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John McLintock
Scotland
Glasgow
Lanarkshire
"Roll dice and kick ass!"
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Broad-brush polemic ruffles feathers
A book I picked up on sight from a recommendation on the WW2 SS Counter Colours thread, Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II's 2008 scholarly study, The Myth of the Eastern Front: the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture was going to become an article even as I first read it – avidly – over xmas last year. Researching for this series- in which The Myth of the Eastern Front was going to feature centrally, I found the military hobbyists' inevitable internet hot flushes in its wake. Inevitable? In response to an academic tome?
The biggest invasion of the biggest war in history: a lot there to forget
Yes, because The Myth of the Eastern Front is part analytical historical deconstruction, and part broad-brush polemic against the 'romancers'- promulgators of an idealised vision of the Wehrmacht and the SS as honourable soldiers fighting a 'Lost Cause' against the Red horde. Smelser and Davies root this mythology in the Wehrmacht's 'last campaign': the ex-generals' postwar years of networking and spin aimed at rehabilitating the image of the German armed forces on the Eastern front.
Enemies after a mutually
embarrasing past affair?
As Cold War tensions rose, the wartime memories of the Soviet people's heroic resistance against Nazi Germany became a propaganda casualty. A remarkable act of historical forgetting was engineered, apparently rapid and profound enough to turn around the war generation's own perceptions of the Eastern front's importance in the Second World War largely before they reached middle-age.
Cold War myths deconstructed
Uncle Joe
Smelser and Davies start with the mainstream suspicion of, and hostility to the USSR in America in the 1920s and 30s. They demonstrate how- through massive media coverage of the Red Army's resistance to the onslaught unleashed by Germany with Operation Barbarossa on June 22nd 1941, the American people were won over to widespread sympathy and active support for the Soviet people during the Second World War. Pride of place among the breadth of media sources Smelser and Davies cite should undoubtedly go to TIME, March 29, 1943, the 'USSR Special' featuring Stalin on the cover.
Evil genius,
or just genius?
In over 100 pages of what was then cutting-edge reportage, the magazine celebrates Russia's history, its economic achievements, the diverse peoples and their love for art, culture and sports, and spotlights some key personalities from the Soviet war effort. There's even an article styling Lenin 'The Father of Modern Russia', which credits him as "Perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and telling us elsewhere that "Lenin's genius brought order out of chaos and saved the USSR." You don't have to hold a torch for the former Soviet Union to see that these pages glowing with enthusiasm for the Soviet cause are tantamount to an endorsement of the Soviet regime.
Criminals no more: the German generals in the Cold War
Defeated & dishonoured
in front of the world
In the years immediately following Germany's surrender on 8th May 1945, the Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Military Tribunals make plain the full nature of the war crimes of the German war machine in its genocidal war of conquest and enslavement on the Eastern front. German generals are in the dock, on the scaffold; the General Staff tout court might be next. As the authors explain, these trials weren't even finished before the new realities of the postwar world began to make their impact felt. The emerging crisis in relations with the Soviets meant that political pressure to exculpate the accused and the convicted began to come to bear.
A significant turning point came when the American army rescued General Franz Halder from a possible war crimes trial on the grounds that he played an indispensable role in the Operational History (German) Section of the United States Army Historical Division. Halder in fact went on to direct the History Section for several years, gathering around him a group of politically reliable former officers to provide the US Army with an appropriate account of German operations on the Eastern front. Then, after the Korean War, the realisation grew that a new German army was needed as part of an anti-Soviet alliance in Western Europe. The surviving German generals became a major asset to the American military.
Figures like Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein enjoyed great authority in US army circles because of their experience fighting the Soviet army on the Russian front. The authority these men and their wartime fellows enjoyed ensured an uncritical, even adulatory, reception for their self-serving memoirs when these were published. The ex-generals' mythologised account of the Wehrmacht's 'clean war' on the Eastern front established as the authoritative version, the way was open for a flood of popular histories, personal memoirs and even pulp novels, all straightforwardly pro-German; all of which in sum contributed to the reimagining of the German attack on the USSR as a war in which German soldiers were cast the main victims, whether of the Russian hordes, the climate and terrain, or the megalomaniacal folly of Hitler himself.
Learning (from) history?
When wargamers confront the political and ethical implications of our hobby, a common argument heard is that wargaming is educational, that it teaches the horror and folly of war by giving hobbyists insight into the human costs of battle. There's more than a grain of truth in this, even if actually anti-war wargamers still appear thin on the ground. For example, I think that the rehumanisation of the enemy is valuable in and of itself because dehumanisation of the enemy is an essential element of war propaganda on all fronts- home and fighting.
But of course, wargames themselves are so abstract and wilfully decontextualised that they themselves can't really contribute much to rehumanising the enemy, or to generating any other insights into warfare as a grotesque human folly. That side of things typically stems from reading around the subjects which most interest you on the tabletop. And insights of this ilk can arise in peculiar ways. For me as a teenage tankie, pictures were particularly influential.
Context is everything
Just regular guys?
Take the picture here above (from Brian L. Davis' authoritative German Army Uniforms and Insignia, 1933-1945). This is a less gruesome sample of several pictures which used to fascinate me as a youngster. What drew me to this picture was its sheer mundanity. The contrast between the flanking NCOs' cheesy grins and central officer's forced grin is a very human touch, and the photo looks for all the world like a tourist snapshot. I used to find myself wondering if these guys had any notion of what their futures would bring them.
Smelser and Davies' convincing deconstruction of how the German view of the Eastern Front became the official American view after the war casts my youthful musings in a new light. Why? Because I was then simply unaware of how my otherwise perfectly reasonable interest in humanising the enemy was conditioned by the pro-German bias Smelser and Davies explain. That is to say: I always assumed that picture was taken on the Eastern Front. I don't know why, but I did. And when I wondered what might've happened to those three men, I never seriously imagined that they might've been active agents of genocide. For me they were always hapless victims. If that's not an example of the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht' in action, I don't know what could be.
Conclusion
The fundamental point that Smelser and Davies make which is of importance to wargamers is this: an entire branch of our hobby was founded on the bill of goods sold by the German ex-generals during the Cold War. Their agenda- to sanitise the role of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, was both personal and political. The legacy of those efforts still infuses our hobby today. I say this not to point the finger at wargaming as a den of romancers. Instead, I think that this poses challenges to wargamers: to be more critical of those politicised myths; and to find a role for that critique in inspiring new approaches to designing games. It is challenges of this ilk which make me believe that The Myth of the Eastern Front is uniquely useful to wargamers who are interested in new insight into the hardy perennial of our hobby- the 'German question'. 
Related@RD/KA!
Wargames, politics and ethics
- #1: Ah, that old bugbear
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John McLintock
Scotland
Glasgow
Lanarkshire
"Roll dice and kick ass!"
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A long time coming
Regular readers will be well aware that I'm not a negative reviewer as a rule. It's too easy to find negativity on the web, and the first editorial decision I made way back in 2005 was that I wasn't going to contribute to it here at RD/KA!. Also, when I review anything, I've paid for it and therefore have a good reason to want to like it. Every so often though, something comes along which disappoints me sufficiently to prompt a distinct lack of enthusiasm to which I cannot but give vent. Antonio Catalán's game of the Spanish Civil War- España 1936, is a case in point.
Dust off and dust-up
España 1936 is a game I bought on sight when I saw it in Static Games, an FLGS: the subject of the Spanish Civil War interested me and the box ad-copy showed nice-looking components. It then joined my collection of dust-gatherers, where it stayed for a good three years. Only recently, with Liam's newfound enthusiasm for strategic boardgames, did I begin to think that I might finally get a chance to bring España 1936 to the table. My thinking was this game would serve as a useful bridge between Labyrinth and Twilight Struggle on the one hand, and games like Unhappy King Charles! on the other.
And so, on Wednesday night Liam and I sat down to have a go. Five hours later, I'd won the game, but España 1936 had lost the vote of confidence.
Components: a source of satisfaction
The mapboard
Colourful & functional, but hardly inspired
Let me be clear right from the start: España 1936 isn't a broken game, nor even a particularly bad game, it's just a disappointing game. None of this disappointment came from the components as such, which lived up to expectations. The mapboard is nice. Sure, comparing España 1936's board to those from Labyrinth and Twilight Struggle doesn't flatter the former, but it's still an example of clean and functional graphic design offering nothing to complain about, visually at least. It's also fully mounted, which is always appreciated.
The cards
History, events & combat modifiers
The four decks of cards: two each for the Republicans and the Nationalists- 1936-37 and 1938-39, are very nice too. The artwork is slightly cartoony in style, but this is a consistent design aesthetic throughout España 1936 and it contributes to the game's strong visual appeal, which is better than average compared to your typical wargame. Each card has three elements- the historical background, the event, and the combat modifiers; and these are all clearly depicted. The graphics for the combat modifiers are particularly good because they distinguish neatly between the two kinds of modifier: bonus/penalty dice; and bonus/penalty DRMs.
Well laid out with some neat touches
The counters
The counters too are nice. They're one of the game's best features in fact. Their vivid colours and images are more than just attractive, they're also useful in play, making it easy to recognise each side, and each side's different units. And there is quite a variety of troop units on each side. The Republicans have the Regular and Basque armies, the Anarchist and Communist militias, and the famous International Brigades; the Nationalists, their own Regulars, Carlist and Falangist Militias, Legionnaires, the Army of Africa and Italian troops. Each side also has its generals, tanks, aircraft and ships (for the optional naval game, which Liam and I didn't play, so there will be no comments on it here).
Sizes & shapes: smart graphic design makes checking stacks easier
What I like most though is the use of different sizes and shapes for different units. There are three shapes: hexagonal- the generals; square- ships; and round- troops, tanks and aircraft, which come in three sizes:
- The smallest are the strength 1 and 2 troops.
- In the middle are the strength 3 and 5 troops.
- The largest are the tanks and aircraft.
This isn't the first time I've seen this: my original Gibsons Games edition of History of the World does something similar, but it's a definite plus for España 1936 that it uses the same approach, whose effect is to make it easy to scan the board for your opponent's concentrations of strength.
Gameplay: familiar features competently executed
The system in general
A handy player aid
In a mere 8 pages of rules featuring large print and several well-illustrated examples, España 1936 features all the mechanics you'd expect of a point-to-point movement wargame:
- Controlling/contesting boxes: only one side's troops/both sides' troops in a box. Winning the game is based on controlling objective cities (the yellow boxes): there are several instant victory conditions, the most important of which is probably controlling 7 objective cities. If there is no instant win, the Republican wins if they have combat units in three objective cities at the end of turn 10.
- Movement, with the limitations imposed by moving into or out of controlled or contested boxes. Only troops and tanks actually move (aircraft and generals are freely placed); movement is essentially unlimited although units must stop moving if they enter/leave an enemy controlled/contested box.
- Stacking limits: 4 troops units/box (generals, tanks and aircraft don't count towards stacking limits).
- Supply, with the attendant effects on movement and combat: a box is in supply if there is an adjacent friendly controlled/contested box; troops out of supply can neither move nor attack.
- Combat, naturally enough.
There is also an events phase, and a replacements phase on every odd-numbered turn. These mechanics are all straightforward and the rules explain their workings clearly enough. The player aids also help players to keep track of the phases each turn: another plus.
Combat in particular
The rules for battles are the longest single section of the rules of España 1936. They use the tactical battleboard approach, in which each individual battle is broken down into one or more rounds. You can only attack if you've got a general with your troops, so you have to plan your battles carefully when it's time to place your generals- which is done after both players' movement is completed. Sometimes you'll want your generals to lead an attack; other times you'll want to commit a good general to help defend a vital objective city. This element of strategic planning meshes nicely with the additional tactical planning to make for battles which can be both interesting and tense.
Setting up a battle
This picture shows how a battle is set up. The attacker must always use their general in the first round; this is optional for the defender. In any event, no unit may attack or support more than once, although the same defending unit may be attacked more than once. Here, the Republican player has decided to throw everything he's got at the Nationalist's weaker unit- the Army of Africa, hoping that 4 dice with three good positive DRMs will be enough to eliminate it in one round- you resolve attacks by rolling 1d6/combat strength, scoring hits on '5's or '6's. The Nationalist decides to use their general and their Me-109, which'll have a good chance of winning a dogfight against the obsolescent B-XIX; the resulting 4d6 with a +1 DRM should ensure that the Republican's International Brigade won't come out of the battle unscathed.
Resolving the first round of battle
With the Army of Africa unit eliminated and the International Brigade unit reduced to a 1 strength Regular army unit, the Republican player now faces an interesting dilemma: the Legionnaire's +1 combat DRM and the tanks make it a tough target to take on but if it can be eliminated, the Nationalist will also lose his two tank units. In this situation, both players would probably be looking at their cards to see if they had any combat bonuses/penalties which might tilt the balance one way or another.
(NB. There is a small mistake in the above picture: the Me-109 has a combat strength of 2, and would roll 2d6 in the air combat. Ah well.)
The battle system has some crucial implications:
- If you want to win a battle in one round you need both an equal or greater number of units and significantly more combat strength and/or support bonuses.
- Even then, battles between relatively equal forces- large or small, will commonly end up as indecisive.
This makes sense to me and it means that the combat system, as a whole, is a strong feature of España 1936.
Caveats: the disappointments
Minor: the rulebook
The rulebook for España 1936 is written in the so-called 'conversational style'. As such it suffers from the typical problems of rulebooks of that ilk: illogical organisation, no cross-referencing, and frustrating page-flicking as you search for rules you're sure you've read, somewhere. This last problem is compounded by the lack of either a list of contents or an index. OK, the rulebook is short and the rules are simple, but what is there to lose by making life easier on players? Some examples of poor organisation:
- The rules for friendly and contested boxes (which are crucial to movement, supply, and winning) appear under 'Components'; ie. before the rules of play as such.
- The supply rules appear directly under the 'Sequence of Play'; just like the rules for friendly and contested boxes, these would benefit from appearing in a list of definitions of key terms at the top of the rules of play.
I'll admit that these are minor criticisms, but they highlight the inherent limits of the style of rulebook chosen by Antonio Catalán, a style I simply don't like because problems of this ilk inevitably crop up in my experience.
Middling: the mapboard and the battles
The mapboard aptly serves its purposes in the game. It's a bit bland though. By this I mean that there is absolutely no terrain differentation at all. It can reasonbly be argued that terrain effects on movement has no place in a game with 4-month turns. But it is hard to deny that Spain itself sort of fades into the background in a game in which ports are the only distinguishing feature of otherwise geographically identical locations.
And the battles? As interesting as they are, the larger battles can also be relatively time-consuming. It's open to question whether the added fun factor the battles bring can really compensate for the game's other shortcomings.
Major: the 'meh' factor? It's all in the cards
The cards in España 1936 do exactly what they're supposed to: deliver reinforcements, generate a few other events, and offer opportunties to manipulate your chances in battles. And that's the problem. The Spanish Civil War was above all a war about the fate of a revolution. That is to say: it was all about politics. Unfortunately politics feature nowhere in the game. Sure, there are events which do more than just bring on new units; some of them even interfere with your opponent's plans. Nonetheless, the function of the cards in España 1936 in no way corresponds to their use in CDGs like Labyrinth or Twilight Struggle. The result is that the events are essentially colourless, and hand management and cardplay generates none of the tension which makes the CDGs so gripping.
Another issue arising from España 1936's use of the cards is that they're not used to create a quick, alternating-phase turn structure. There are some phases which alternate; eg. placing generals or activating them to attack (or not). The movement phase though is a classic IGO-UGO. This adds a degree of downtime which isn't seen in CDGs. I guess this would decrease with more play experience, but it strikes me as another example of where Catalán's design vision turns round and bites him on the ass.
Overview
Antonio Catalán succeeded in making España 1936 what he wanted it to be: a simple wargame of the Spanish Civil War which isn't shallow, neither in strategy nor tactics. Unfortunately he chose to leave out the politics and so failed to make use of one of the biggest design innovations of the last 20 years, the CDG. The result is a game set in Spain in the years 1936-39 in which Spain, its revolution, and the important international dimensions to the Civil War all feel strangely absent. In short, Catalán kind of missed the boat. As I said above, España 1936 is neither bad nor broken, it's just missing that special something, which it might've enjoyed had it been released ten or twenty years ago. If you're looking for short wargame on the subject, this game could easily fit your bill. If you're looking for a Spanish Civil War CDG, I guess you'll have to wait for Crusade and Revolution: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 to make its way through MMP's preorder system.
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John McLintock
Scotland
Glasgow
Lanarkshire
"Roll dice and kick ass!"
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Reality bites
At some time or another, many wargamers will have found themselves pondering the political and/or ethical implications of their passion for revisiting the past, present and future battlefields of the world with their maps and little counters. This reflection leads some to create boundaries and/or preferences: periods they won't game, sides they always prefer to play, and so on. For me this began in my teenage-tankie youth, when I drew a boundary at 1945. My reasons for this were twofold:
- In the late 70s and early 80s- with Thatcher and Reagan's 'second' Cold War at its height, modern warfare was too closely linked to the spectre of global thermonuclear holocaust for it to have any appeal to me.
- I felt uncomfortable with the idea of playing games about wars the casualties of which would be actual people living in my own time.
I abandoned this boundary as I grew older. That's not to say that I 'grew out of it', because that would be to imply that there's something immature about the choice to draw and to exercise such boundaries. I've no wish to be so insulting to others who've made these choices.
No, for me the decision to abandon such boundaries was driven by much more personal imperatives of simple mental survival. That might sound grandiose but it's true. Y'see, in my early days as a student, I got into a conversation about philosophy – as you do – with a guy I met in a student flat. The end result was that I became a convinced strong sceptic; ie. I took seriously the notion that we can't take the evidence of our senses for granted, to the extent that I confronted the proposition that reality was essentially unknowable. This might sound like just another cockeyed bit of undergraduate Philosophy 101. It was. And so it would've remained but for the later emergence of the delusional phase of my bipolar disorder.
Dreams into nightmares
The dangerous confluence of this cod philosophy and my declining mental health began with another typical undergraduate mind game, this time about roleplaying. Following the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and his famous quote "I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man", we used to ask whether we were ourselves roleplaying our PCs, or our PCs roleplaying ourselves.
I took this further, applying the question's method to my games of Squad Leader to ask whether I was just pushing around cardboard counters or actually giving orders to real men who were living and dying at my command. Once I'd thrown the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory into the mix, I was caught on the horns of a real dilemma: radical scepticism meant that I couldn't be sure that I was just pushing cardboard counters around on a map (or playing at being "a renegade ninja who has set out to destroy the evil that spawned him"™); and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory meant that the very act of asking if I was actually giving orders to real men on real battlefields meant that somewhere, I actually was.
At this point my survival instinct kicked in and common sense took over: strong scepticism was patent bollocks; Zhuangzi was just an poetic old dreamer; and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory? Well that just has to be pseudoscience, doesn't it? With my maps and counters restored to their real status as cardboard tokens, I decided too to abandon completely my old boundary, which had become a bit porous in the intervening years in any case. This may seem an, erm, eccentric (yes, let's call it 'eccentric', eh?) way to introduce the topic of 'Wargames, politics and ethics'. I guess it is. I believe though that it serves one useful purpose in particular: it shows that no matter where I take this analysis, it's founded on a firm grasp of reality. Quite literally.
Back in black?
This frankly bizarre route to the formation of my personal outlook on the ethics of wargaming aside, readers will readily imagine the one subject above all which brought political and ethical questions about wargaming to the forefront of the minds of a group of pals in whose company I- as a long-time teenage-tankie and WW2 wargamer, felt right at home. That subject was all-too-familiar popularity of the Germans among WW2 gamers. And, naturally enough, that special fetish held by an uncomfortable number for the 'Übermensch' of the Waffen SS, with their inevitable legions of Tiger tanks. Our discussions in those Edinburgh days led us to the obvious conclusion: that some of these types were more than just a bit dodgy. Beyond that? We just mocked them for their historical inaccuracies
All of which brings us almost right up to date. Early last December, someone started a thread on BGG's Wargames forum entitled 'WW2 SS Counter Colours' (observant readers who follow the link will notice that said thread now resides in the Religion, Sex, and Politics forum, whence it was consigned when the topic unsurprisingly strayed from the 'straight and narrow' of a discussion about wargame counters to the wider political issues of fascism). The OP was asking if- in his 20-year hiatus from the hobby, wargaming had gone PC to avoid offending "Euro Wargamers", because SS counters in wargames are now grey instead of the "correct" black.
No, not that 'counter-culture'
It's not my purpose here to revisit that thread's discussion in any degree of detail, because I'm only referring to it to show that certain fundamental issues about the wargaming hobby are evidently every bit as live now as they were 30 years ago. For the sake of a taster though, its 344 posts across 2 months can be roughly summarised thus:
- It's PC gone mad (I put my oar in on this issue).[/li]
- Actually the Waffen SS didn't wear black uniforms, so black counters are ahistorical anyway (sounds familar).[/li]
- They're just games, so you're dumb if black SS counters bother you.[/li]
- War is brutal; all sides commit atrocities to a greater or lesser extent; so:
1. Why make a special fuss about the SS and our cool black counters?
2. Precisely because the SS were the cutting edge of German war crimes on the Eastern Front, it is dubious to make them look specially cool for no good reason (I commented on this issue- function versus decoration, too).
Those were the main issues around which circled the debate about counter colours before the thread polarised into mud-slinging between liberal anti-Fascism and rampant anti-Communism. So you can see that this familar old issue is not just alive and kicking, but is positively explosive.
And that's it for now. When I return to this topic I'll be looking more closely at the whys and wherefores of wargames, politics and ethics; and the benefits our hobby might enjoy if we were more attentive to these issues, whether we like it or not.
Related@RD/KA!
Wargames, politics and ethics
- #2: Politics? You can run but you can't hide
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John McLintock
Scotland
Glasgow
Lanarkshire
"Roll dice and kick ass!"
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Technical problems stop the Panzers in their tracks
Badger came round last night for what was supposed to be another session of Fighting Formations and perhaps some Combat Commander. Unfortunately events were to intervene in the form of the shiny new desktop PC which I had taken delivery of just the previous day. I hadn't had time to set everything up that Thursday, so on the Friday I decided just to wait for Badger's arrival so that he could offer his assistance. It's not that I'm a complete tech-idiot or anything but there are always risks associated with transferring your old system to a new machine, so I felt it would be useful to have Badger on hand.
Just as well too it turned out.
It all began when I foolishly simply yanked the USB connector for my external hard drive from its socket in the back of my old machine. When I had the new computer all set up, it kept telling me that I had to format the external hard drive, on which is stored all the work I've done in more than 10 years. You can imagine then, dear readers, how I was feeling at that point. Badger leapt into the breach and, a quick internet search later, he had diagnosed the problem: namely that I had forgotten to 'safely remove' the external hard drive. Apparently it's rare that this will produce problems which, to be blunt, was little comfort for me at that moment.
The Badger saves the day
So, Badger was humming and hawing about how to fix the problem and reassuring me that he was sure my data could be recovered somehow or other, when he suddenly remembered that I have an old laptop on which, some time ago, he'd installed Linux Mint in the hope that he could encourage me finally to abandon Windows (he's something of a Linux crusader don't you know). That effort had failed because, for some reason, we couldn't get that old laptop to connect to the internet to install the updates needed to demonstrate Mint to me in all its glory.
One lengthy boot process later, sure enough, the laptop recognised the hard drive and there was all my data, safe and sound. Phew. Then I had the bright idea that my new computer wouldn recognise the drive now that it had been recognised by the laptop. Et voilà, problem solved. All that remained was to repeat the whole process- because the problem recurred when I when I switched the drive off, then to copy all my data from the external drive to the hard drive on the new machine just to make sure that it is secure. Three hours later, the emergency was definitvely over.
Meanwhile, the shiny shiny?
After all those hi-jinks, what about my new computer? In short, it's fab. Apart from all the usual stuff about the extra power you get when you upgrade, I have to say that a 20" wide monitor is truly amazing: webpages are so much more spacious, and favourite apps like GIMP benefit greatly from the extra width. The only 'downside' is that I'm forcefully reminded exactly how much space is wasted in those green columns on each side of RD/KA!'s venerable classic blogger 'Son of Moto' template. I really will have to do something about this.
Alhambra it is then
The day saved and dinner done, it was too late for Badger and I to start our planned game of Fighting Formations. Liam was visiting too, so it seem churlish to sit down to a game of Combat Commander. Some light 3-player action it was going to be then. I was very keen on a game of Cosmic Encounter but Badger persuasively noted that it's not at its best with 3 players (sad but true). Dominion was mooted by Badger, but it lost out in the end to Liam's suggestion that we play Alhambra.
We played 2 games. I won the first comfortably, although Badger was pleased to come second because he'd never played Alhambra before. The second game was much closer. Badger won in the end thanks to some astute wall-building in the endgame (I played that aspect particularly badly in this game, in stark contrast to the first). Liam and I were tied a mere 1 point behind.
Bagder liked Alhambra. Well you would, wouldn't you, after doing so well in your first 2 games? To be fair though, his liking was evident throughout play, as witness his catchphrase for the night, "In-teresting".
BTW, PS
And yes, I'll never again yank USBs from their ports before I've 'safely removed' the hardware. Of that you can be sure.
Sun Jul 10, 2011 12:12 am
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John McLintock
Scotland
Glasgow
Lanarkshire
"Roll dice and kick ass!"
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I wrote last time about some of the highlights in recent multiplayer gaming. Today, I'm going to look back at some of the 2-player fun I've been having. When the Sunday sessions dried up I came to realise that the last couple of months of Sunday gaming had been slightly frustrating: we'd been playing too many light Euros. It's not that I don't like these games- I do; it's just that I wanted some meatier fare, with the lighter games filling their proper role, namely filler. I'm pleased to say that I've managed in the past couple of months to satisfy this desire to a significant extent.
Combat Commander
Regular readers won't be surprised that Badger and I have been keeping up our regular Combat Commander games. We've mostly being playing our way through the Combat Commander Battle Pack #3: Normandy. The scenarios start at the beginning, with Operation Deadstick- the Ox and Bucks' coup de main at the Bénouville (later Pegasus) Bridge in the early minutes of June 6th 1944; and finish at the end, with the 1st Polish Armoured Division's stand on Hill 262 ('The mace') during the battle of the Falaise pocket in late August. In between there are beaches to fight your way off of, beachhead fortifications to overcome, lots of bocage to fight your way through, villages to capture, and a couple of scenarios featuring French Resistance forces to boot.
BP#3 includes 4 new double-sided maps; new special rules for the beaches and for bocage country- including a nice new set of night rules; a sheet of new counters; and a campaign game. All in all an excellent expansion which has been pleasing other CC:E fans as much as it pleased Badger and I.
Fighting Formations: Grossdeutschland Infantry Division
I previewed Fighting Formations- Combat Commander designer Chad Jensen's next WW2 tactical project, back in August 2009. The game finally shipped some 3 months ago and I got hold of my copy in late May and, one pause for some counter-clipping later, Badger and I enjoyed our first play at the end of the month. A thorough review will have to wait till later. For the moment I'll just say that the game is a lot of fun to play (it's good to get some tanks rolling!). The game is also remarkably easy to learn and teach; Badger grasped the rules in minutes, meaning that I found FF:GD as easy to teach as I did Conflict of Heroes when I was demoing it at Conpulsion 2010. This was a big surprise.
It is also noteworthy that FF:GD sold out in just over two months. A significant proportion of those sales will have been to retailers, meaning that the games are still in the distribution chain, but it's quite a landmark for Chad and his crew nonetheless. More soon you can be sure.
Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear
As part of my new 'campaign' to play more of the games which have languished too long on the shelf, I persuaded Dave (last seen in March 2010 introducing the lads to Z-Man Games' most excellent co-op game Pandemic), to have a go at Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear. Regular readers will remember the enthusiasm with which I greeted Uwe Eickert's new WW2 tactical boardgame back in December 2008. Sad to say, Badger didn't really take to the game after our handful of initial plays, so CoH joined the ranks of those wargames at which I gaze wistfully on occasion, wondering when and if...
You can imagine then, dear readers, that I was well pleased when Dave took up my invitation. You can imagine how much more pleased I was when it turned out that Dave not only likes CoH, but turned out to have something of a flair for tactics: we've played 3 games so far, and the score stands at 2-1 Dave. I'm not at all surprised that Dave took to CoH the way he did. I pitched it to him as a 'wargame for Euro-gamers', and the fit was perfect, as I'd hoped. Again: more soon, you can be sure.
Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?
I visited an FLGS in the middle of May expecting to pick up my long-awaited copy of FF:GD. It turned out that it wasn't in because, on seeing the price, the store owner wasn't sure if I'd want the game after all. I reassured him that FF:GD was on my 'must buy' list and he promised he'd have it in the following week. The spending bug was in me though, so I started looking round for something to get it out of my system. In the end I plumped for Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?, a Card Driven Game (CDG), by Volko Ruhnke.
I chose Labyrinth because:
- People had raved about it on the internet.
- The theme intrigued me.
- I'm interested in the idea of CDGs, which are one of the biggest innovations in wargaming of the past 2 decades.
- The box ad-copy showed some nice-looking components.
- I figured it was worth picking it up 'cheap', before the 2nd print-run copies arrived at prices boosted by recent inflation and currency fluctuations.
So, I took the game home and did my bagging, tagging and card-sleeving thing (no counter-clipping because the deluxe counters are nice and thick). I showed it to Liam one night before one of our Ivanhoe sessions (remember those?). He too was intrigued by the theme and liked the look of the components, especially the board, which is an excellent piece of functional graphic design with a nicely muted colour palette.
And so it was that just over a week after I'd bought Labyrinth, Liam and I sat down to our first game one Friday night. Labyrinth features an excellent tutorial, which takes you through a scripted first turn, by the end of which you have sufficient familiarity with the rules to play that game through to completion. That took us 5 hours, at the end of which Liam was keen to try again. That second game took about 3 hours, which left us sitting up past dawn. The dam was broken (remember that "something [which] came along to break Liam from his obsession with Ivanhoe before I broke down completely!"?), and Liam had a new game to obsess over.
I invited Gav (last seen enthusing about Dogs in the Vineyard) round a week later to try Labyrinth. He was a bit leery initially, but the end result was exactly the same as with Liam. In the next 4 weeks I played 22 games of Labyrinth, mostly with Liam; meanwhile Liam had started eyeing up all the other games on my shelves.
Twilight Struggle
With Liam obviously keen to try other games, I decided one day to take the plunge and lash out on a copy of the Deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle, which regular readers might remember I first played against Alan Poulter- webmaster at Web-Grognards, at a DiceCon West way back in 2008. I really liked Twilight Struggle but, apart from one ill-fated VASSAL game back in September 2009, my 2nd edition set was just another game which had sadly been gathering dust.
Incidentally, that game fell through partly because I just couldn't grokk the tactical/strategic complexities of TS across VASSAL. Mostly though it was because of the disjuncture between VASSAL and ACTS noted by an anonymous commenter to my second TS@VASSAL post: namely the fact that it's essentially impossible to register the effects, on TS@VASSAL, of cards played on TS@ACTS. I just didn't like this at all and found the resulting confusion to be a real disincentive.
Anyway, Liam took to Twilight Struggle with alacrity equal to or even greater than his enthusiastic response to Labyrinth. We've played 11 games already, in less than 2 weeks. And I'm pleased to say that Liam is not just willing, he's able. This is pretty good going considering his very limited experience of games beyond the familiar family boardgames and cardgames.
Last words
So you can see, dear readers, that life hasn't been all gloom and doom- in the past couple of months especially. I've got some serious 2-player games out onto the table and I'm sure this is going to run and run. I've even got a neighbour dropping in regularly for weeknight gaming sessions. What kind of gamer's heaven is that, eh?
Related@RD/KA!
- The long dark night of the dice rolls #1: a little light relief
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John McLintock
Scotland
Glasgow
Lanarkshire
"Roll dice and kick ass!"
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I've been following some of the blogs here lately and have noticed a few are reposted from externally-hosted blogs. In for a penny I decided, so here is my first posting of RD/KA!@BGG. Enjoy!
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Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe and yet more bloody Ivanhoe!
I mentioned a week past Tuesday that I've played hundreds of games during the months of my depression, nearly 600 in fact. Still getting back into the swing of things here at RD/KA! as I am, I thought I'd run through some of the highlights of that epic series of games, and cast a quick eye over some other games which I've bought recently.
The impressive statistic of nearly 600 games played since last September is put in its proper context by the fact that more than half of those were games of Ivanhoe. My neighbour Liam (last seen swigging wine at Sioux's gallery launch in May last year) came round on xmas eve keen to play a game to which he'd taken an instant liking way back in October 2009. We played a 24-game session. And so began a marathon run of 325 games, all but 9 of which were played in the 6 months up to May. That's averaging 14 games/week, in a couple of sessions each week. Whew!
I've written before about how much I like Ivanhoe. I still like it, but I never would've imagined that there could come a point when I'd be scunnered at the suggestion of playing again. That point came sometime in May I seem to recall, when we played 12 sessions. Luckily something came along to break Liam from his obsession with Ivanhoe before I broke down completely!
A pleasant sufficiency of Alhambra
Alhambra is a game I first played a couple of times at a DiceCon in Glasgow way back in the days before RD/KA!. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and remember it as being something of a brain-burner in which my every move was foiled before I could make it. Seeing some slightly battered boxes going cheap in Static Games a couple of years ago, buying a copy was a bit of a no-brainer. As so often happens, the game then gathered dust on the shelf until I finally got it to the table one Sunday last November.
I won't give a detailed review. In short: Alhambra is a tile-laying game in which players have to collect money cards to buy their tiles (for more info, see the video on the game's page, via the link above). The rules are very straightforward, although they contain one or two of the little 'fiddles' which some gamers take as characteristic of Euros and which they dislike with varying degrees of intensity.
A major feature of Alhambra is that there is no direct player interaction, so that the game is something of a multiplayer solitaire puzzle. Even though I'm an avid wargamer I don't mind this a bit: random tile and money draws; the uncertainties of market conditions as you wait your turn; coupled with often fraught decision-making in poor markets; these all add up to a game I'll be happy to play a lot more.
Not nearly enough Cosmic Encounter
"We come in peace for the benefit of all humanity"
Cosmic Encounter is one of the classic multiplayer boardgames of our time. It was first published in 1977 by Eon Games and has since seen 16 editions. 'Uncle' Martin (last seen around xmas 2009 introducing me to the delights of Pandemic) owned the original- and all its expansions IIRC, back in the early 80s. We played the game endlessly, and viciously, for hours and hours at a time. It was in my first ever flat- which I happened to share with Martin, and I have one of those peculiarly vivid memories of us all sat playing around the kitchen table; peculiar because I can see the scene from outside, as if out of body.
"Eat plutonium death, you disgusting alien weirdoes!"
Looking for something new to bring to the table for birthday gaming, I treated myself to FFG's 2008 Cosmic Encounter revamp back in March. For the uninitiated, Cosmic Encounter works like this:
- Each player is an alien species with a system of 5 home planets and 20 spaceships.
- The game is played by playing cards in encounters to establish colonies on your opponents' home planets.
- The winner is the first player to have 5 such colonies.
- Encounters work like this:
1. The target system is chosen at random.
2. You place up to 4 of your ships in the hyperspace gate and point it at the planet of your choice in the target system.
3. You invite any other players to ally with your attack.
4. The defender also asks for allies.
5. The other players decide in turn if they'll ally, committing their spaceships as they see fit.
6. You and the defender each secretly choose an encounter card from your hands; these can be Attack cards or Negotiate cards (there's one other kind of encounter card, but I'll leave that out for simplicity).
7. Cards are revealed, with the following effects:
- Attack v. Attack: the highest total of card plus ships wins; all losing ships go to the warp (the deadpile).
- Negotiate v. Negotiate: allies are sent home; the main players have 1 minute to make a deal involving swapping cards and/or bases; if no deal is struck, each player loses 3 ships to the warp.
- Attack v. Negotiate: the Attack card wins automatically; the player who played the Negotiate receives 'compensation'.
To the victor the spoils
The spoils of victory are:
- Attacker and allies: all gain a colony on the defeated planet.
- Defender: survive to fight another day.
- Defending allies: rewarded with 1 new Cosmic card and/or ship freed from the warp for each ship committed to the defence.
'Compensation' means that the player whose Negotiate card lost to an Attack card takes 1 random card from the winner's hand for each ship lost to the warp.
"Take us to your leader"
Readers unfamiliar with Cosmic Encounter might by now be wondering why the game is such an enduring favourite if its core system is a simple as I've outlined above (and it is). There is a bit more to it, naturally enough- namely alien powers: each player has a random alien power which allows them to break the normal rules in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. Some are apparently quite weak and therefore subtle in their applications: who'd want to be the Philanthropist, with the "power of giving"?. Others are so mighty to behold that you wonder how you'll ever stop such behemoths in their galaxy-conquering rampages: who could hope to resist the Leviathan, with their "power of Worldships" which allows them to take entire planets through the hyperspace gate, for +20 attack.
More cards, more sneaky tricks
The aliens and the encounters define the core of Cosmic Encounter gameplay. The basic game is filled out with some more cards in the Cosmic deck:
- Morph: a unique card which dupiclates your opponent's encounter card.
- Reinforcement: any player(s) involved in an encounter can play reinforcement cards after the main cards are revealed, to change the outcome; any number of these cards may be played in an encounter.
- Artifacts: these are 'event' cards which have various useful effects, some of which can tip the balance in an encounter.
In the familiar tradition of FFG box-stuffing, there are 2 further decks of cards in the basic set: flares and tech cards. Flares are intended as part of the core game and are cards you can play for effects which will vary according to whether you have the power matching the flare- 'super', or not- 'wild'. The flares were an expansion for the original Eon edition. Tech cards are new to the FFG edition as far as I know, and are optional.
The rules for tech in Cosmic Encounter are simple enough: each player starts the game choosing 1 of 2 random cards. Tech cards have to be researched before you can use them. Researching a tech card involves placing ships on the face-down card- 1/turn, until the player chooses to reveal the card. If the number of spaceships on the card is greater than or equal to the card's research number, the card is complete. Whether the tech card is complete or not, the ships on the card are returned to the player's colonies.
Surprise, surprise: an expansion!
I also picked up the Cosmic Incursion expansion set for the sake of a potential 6th player. Cosmic Incursion adds 20 new aliens to bring the total number up to 70, and a new rule: 'Cosmic Quakes'. A 'Cosmic Quake' happens when a player has to draw a new card and both the Cosmic deck and the discard pile are empty. All players must discard their cards, then new hands are dealt to each player. This will be rare, but no doubt entertaining and frustrating in equal measure when it does happen. There is also another deck of cards: the optional Reward deck. Players can choose to draw their cards from the Reward deck instead of the regular Cosmic deck when they receive rewards for participating in a successful defensive alliance.
There are lots of neat cards in the Reward deck, but this could prove to be a double-edged sword for 2 reasons: the back of the reward deck cards is different from that of the regular encounter cards- so your opponents could always choose to pick a reward card if they were allowed to draw a card from your hand; and there are a couple of real turkeys in the deck, including the 'Attack -7', the lowest valued attack card in the game. Still, there are only 2 bad cards in the 32-card Reward deck, and some of the good ones are very good indeed:
- Kickers: these multiply your attack card value, compensation and/or opponent's ships lost due to failure to make a deal (just watch out for the 'Kicker x0').
- Rifts: free ships returned from the warp- always good; with a sting in the tail if your opponent steals the card from you- better still.
Overview
The FFG edition of Cosmic Encounter is excellent. In fact it's one of the best new editions of any game I've ever seen, up there with GW's 2nd and 3rd editions of Space Hulk and 3rd edition Blood Bowl, which have long held my prize for best new boardgame editions. FFG's familiar high production values are nicely brought to bear: their thick cardboard makes all the counters and other pieces nice and chunky; and the little plastic spaceships are just lovely, with the added bonus that they stack perfectly and are easy to handle for those players who are all fingers and thumbs.
There are also some neat additions to the destiny deck (from which you draw to decide the target system for an encounter). These are: 'Wild'- any system of your choice; and 'Special'- particular systems according to certain specifications, eg. the player with the most ships in the warp. I don't know for sure if these were in previous editions; they're certainly new to this player of the original Eon edition.
If there was nothing more to FFG's new Cosmic Encounter than some new aliens, cards and high production values, then it would be good but not excellent. What makes the new edition excellent for yours truly are several small additions in particular, much more important in play than their unassuming appearance might suggest. These additions are:
- Text on the alien cards to remind players when they can use their powers and whether use of the powers is optional or mandatory.
- The timing strip which appears on all relevant cards.
These additions- and the rules for resolving timing conflicts, mean that players will always know when and how to use their alien powers; and that there should be no problems dealing with the complex interactions of the wide variety of card effects in the game. Clarity of this ilk is important enough in its own terms in any game. It's doubly important in Cosmic Encounter. Why? Because timely cardplay — to zap powers and to trump or cancel opponents' decisions or other game effects — is at the heart of the fiendish tricks which constitute so much of the tactics in a game as chaotic as Cosmic Encounter.
All-in-all then, this new edition of Cosmic Encounter should be sought out by all fans of highly interactive multiplayer games with serious screwage; sought out, cherished, and played- a lot!
Related@RD/KA!
- The long dark night of the dice rolls #2: light at the end of the tunnel
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The biggest invasion of the biggest war in history: a lot there to forget
