing that beach assault is, as Eisenhower said of postponing the invasion, too bitter to contemplate, so I elect to keep the Initiative in case I need it. With two of the three British sector beaches captured, I can take my chances.
Since the Canadian assault failed, all three 3CanDiv brigades are flipped to Spent status and each takes a Disruption 1 marker, reducing their defence value by one and making them more costly to refit. Apparently the disaster of the Dieppe Raid in 1942 has revisited Overlord. From Vancouver Island to Nova Scotia, the June 7 newspapers back home will make for grim reading. Not only are my Canadian units vulnerable to counterattack, but the beach defences have not been cleared, so any future attack from the sea will have to face the +2 German defence modifier for the beach defences.

With the Omaha and Juno landings successful, the four unique D-Day phases are concluded and it is now the first German impulse of the June 6 turn. With the Allied vulnerability at Juno, the first German move seems obvious. Attacking with the 192nd regt. of panzer grenadiers of 21Pz only involves a move of one area, so there is no threat from Allied air interdiction as there would be from a longer move. It's an opportunity to crush one of the Allied beachheads and wreck one of the attacking divisions.

The German die roll is a good one: 5 plus 5 for the German unit's attack value versus the Allied roll of 1 plus 1 for the defence value of the lead Canadian brigade (2 - 1 for Disrupt 1) plus 1 for the area terrain modifier plus 1 for Allied air superiority for a total of 4 and a difference of 6 which would eliminate all three Canadian brigades, a disastrous result.

If there was ever a good time to cede the Advantage, now is a good time. With the re-roll (Allied 5 + 4 = 9 vs German 3 + 5 = 8) the new result defeqts the German attack and leaves the 192nd PGr spent. So disaster is averted, but the Germans have the Advantage now and there are still German day moves to be made. Will the Curse of Dieppe prove fatal to the D-Day landings? Stay tuned.

Cool Stuff From All Over (And Down Under)

It was another quiet weekend at the Mad Padre's painting chapel, on the edge of the still mostly frozen Canadian prairie. After teasing Curt C about how Regina might not see summer until mid July, my own part of Alberta got a dump of snow this weekend, though Madame Padre did log the first robin sighting on the back lawn this Saturday, so we live in hope.

Since I last posted here I received a message from the Canadian Forces confirming my selection for the Advanced Training List, meaning that I will be going back to school this fall on the taxpayer's dime. Thank you, kind taxpayers. The last time I was in graduate school, I lived on ramen noodles and washed my dishes with my underwear, so this will be a pleasant change. I still await the elusive posting message that authorizes me to move, put my house on the market, etc. In the meantime, work continues. OP LIVING ROOM is now at D+14, with the carpets ripped out, the walls painted, and, after this weekend, the baseboards sanded. Since I ran away to play little soldiers with my friends the weekend previous, I owed Domestic Niner a weekend at the chores.

I should say that sanding baseboards is one of the nastiest jobs known to humanity. My back is still not talking to me, and despite the masks I am sure I inhaled enough dust to take a few years off my life. However, the wood is original, solid, lovely stuff, dating from the house's construction in 1912, and I felt I owed it to the old girl to do it right. I hope to have them stained by this weekend, and the room ready for the carpet layers when they choose to show up. Work has also progressed on some minor side projects, such as OP KITCHEN SINK and OP BANNISTER PAINTING. OP STOVETOP and OP ELECTRICAL are scheduled for this Friday.

Some good things came through my mailbox in the last few weeks that deserve comment. I was thrilled to get my prize from Dux Homunculorum's recent contest, a set of Iron Ivan's WW2 rules, Disposable Heroes.

I've glanced at them quickly and they look intriguing, so possibly they will get on the gaming table this weekend. Thank you so much, Dux. Stanley the Cat says hello, by the way. He keeps sitting by the door, waiting for the postman. I am starting to wonder if he got bribed to pick the winners in my own contest. I could be wrong, but it's suspicious how often he's asked wbat Australian rodents taste like. Why would he think about that, I wonder.

Also in the last few weeks, I was delighted to get a package from Spain, from Benito, the owner of the Gaming With Too Fat Lardies blog. Benito had noticed that in a post a few month's ago, I had expressed a desire to get a copy of Don Greenwood's famous Avalon Hill game, Breakout Normandy. He kindly offerred to trade me his copy, in excellent condiiton, in return for postage and some trades. This was terribly kind of him, and is a fine example of what young Kinch has called The Freemasonry Of The Hobby. Gracias, amigo! I look forward to playing this game this week, once I get the carpet pulled up from my study (the last room to be readied for OP CARPET).

Besides these two exciting arrivals, a third package showed up here recently, and it deserves a post of it's own, because it is so brilliant I need sunglasses to describe it. I hope you're excited, and that you'll come back here soon to find out what it is!

On The Shoulders Of Giants: Don Greenwood On Avalon Hill And The History Of Wargaming

A big shout out to fellow blogger Itinerant Hobbyist for his post last week, noting an interview with Don Greenwood of Avalon Hill on the excellent Guns, Dice and Butter podcast. While the name may not be that familiar to those on the miniatures side of the wargaming hobby, he is an iconic figure to those of us who remember and/or are shaped by the revolution in board wargames that occurred in the 1970s. I hadn't thought much about Greenwood since I sold my original Squad Leader products in the early 90s and moved on to miniatures gaming, but now that I think about, his influence on my own gaming was huge, either through the games he designed or the games he influenced and produced when he was the driving force at Avalon Hill after its initial Charles Roberts days. For me, just hearing a pioneer of the hobby talking about its early days and casually dropping names to conjure with like Dunnigan and Nofi was amazing. For me the only thing more exciting would be a podcast where the Apostle Paul talks about his struggles with Corinthians, but I digress.

As the Intinerant Hobbyist noted, one of the most interesting (and saddest) parts of the interview was Greenwood saying that he regretted the two years of his life and energy he poured into Advanced Squad Leader. As he puts it, he didn't perceive that the hobby was going in a different direction at the time, and didn't need an even more complex rework of a game system that had grown into an ungainly mess since the initial Squad Leader came out in the mid 1970s (I still remember how excited I was when I got my hands on the original SL in 1978). You have to admire Greenwood's passion for the project, just as you have to regret that he was a victim of the technology on hand. It's mind-boggling to think that all the SL and early edition ASL rules were produced on paper and ribbon typewriters, so that if you made a change, as Greenwood recalls, you had to retype the whole page. The first edition of ASL came out in 1985, and I never touched a word processor until 1986 (how well I remember that airless graduate faculty computing centre with its tractor feed printers and amberchrome monitors, and loading Word Perfect off 5" disks). I wonder how much of Greenwood's decision to rewrite the whole system was based on the technology available to him.

As I was listening to this interview I was reminded of Rick Priestly's essay, "A Second Bite", in his "This Gaming Life" column in Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy 63. As Priestly puts it, for the game designer, a second edition of a rules set "is a second bite of the cherry, a chance to correct, improve and perfect. The trouble is - second editions bite back!" Part of that bite back is that your most obvious target market for the second edition is the user base of the first edition, and of those users, perhaps half will be enthused and dedicated enough to welcome an improvement on their initial investment. But, because the "second bite" has to be made new enough to enthuse new users, a significant part of the first edition user base may well be alienated if the changes are so substantial that they see their investment in time, money, and figures to be invalidated. This is the "bite back" of the what Priestly calls the "design-led approach":

"Games designers like to innovate and change things: they just can't help themselves. Yet, the player base is fundamentally composed of customers who like the game the way it is. Thus a radical change, whilst presenting opportunities for publishers to re-market a game and designers to practise their craft, risks alienating a game's most loyal and appreciative supporters. A radical re-write of a popular wargames system will soon see the torch-bearing mob clamouring at the castle gates. Even today, the transition from the second version of Warhamer 40,000 to the third is enough to set grown men ranting uncontrollably on Internet forums."

As Priestly notes, GW is able to offset the loss of alienated existing customers by the recruitment of new ones, but not all publishers have this luxury. I was one of those SL players who walked away when I realized that ASL meant giving up everything but the game boards. I felt abandoned by Avalon Hill, and yet my experience of small-scale, tactical gaming led me to miniatures, while I continued to satisfy my taste for operational and strategic gaming through boardgames and later through a few computer games from publishers like Matrix. Had I been integrated into a community of SL players at the time, and had a better appreciation of what Greenwood was trying to do with SL, I might have seen a bigger picture and stayed loyal to the brand. To be sure, many many SL players stayed loyal, and I would not want to deny the validity of the ASL community, but that community seems to me a small cadre that revels in granularity and in a certain subculture status. Pray correct me if I have that wrong.

Technology is a factor here, surely. Greenwood says in the podcast that the internet came along too late to save Avalon Hill. He wasn't able to use the internet for playtesting until he was working on Breakout: Normandy. By contrast I think of my own experience as a very minor, mostly lurking member of the Too Fat Lardies internet community. A committed player of their signature WW2 rules, I Ain't Been Shot, Mum!, I was willing to buy the third edition of IABSM, and some extra bits and pieces, because I felt there was a consensus among the TFL comunity as to where the designer, Richard Clarke, was wanting to go with IABSM. It helped that the investment was limited to a rules set, vice the all-new counters and rules books that ASL required, but the fact that technology enabled the third edition of the rules to be an evolving process is a significant change from the SL/ASL transition, and one that Greenwood would envy, I suspect.

A final thought from the interview was Greenwood's comment that the fundamental difference between AH and its contemporary, Simulations Publications Inc, was that AH games were designed for replayability, and many to this day have fans who have played them hundreds of times. I think of the AH games I know and love, like Victory in the Pacific or Russian Campaign, and have trouble thinking of many SPI games that come close - Terrible Swift Sword, possibly, or my favourite SPI monster game, Wellington's Victory. Most SPI games are forgotten today, I think. It is interesting to ask the same question of miniatures rules sets. Which miniatures rules have attained a degree of replayability and affection comparable to certain Avalon Hill games? Which rules sets have been, or will be, played once or twice and then relegated to the shelf? It's an interesting question, especially at a time when the hobby enjoys a surfeit of new rules sets out or soon to be released. It will be interesting to see, when I am a very old man, if I look back on today as a golden age, as Greenwood remembers his best years at Avalon Hill as being. Time will tell.

In the meantime, thank you, Don, for all you've given the hobby. And now I'm all nostalgic. Does anyone have a copy of Breakout: Normandy they are interested in selling me?