Wendell
United States
Arlington
Virginia
All the little chicks with crimson lips, go...
Hey, get your stinking cursor off my face! I got nukes, you know.
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We finished a four player game of RCW last night - first game for three of us, and the fourth had played it a couple of times back in the '70s. This is an impressionistic review of some of the highlights... and of a confusing ending.
The game started (turns 1-2) with White forces under Kevinovich (who moved first, and by luck of the draw had very few Red leaders) blasting their way north, taking Petrograd and Tver, picking off some scattered Red forces, and interfering with Red reinforcements. Marksky, who had both Trotsky and Lenin in his faction, and his ally Makinsky started worrying at Kevinovich's White forces. They also had great fun picking on various small foreign armies in the Ukraine. My forces (the Wendellachev factions) just tried to survive; I lost 6 Red leaders to combat and assassination (and my guys in Siberia were whacked by the Japanese) before I had my first move, but Wrangel and some other White leaders managed to hole up in the Transcaucasus and avoid the bloodletting.
Things were looking good for the Reds going into Turn 3. Kevinovich's White forces had also fled to the Transcaucasus, and it appeared that a Red victory was imminent. Marksky confidently divided his few White forces into weak stacks in Kherson, and divided his strong Red armies up into in Kherson to take care of those White leaders; Lenin meanwhile had gone to Tver to grab a powerful Red army there.
But then things went south for the Reds. Late in turn 3, the Poles entered, under my control, and whacked a Red Makinsky force in Vitebsk. Then Kevinovich's Whites under Kolchak (I think) charged out of the Transcaucasus and destroyed Trotsky in Don Cossacks territory on a risky 2-1 attack (an exchange would have destroyed most of Kevinovich's White forces; it was an act of desperation.) Then the Poles pushed deeper into Russia on and shocked Lenin, defeating him in a bloody exchange. Lenin was dead. Wrangel shot out of the Transcaucasus and risked battle in Kherson against Marksky's divided Red commands, destroying Voroshilov (only 2-1) without loss.
Elsewhere, other bad things happened to Makinsky's Red forces, and Makinksy had only one White leader and no Red leader on the map. Makinsky and Marksky considered a purge against some of my few Red leaders (including Frunze and Zinoviev), but the odds of success were low and the risks high, so they didn't try it. Instead, Makinsky gave Marksky a bunch of assassination chits, and Marksky tried to assassinate Wrangel in Kherson.
Mark needed a '4' or higher (on 2d6) to succeed.
The result: 
Score one for Wrangel's bodyguards. There was much laughter.
Anyway, things got even more chaotic. No Red reinforcements of course with Trotsky and Lenin having snuffed it. Frunze destroyed Makinsky's White leader in Poland to clear the way for the return of the Poles in the future (they all died in their glorious defeat of Lenin). More bloodletting in the Ukraine. Somewhere there were a couple of bloody exchanges and the White forces of Kevinovich and Wendellochev were much reduced.
We get to turn 5, and Marksky goes first. He goes for Victory. He divides his Red forces into three stacks, to destroy the last White leaders in Russia. Each attack is even odds, exactly. Each attack ended in a full exchange. Suddenly, there were only two Red leaders and one White leaders on the map. And the Red leaders were mine - Frunze and Zinoviev, in Poland with (between them) one 4-factor Red army. Frunze went into Livonia and assassinated the last White the last non-Wendellachev Red leader. Zinoviev took the troops and did a suicide 1-2 attack against Finns in Petrograd - an exchange took care of Zinoviev. Then Frunze, alone, attacked an unaligned 2-point White army in Livonia, and was obliterated. Meanwhile, the Czechs boarded ships in Vladivostok to go home via the Panama Canal.
There were no more leaders on the map at all. The Russian Civil War, it appeared, ended in a glorious victory for everybody who wasn't Russian. (At least, Russia appeared headed for continued instability...)
So, who won the GAME?
We don't know.
The rules list victory conditions; both the Reds and the Whites had achieved them. But nowhere did it say who wins if BOTH Reds and Whites achieve victory at the same time.
If the REDS were the winners, then Marksky gets the win with 38 points.
If the WHITES were the winners and only WHITE VPs count, Kevinovich won with 61 points to my 53 - the 9 points from the stupid Czechs being the difference.
If BOTH sides "won" and BOTH victory points were counted (as Mark had suggested), I would have won with 69 total VP.
Or maybe, NEITHER side won and all four of us lost?
Anyway, it was rollicking good fun but we were frustrated at the end not to be able to say who actually won the game. I hope this is cleared up in the reprint coming out soon, though I hear it won't be.
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Jon Williamson
Canada
Calgary
AB
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In Soviet Russia, the game BEATS you...umm...ahh crap...I've got nothing.
The situation you described confused me a bit, so I went to the game page to read a few reviews to help clear things up, which only confused me more. It's like quicksand.
This game confuses me so much I am rather intrigued by it. A reprint coming out you say...
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Kevin Bernatz
United States
Alexandria
Virginia
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Just to clear up some of what my fellow white comrade wrote.
1st, my glorious attack on Trotsky /did/ result in an exchange, which we had carefully planned for. However, it left our two glorious white stacks at 9 and 10 strength, which would have been fine if Markovsky had not been able to mass 30+ strength for a 3:1 on my gold-carrying stack.
2nd, you forgot my glorious assassination attempt immediately following the '2' rolled against you. A strong red leader was found alone in a cafe (or so we thought), and as we attempted to assasinate him (needing 8+, so not nearly as well planned as the 4+), we rolled....another 2! Two assassination attempts. Two 2d6 rolls of 2  . Sigh.
Finally, when you showed us the PROPER way to do an assassination...it was not a red leader assassinating the lone WHITE leader. They had all long died, it was you assassinating Markovsky's lone RED leader, then suiciding YOUR remaining red leaders, to try to insure that the White fraction would win (and, like you said, only because I got so insanely lucky to draw control of the Czech's at the begining of turn 4, then the Siberians at the end of turn 4, was I able to steal victory from you. Unless we all lost, in which case none of it matters :-).
-K
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Was George Orwell an Optimist?
United States
Corvallis
Oregon
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I had great fun with this game 35 years ago, but I don't remember what was supposed to happen if both sides scored enough to win. It was a beautiful game physically, with the high quality SPI mounted mapboard (at least I don't remember seeing any paper map versions of this one).
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Wendell
United States
Arlington
Virginia
All the little chicks with crimson lips, go...
Hey, get your stinking cursor off my face! I got nukes, you know.
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kbernatz wrote: Just to clear up some of what my fellow white comrade wrote. 1st, my glorious attack on Trotsky /did/ result in an exchange, which we had carefully planned for. However, it left our two glorious white stacks at 9 and 10 strength, which would have been fine if Markovsky had not been able to mass 30+ strength for a 3:1 on my gold-carrying stack. 2nd, you forgot my glorious assassination attempt immediately following the '2' rolled against you. A strong red leader was found alone in a cafe (or so we thought), and as we attempted to assasinate him (needing 8+, so not nearly as well planned as the 4+), we rolled....another 2! Two assassination attempts. Two 2d6 rolls of 2 . Sigh. Finally, when you showed us the PROPER way to do an assassination...it was not a red leader assassinating the lone WHITE leader. They had all long died, it was you assassinating Markovsky's lone RED leader, then suiciding YOUR remaining red leaders, to try to insure that the White fraction would win (and, like you said, only because I got so insanely lucky to draw control of the Czech's at the begining of turn 4, then the Siberians at the end of turn 4, was I able to steal victory from you. Unless we all lost, in which case none of it matters :-). -K
Thanks for the fixes Kevin - that's what happens when I do a session report without notes! But I think Markovsky's "Red" leader had some dangerous Tsarist tendencies, so I thought of him as a "White"...
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Wendell
United States
Arlington
Virginia
All the little chicks with crimson lips, go...
Hey, get your stinking cursor off my face! I got nukes, you know.
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Sphere wrote: I had great fun with this game 35 years ago, but I don't remember what was supposed to happen if both sides scored enough to win. It was a beautiful game physically, with the high quality SPI mounted mapboard (at least I don't remember seeing any paper map versions of this one).
Agreed. Nice (mounted) map, and the abstraction of Siberia (necessary to keep the game at a manageable size; Siberia is BIG) worked very well.
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Wendell
United States
Arlington
Virginia
All the little chicks with crimson lips, go...
Hey, get your stinking cursor off my face! I got nukes, you know.
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Capt_S wrote: In Soviet Russia, the game BEATS you...umm...ahh crap...I've got nothing. The situation you described confused me a bit, so I went to the game page to read a few reviews to help clear things up, which only confused me more. It's like quicksand. This game confuses me so much I am rather intrigued by it. A reprint coming out you say...
It's cool, and the reprint is in the March/April S&T. Don't know if there is a Vassal module.
Which reminds me: the rules in the back have rules for POSTAL play! I can't imagine playing any game by snail mail!
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Was George Orwell an Optimist?
United States
Corvallis
Oregon
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wifwendell wrote: Which reminds me: the rules in the back have rules for POSTAL play! I can't imagine playing any game by snail mail!
I played that way in the old days (pre-internet). We used stock trading numbers from a pre-agreed date to generate random numbers for die rolls (and cut them out and mailed them with our moves, in case somebody had a misprint). It took a long time to play, but we enjoyed it. Fewer games and a slower pace wasn't all bad.
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Mo Caraher
Canada
Thunder Bay
Ontario
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Quote: In Soviet Russia, the game BEATS you...umm...ahh crap...I've got nothing.
"In Soviet Russia only game wins. ALL players lose."
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Tom Swider
United States
Harrisburg
Pennsylvania
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wifwendell wrote: Capt_S wrote: In Soviet Russia, the game BEATS you...umm...ahh crap...I've got nothing. The situation you described confused me a bit, so I went to the game page to read a few reviews to help clear things up, which only confused me more. It's like quicksand. This game confuses me so much I am rather intrigued by it. A reprint coming out you say... It's cool, and the reprint is in the March/April S&T. Don't know if there is a Vassal module. Which reminds me: the rules in the back have rules for POSTAL play! I can't imagine playing any game by snail mail!
That's how you had to do it before CompuServe and the Internet. Surprisingly, quality of play and negotiations were much higher in snail mail games on a monthly deadline. Players accepted that there was "real life" going on. A lot of this fandom (esp for Diplomacy players) have led to life long friendships, which don't seem to happen as much with Internet gaming.
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