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Archives for August, 2013


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Games on COIN

This post is prompted by an excellent post by the guys at On Violence. You should read Capturing Australia! COIN is Boring  to which this was my belated comment. McCormick model of insurgency (Photo credit: Wikipedia) My apologies for coming late to this one, I’ve been on leave for a couple of weeks now and being spending time with the family. I’ve been interested in designing a counter insurgency game since the mid 1990s. The original trigger for my interest were the decolonisation conflicts of the British Empire. This wasn’t a board game, nor a computer game. The group I belong to designs face to face games for multiple participants, a bit like the sort of command post exercises those of us who’ve done some military or civil contingencies time would recognise. I never ran the decolonisation game that prompted…
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Trawling the Archives

I've been looking through some of my early writing on my computer, most of which was written for publication in Chestnut Lodge's club magazine, known affectionately as MilMud (a contraction of Military Muddling). I found several articles from the mid 90s which I have cut and pasted into the blog with dates when they were originally written or the file modified date if that isn't clear. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Libre Office can open WordPerfect files with no problems. 1995 CLWG Games Weekend - Saturday. This was my first ever CLWG event and my first offside report. 1995 CLWG Games Weekend - Sunday. The second part of this report. A Young Officer’s Guide to Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA). I wrote this as a spoof of a training manual extract. At the time I was very much…
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Book Review – Biggles in Spain by W.E. Johns

Biggles in Spain by Johns My rating: 4 of 5 stars I picked this up for a pound in a charity shop in Caterham. I was surprised to find that it stood up well to the passing of time. It was written towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, during which it is set, and first published in 1939. It still reads as a good story. A bit boys own in places, but it is Biggles and that's exactly what Biggles stories are supposed to be. There is a good feel for the history, which is partly through being practically contemporaneous with the events it described. Well worth reading. View all my reviews Related articles Biggles and the Classics The Sunday Yarn ~ Biggles biggles goes to war Book doctor: What first world war books might 10-year-olds like?
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Guest Blog for Government Digital Service

I was asked to do a guest blog for GDS on my experience as a Service Manager on one of their early service assessments.  You can see what I have been doing at work of late, including a screenshot from the passport online appointment booking service and the project's agile kanban board, which I stole the idea for from the Government Digital Service. So here it is - Learning from assessments Related articles Learning from assessments Government leads the way on Online Digital Services. Eh? What??
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