We Interrupt Scheduled Programming...

to bring out a late development.

As hinted at in the previous post, today's post was meant to run out a battle report from the Salem Church game with the Rejects' game from ten days ago.  Instead, I squeezed in a Zoom tutorial today between last Sunday's game with Matt and tomorrow's game.  Today's post highlights this Zoom tutorial.  This last-minute development brings the count to three Salem Church battles this week, alone.  

Andy (Muskets & Magnification blog) mentioned that he had been going through my back catalog with a particular focus on remote gaming.  The idea of playing a remote game over Zoom appealed to him and he wondered how I did it.  After exchanging a few emails, we set Friday for a test session.  In this session I hoped to share how to set up and use Zoom to log into and play a game remotely.  Since Salem Church is still out on table, I suggested that once we get the technology working, we give the game a try.  My expectation was that we might only go through a few activations to demonstrate the functionality.  We ended up playing two full turns.

Armies arrayed for battle.

Once we had Zoom working and switching cameras mastered, we dug into the demo with Andy leading the Federal Army.  Now, Andy was using his phone so views from the webcam were small.  Quite small.  Nevertheless, Andy took to playing both over Zoom and to the rules quickly with dice being thrown on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sedgwick opened the battle by ordering divisional artillery forward to pound the Rebel positions around Salem Church.  One of Wilcox's regiments was destroyed supporting Confederate guns in the woods.  Then, the Federal army advanced toward Salem Church with the Orange Plank Road as its axis. 

Federal artillery opens up.

Sedgwick on the move!

The Rebels respond by placing Semmes' Brigade on Reserve in the center and then advancing Kershaw and Wofford on the Rebel Right.  If the Rebels can turn the Federal Left, perhaps, the Union general advance will pause.

Rebels respond...

by advancing Kershaw and Wofford.

Wofford screams through the woods to hit elements of Bartlett's Brigade.  Casualties to Bartlett are heavy.  One regiment is destroyed having been pushed back, caught in retreat, and scattered.  A second regiment falls back upon supports after having been handled very roughly.  The situation is not looking good for Bartlett especially seeing a Rebel regiment on his flank.  As Bartlett reforms, Brooke turns his divisional artillery onto the flanking Rebels who are now in open ground.  Within minutes of success, those Rebels are pounded by artillery fire.  For now, the Rebels stand their ground! 

Wofford attacks and drives back the enemy.

Federal artillery pound the flanking Rebels!

With pressure mounting upon Bartlett, he orders his brigade back but not before Kershaw crashes into a Federal regiment caught in the open.  Coming out on the short end of the close combat, Bartlett's men are driven back.  A second round of artillery fire from Brooke's guns destroys the Rebels on the flank.  The Federal Left holds!

Kershaw attacks!

Seeing Bartlett falling back and Kershaw moving up, Brown counterattacks from Williams' farm.  Seeing initial success, Brown is ultimately driven back when he, himself, is counterattacked.  On the Federal Right, Wheaton moves his brigade up into the woods toward Golin Run. 

Brown driven back!

Well, after completing two full turns, we decided that this was a good introduction to both Zoom and playing a game over Zoom.  Although Andy was confined to watching the battle unfold on his phone screen, I think this exercise was a success.  Encouragingly, Andy claims that he would like to try this again despite his dice letting him down on more than one occasion.  Hooray!  Another possible conversion into remote gaming!

Thanks, Andy, for a very enjoyable session!  That was good fun!  Until we meet on the remote battlefield again.

Oh, and I still have two Salem Church battle reports to write but I did finish up basing five units this afternoon.

GWS 2026 and a New Project

After the rigorous analysis on what we least like about wargaming, time for a brief update this morning before diving into the first of the Salem Church battle reports.  First, a big thank you to everyone who weighed in with their thoughts on their least liked aspects of wargaming.  Commentary was robust, interesting, and most welcome.

Given that the GWS 2026 data file hit my Dropbox yesterday, attention will turn to preparing that file for the coming year's analysis.  Since I ended the 2025 reporting year examining what we disliked about the hobby, I thought an immediate follow-up with a similar analysis for the 2026 survey might provide an interesting compare and contrast while the 2025 results are still fresh in mind.  Will much change?  We will see.  On a positive note, survey response was up by about ten percent over 2025.  A ten percent increase is a welcome bump from a couple of years seeing a slide in participation.  In a quick count 17 readers put in the "PWJ2026" code into the survey Comments field.  Without confirming, I recall we had 11 such entries last year.  Excellent!  At some point, I will produce select a set of summary statistics for this august group of dedicated readers. 

A New Project

New project?  Yes, it appears that is the case.  Having my arm slightly twisted into submission, I am embarking upon a new, joint project with a friend.  I have long considered this period but figured there were already too many projects in work.  Even if overwhelmed by temptation, I figured that I would tackle this period in 10mm.  Well, I have been a victim to temptation and coercion.  The project will not be in 10mm but 28mm!  The first tranche of figures arrived from the UK on Monday.  What have I done?  Well, giving a little boost to The Lead Pile if nothing else!  The counter in the sidebar illustrates this loss of resolve in reducing The Lead Pile.  Any guesses?

Sedgwick's Corps on the attack!

Next time, a battle report on the first of several playings of the ACW Battle of Salem Church when we see five of Postie's Rejects locked into battle for control of the Orange Plank Road.

Until next time.

The Things We Love to Hate About Wargaming

Having covered what people love about wargaming in the What I Like About You post, it's only fair to look at the flipside too.

In the Great Wargaming Survey, 2025 edition, a related question asked respondents, “What do you like least about miniatures wargaming?” As in the "most liked" question, responses were recorded as unstructured text with a maximum length of about 2,100 characters.  A few respondents actually pushed this limit in their lengthy and generous responses.  Some of these longer responses are fascinating to read and offer much to consider.  In total, there were 4,029 non-blank responses recorded.

Technique Choice

To (hopefully) make sense of this large body of free-form text, machine learning techniques are introduced.  Unlike the analysis on "What I Like" linked above, this analysis focuses on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) rather than on hierarchical cluster analysis.  While both tackle the challenge of qualifying these text responses, PCA and cluster analysis approach the problem differently in order bring some meaning out of the seeming chaos.  Both of these statistical techniques attempt to bring out underlying data associations lurking within these data.  PCA helps with revealing these patterns, graphically, using a biplot technique.  The first step in analysis is to preprocess these data and prepare them for further analysis. 

Preprocessing

To produce a PCA biplot, data reduction methods are utilized to reduce thousands of unique words (tokens) to a smaller and more manageable dataset.  The goal is to transform these unstructured texts into a count of representative tokens while keeping the essential meaning intact.

As an example, a snippet of survey responses shows the following text in the Miniatures_Gaming_Least column.  Parsing and preprocessing requires a number of text transformations (including correcting some spelling errors) to shape tokens into a standardized form.  In addition, synonyms are used to group similar tokens.  For example, parsing and tokenizing the highlighted entry produces the meaningful tokens, "general", "concerns", "persistent", "gatekeeping", "wargaming", "community".  

Raw text before parsing.

After these routines are completed, the resulting dataset produced 3,488 unique terms with associated frequencies.  A further data step involved keeping only tokens with 30 or more counts and then removing near-zero variance terms.  The result produced a dramatic dataset reduction to only nine key word tokens. These nine tokens are "people", "painting", "gaming", "time", "competition", "miniatures", "cost", "rules_lawyer", and "find".

Frequency table showing nine key tokens.

Principal Component Analysis

Once tokenization is complete, the next step focuses on Principal Component Analysis (PCA).  PCA simplifies complex datasets by reducing a number of related variables into a smaller set of uncorrelated dimensions called principal components.  These components are ordered by how much variance they explain.  The first principal component captures the most variation.  The second captures the next most, and so on.  One useful visualization tool is a PCA biplot which illustrates the relative importance (loadings) of each of the nine variables in 2D space.  The PCA biplot produced by this analysis is shown in Figure 1.  The plot shows broad association patterns only and does not identify any one individual.  Color and length of each vector denotes its contribution to the PCA analysis.  Variables pointing in similar directions are positively linked. Those pointing in opposite directions represent contrasting views. Vector length implies importance in the given dimension.   

Figure 1

Grouping or Clustering

The plot suggests that respondents’ least-liked aspects of wargaming fall into a few related, but distinct types of dissatisfaction based upon the nine tokens retained in the preprocessing phase.  Based upon the results illustrated in Figure 1, four main groups emerge from the PCA plot as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

At a higher level of aggregation and inspection, these four clusters can be neatly bifurcated by each of the two dimensions (DIM1 and DIM2) as illustrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4.  For each Dimension, hemispheres are given intuitive classifications to describe the groupings.   

Figure 3 - DIM1

Figure 4 - DIM2

Interpretation and Inference

Graphical analysis of PCA results tends to lend itself (in most cases) to inferences that are easier to interpret than raw data and rudimentary descriptive statistics.  This PCA analysis shows that wargaming complaints aren't just one big nebulous cloud of negativity.  Instead, player dissatisfaction falls into three distinct "pain points" and one universal constant as shown in Figure 2.  These pain points are:

Burden (Miniatures, Painting, Time) 
The strongest pattern connects the time and labor required to bring a force to the table.  While respondents do not necessarily dislike collecting or historical gaming, itself, they tend to feel overwhelmed by the total preparation commitment.  Those commitments can include assembling, painting, basing, storing, and managing a project backlog of The Lead Pile.  The primary obstacle is the time lag between purchasing the figures and terrain for a new project and actually getting the figures onto the table for a game.

Access (Gaming, People, Find)
A second distinct cluster highlights the possible frustration around getting a game onto the table once painted armies have mustered out.  This roadblock includes finding compatible opponents, joining local clubs, scheduling, or matching interests in a particular period, scale, or ruleset.  For these players, the challenge isn't building or painting an army, but the ability to transform those completed units into regular, enjoyable games.

Culture & Friction (Competition, Rules-Lawyering)
A third, sharper pattern links competitive environments with rules disputes. This reflects a clear distaste for extreme adversarial gaming where min-maxing, rules-lawyering, or winning overshadows sociability, historical narrative, and mutual enjoyment.  This dimension strongly differentiates players who favor relaxed, scenario-driven or pick-up games from those uncomfortable with tournament-style play.

Cost as an Independent Factor: Cost operates largely independently, showing low alignment with any single cluster across the first two PCA dimensions. This suggests that financial expense is a universal secondary concern across all groups rather than the primary defining trait of a specific subset of players.

Dimensional Study

Dimension 1 (DIM1) in Figure 3 breaks the horizontal axis clearly between a production cluster on the left from the gaming/social cluster on the right.  On the left are people who dislike painting, miniatures, and the time those activities demand.  On the right, complaints focus on other players, gaming opportunities, competition, and even finding games or opponents.  Perhaps this underscores the differences between the solo preparatory burden of miniatures gaming and the social or organizational realities of actually playing it.

Dimension 2 (DIM2) in Figure 4 divides the vertical axis between the access or burden dislikes of the hobby against the negative culture or style of play components.  On the top, dislikes focus on participation, access, or preparation.  The bottom, on the other hand, highlights the style or tone of actual play especially in competitive or argumentative settings.

Summary
The broad inferences, here, suggest that wargaming’s main barriers are threefold and arise at three distinct stages of the hobby.  These are:

• Preparing to play.  Acquiring and painting miniatures takes time, effort, and money.
• Finding a game.  Connecting with like-minded opponents, clubs, and schedules.
• Enjoying the game.  Matching culture, style, and competitive expectations once at the table.

Ultimately, these data indicate that player disengagement is rarely caused by a lack of enthusiasm for history or rules.  Instead, these dislikes are driven by the sheer effort required to prepare, the friction of finding compatible opponents, and the occasional dissatisfaction with how games are played.

What are your main dislikes about the wargaming hobby?  Do any of these tendencies and associations hold for you? 

Prelude to Salem Church

The first Battle of Salem Church is in the books after a short/sharp fight on Monday.  How did Sedgwick fare?  That is a tale for another time.

Sedgwick on the attack!

Today's post is but a brief update to the Blog List to test that I can follow up with another successful post after having changed my url from "http" to "https".  While my url had been "http" since inception, the HTTPS Redirect toggle ensured that my "http" was redirected to "https".  Since the populated "Original feed" url in Feedburner is a fixed entity, that redirect may not be honored.  

Heavy fighting at Perry Farm.

To guarantee that you pick up your own blog in Blog List and that others can find you after using the Feedburner bypass, the Blog List entry in the gadget must match the "Original feed" path in Configure Proxy page.  If your Original feed path shows "http" then the Blog List entry must reference "http" as well and vice versa.  This works similarly for following other blogs in the gadget.  Your url entry in the Blog List gadget must match the author of the other blog's url if that author is using the Feedburner bypass.  If another's recent post is not appearing in your Blog List and that person has used the Feedburner bypass, try editing that Blog List entry by changing either "http" to "https" or from "https" to "http".

Clear as mud?

Let's see if PWJ still updates after switching to "https".  Yep!  Looks good in my Blogroll.  How about in yours?

Bring In The Cache Buster!

By now, we are all familiar with the issue.  Blogger's Blogroll gadget refuses to reliably pick up and publish the latest post.  I first encountered this issue back in May when I posted a short update at PWJ: Testing.  In May, this was an occasional issue with variable lags but not too long.  There were a few workarounds that seemed to lessen the burden and at least one of these techniques worked, most times, to force a repolling of Blogger's Blogroll gadget.

That situation has changed to a worse case as witnessed by blogs now seeing multi-day delays in the most recent post appearing in Blogroll.  Very frustrating.  None of the temporary "methods" I used in the past to jog the gadget into action seemed to work.  Blogger's Community has seen a growing number of complaints that I first referenced in response to a comment in PWJ: Fourteen Years of Marching Through History.  That reference pointed to New posts not showing on Reading List.  This issue holds for the Blogroll gadget as well.  One respondent laid blame on pasting formatted text into a blog post for this failure to update.  A more likely explanation is that the Reading List or Blogroll displays a cached or stale feed rather than the feed from the most recent post.  The latter explanation seems the most reasonable conclusion since current posts still appear in the daily Feedspot Today email and Feedly Reading List remains current.       

Responses in the community note, above, suggest clearing the cache.  Now, “Clearing the cache” can mean two different things, and it is important not to confuse them.  The response suggests clearing your browser cache.  Clearing the browser cache or viewing the blogsite in a private/incognito window is a good way to make sure you are seeing the current version of your own blog.  This is useful for validating whether a change made to the Blogroll gadget has appeared publicly without cache contamination by your local browser.

In the current state of affairs, Blogger’s feed cache is, again, the more likely culprit.  Blogger keeps its own cached copy of the feeds used by the Blogroll gadget.  Blogroll gadget sometimes holds on to an old copy of a blog’s feed.  Therefore, the gadget does not always notice a new post promptly even though the post was published correctly.  This condition is reinforced by seeing that many Wordpress blogs continue to show recent updates.  What we really need to do is bring out the heavy equipment and bust through the Blogroll cache that is holding back more recent posts.

One workaround is to use Google's own Feedburner's version of the blog’s feed.  Feedburner acts as a middleman.  It takes a fresh copy of the blog’s feed and provides a different feed address for the Blogroll to read.  That is why the Feedburner approach can be useful.  On the Feedburner page, your blog should be listed under "Your feeds."  Clicking on the three dots next your feed brings up a dropdown with "Refresh feed."  This choice forces Feedburner to fetch the current feed again.  If your Blogroll points to the Feedburner URL, it may retrieve the refreshed Feedburner version rather than relying on Blogger’s stale copy of the ordinary blog feed.  Now to be clear, PWJ still references the ordinary blog feed url in Blogroll.  That is, 

http://palousewargamingjournal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

An alternative option that works for some is

http://palousewargamingjournal.blogspot.com/?alt=rss

After publishing a new blog post, open Feedburner website and click on "Refresh Feed."  That click ought to set the refresh in motion.  The key to remember is that Blogger’s Blogroll can still have its own cache. Resetting Feedburner cannot force Blogger to clear that cache or trigger Blogroll to poll immediately.

Note Very Well!

Do not rely on Feedburner as though it is a guaranteed repair.  Feedburner does not give you control over Blogger’s internal Blogroll cache.  This technique is best viewed as a practical workaround and not as a definitive solution.  Blogger still needs to resolve this issue.  Good practice to back up before making changes like this and test results.  Of course, YMMV.

If you give this a try, report back with your results.  If I see recent blogs popping up in my Blogroll, I will bet that some of you gave this workaround a try.  This technique worked for allowing PWJ to appear in Blogroll with its current and timely post, but I make no guarantees that this maneuver will work for everyone.  Enter these waters at your own risk!

Biblical Camel Archers

The purpose of this post is twofold.  One to show the latest figures loping out from the painting desk, and two, to see if what I discovered about a working solution to the blogroll delay (or absence altogether) is reproducible.

First up, the latest units off the painting desk are two, three camel groups of mounted archers.  These early, tandem dromedary troopers are additions that I have been eyeing for a long time.  Finally, the first two stands are ready for action.  These fellas will see service in some of the Biblical armies.  

Figures are 28mm Newline Designs.  Nice looking sculpts and something different and fun to paint.  I like 'em!  There are another six of these camelry in The Lead Pile.   

Second, this post is a test to see if the forced, work-around publishing to the blogroll seen in my 14th Anniversary post can be reproduced in a controlled and repeatable fashion.  If it can, then I will write up what I discovered and my solution.  If the forced effort fails, well, then you will not see this post unless you come looking. 

Fourteen Years of Marching Through History

Fourteen years ago, in September 2012, the Palouse Wargaming Journal (PWJ) began as a place to record my wargaming activities and perhaps connect with a few like-minded wargamers.  At the time, I had no clear sense of where the project might lead nor how long this venture might last.  I certainly did not imagine that, fourteen years later, the blog would have accumulated 1,915 posts, 62,241 comments, and 341 followers.

Those numbers are more than statistics.  Much more.  Together they represent fourteen years of games played, figures painted, and ideas exchanged with readers and fellow wargamers.  The Palouse Wargaming Journal began as my hobby notebook, but it has gradually become something more.  The PWJ records my ongoing wargaming activities preserved one post at a time.  Occasionally, a little bit of Real Life is tossed in for good measure.

The blog is also a record of the dynamic nature of the hobby.  Some periods have been filled with games and painting projects.  Others have been slowed by competing demands, a wandering eye, or simply the difficulty of finding time to arrange a game.  Projects have been started, set aside, restarted, and occasionally (but rarely!) completed.  Armies have marched onto the tabletop, disappeared back into their storage boxes, and returned years later under entirely different rules.  Sometimes even appearing with different basing schemes.  The blog preserves all of those stages, including the false starts, mistakes, and second guesses that rarely appear in a photo or a summarized battle account.

The past year has been a period of both activity and reflection.  I have continued to report games, show painted figures, and describe the projects occupying my painting desk and gaming table.  At the same time, I found myself thinking more often about the wider purpose of wargaming blogs.  What makes such a blog worthwhile?  Does blogging still have a future in an age taken over by social media, video, and artificial intelligence?  Why do wargamers devote so much effort to recording painting, researching, designing, and playing of games?

My continuing interest in analyzing the results of WSS' The Great Wargaming Survey offers one way to explore these questions.  The survey provides useful information about the people who participate in the hobby, the periods and rules they prefer, and the reasons they continue to wargame.  Yet these data also raise questions that statistics alone cannot answer.  Numbers may reveal patterns, but they do not always explain the personal experiences behind them.  Two people may report playing the same rules or historical period while finding entirely different rewards in the experience.

That tug-of-war between information and experience has become increasingly important as the internet continues to change.  I repeatedly find myself asking whether blogs still matter.  The question has been particularly difficult to ignore during a year marked by ongoing frustrations with Blogger’s infrastructure.  Those technical problems are compounded by the growing influence of social media which offers quick publication and immediate feedback.  Video, too, has become an increasingly popular way of presentation.   Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the changing landscape by summarizing information and answering questions without necessarily directing readers to the original source.

Can blogging offer something different to these newer forms of communication?

I believe it can, although perhaps not by trying to compete with them on their own terms.  The Palouse Wargaming Journal is not simply a collection of answers about rules, armies, or battles that can be extracted and summarized by an AI agent.  For me, it is a personal record of a hobby in progress.  It shows the figures and units as they emerge from the painting desk, the battlefields as they are laid out, the games as they develop, and the decisions that influence battle outcomes.

That personal element is important because wargaming is not only about information.  It is also about interpretation.  A battle report may explain who won, but it can also describe how the game unfolded, which decisions mattered, and what made the contest memorable.  Similarly, a painting post may show a finished unit but also the way attention moves from one project to another, from one army to another, and from one historical period to the next.

As I wrote in Has AI Killed the Blogger Star?, those details cannot easily be reduced to a generic summary.  These details belong to a particular hobby journey and to the individual experiences of the people involved.  A blog can preserve those experiences in a way that is more personal and more durable than a brief social-media post.

In that sense, the blog remains both an archive and a conversation.  Each post records a small part of the hobby, but it also invites readers to respond, contribute their own experiences, and even disagree with my conclusions or decisions.  The comments, correspondence, and remote games that have grown from the blog are as important as the posts themselves.  They demonstrate that wargaming is not merely a solitary activity carried out among shelves of miniatures.  Wargaming is also a means of building connections across distance and sharing enthusiasm with people who may never otherwise meet.

When I began blogging fourteen years ago as a challenge, I did not know whether anyone would read the Palouse Wargaming Journal, much less whether it would still exist fourteen years later.  The wargaming blogosphere has changed considerably since 2012.  Many blogs have disappeared, social media has altered how wargamers share their work, and AI-assisted search is beginning to reshape how people find information online.  Yet the fundamental appeal of the hobby remains unchanged.

There is still satisfaction in painting a unit, studying a campaign, laying out a battlefield, rolling the dice, and discovering what happens when history is placed in the hands of players. There is also value in recording that experience.  Not of value because every game is historically significant or every painted figure is a masterpiece, but because each one forms part of my continuing journey.

Blogging remains my preferred way of sharing that journey.  It provides the time and space to explain not only what happened, but also why it mattered to me.  The Palouse Wargaming Journal continues not only because the hobby remains rewarding, but also because sharing my thoughts and experiences with others makes the hobby better.

Thank you to everyone who has visited the PWJ, left a comment, joined a remote game, offered encouragement, or simply followed along quietly.  Your interest has helped sustain the blog through fourteen years of painting, gaming, research, reflection, and occasional technical frustration.

For now, marching through history in miniature continues.

Edit 11 September:  Even with no (or long delayed) Blogroll widget updates, seeing readers find this post despite the hurdles to overcome is very encouraging!