Field Commander Alexander

I spent a good chunk of the weekend cleaning and organizing various things around the house. If you’re a home owner sometimes it feels like the weekend is so busy that the week itself is more relaxing.

I did manage to get in, finally, some playing of Field Commander: Alexander, and tried to launch an expedition into Persia. I won the first time but didn’t quite get the rules right, so I tried again and got trounced, alas. But it turns out I still missed out on some rules intricacies. I’m looking forward to a re-match against those wily Achaemenidians next Sunday morning.

I’m a big fan of Field Commander: Napoleon from the same company, DVG, and I’ve been curious about this earlier game for years.

It comes with four separate campaigns set at different points in Alexander’s short and spectacularly successful life. Each has its own board with its own special rules which amount to having four separate games with similar mechanics. Alexander’s troops and successes (or lack thereof) carry over from board to board if you’re playing the campaign game, or you can set up each board without playing them all in a row.

On the board to the right you can see me set up to start the first campaign, on the board titled “Granicus.” I have my troops massed in the northwest. Below me are some Greeks I have to conquer before I head on over to Persia. Now that I have the rules cleared away I’m really looking forward to continuing my attempts to conquer the ancient world. That will have to wait until NEXT Sunday morning.

The outlining of future short stories continues even faster than originally intended — I’ve now got four thumbnail outlines for unwritten Dabir and Asim adventures, with two more devised. I hope to jot them down this morning. And novel two of the new series is coming along nicely, if more slowly initially. I’m trying to take more care with the revision so that it’s not the first of seven revisions, say — which is maddening and soul draining — and I think it might be working, for the wife was looking over the first three chapters last night and complimented me on the smoothness of the prose. Now, frequently when a writer says something like “but my relative thought it was great!” we all laugh, but for me the wife is a bellwether, because she’s brutally honest with me about my writing, which is always good, I guess, even when it feels like a gut punch…

I continue to treat myself from various short story collections, and when I finally get one of them finished I’ll be able to share my findings.

Right, well, time to start the week. Here’s hoping we all have good ones.