“I was born on the night of Samhain,  when the barrier between the worlds  is whisper-thin and when magic,  old magic, sings its heady and sweet song  to anyone who cares to hear it.” ― Carolyn MacCullough, Once a Witch Happy Hallowe'en! Welcome to The Art of Caesura! If my calculations are correct, Hallowe'en only falls on a Friday (the day my blog posts go live) once every 6-7 years (leap years probably mess with this), so today is a special occasion indeed.  I recently attended a TED talk by Dr. Jenny Butler, a Lecturer at University College Cork where she teaches courses on mythology, folk religion, new religious movements, and Western esotericism. Her TED talk was on "Samhain and the Origins of Halloween".  Dr. Jenny Butler Long-time readers of the blog will know that I love Hallowe'en, so I really loved her talk, and I'm excited to share aspects of it with you today! A couple last things before we start: for a fun Hallowe'en festivity, check out the...

"Never memorise something that you can look up." - Albert Einstein Hello and welcome back to The Art of Caesura! I'm sending loads of positivity your way, especially if you need it today! In today's post I'm going to share a useful tool that I made for this Warhammer 40k Gaming league that I'm involved in. It's a cheat sheet (or script) that I follow so that I don't miss anything important during the game. Warhammer 40k is an incredibly complex game. In addition to the stat line of each unit (which may or may not have multiple weapon profiles), every unit has at least one special ability plus a bunch of keywords which relate to interactions with various core rules, advanced rules or strategems. Then multiply this by the 10 - 15 unique units in your army and you can see that the rules just for your army are pretty immense. Then you might want to have some idea about how your opponent's army works... Plus you need to know the best ways to deploy your...

Hello, and welcome to another Friday on The Art of Caesura!   Wait a minute, wasn't my last league game against Astra Militarum? It sure was, I think we have 17 people in the league and there are 3 Astra Militarum, 2 Black Templars(!!), and only one generic Space Marines! Anyway, this game came hot on the heels of my second league game (where I had taken a big loss to a similar list) so I really wanted to improve.  As I detailed last week , my focus for improvement came in the form of deployment. I printed off the map and terrain layout in advance, and plotted and planned all of the elements that I discussed last week: where is safe to deploy without getting shot turn one, where are good staging areas etc.  Another element regarding deployment and gameplan that I studied was the idea of "flipping the board". Rather than throwing all your pieces to the floor in a huff, flipping the board refers to the idea of recognizing that the terrain layout is not optimal for your ar...