Overexposed

Happened to watch a lot of GSN last night with my wife. By the end of the experience, she had had enough.

Which seemed a little strange to me. We were watching game shows, after all. How could anybody get overexposed to our little genre? Well, apparently it's quite possible for a lot of people. Game shows have always been niche programming in American television, though they've had their moments of great popularity.

Maybe I needed the useful reminder that not everybody shares my interest in game shows. I get caught up in watching and blogging and arguing about the shows so much that it seems like the whole wide world must feel the same enthusiasm. Not so, you naive game show blogger. Most of the world does not care, and emphatically so.

Luckily, enough folks do care to keep the genre alive, despite frequent signs of exhaustion or extinction or both. Game shows have survived the rigging scandals, a decades-long exile from broadcast prime time, and Extreme Gong. They can probably survive a lot of folks' indifference to them.

Fridaygram: Live, Tatooine, Sky Bikes

By Ashleigh Rentz, Google Developers Blog Editor Emerita

It’s been two months since we wrapped up Google I/O 2012, and there’s been no shortage of topics for Google’s developer advocates to discuss with the community afterward! Google Developers Live opens the door to two-way communication all year long by hosting online office hours sessions, but it also offers other viewing opportunities like interviews with community figures and tech-centric reviews of Android games. With over 100 new episodes recorded for posterity since I/O, chances are good that we’ve all missed something fascinating. Why not flip backward through the events calendar this weekend and see what’s been happening in our studios?

While our own cameras are focused on earthly developers, NASA has their sights on the skies. This week, astronomers discovered a new binary star system with multiple planets circling those stars. One of these planets with two suns is even within the habitable zone. It may not be in a galaxy far far away, but the similarities to Tatooine are still fun to speculate on.

Finally, this week’s addition of bicycle navigation to Google Maps for Android is welcome news to we pedal-powered commuters, but the stakes have been raised... A team at University of Maryland recently built a new human-powered helicopter, and videos of the test flights are now making the rounds on YouTube. It’ll be an awesome day when Google Maps helps me find my way to work pedaling one of those!

Each week, we bring you a Fridaygram full of interesting things that help keep your weekend geekarific. Ashleigh is our editor emerita who comes back to visit when Scott takes some time away from the office. This week, we join many others around the world in saying a somber farewell to Neil Armstrong, an inspiration to us all.

Who can sit next to children on flights?

[This post originally appeared on Forbes.com on 14th August 2012].

It seems almost silly to ask the question: who can sit next to children on flights? Obviously, parents would be desirable but sometimes that can’t happen. It may be that a child or children are flying

Virgin Australia's Airbus A330-200 (R) taxis past a Virgin Blue Boeing 737-800 (R) after landing at Sydney International Airport on May 4, 2011. Domestic carrier Virgin Blue and its international offshoots, Pacific Blue and V Australia, will all be known as Virgin Australia, with negotiations underway to bring Polynesia Blue under the same umbrella. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

unaccompanied or maybe, because of poor airline seating policies, they are apart from parents (Air Canada, I’m talking about you here). In those cases, they are going to end up seated next to an adult they don’t know.

Can You Outsource Child Care On A Plane?

Joshua GansContributor

O' Air Canada, do you really want to separate families?

Joshua GansContributor

Well, it turns out that some airlines actually have a policy on this. Specifically, it appears that if the adult stranger (to the children) is a women, that’s fine but for a man, that’s prohibited. Story No.1 comes from Virgin Australia. They apparently have this policy and unseated fire fighter, John McGirr, who had been seated next to two children. McGirr recounts the experience:

‘Sir we are going have to ask you to move’

‘Why’, I said.

‘Well, because you are male, you can’t be seated next to two unaccompanied minors’.

Shocked, I replied, ‘ Isn’t this sexist and discriminatory?’

She replied, ‘I am sorry, but that is our policy’.

Basically, he felt like a pedophile precisely because he was treated like one. The story created an uproar (although not everyone disagreed with Virgin’s policy). Virgin are now reviewing their approach.

Virgin are not alone. The week brought a similar incident on Qantas who claimed they were maximizing “the child’s safety and well-being.” Really Qantas? You seem to run out of pre-ordered children’s meals quite quickly if that is really what you are doing.

And here is Boris Johnson’s experience on British Airways. Yes, that is Boris Johnson who is now mayor of London.

There we were, waiting for take-off, and I had just been having a quick zizz. It was a long flight ahead, all the way to India, and I had two children on my left. Already they were toughing each other up and sticking their fingers up each other’s nose, and now — salvation!

Hovering above me was a silk-clad British Airways stewardess with an angelic smile, and she seemed to want me to move. “Please come with me, sir” said the oriental vision.

At once, I got her drift. She desired to upgrade me. In my mind’s eye, I saw the first-class cabin, the spiral staircase to the head massage, the Champagne, the hot towels. 

“You betcha!” I said, and began to unbuckle. At which point, the children set up a yammering. Oi, they said to me, where do you think you are going? I was explaining that the captain had probably spotted me come on board, don’t you know. Doubtless he had decided that it was outrageous for me to fly steerage, sound chap that he was. I’d make sure to come back now and then, hmmm? 

At which the stewardess gave a gentle cough. Actually, she said, she was proposing to move me to row 52, and that was because — she lowered her voice — “We have very strict rules”.

Can You Outsource Child Care On A Plane?

Joshua GansContributor

O' Air Canada, do you really want to separate families?

Joshua GansContributor

Eh? I said, by now baffled. “A man cannot sit with children,” she said; and then I finally twigged. “But he’s our FATHER”, chimed the children. “Oh,” said the stewardess, and then eyed me narrowly. “These are your children?” “Yes,” I said, a bit testily. “Very sorry,” she said, and wafted down the aisle — and in that single lunatic exchange you will see just about everything you need to know about our dementedly phobic and risk-averse society.

Johnson was saved public humiliation but say the injustice in the policy. Subsequently, British Airways was forced to change its policy following a law suit. They now try and sit children together. They apparently think, against all evidence, that an adult is more likely to be a sex offender than a child might be a bully.

Which brings me to my story. I wasn’t discriminated against but having been incensed by all this discussion and the fear of pedophiles, I took a different approach. The other day we boarded our long, 13 and a half hour flight from Sydney to LA. Our family had two seats at an end and then three of the four seats in the middle of our Qantas aircraft. Our plan had been to seat the two eldest children together and have the two adults with the youngest one. The youngest wasn’t too happy about this as she wanted to be next to her brother and sister. But then we got on the plane and sitting in the four seat was a man. That caused me to think about our youngest child’s plea. Why were we doing things that way? It could be we were trying to spare the stranger any discomfort from sitting next to a child. But it could also have been that we subtly held ‘stranger danger’ feelings ourselves? I couldn’t risk the latter so I let the children sit with each other while we parents slinked over to a separate area (in the same cabin but over the continuous mathematical line that would be perfect accompaniment). We would defiantly protest Qantas’ policy.

Now the news is, of course, that nothing bad happened. Well, to our children. To the man, I’m not so sure. It was a pretty smooth flight but you can’t get perfect behavior for 13 odd hours. But he didn’t call a waitress and claim that he should be moved according to Qantas policy so it couldn’t have been too bad. Perhaps he was pleased that some parents had confidently not considered him to be a sex offender.

But think of the alternative. Yes, Qantas might be discriminating against men by making them appear to be sex offenders but, when they get their seating policy right, a disproportionate number of women are finding themselves seated next to unaccompanied children on flights. Boris Johnson’s heart lept when he thought he might be moved from his own children as we know that adults, if given a choice, would rather be next to other adults. And there are many more women suffering from this than men likely being moved. Sounds like another consequence of discrimination to me.

When it comes down to it, like so many aspects of airline policy — consider how you are forced to turn off a Kindle on takeoff — the airlines have got their priorities wrong because they can’t get their statistics right. Consider the caption in this recent British Airways ad.

We test our cheese as meticulously as we test our engines.

If not for the accompanied small font explanation that might be taken in a bad light. We expect airlines to quantify risks well when it comes to safety but surely our confidence in them might be harmed a little when they can’t calculate risks in relation to other matters.

For unaccompanied children, I suspect the risk of any criminal behavior befalling them is might less than say, them being misplaced by an airline. On that score, this recent United Airlines experience may given parents far more cause for concern. 

The Driest August In Seattle History (and more to come)

I didn't want to mention this, worrying I might jinx it, but it is clear that August 2012 will the driest in Seattle history. So far we have had a trace--which means a sprinkle that is less than .01 inches. (The National Weather Service defines measurable rain as rain of .01 inches or more.)   The previous record was in 1974 when .01 inches had fallen.

The other record we working on is the longest stretch of dry days----for which the record is 51 days.
 Right now we are at 38 days...which I believe is something like the 7th longest dry spell.   But it is clear that we have at least 4-7 days of no rain ahead, so we will surely get into the mid-forties.

One of my favorite forecasting tool is from the output of the North American Ensemble Forecasting System (NAEFS), which combines the ensemble forecasts of the U.S. and Canadian forecasting efforts.  Remember, an ensemble is when we run the models many times to get an idea of the uncertainty and probabilities in a forecast.   Combining two ensembles is even better than using one!

So here is the output from NAEFS (keep in mind this is all in metric).  Temperatures are moderate (highs around 20C--68F), but then warm well into the 70s and low 80s, as a major ridge builds in next week).

But look at precipitation in the second panel.  Nothing for the next week...so we should get at least to a 45 day dry streak.  We will be in the top five at that point.   Within striking distance.

 Finally, today and this weekend we have some weak troughs over the area, bringing some morning low clouds and temps in the upper 60s to low 70s.  Fine for outdoor activities.  As the ridge revs up this week, highs will rise in the mid to upper 70s, perhaps 80s in some locations.  My tomatoes are very, very happy.

The only issue will be wildfires.  There will be no lightning, so that won't initiate them.  But the landscape of the region is very dry.  Consider the MODIS satellite imagery from yesterday:  many fires (and lots of smoke) over Idaho, and several fires over CA.

Science names the Hamster

"Reverse Frontostriatal Connectivity" is the neurobiological term for the Rationalization Hamster:

Women and men differed in the brain mechanisms that enabled self-controlled decisions. During self-control men showed a stronger decrease in some limbic regions than women. An increased frontostriatal coupling helped men to control immediate reward desiring. Women showed the reverse frontostriatal connectivity during a ‘desire-reason dilemma’.

Translation: Men use reason to override their feelings. Women use feelings to override their reason.

This would help expain why it is difficult to utilize logic to convince a woman of anything. The more you succeed in convincing her, the more she will be inclined to amp up her feelings in order to counteract that success. Applying logic to the science, this suggests a more successful strategy would be to simply skip the logical process entirely and go straight to making an appeal to her emotions.

Sound familiar?

Kickstarter Stretch Goal Perks: More or Better? [POLL RESULTS | INFOGRAPHIC]

Following up on the poll earlier this week, I asked if you prefer Kickstarter stretch goals that add more perks or improve the perks you already expected. This question got a lot of really great responses and the voting was very tight. Interestingly, though BETTER won the day, MORE had far more supporting comments. Granted, comments from either side had plenty of caveats.

"MORE!... Assuming the base product is already high-quality."
"BETTER!... Depending on the type of product."

So what do you think of the results? Surprised? Relieved? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Polish Royal Guard regiment complete (BF&S)

Finished the regiment, with some time to spare, for this Sunday's game of By Fire & Sword. Patrik and David are both busy painting additional regiments for their own armies, so there will no doubt be a big battle awaiting.

The Pikes and musketeers as well as the command are from the "By Fire & Sword" German mercenary old type box set. The regimental cannon and its crew are from Khurasan Miniatures. I traded my original regimental gun with David since he needed  a much more uniform look for his artillery battery and I myself don't mind how the single artillery piece in my regiment looks like. I did however shorten the barrel since this was a medium cannon and the regimental guns are smaller light guns.

Like with the rest of my regiments, this is a "minimum size" force, and can be expanded with additional companies of Pikes and Muskets as well as additional junior officers and regimental guns. This makes the limit of 5 regiments in your division not being as restrictive as one might think. And with a 4th regiment, in my army I can also field another "divisional support" unit  like Reiters and Armoured Reiter companies.

Been there, done that

Just watched the sneak peek of GSN's Pyramid. This blog entry's title probably gives you a good idea of my overall reaction. The show was so retro that I felt like I was watching an episode of Dick Clark's Pyramid with a new host and a glossier set.

Which is hardly terrible, of course. Pyramid is one of the all-time classics, and GSN was obviously afraid to tamper with the tried and true. The excruciating faithfulness to the old Clark format will make many classics fans happy. But I was left vaguely disappointed. If you're just going to do exactly the same old thing, why bother?

Still, everybody in the GSN version was competent and entertaining. Mike Richards, despite the grief he catches from some The Price is Right purists, did a fine job as the host. He cracked wise and even replayed the old Clark bit of offering perfect clues after a failed Winners Circle. But then everything was like the Clark version. Which has to be the first and last word on this GSN effort.

Meanwhile, I finally caught an episode of Beat the Chefs. I went into the experience with a lot of doubts, mainly because I hate to cook (but love to eat). Funny thing, I enjoyed the show. Sure, host Matt Rogers shouted too much, and the trash talk between the amateur cooks and the pro chefs got old immediately. But the show moved along briskly and even held the interest of anti-culinary moi.

Lossless and Transparency Modes in WebP

By Jyrki Alakuijala, WebP Team

At Google, we are constantly looking at ways to make web pages load faster. One way to do this is by making web images smaller. This is especially important for mobile devices where smaller images save both bandwidth and battery life. Earlier this month, we released version 0.2 of the WebP library that adds support for lossless and transparency modes to compress images. This version provides CPU and memory performance comparable to or better than PNG, yet results in 26% smaller files.

WebP’s improved compression comes from advanced techniques such as dedicated entropy codes for different color channels, exploiting 2D locality of backward reference distances and a color cache of recently used colors. This complements basic techniques such as dictionary coding, Huffman coding and color indexing transform. We think that we've only scratched the surface in improving compression. Our newly added support for alpha transparency with lossy images promises additional gains in this space, helping make WebP an efficient replacement for PNG.

The new WebP modes are supported natively in the latest Beta version of Chrome. The bit stream specification for these new WebP modes has been finalized and the container specification has been updated. We thank the community for their valuable feedback and for helping us evolve WebP as a new image compression format for the web. We encourage you to try these new compression methods on your favorite set of images, check out the code, and continue to provide feedback.

Dr. Jyrki Alakuijala is a Software Engineer with a special interest in data compression. He is a father of five daughters, and sings in the Finnish Choir in Zürich. Before joining Google, Jyrki worked in neurosurgical and radiotherapy development.

Posted by Ashleigh Rentz, Editor Emerita

Polish Royal Guard command (BF&S)

I bought a box of German Mercenary "Old Type" infantry what seems ages ago to boost my Polish-Lithuanian army with some stability a Pike& Shot unit can offer. Hundred things came in between and I did not start painting on this unit until Patrik at our club asked when we were going to play By Fire & Sword again.

Having a game waiting is always a good incitement for painting something, and thus I started painting my Pike&Shot unit, modeled on the information I was given by Kadrinazi from http://kadrinazi.blogspot.com/ and also the moderator of the By Fire & Sword forum.

The Polish Royal guard apparently wore blue as their main color, in tradition with the Polish Vasa line of kings still clinging to their lost throne. The banner for the guard was silver white with a diagonal yellow cross and a holy icon on one side and (from the picture I used as a source) what seems to be the combined coat of arms of Sweden and Poland-Lithuania.

It's going to be a very cool unit once everything is painted up (only have the regimental gun left - so pictures of the unit will be up tomorrow). I mainly painted up the command in advance for two reasons, to have prototype paintjob to serve as a role model for the rest of the unit - and I also wanted to dedicate a little extra time for the banner which is made of a sheet of paper that I painted with PVA glue and then several layers of regular acrylic paint, free hand painting the cross and iconography. I'm quite pleased with the end result, but it looked like it would end as a disaster midway through when the basecoat didn't turn out the way I wanted and everything was running due to too much water in the paint mix.

 

The Play's the Thing - Cover Design

Earlier this year, I laid out The Play's the Thing, a Shakespearean roleplaying game from Magpie Games.

I did the cover and interior layout, but the let's focus on the cover design. Marissa Kelly had the art you see above already made for the cover, so my job was mainly to create a suitable frame around it. I pulled some old book cover textures to create the feel of a well-worn play book.

It took quite a bit of cutting, pasting, blending and warping to get all these textures to fit together naturally. The blue area you see above is actually from a different cover than the striped area. Hope it looks relatively natural. Take a closer look and tell me if you can spot the seams.

Magpie Games super-chill people and a real pleasure to work for. Pick up the The Play's the Thing from their site or at your local game shop.

Sneaking and peeking

We just don't have debuts of game shows nowadays. We get wow-oh-boy sneak peeks.

In fact, we'll get two of them over the next couple months. As a faux tweet noted, GSN trots out a special sneak preview of Pyramid tomorrow after the first-runs of American Bible Challenge and Beat the Chefs. The network clearly hopes to capitalize on the strong ratings for their Bible quizzer and pros-versus-joes cook-off.

SyFy will do something similar with the second season of its in-the-dark stunt show, Total Blackout. The "regular" season debuts November 13, but the famous sneak peek comes on October 29. The peek-a-boo will enjoy a marathon lead-in from hidden-camera project Scare Tactics.

Cable networks get sneakier all the time. Guess they figure a tantalizing glimpse will lead to better numbers for the regular run. Of course, if a show stinks, all the sneak peeks in the world won't impress the Nielsen Company.

Now in BigQuery: batch queries and a connector for Excel

By Ryan Boyd, Developer Advocate for Cloud Data Services

Businesses and developers are using BigQuery to solve a wide variety of use cases – from optimizing advertising campaigns, to spotting inventory shortfalls, to understanding customer behavior. Accommodating these varied use cases requires BigQuery to be flexible, both for the developers integrating applications with the API and for the analysts running ad-hoc queries. Today we’ve made it more flexible by adding batch queries and a connector for Microsoft Excel.

Batch priority queries

BigQuery was designed for ad-hoc, iterative analytics on millions-to-billions of rows of data. When you’re diving into your data to gain insights, you want your queries to run in seconds rather than waiting minutes or hours. Sometimes our customers don’t need these fast responses when they’re running nightly jobs to update dashboards or reports, but want to use the same BigQuery technology and underlying datasets for these queries. We’ve now added batch pricing to accommodate these developers, allowing them to run their queries at a significantly lower cost.

Here’s how to set the priority to ‘batch’ when submitting a new query via the Google APIs Client Library for Java:

    Job job = new Job();
    JobConfiguration config = new JobConfiguration();
    JobConfigurationQuery queryConfig = new JobConfigurationQuery();
    config.setQuery(queryConfig);

    job.setConfiguration(config);
    queryConfig.setQuery(querySql);
    queryConfig.setPriority("BATCH");

    com.google.api.services.bigquery.Bigquery.Jobs.Insert insert =
     bigquery.jobs().insert(projectId, job);

Batch queries will execute between 30 minutes and 3 hours after they are submitted. See more information in our Developers Guide.

BigQuery Connector for Excel

Spreadsheets are a popular tool for analysts, executives and and developers to explore data. Last year we launched the ability for users of Google Spreadsheets to execute BigQuery queries using the Google Apps Script integration. Today, we’re launching the BigQuery Connector for Excel, which allows Microsoft Excel users to do the same with the ‘External Data’ functionality built into the product. Once the BigQuery results are in Excel, you can easily make pivot tables, create charts and integrate it with data from other sources. If you’re interested, you can try it right now!

Let us know what you think of these new features and what else you’d like to see in the roadmap by reaching out on Google+. We’ll also be holding office hours this Friday at 10 AM PDT on Google Developers Live to talk about these new features and answer any questions you have about BigQuery.

Microsoft and Excel are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation


Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on cloud data services. He's been at Google for 6 years and previously helped build out the Google Apps ISV ecosystem. He published his first book "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0" with O'Reilly.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

European Team Championship 2012 Poland report

Andreas from our club tagged along with the Swedish FoW team down to Poland last week to participate in the European Team Championship tournament. Andreas snapped a bunch of pictures and compiled a summary of his battles and his demo game of By Fire and Sword. Had I known the By Fire & Sword guys would be there (from what I learned they were sponsoringthe whole event) I would have tagged along myself. The text and pictures below are by Andreas "Deathbullar".





................

Well better late than never, here is my short report from etc 2012 Poland. For this FoW team tournament I was going to run the new tank destroyer list, as the teams were only allowed to take 2 lists of every type (tank,mech and inf).

The lists of the Swedish team:

Tank: German panzers, and British Sherman’s

Mech: Us TD and Totenkopf

Inf: Russians and Cassino Germans.

Some good solid lists, not the best in the game but not the worst either.

Summaries of my games:

Game 1 Ireland.

Mission: Breakthrough

Us rifle, a lot of art, 2 x rifle, 1x engineers, 3x At guns, Mortars and air.

A battle that started on the wrong foot, as my opponent was very hung over. Not the best battle I ever had, and at the end I noticed a thing that would have given me with the win. Undeserved Draw, but what can you do...

The others did not that good either, Victory to the Irish. 1 win, 2 draws 3 loss.

Game 2 Serbia

Mission: Hold the line, (or I think it was)

German Wiking 9x panthers 2x Hertz 2x 8-rads and AA Put 1 TD unit in ambush and the rest on the board. Not that much to say, a bit of cat and mouse game where I started to single out his units and at the end broke one Panther unit, 8-rads and Hetzer’s forcing him to a company morale which he fails (fearless). Leaving me with a 6-1 with 2x TD units almost below half.

Victory to the Swedes

6 wins (flawless)

Game 3 Canada

US Tanks a lot of Sherman’s, M10's, Patton and Stuarts.

Mission Hasty Assault

Started with all of my TD units on the board, it was a good list for me to play against. Trained troops with front 6-7 would be an easy opponent. Sadly I roll like crap... the first shooting saw 8 /8 hits on 3+ but some failed Fp left his 6x Sherman platoon above 50%. After that It was down hill, with 16 shoots at 4+ and they all miss... There is nothing you can do to come back from that.

Game ends 2-5

2 wins, 4 losses for the Swedes this round.

Canada wins

Game 4 Portugal

I had played against one of their team mates in last year’s EGT. After the drafting we stood facing each other once again!

He was playing US armored rifle (vet)

2x Armored rifle, Hmg's, Mortars, 4x Hellcats, 3x Sherman’s, Abrams (Sherman’s in ambush). Scenario was Fighting withdrawal. I got to be the attacker. Started to move very aggressively against the last objective that was held by the hmg's and one armored rifle platoon. I started to kill of the hmg, for an easy kill point and to bring him close to company morale, but also to push him to start moving out to the objective. You can't ignore 12x M10's that are standing next to the objective. After a few turns of shooting I was coming closer to breaking his company, but he kept on passing his platoon morale tests (I don't think he failed once). The time runs out, it all comes down to him passing a 4+ test which he passes. He should have tested for the Sherman’s as well but that is a different story.  Since we didn't pass turn 6 it was a draw, but one more round and the victory would been mine since all he had left was a rifle and Sherman platoon below half strength.

Draw

2 losses, 3 wins and one draw

Swedish Victory!

Game 5 Finland!

Always fun with brotherly rivalry, and what more perfect way to end a tournament and to have a big clash of the North!

US TD, 8x m10's 3x Sherman’s, 5x Stuart, Armored rifle, Patton.

I was faced of to play against another TD company, not the most fun but one must take one for the  team. The game was very boring for both of us, he started with his m10's ambush cloaked while I started mine on the board. And that cost him the game, he didn't got the opportunity to ambush them once in the game, while I awaited his reserves and started to kill them off one by one. After 1h he gave me the win, a clean 6-1.

3 wins 3 loss, a draw... but at least we won on kill points ;)

We (Swedish team) ended up on a 6th place! Which is more than we had hoped for. Even if it would have been great to be amongst the top  no one ever thought we would be top 10.  Some bad rolls and the lists could have been a bit cheesier but at the end everyone had a great time and I think I’m not alone hoping that we will see another Fow Etc next year! 

After the tournament me and a friend went down to the “By Fire and Sword” gang for a demo. I have seen the game a couple of times in Lund but to Patrick it was the first glimpse. Since he wanted to play the Swedish (DOOH) I was left with the Ottomans! I won the starting roll and placed some random charges gambling that they would reach his Reiters. Luckily they did manage to hit reach the enemy troops and after some awesome rolling his Reiters were killed and I was running into his Armored Reiters.

His other troops moved around a bit and did nothing. This was going well i thought, until his other unit of Armored Reiters smashed into my skirmish bowmen and started to tear up my flank. After some good battles and laughs the game was called a draw. I must say that was the most fun I had the whole weekend! A perfect game to play against your friend that has the guts to run out and face you on the battlefield! Thanks to the Fire and Sword gang for the Demo and helping out the Swedish ETC team to buy more miniatures!