The Lay of the Land

This had been something of an exhausting week, so on the spur of the moment I cast around yesterday evening for some folks to play games with. I found precisely two--one of the results of doing things as snap decisions. Both were fellow Civil Warriors from the office, but I eschewed wargames for two more Euros to introduce them to.

I chose Ra and Taluva. We did Ra first. It's gratifying to see people get more comfortable with games, and thus with rules. The actual play of Ra is fairly straightforward, but there are a lot of things to keep track of, particularly with scoring. Talking everything out led to a lot of a-ha moments. The first epoch saw ridiculously few Ra tiles come out; there were several auctions called before we started seeing Ra tiles. As it happened, I had three suns left when the other two bowed out, so I got a pretty big haul. I ended up winning the game; the scores were something like 60-50-40.

On to Taluva. As always, choosing colors is fun. "Do you want to be the brown people, red people, yellow people, or white people?" None of us felt secure choosing the white pieces, so they were left in the bag. By the second turn pretty much everyone was comfortable with the rules.

This game was insanely close. I won, and Jonathan (to my left) would have won if I'd missed my chance. Looking at the game afterward, though, we discovered that Tim (to my right) missed a win on his turn...so yeah, it was close.

What came next cemented our status as dorks. We analyzed our created island for militarily important typology. The island was really two islands, connected at a pair of isthmuses (isthmi?). Clearly those two points were critical, as was the long saddleback ridge on the east island. The west island had one big mountain that dominated the whole works, with a sort of "lost valley" in the middle, a single hex surrounded by elevated terrain. We figured that the east island would likely have better soil.

We also concluded that Tim's Red Peoples had were a maritime people; with just a couple of exceptions they were all at Level One by the sea. Jonathan and I, on the other hand, had a more varied cultural topography.

What can I say? It's what we do. Tim told us about how when he and his fiancée go for walks, he periodically asks where she thinks the defensive lines should be from an attack out of [some trees/a road/a car dealership]. I've done something similar on my walks; if I walk from Road A uphill along Road B to my apartment, I often think about what an ordeal it would be to charge up to take the ridge my apartment is on; there are three military crests that can be stoutly defended, and it could take hours to get to the top. The other options, though, are up some sheer surfaces in the woods. It's quite a ridgeline. I figure this kind of planning will come in handy if some kind of "Red Dawn" situation breaks out in State College.

Morning!

Yeah, that worked like a charm. This security guard got fired for sleeping on the job. Have to come up with some other trick...

Hold the Line

I'm stuck on a sentence, so why not write a bit here...

I've been casting around for a game to have set up where I can pick up a turn here and there as events warrant. The most recent game I've cleared space for is Worthington's Hold the Line, a reimplementation of Clash for a Continent, which is one of my favorites.

I'm of two minds about the upgraded look. Between C4aC and HTL, Worthington has moved up a weight class in terms of graphical presentation. The counters are linen-finished, and the art on them is done by one of the "historical art print" artists, Gary Zaboly. I do like the new board and terrain hexes, even though I found the originals to be serviceable enough. The counters I'm more dubious about; I liked the old wood ones, and with them it was easier to put an infantry unit and a leader/artillery unit in the same hex. That said, from a purely graphic-art perspective they're quite nice.

I've set up the War of Independence scenario for Harlem Heights. I chose it because I didn't know too much about it, and it looked interesting on the board. Washington has cut off part of the English army--some of the best bits of it--and has to outflank it before the reinforcements arrive, which is soon.

When I get a chance to play it, I'll try to post some pictures. When that'll be...

This has been Working Well

Only one nap! Check this space at 4 AM...

An Experiment

My, it's been a little while.

If you look carefully, you might notice little shiny metal buttons set in the walls of, say, shopping malls, stadiums, or--where I first noticed them--large dormitories. They're for security guards, who have a special little...doohickey with them. When they reach one of the little buttons, they touch the doohickey to it, and that tells the central computer that the guard hit that checkpoint--i.e., that he was (probably) actually pacing the floor.

Tonight/this coming morning, this blog is going to serve a somewhat similar function for me. My writer's block and procrastination have been acting up something fierce, and that combined with the happy news that a conference paper that I thought was due next week is actually due last week...fun times. I need to write something on the order of ten pages, real soon now, and I can't trick myself into taking a "power nap" or anything of the sort.

I have to make one more trip for supplies, and then I'll post something every top-of-the-hour. It'll be game-related. The big supply I need I have plenty of: Coffee. My three ibriks, two moka pots, one steam espresso maker (but no drip coffee maker) will set me fine, with my two coffee grinders and God only knows how many different kinds of coffee. The real trick will be figuring out how to do this without sugar. Those who know me from back in the day might remember that Bit-o-Honey and orange juice is my brain food of choice.

I'm on a low-carb diet, though, so those two are out. I'm thinking gum; that's supposed to keep you thinking straight. Ish. We can hope. Anything to keep me rolling until about noon, at least...

(I'll brook no criticism of low-carb diets, at least as a lose-weight-fast technique (which was the doctor's orders; I was a special case). I've lost forty pounds since the second week of January.)

Manoeuvring

I managed to contrive a way to play games two days in a row this week, which is something of a new experience. Even stranger, I played the same game each day.

Friday night, my friend Tim and I eschewed a departmental bowling night (Team building + Beer = Damn near Charles Bukowski) and met for some gaming and conversation. We were hoping for a third, but he failed to materialize. I pulled out a two-player I had tried to get onto the table for some time--GMT's Manouvre.

Many/most/all of you have likely heard of this game by now. It's played on a chessboard with terrain (towns, hills, forests, etc), and each player gets eight pieces representing one or another Napoleonic-era military unit. Each nation gets a different mix of units, and a different mix of cards with which one has those units attack, defend, bombard, get healed, go on forced marches, and on and on. There are also a few leaders in the deck, which give yet more combat bonuses and allow for coordinated attacks.

I took the Turks, Tim took the Prussians. The key to the game was a little clump of hills right in the middle of the board. I managed to plant my Janissaries (by far my best unit) up top, where they became almost unstoppable. Both Tim and I fought like demons, and I won a narrow attrition victory--piling a few cards up to make the attack almost unstoppable. We both agreed we liked the game very much, and would definitely try again.

On Saturday, I went over to Castle Cranky for a trio of games, another of which was Manoeuvre. I took the Austrians; Josh had the French. Each of the various nations has a particular "personality;" the French personality is "being awesome" and the Austrian personality is "being terrible." Still, Josh (weakened by, as he put it, bad card draws) failed to kill a single one of my troops, and I couldn't maintain any kind of bridgehead into his territory. (My Austrians also, naturally, failed to kill any of the French.) Josh won a controlling-the-field victory in style.

And then essentially declared he never wanted to play again. I think, among other things, this points up a major difference between a Eurogame mentality and a Wargame mentality. (Not that one cannot have both; I like to think I do.) The luck of the draw can be maddening to Eurogamers, who demand relatively little luck compared to wargamers, who are obliged to accept that life is not always fair in these games. Managing this gap is one of the key problems for Euro/Wargame crossovers. (The other, of course, being the appropriate level of detail.)

Luckily for Josh, there are other games to play as well. We actually began the day with Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, one of Winsome's Essen 2008 offerings. It involves railroads, and auctions where the money you spend goes towards capitalizing said railroads. It reminded me a great deal of Age of Scheme, but with a few twists. I did like the ending mechanism: There are six colors of cubes, one with about ten cubes, on up to thirty cubes. When a railroad starts, it takes the color of whatever has the most cubes left. Once each color has been used once, the game ends. It's an ending mechanism that really affects how the game plays out. It's good, but I have a lot of good games. I'll try it again, and see what I think.

Finally came Vikings. I bumbled through the game, not entirely certain what was going on, or what all the rules were. I bought stuff that it seemed like I could use, never having much money laying around, and generally wandered around, trying to figure out which of Josh and Jean--both experienced veterans of the game--would win. They had so many vikings! And were creating oodles of gold, lots of nobles for VPs...it was impressive to watch.

Needless to say I won, and by a decent margin. Is this really a game where you can win by making obvious moves? More likely, I think, is that Josh and Jean were too engrossed with their own battle to pay much attention to me. This has worked to my advantage before. My first gmae of Stephenson's Rocket pitted me against two wily veterans, and I clearly looked harmless the whole game. By the end of it, I had more money (VPs) than the bank had left, and more than the other two put together.

Of the three games, I thing I like Manoeuvre the best for the time being; Vikings has some interesting mechanics; I'd like to try again. GM&O didn't grab me, but I'm willing to try again. What's best, though, is that I've managed to play three games from my unplayed list. As a devotee of the Cult of the New, that's a real accomplishment!

Ancients: Remix

By mid-May, I have to have written a conference paper, two journal-article-length papers, and have read (or have "read") some 250 books...so what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than playing a wargame?

I felt inspired to try another Victory Point Games title, so I brought out Ancient Battles Deluxe. It's a redesign of one of my favorite games, Ancients. Ancients was an attempt to make a fairly believable but very simple tactical game. It featured generic counters, generic maps, and a bajillion scenarios.

This one keeps the same look. The counters are Red Army vs Blue, the maps are just 18 x 12 hexes. The rules, however, are a notch or two up in complexity. That does not mean they are complex; it just takes a few goings-through before you internalize them, particularly the melee rules. There's a lot of adding, multiplying, and dividing going on here. However, by halfway through the battle, I was up and running nicely.

I chose Magnesia, mostly because it had elephants on both sides. The winner is the one with the most VPs. You get a VP for making the other army panic (losing a certain number of strength points), capturing the opposing camp, and one for having the most troops on the field at sunset. The Romans, in this scenario, have superior leadership (the Scipios) but fewer troops. They are given a 1 VP handicap.

I had Antiochus simply charge the Romans with his greater volume of soldiers, in the hopes of tying down the Romans and hopefully turning a flank or two. The Romans refused both flanks in time, but fought from a cramped position the whole game. The Seleucids took horrific casualties, but hoped to hang on until their phalanx caught up (it was left far behind in the initial charge)--and hoped to last just one turn longer than the Romans.

And, lo, they did. I eventually called it for the Seleucids; the Romans were on the verge of losing the last casualties before panic and rout set in--and weren't going to inflict it on the Seleucids simultaneously. The Romans missed a lot of die-roll breaks in the second half of the game, but their limited mobility told the tale.

I like the command and control system here. It's about as good as one can be that doesn't get completely bogged down. You have n leaders, and you allocate them to units each turn. They represent concerted efforts as much as anything. They can command multiple troops if they're part of a formation...and these formations tend to break apart as the battle progresses. Then, it becomes a matter of aiding local battles.

A worthy update and successor to the original model (which is still available here, for free). The homepage lists a third expansion coming out, covering (mostly) the first years of gunpowder in the west--which, naturally, I'm eagerly awaiting.

And now: Back to the reading.