I love history. I wargame the American Civil War with 15mm metal soldiers that I hand painted myself. I have also wargamed ancient Romans vs Gauls, 19th century British Army vs Zulus, and World War II German vs American. I make scenery or use railroad or war gaming scenery. I recreate historical battles or just make up my own. Although I have a few Confederates the vast bulk of my army is Union. My son has a huge Confederate army but we only play once in great while when we get together at Christmas. But I do play chess everyday online. And chess is the original war game. Legend has it that chess was invented by early Buddhist monks in India and the game spread throughout Asia with the spread of Buddhism. The story goes that the monks were disturbed by the suffering caused by the almost constant warfare between the princes of India. More disturbing was the fact the main cause of this warfare was simply that the princes liked to sit on their elephants and command their army in battle. Since they weren't actually the ones getting body parts hacked off it was all just a game to them. Realizing this the monks meditated on a way to remove the suffering from this game. Chess is just a game. But it is war. When the crusaders brought chess to Europe the rook became a castle but a rook is a war elephant.
Kossack Recruitment Center
I publish a diary now and again to try to recruit players for our online Kossack chess team. Everyone is welcome to join. http://www.chess.com/... Our team has played 21 matches and has won 67% of them. We don't care how good you are. We have some top players and then we have people like me. The matches we play are online correspondence chess with 3 days allowed per move. These are rated games. The default rating for new players is 1200. First you must register with chess.com. It's free. When you get to our home page you will need to join our group. Clink on join group. One of the administrators will approve your membership. Then click on matches on the main menu. On our match page there will be a list of our matches past, present and future. Clink on an open match that hasn't started yet and then click on join match.
Our highest ranking player signed up for the match will be matched against their highest. Our second to their second ect. If the sides are uneven when the match starts the extras are bumped. You will play two games. One as white, one as black. You score 1 point for a win and .5 for a draw. When all games are over the team with the highest score wins the match.
You can also play live games online in real time. Our group is three years old and we play matches and sometimes have a kossack tournament among ourselves. So if you like to play chess, come on over and see us. At present we getting ready to play the Arabian Chess Masters. Come on and join us.
Kossack Veterans Center
Actually we have a pretty damn good team. A few months ago when we started playing matches again we had a 59% win percentage. Since then we have improved to 67%. We have won the last 12 of 15 matches. Since I have been retired since last summer I have more time to devote to the group and I have been thinking about team matches. I have decided to divide the matches into open and rating restricted categories. Since I love wargaming so much I sort of look on our team as an army and the matches as battles. In wargaming armies are divided into 3 parts, infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The army will be divided into 3 parts in order to play rating restricted matches as follows. <1500=infantry, <2000=cavalry, >2000=artillery. I will also issue challenges for open matches that everyone can play in. I have issued challenges to the top 2 match teams on chess.com. They haven't accepted yet but the #1 team is playing over 3000 matches and #2 over 800 so we'll wait and see if they get around to us. Even though I myself am down here in the trenches with the infantry we have a strong cavalry force and not just field artillery big railroad siege guns. Anyway I will try to recruit new players on a continuing basis and try to build our team. I think we have the potential to be a real contender.