by Fruitcake on Thu Dec 11, 2008 3:34 pm
The set we had was with the little plastic squares and rounded triangular shapes for 10 armies. We named them 'piglets'. As my friends and I really did not know about rolling up sets etc, we would sit there building huge armies. As we kept running out of 'piglets' I asked my Father if he could not get some made at the tool and die factory he owned, sure enough, one night when I was home from school on holidays he came home with a bag stuffed full of extra, correctly dyed 'piglets' I seem to recall around 250 of each. I returned to School after the hols proudly bearing the new additions to the game we posessed.
Naturally, as is the way of things we would then just let the armies get even larger. Then instead of rolling the dice for single armies we would indulge in 'piglet' warfare. After about 4 hours of playing and hundreds of these verminous little pieces of plastic stacked up on territories the cry would go up "Piglet warfare!" This meant that instead of losing 1 or 2 armies dependant on the dice one would lose 1 or 2 piglets/10 or 20 armies.
On reflection, I never really understood why we did that, but it would while away a Sunday afternoon and as long as we weren't caught, the company, the smokes (especially them as we were fined if caught) and the discourse made up for what was in essence a way of extending the game. I suppose that was the real objective.
Due to current economic conditions the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off
, so after that we had to count all our armies before we left 
