Ankerbausamstag mit Kindern

Vor ein paar Wochen hatte ich meinen Patensohn und zwei seiner Geschwister zu Besuch und wir haben gemeinsam mit Ankersteinen gebaut, zum Teil frei Schnauze und zum Teil nach den Bauplänen aus dem Baukasten 8.
Es war sehr günstig, nicht nur den Kasten 8 zur Verfügung zu haben, so konnte mit den überzählichen Steinen immer irgendwas im Eigenentwurf gebaut werden, während zwei oder drei andere Baumeister nach Anleitung aus dem Büchlein zu GK-NF 8 bauten.
Es sind viele schöne Bauten entstanden und sogar der kleinste Baumeister (Vorschulalter) hatte verblüffend viel Ausdauer und schöne Ideen beim Selberentwerfen.

gleich fertig...

Zwei stolze Ankerbaumeister mit dem ersten gemeinsamen Bau des Vormittags - GK-NF 8 Wartturm.

GK-NF 8 Pavillon

Der Junior hat aus verschiedenen Brückenteilen eine große Brückenanlage aufgebaut.

Und daneben eine Brückenkonstruktion aus dem Anleitungsbuch: GK-NF 8 Steg

Dieses Häuschen war eine Eigenkonstruktion unserer Baumeisterin - toll, was die Kinder schon bei ihren ersten Versuchen für Ideen haben.

Hier noch ein weiteres Gebäude nach Vorlage: GK-NF 8 Festhallenportal

Und zum Abschluß noch ein ganz kleiner Eigenentwurf, der die weiße Säule schön als Fenster (oder große Turmuhr?) verwendet.

Die ersten Füsiliere

Als ich die ersten Flachfiguren aufgeklebt und grundiert hatte, habe ich beschlossen, doch nicht auf Vorrat ganze Regimenter zu malen, die ich für das erste angepeilte Gefecht bei Zinna gar nicht brauche. Stattdessen male ich das erste Bataillon vom Füsilierregiment Salmuth und das zweite Bataillon vom Füsilierregiment Hoffmann.

Die ersten Figuren sind bemalt - noch aufgeklebt auf die Leisten, die ich zum Grundieren und halten benutze, damit ich die Figuren nicht dauernd anfassen muss.

Vorne die ersten Füsiliere vom IR 44 (Hoffmann) mit Leibfahne, hinten die ersten von IR 48 (Salmuth) mit Kompaniefahne.

Es kommt nicht sehr deutlich raus, abe ich habe mich entschieden, für die Metalle, zB für die Stickereien auf den Fahnen, doch Acrylfarben in den Metalltönen zu nehmen.

Es macht total Spaß, mal wieder ein paar klassische Flachfiguren schön in Reih und Glied in die Vitrine zu stellen...

SOM Diary: more on scoring and results

So I've played a few dozen Stratomatic games and scored them with iScore. Overall I'm very happy how it went, but I'm still uncertain how to deal with a few aspects I would like to cover better. For several aspects of baseball scoring and statistics it is not easy to get the needed input from SOM and/or capture it in iScore.

1. Hit locations
iScore can capture information about hit types and hit locations. I tried recording these in my scoresheets for a few games. It was fun - Stratomatic may not explicitly spell out this information in the die roll results, but it does specify the player (position) a ball is hit to, and how hard it is to field any given ball (A, B, C and X results), so with a little added fantasy it is easy to fgure out of a given ball in play was a grounder or fly ball and how hard it was hit.
However, I quickly found that determining and recording hit locations slows down gameplay and scorekeeping considerably. In addition, iScore displays all historical hit locations for the player currently at bat graphically, and with more than ten or so recorded balls in play for a given batter the display gets very crowded - this feature probably only makes sense when you are scoring individual games or series, not longer SOM seasons.
I will stop bothering about hit types and hit locations in the future.

2. Pitch types and pitch counts
iScore can also record location, velocity and pitch type for every pitch. I was thinking about at least recording pitch counts so I can make decisions to replace pitchers based on pitch count and not just on batters faced. However, SOM results do not say anything about pitches per batter faced, and inventing pitch counts on the fly would not lead to better results than just counting BF, I guess. It certainly would not reflect individual pitchers' habits unless I somehow work in additional pitcher stats not listed on the SOM player cards.
So I won't bother about any of this and continue to let pitchers play until they reach the innings limits from the SOM fatigue rules, or reach about 25 BF (roughly 100 pitches) and/or start pitching badly, losing control etc. (knowing full well that if this happens in SOM it is purely random and not really reflecting any personal fatigue or stamina characteristcs of the player beyond the innings pitched limits).

3. Short game summaries
One of the things I enjoy to record is a brief 2-4 sentence game summary, mentioning peculiarities in how the game went, big innings, wild swings or unusual player feats or blunders. I've also started to use some of them in my game day summaries here in the blog.
However, I need to write these immediately after the game when my memory is still fresh and am not sure where to put them. I've tried

• the game notes in iScore - easily reached after the game is over, and easily referenced when looking past games up in iScore, but very tedious to copy-and-paste elsewhere, e.g. into this blog. It is also a major nuisance to navigate between the game notes and other game stats recorded in iScore while I write the notes, e.g. to double check the offensive or pitching stats of a key player.
• a local document e.g. in some notes app - easier to switch between writing and looking things up in iScore, but creates another place where game and blog relevant texts are stored.

Maybe in the future I will write game notes directly to a draft blog entry here, or to a notes app like Evernote which can be accessed from anywhere.

4. League statistics

One of the most fun things to get out of poperly scored league play data is league leaders and league statistics.

iScore is great at providing team statistics, both within the app and on the website you can have it generate, but for some reason I have not yet found a way to display cross-team or league wide statistics overviews.

For the updates on my 1992 league I gave here and here, I compiled the league leader stats by hand here in the blogging drafts by going through team stats in iScore team by team. This quickly becomes boring when you repeatedly do it.

I may have to look for different scoring apps that can generate league wide stats, as well.