Battles

 Yesterday I went over to Pittsburgh to the Soldiers & Sailors Tabletop Gamers club to run a game of Chain of Command.  Paul Lawson invited me to come and run a game at the club’s Winterfest.  This club was new to me but it turns out I was acquainted with several of the people involved.      The club meets at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum Trust, Inc. in down town Pittsburgh.  There can not be enough said about this location.  It is both a museum and an event space.  The club meets in the paneled room filled with all of the CMH recipients for the state of Pennsylvania.  The building itself is wonderful but it is filled with some great historical material making it a place everyone should visit.     The club has a good cross section of both young and old and all of them interested in playing games and running them.  It was a delight to spend the few hours I did with the club members and I will mak...

  A Righteous God Isaiah 51:13 Have you forgotten the Lord who made you, who stretched out the skies and made the earth? Why are you always afraid of those angry people who trouble you and who want to destroy? But where are those angry people now? Our little homestead is in a battle with a very dangerous foe that I never thought of as anything more then a nuisance. This year we learned how destructive mice can be to everything. We have had mice chew through car parts and I think they ate more chicken feed then the chickens ate. Dealing with mice is a problem everyone has had but it never seemed to be a threat to us like is has been this year. The problem with mice is you don’t see them and when you do you only see one or two. And don’t even talk about how cute they are. There is a reason a mouse is the most famous image of a very large entertainment corporation. Mice just seem not to be a problem until they are because what you don’t see is the dozens of mice eating eve...

 Here is how you fight a wagon fort.    

  Real Joy Isaiah 51:11 The people the Lord has freed will return and enter Jerusalem with joy. Their happiness will last forever. They will have joy and gladness, and all sadness and sorrow will be gone far away. As we officially enter the Christmas season we as believers begin a celebration of the birth of Jesus that is filled with real hope and abundant joy. At the same time I also want us to see that this hope and joy is not some mythical idea but it arrives through real struggle and difficulty. The glory of God is shown in the silence that is forced on Zechariah or the questions the Joseph has about what is going on. Think about Mary traveling during the last weeks of her pregnancy that must have been some hard days. What I want to say is that the hope and glory that the birth of Jesus brings was done in the real world with real problems and the daily battles of authentic humans. The hope we have does not happen because we don’t have trouble in our lives but precisely ...

  Good God Psalm 118:1 Thank the Lord because he is good. His love continues forever. A friend of our family lost her husband this year and the grief she feels is over whelming. When I think about the grief, she is suffering with I wonder why anyone would get that close to another person that they would have to deal with the pain of that loss. If you ask her why she would willingly endure such a fate, she would tell you the price of losing the man she loved was worth it because of the love she experienced for forty years. One of the side effects of love is sorrow and there is no avoiding it. Because of sin there can never be real love without the down side of heartache. That is what makes our God so amazing. God loves us and cares deeply for us. We are so blessed to have a God who loves us like He does. The lengths that our God will go to should make us weep with hope and joy. We need wisdom so God fills pages and pages of wisdom for us to learn from. But the most powerf...

 My son is up from Tennessee with his family and so we had a chance to play a game of Chain of Command. February 42 Soviets vs Germans Germans had a standard infantry platoon of 3 squads. Each with a junior leader, five rifles and a 4 man light machine gun team. Support units were a Flame Thrower, Panzerjager I, a medium machine gun team and a Pak 38. The Soviets had a platoon of Tank riders. The platoon had three squads made up of a junior leader with an smg, six men with smgs, and a 3 man LMG. As support they has a platoon of 3 T70's and a 13 man ski squad with rifles. The Germans were dug in and the Soviets were attacking. The Soviets got their tanks on quickly but they took to long to get into action. The German Pak 38 did not do much early on and finally the Soviets killed the German senior leader and made the Pak 38 useless because of shock.   The Soviets started with a Force Morale of 8 and the ski unit showed up in the wrong place and just got driven off the board...