Morning In America

I woke up early enough (remember, I'm retired) to see the important parts of the Inauguration, the entrance of the notables through the Benediction. Here are a few thoughts:

• Wow, that's a lot of people. I'll be curious to see what the attendance numbers were for this Inauguration compared to the past several (back to Carter, or even Kennedy). 
• I hear the crabs complaining that $150 mil was spent on the various events, the most ever. Considering that my guess is that this Inauguration has generated the largest attendance ever, and I'm guessing this is breaking the record by a factor of, oh, 2 or more, that's not a big surprise. Certainly the security is going to be very high as there are still people in our country who want to judge people by their racial background and not by their acts or motives.
• How wonderful to have a person representing this country who can speak in public. Sure, he bobbled the Oath of Office a bit, but I see that as showing that he recognized the import of the occasion. 
• I saw a letter to the editor today that said that "true" change will come when a woman takes the Oath. At first, I dismissed this, thinking that African Americans emerged first from systematic bondage to at least nominal equal protection and opportunity over a 100 year period, and then I realized that many black men could vote decades before women could, and that women are still fighting to keep their reproductive rights in an era when African Americans largely don't have to fight these sorts of legal battles. The day we stop caring what someone looks like who runs for office is the day we can put these sorts of concerns to rest. 
• Dick Cheney, arguably the most powerful man in the world, leaves office in a wheelchair. An incredibly apt metaphor for the condition he leaves the country in. Hopefully both will recover. 
• Now comes the hard part. 

I say now to those who felt incredible relief when Bill Clinton left office, that the joy and elation you felt to see a man whom you felt had no morals, who would do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted for whatever reason he felt like, that the joy and elation some of us now feel in exactly the same situation is no less valid, real, or great. History will judge both presidents, but you'll pardon me if I say that somehow torture, unnecessary and unjust war, secrecy, invasion of privacy, incompetence in the aftermath of natural disaster, politicization of what should have been the most partisan-free element of the federal government (Justice), disregard of the rule of law, and the myriad other sins of the Bush administration seem to be just a little more compelling than lying about a blowjob or crimes of similar magnitude. 

Many of us gave GWB the benefit of the doubt when he became president. It says a lot about those who label the new President a "confidence man" (Rick Lowry) before he's signed a single law. Bush had at the very least a pretty cushy job to start, and a prosperous and respected nation to lead. Obama begins with no room for error, a trampled Constitution, and multiple foreign crises, from Korea to Gaza. Perhaps this might be a good time to give him the benefit of the doubt for at least a little while before you go sharpening *your* knives, seeing as it's in all of our best interests that he is successful. 

Today, I feel like the Who's at the end of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Our cupboards are bare, our presents stolen, and yet we stand and sing praise to the day, because we believe that some things are more important than ideology or winning at all costs and against all common sense. We see a bright future, and a bright leader to inspire us, because in the end it's not his job to fix our foundering ship, it is all of our jobs to do so. And that is what Barack Obama represents, a renewed belief that America really *is* of the people, for the people, and by the people. For too long, it's been very hard to believe that. 

Fields of Fire Overview, Pt 1 - Components

I trashed the development of Fields of Fire a week or so back, but I hope that the essential message in my post wasn't lost - this is a great game, worthy of your time and effort to learn, just perhaps not quite yet. 

For those of you who have decided to take the plunge anyway, here is a "quick" overview of the various systems. Because this is a complex game with unique elements, I'm going to discuss the various parts of the game in sections. Today, I will talk about the various components and what they do in the game. 

The components are, by and large, well done, although there will clearly be a few places where the designer/developer can improve things going forward. The game makes use of a variety of ways to represent information, from direct text to iconography to tables, and I'm not quite sure why in some cases. For the most part, text is readable by my 45-year-old eyes, and the colors dont' seem to get in the way too much. 

To start with, there is no map per se. Instead, the game comes with three decks of terrain cards, one for each period/conflict represented - Normandy 1944, Korea 1950, and the Vietnam Lowlands 1968 (or so). These cards are laid out in a grid to form the map, arranged in columns and rows, with Row #1 (an important concept) being the row closest to you. In addition, there is considered to be a "virtual" row of cards below Row 1 called the Staging Area, which is used mostly as a starting point for many Offensive missions. 

Each mission (detailed below) will outline various objectives that your company must achieve to consider the mission a success, and while they largely depend upon the mission, some are pretty stock items. To start with, you have a "line of departure" that more or less identifies the line between what you control and what you don't. There are also boundaries that form the operational area for your company - remember that you are, often, one company among many involved in a larger operation, and while it is possible that the map will expand over the course of the game that you can't leave those boundaries. In the first mission, the map is three rows deep by four columns wide, and this happens to be the operational boundaries for this mission, with the line of departure between the Staging Area and Row 1. 

The cards have a few different bits of information on all of them, regardless of the campaign you are playing. First is, of course, a text description of the terrain (bocage, village, cemetery, forest, etc), along with a prominent greyscale photo of the terrain in the middle of the card, which is where your units will go as you move from card to card. Around the perimeter is a green, white, or mixed color border, divided into eight segments, four being the "sides" of the card, and the other four being the "corners" of the card. For reasons I don't understand, the side borders are dashed, and the corners are solid, but this has no effect on gameplay. This border determines whether or not you can see through the card to another card, or whether the terrain blocks line of sight (LOS) or not. Green represents blocking terrain, white represents a clear LOS. If you have three cards lined up in a row or column (or diagonal), and the middle card has white borders adjacent to the outer cards, you could be able to see the outer cards from each other. Interestingly, you cannot see another terrain card if it is not orthogonally or diagonally lined up with the sighting card, so a card a "knight's jump" away can't be seen under any circumstances. The designer has rationalized this choice for environmental/simulation reasons, but I believe it was done to keep the LOS rules simple. 

Elevation also plays a role in the game in two respects. First of all, you might draw a Hill card for a given slot of the map grid, but it only determines elevation and you'll place another card on the Hill card to demonstrate what the terrain is. You can see over lower terrain if you are on higher terrain, and it is possible to have multiple levels of terrain if you draw multiple Hill cards. There are also cards with buildings on them, some of which are designated "multi-story" terrain. In these cards, it is possible to find a church tower or second story, which function similarly to Hill cards but don't block LOS like Hills do. 

Each card has a few more pieces of information, mostly to do with cover, which most of us would call "landscaping" or "buildings". Each card has a terrain modifier to combat, which is a +modifier. Some cards, the ones with two types of LOS into the card, use a smaller number to represent the modifier for fire coming into the card through an open LOS, for indirect fire (mortars or artillery), grenades, or fire from enemy units in the same card. These mods will apply to every unit in the card, regardless of whether they have found "cover" and represent the general environment. 

Cover, on the other hand, represents specific elements of the landscape, such as a copse of trees, a group of bushes, or a building. Each card will have a maximum number of such elements, and they can be either natural (a shrubbery) or urban (an outhouse). Natural cover always gives a small improvement defensively, while urban cover can be two or three times as effective. There is also a number that indicates how easy or difficult it is to find cover once you've moved a unit into that card, which I'll discuss in more detail in a later entry.

Finally, the terrain will sometimes have special icons that represent the unique features of that card. For example, some cards tell you whether vehicles have to stop or are prohibited from entering that card. Some give a negative modifier if there is incoming indirect fire. Some designate the presence of multi-story buildings. All cards have a unique number for that deck, allowing us to specify what cards we are using in a given mission session report.

The end result of this card system, while having some limitations, is to allow for a wide range of potential terrain when replaying missions. While I dislike a few things (no knight's move LOS, the dashed/solid LOS lines), in general the effect is extremely useful and versatile. For example, you can have areas of the map that are unrevealed at the start of the mission, as well as areas outside of your operational area that come into play as enemy units appear. It's a very flexible system, and well suited for tactical operations at this level. 

On to the units. The rules are particularly vague in many respects, with some critical information stuck on the back cover of the book with no real explanation of use, so I consider this section of these overviews to be of particular interest. A unit is a little hard to describe. There are "infantry" units, which is any unit that isn't a vehicle. They are, for the most part, identified by the use of their "stacking" dots on the bottom edge of the counter. Most units are either one dot/step "teams", while most of the rest are three step "squads". A few units, such as the German 88mm FLAK team, have two steps on the front side of the counter, one on the back. The three steppers all are platoon squads, and have a two step side on the back. 

There are also a large number of Limited Action Team counters as well, some of which are on the back side of "normal" counters. LATs are used in many situations, usually from taking combat losses but not always. As their name suggests, they are somewhat limited in what they can do during the course of the game, and they also do not have an association with specific company elements, unlike weapons teams or squads. There are Fire Teams, Litter Teams, Paralyzed Teams, and Casualties, in descending order of effectiveness. Casualties won't ever improve their status as the game continues, but the other teams may be improved through rallying or changed (sometimes for the better) by combat results. In addition, units that have become Pinned by fire are also considered LATs in many respects. Finally, many weapons teams and HQs with a single step have Fire Teams on their reverse sides, which occurs if the team runs out of ammo, or through combat. The best way to think of LATs is that they are breakdowns of larger units or less effective versions of single-step units, and have a hierarchy that allows some of them to regain their status in certain situations.

Infantry units also have two other bits of information on them, the weapon type and their range. Range is, for some reason, given as a letter code instead of a numeric range. I understand that Point Blank the same card, a range of zero, but it's another example of how a game was designed by a soldier without regard to his audience being people without military experience. The weapon code has to do with how much lead/shrapnel goes into the air when the unit is firing, so Small Arms (S), Automatic Weapons (A), Grenades (G), Incoming rounds from airstrikes, arty, etc (I) and heavy weapons such as .50 cal MGs (H) all designate how effective the different weapons systems are. There are other designations such as G! that shows ranged grenades (bazookas or mortar teams firing directly), or "tripod" designations that create certain conditions and opportunites for some weapons. 

Included in infantry units are the HQs, the units that give the player the access to ordering their men and weapons. These units don't have weapon types or range on their counters, as they represent individuals with small sidearms that are mostly used in emergencies. They have Fire Teams on their reverse sides if they are converted during combat, but otherwise they are part of the comm net and the heart of the game. 

Other special units include Runners that can be broken off from larger units to relay orders and Snipers that your enemy deploys against you. Funny how you never get to deploy snipers in these games, at least not usually as the US. There are also Forward Observers to spot for arty or off-board mortar units, and several other special units that I haven't run into yet.

There are also a plethora of vehicle units, which thankfully you don't have to worry too much about early on aside from a single Jeep unit in the first mission (which has a whole host of special rules, unfortunately). Vehicles don't have steps, but they do have AT (anti-tank) modifiers in little circles, and drawings of the vehicle in question along with a text description of what they are. Vehicles often have much of their information on tables rather than 

Aside from the many markers in the game, there are also a handful of other weapons that don't represent personnel but are often one or two shot units, such as rifle grenades, panzerschreck, and panzerfaust (for the Germans, I haven't really seen what the Koreans or Vietnamese have). There are also pyrotechnic "assets" such as high-concentration smoke for concealing movement, white phosphorus that's like HC smoke but nastier to anyone around it, colored smoke and flares for providing signals to units (we'll get into that later), and phone lines that allow you to extend your communications net (also discussed in a later entry). 

Units come in three colors, kind of a strange choice seeing as there are four different nationalities (and effectively five): US, German, Korean, North Vietnamese regulars, and Viet Cong units. The US and German units have their own colors, green and gray respectively, but for reasons that I can only imagine had to do with conservation of countersheets, the Korean and Vietnamese units are both the same color. The Vietnamese infantry units all have designations (AVN or VC) to differentiate them, but the Koreans have no such designation, and the vehicles don't either, making sorting a little complex. The rules and the countersheet tell you which parts of the sheet have what units on them, but it's useless information once the counters have been punched. 

Making things more interesting is the bewildering array of weapons illustrations on the various counters. For example, the US fire teams come in three or four different flavors, some identical, some not. The designer has frequently identified the different counters by the weapon designation of the illustration, which is completely useless for me as I'm not a gear-head as many military folks are. For the various squads, they are broken down according to an illustration in the back of the rules that isn't referenced anywhere else, and to make things more complicated they are shown in more or less *reverse* order of how things break down. 

For example, say we have a German MG squad, which consists of three steps and has a weapon type of A, which is more effective that S. Let's say the squad takes an F result, so it flips to it's two step side and you are supposed to replace the third step with a Fire Team. Which one to use? The chart shows (first) an A team, then two S teams (in some cases with different weapon pictures, although they are identical in function). However, the rules say that the *last* step should be the A step, so you choose between the two S Fire Teams, unsure of whether there should be a specific type of unit on it's reverse. In our example, the squad flips to it's two step side and an S fire team is placed in the card with the squad. If the squad loses another step (let's say to a Litter Team with an L result), then the squad is removed, a litter team is placed on the card, as is an A fire team. It can be a confusing system and this is one of many places where examples in the rules would have helped tremendously. All of the markers will be discussed as their functions come up.

What I'm really trying to say here is that you will be presented with many situations where you have no idea which of several seemingly similar counters should be employed. There are even two sets of US squad counters, one for Germany/Korea, the other for Vietnam. Be sure to reference the inside back cover of the rulebook, as well as use some common sense. Also remember that units like the 88mm with two steps don't follow the rule that says that the final step of a unit should become a fire team - that applies only to squads. To my knowledge, this hasn't been included in the errata yet. 

So much for units. There are also a ton of markers, and like most games with a lot of markers I like to use a counter tray for these so that I can prep them very quickly (just take the tray out and remove the lid) and access them easily during gameplay. The red markers refer to various elements of combat and weapons fire, the blue ones that aren't specifically ammo are general markers, and there are a lot of LATs that look remarkably like markers but aren't, identifiable via the step dot on the bottom edge. There are also a bunch of Potential Contact markers that are blue - I recommend bagging these instead, as often you will need to draw them blind and they have the same back to create some fog of war. Unfortunately, a few were misaligned and have easily distinguishable backs, but you can "fix" this by taking out a proportional number of the other counters (they come in A, B, and C flavors).

The next element is the Action Deck, which I strongly recommend sleeving. You will shuffle this deck about 30 times in a game, so sleeves will definitely protect your investment (compared to the terrain cards, which don't really need the sleeving as they are handled much less often). The action deck is essentially the random number generator for the game, and it does it in a lot of interesting and conflicting ways. There are several sections of the card used in different functions, and to be honest this could just as easily have used tables to achieve the same effect. I think that the designer is an Up Front! fan, as at least one part of the card mimics the RNG function of the Up Front! cards. 

On the top is the Activation/Initiative number set in the upper left corner. These numbers are used to determine how many Orders a given HQ unit has available during the Command phase, which we'll discuss in a later entry. To it's right may be one of a number of text terms such as Cover, Rally, Contact, etc. Below this text, if it's there at all, is one or more icons representing spotting/concentrated fire, infiltration, grenades, etc. While there will only be one piece of text, there may be multiple icons. Below the icon field is another place for icons that are used in vehicle combat and to determine if "higher HQ" events occur. Again, all of this could easily have been represented by a set of tables using percentages and a pair of d10s.

There are three areas for tables on the cards as well. Along the left edge is a table with entries running from -4 to +6, used to determine combat results of Miss, Pin, and Hit. Below the vehicle and HQ icon area is a section that determines the status of a unit if it is hit, and the results are given as a set of letter codes matching LATs (P for pinned, F for Fire team, etc). There will often be two results, only used if the target has more than one step. Along the bottom will be a sight familiar to Up Front! players, a table that creates random numbers for a wide variety of integers from 2 to 14 or so. If you ever need to randomize between, say, one and five, you simply turn over a card and reference that column of that table to get a number in that range. 

While I get that the card provides a very fast means of determining a result, and that this is a good thing, at the same time the designer assumes that we're all able to take the information on seventy different cards, note that certain cards with certain results have come up during that deck, and will adjust our play accordingly. This guy is a freakin' genius if that's the case. When I turn over a card to see if I found Cover, for example, I don't look at any of the iconography or table data, much less remember it. To keep the numbers sufficiently "random" (as if having multipurpose cards doesn't already satisfy that condition), you have a "reshuffle" card that is placed about halfway into the deck. Believe me, you turn over cards for everything in this game - finding cover, rallying, firing arty, determining orders - you will reshuffle the deck once or twice per turn as you only get through 35-40 cards before hitting reshuffle. I think that the convenience of the system he's created is negated by this constant reshuffling, especially when you are drawing four cards and looking for a result, but have to reshuffle after drawing two, then remember if you got a certain result. Were I even more anal than I already am, I'd go ahead and generate tables after determining percentages and use Dicenomicon on my iPhone to cover the odd RNG things like 1-7. This sort of thing strikes me as a lot of design/development time spent to get the right balance on the cards when it could have been used to, oh, edit the rules and provide decent examples. 

Almost done! All we have left are the rules, the mission playbook (which consists mostly of the mission logs, force package tables, and some designer notes and play suggestions that use a lot of terminology foreign to the game itself), and the mission log pad. There are also several player aids, many of which are less than useful when you get started because they don't contain all of the info you need (I'm talking to you, action tables). One thing I do recommend strongly is that you download and print out both the campaign information (two pages) and the mission briefing (another two pages) rather than constantly refer to the playbook. However, you will want to refer to the cover of the playbook on occasion because it has *more rules* on it. There were a couple of bits there that I spent a good 30 minutes perusing the rules for. Rules, my friends, go in the rule book. I also recommend putting the enemy player aids and mission info in one stack on your table, and leaving the US mission info in front of you to record experience points as you progress through the mission. 

That's it for the components. In my next installment (later this week) I will cover preparing for play (including conceptual info such as Chain of Command and communications nets), followed by the Command Phase, Enemy Action Phase, and Combat. 

B-Star G - It's Back, Baby

I'm very glad I didn't have anything else going on this evening. Had I scheduled something, I think my wife would have killed me, as tonight was when the long-awaited final set of episodes for Battlestar Galactica finally aired. 

I am *not* going to give any spoilers, but if you haven't seen the series up until now, I strongly suggest that you just stop reading as I'll mention things leading up to tonight's episode.

Last chance. Be strong. Turn away now. It will all be worth it. Trust me.

First off, it turns out that Captain Picard is, in fact, a cylon.

Whoops, wrong series. But I'm sure at least one of you was trying to remember which character Captain Picard is, and who plays him. Hint: ST:TNG. 

Now that I've shamed the last of those who aren't following this show like it's the Second Coming (and frankly, I think it's probably more interesting than the Second Coming, at least if you're an unapologetic apathist like I am), you're probably wondering whether the show has lived up to the hype. Of course, we won't really know the answer to that until the series has run it's course, but I will say that this was a very satisfying episode in many ways, and there were surprises at every turn. I'm not one to follow the fan-based forums (or the official ones, for that matter), but I will say that there were several developments that I never saw coming. Not even a little. 

When we last left the cast, they had finally found Earth, in conjunction with a splinter group of Cylons who had broken with their brethren for the simple fact that they felt that immortality robbed them of treasuring their lives. If every time you die you are resurrected into a new (but identical) body, you start to wonder what the point is. Which is ironic, because I'm sure a lot of people who are getting up in years start to wonder what the point of their lives has been if it's going to be so short. 

I can answer that question in a heartbeat, and it's called your offspring. 

So here they are on Earth, but it's a wasteland, and has been for some time (as the latest episode will reveal). Some other things that are developed further are insights into the people who were living on the Earth (which was, of course, the "lost tribe" of the human culture), who the four "final five" cylons who were outed close to the end of the first half of the season are and where they might have come from, how Starbuck could have had her ship explode yet return in a brand-spankin' new Viper after finding Earth, and what happens when the thing that has kept you going for lo these many months and years, that you have fought tooth and nail to achieve, suddenly isn't at all what you thought it would be. 

And that last topic is really where the meat of the episode is, as with all well done drama. It's not really about spaceships or skinjobs or funny-shaped paper. It's about us, about how we respond under pressure, how we grieve, how we love, and all of the other things that make us human. Flaws and all, because if nothing else, B-star G shows just how deeply flawed we all are. That's part of why Lost has been so good (when it's been good, which is most of the time) - the characters all make mistakes, sometimes knowing full well that they are sacrificing their ethics to serve the greater good. And sometimes to serve the immediate personal good at the expense of others. 

As we get close (oh, so very close!) to the end of the Bush administration, I find this sort of removed soul searching to be very cathartic. After all, I didn't drive out to Washington, D.C. after the botched Katrina relief efforts and protest in the streets. I didn't write letters to my congresscritters telling them that they must oppose the invasion of Iraq, that we must stop torturing for any reason, that we must stop selling our souls just so that we can maintain an illusion of prosperity and decency. It's pretty clear that the main players in the Bush administration, starting at the very top, are spending a great deal of time trying to convince us all (and failing utterly in the attempt) that they really did a very good job. In the end, however, it's pretty hollow to say that we haven't been attacked since 9/11 when we hadn't been attacked *before* 9/11. If your only accomplishment is that no one has snuck in a suitcase nuke and detonated it when no one has even *tried* to do it (and believe me, they trumpeted every single tiny "success" of disaffected crazies who would struggle to hold up a Mini-Mart, it happened in Portland), then you really haven't done much at all. at least to the good. 

So it is that we sit on the edge of hope for a return to decency in America, watching a mirror of ourselves on what I am convinced may have been the best television series of all time (The West Wing came very close, had it not gotten *so* lost around season 4) in what are clearly the darkest ethical and economic times in decades. B-star G showed us all sides of the Iraq War, the War on Terror, our use of torture, the leverage of individual differences for political gain, the dangers of stepping outside of our ethics in the quest for a "greater good" when all you really gain is the loss of your own soul. And they did it using a franchise that was known primarily for it's cheesiness (look! the Cylon is dressed like a Sheriff!) and made it into commentary on living in America during the Bush years, and did it in about as evenhanded a way as anyone could hope for. 

We've got nine episodes to go, and I've got to tell you that they could probably have dragged this out for at least another year (unlike Lost, which really has me starting to get a little worried that maybe we're going on a very long ride that will end up with Wallyworld closed for renovations). There were some major surprises in the episode that look to end this ride on a very tight and well-done note. What a great series. It, along with The Daily Show, has kept me sane for the last eight years, and I will miss it terribly when it's gone. 

Fields of Fire

Those who know and have gamed with me know that I am very fussy about rules. I do not like ambiguity in a ruleset, not one bit. I have given away games with rules that were ambiguous, and in one case, I no longer will purchase games from a particular company, Phalanx, because not only do they seem to have no one checking the rules, but they don't seem terribly interested in answering questions if you write to them in English (they will quickly respond if you send in Dutch, as evidenced when my friend George, a Nederlander himself, asked exactly the same question to exactly the same e-mail address five minutes later, while I was never responded to. Ever.) The worst of the bunch was Revolution, which contains multiple ambiguous definitions of the term "province" that they, to my knowledge, refuse to clear up. 

I find this sort of thing inexcusable. A little research on the subject shows that various groups play with different interpretations, resulting in a much different game. My understanding is that when the Blennemanns buy a design for publication, they have little or no contact with the original designer, as when they ruined Ted Raicer's The First World War by adding in a random game ending element. 

Enough whining about Phalanx, bless their pointy little heads. This post is about Fields of Fire, put out by a company that usually does a much better job of checking the games that go out under their banner, GMT Games. 

This time, GMT was asleep at the wheel. 

I believe that GMT got stuck in a production crunch, when several games went out over a period of a couple of months, plus they did their big year-end sale. Unhappy King Charles!, Successors, Clash of Monarchs, Combat Commander (both Pacific and Stalingrad flavors), and Fields of Fire all went out since mid-October, and I'm sure they spent a huge amount of time just assembling and mailing out what must have been something close to 30,000 games. 

However, much as when Thirty Years War went out some years ago while their head honcho was embroiled in a little legal problem (and ended up in jail for a while), I think they took their eye off of the ball and the result was perhaps the most underdeveloped game they've put out in years. Even the Great War in Europe Deluxe Countersheet SNAFU, where they not only held up a game for a month because they had so much counter errata that it required a full countersheet extra in the box, but also had to send out a *second* sheet a couple of months later to fix the mistakes they missed or introduced (and this on a game that was a *reprint* of an earlier Command Magazine game) wasn't as bad as this. 

The game is Fields of Fire, which is by all accounts a brilliant design, unlike anything I've ever seen in a consim. You play a company commander, and your job is primarily to issue orders through your chain of command, taking the comm net into account, and watching your men shoot at the first target they see, even if it's wiped out. Where Combat Commander demonstrates that war is chaos, and that men often won't take orders, Fields of Fire demonstrates that getting the orders *to* the men is just as problematic. 

The designer, Ben Hull (currently serving in Iraq with the Marines) is an officer, and understands that most of the job of a second lieutenant is running from bush to bush screaming orders at the top of his lungs, and this game does a bang up job of showing just how well that works when you're under enemy fire. It's a miracle anything gets done at all, but on the other hand you can bet that for the most part, your enemy has the same problems. Ben, unfortunately, wrote the rules in a military style rather than a wargamer style, and as such there can be a bit of ambiguity as to exactly how something is supposed to work. The military loves to give you the parts and a sketch of the finished product, and expect you to get from A to ZZZZZZZ on your own, do it quickly, do it well, and then berate you if one of the bolts isn't as tight as they'd like. 

As you can imagine, it's dangerous to do this with a ruleset in most cases. Fields of Fire compounds the original sin in three ways. First, this is truly an evolutionary game. It's not ASL, it's not Combat Commander. Your only decision points are in what commands you give to your men, and that includes telling them to *stop* shooting, or to shoot at something else. If you tell them to stop shooting, and the *only* thing they can see to shoot at is the thing they were shooting at before, they'll start right back up again. And if you don't have a *way* to tell them to stop shooting (you have to be pretty much under the same bush), good luck with that. You do have a General Initiative rule that allows units to do things even if they haven't been commanded to, but as you can imagine it's not something you want to count on. As such, it's vitally important to explain not only the rules, but the underlying concepts. In this game, often you get high concept or you get details, but rarely both. 

Second, the rules are spread out all over the place. For example, the use of Potential Contact (PC) markers are in at least four different parts of the rules, but in only one location are you told that you should remove the PC marker after resolving it. Worse, there are some rules that are placed on the front page of the Briefing Booklet (essentially the Playbook), which is ridiculous as they apply to all of the scenarios in the game. Some rules aren't mentioned at all, such as the concept of duration, or how long each mission (scenario) lasts. Some rules are flat out wrong, telling you that when a unit gets down to it's last step it should be replaced with a Fire Team counter, but what it really means is that it only applies to squads (which have three and two-step sides), but not to units that occasionally have two and one-step sides. 

Third, and in my opinion the most egregious of the three sins, is that there are exactly two examples in the rules, and one of them is misleading in how it describes the process of activating HQs. The other demonstrates line of sight, using pictures of cards with the numbers so small that you can't read them, then using those numbers to describe the example. Really, really, really, really incredible that this was left out. 

Now take all of this in a solitaire game, where you don't have an opponent to help you mash through the rules on the first playthrough. I spent five hours with this game, getting to the point where I actually got through an entire turn by going through the sequence of play and reading the rules for that section as I went. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out which row was Row #1. It is not defined in the rules, but rather you are supposed to infer it. There is *no* definition of when the missions end, just a condition and a duration (completely ignored in the rules). As such, who knows whether you are supposed to stop the mission when you meet the condition, or continue through the number of turns (given, I must infer, from the "duration").

There are already five pages of errata for the game, but to my mind there should be more like ten, as several of the questions I've asked that were not covered in the rules haven't been included yet. The rules should simply be tossed out and started over from scratch, they are that bad. 

Of course, there are the apologists for the game, one of which spent something like 50 paragraphs defending the rules, saying they were crystal clear, that anyone should be able to figure them out without any problem, that it just required careful reading, blah blah blah. Two weeks later, the chucklehead posts that he's just played the game for the first time. He hadn't even tried to play from the rules yet. ConSimWorld is worse, with the designer pulling the fact that he's in Iraq on someone who called it as they saw it and said they were the most confusing rules he'd ever seen. To Ben's credit, he is in a very difficult situation and answering the questions, but he kind of has to because it's pretty clear that the developer didn't even start to do his job. I see now that he's developing the new Musket and Pike game, which astonishes me as I can't believe that GMT would ever let him develop again. 

All of the above is really a crime because this is a great game. It really is. Like CC before it, it shows a side of warfare that those of us who are not in the military will never (hopefully) see. Unlike any game I'm aware of, it demonstrates in great detail how the improvements in communications technology have changed how commanders communicate with their men, from 1944 Normandy to 1972 Vietnam. The use of cards for maps ensures massive replayability, even given that there are 21 different scenarios in the box, from combat patrols (complete with LZs in the Vietnam era) to defensive and offensive missions. The missions link together with your company improving in capability from mission to mission, and stiff penalties if you fail to complete a mission in a certain number of tries (you do get to start from where you left off a failed mission, thankfully). The use of the concepts of Volume of Fire (how much lead is in the air around you) and Primary Direction of Fire (where it's coming from) combine with artillery, grenades, heavy machine guns, bazookas in a way that, while a little hard to grok initially, becomes extremely intuitive once you understand what the game is trying to do - show you that people don't die in war because people are shooting at *them*, but because people are shooting in their general direction. 

So it is that I am literally gobsmacked (don't ask me how exactly I can be "literally" gobsmacked with there being no actual verb going by that name) that the only way I could learn this game was to post a trial game as I went on BoardGameGeek, getting feedback and questions as I went from others on the group. I'm still trying to figure out some things, such as how you might group actions together to, say, load up folks in a Jeep and drive them across the board. The rules specifically suggest that the best way to learn how to use pyrotechnic signals (colored smoke, flares) is to "try stuff". I still don't know if bazookas generate PDF since you must specifically order them to fire grenades, in contrast to LMG teams, which fire early and at every opportunity. But I did well enough that I was able to start the whole thing over and get through an entire mission successfully (hint: if they counterattack, don't move.)

I've been in contact with something like 25 people all trying to learn the game, and as frustrated as I am at how poor the rules are for learning it. Some want to rewrite the rules. Some (like me) want to generate videos to teach the game (I intend to do this once the damned VASSAL module comes out - the guy who did the playtest version won't answer my requests for it so that I can work up effective scripts, and he hasn't gotten the production version out as I write this). GMT very thoughtfully put out a much-needed example of play with illustrations but that didn't go far enough in covering certain situations (such as whether General Initiative can be used for more than one unit, seeing as the rules uses the singular "unit"). Clearly it's a very cool game, and it's equally clear that those who get it have been following the design in the ConSimWorld folder for three years. In fact, someone gave me a link to a three-year-old example of play on CSW. I'm thinking a few things may have changed since then. 

GMT, to their credit, has started a folder to take a closer look at how they can improve the rules so that people can learn the damned game. I pity anyone who buys this in a store, takes it home, and doesn't realize that the only way to figure it out is by going online. 

As I've said, the designer is doing what he can to rectify the situation, although often his answers are less than clear (if I say "a or b?" and he replies "yes" that is not clear). The real problem with this game is that the developer didn't do his job. His job is to take a design and put it into a printable form. That means having cards in the game that add up to a multiple of 55. That means counters that will fit on a multiple of 280 counters (one sheet of 5/8" counters). The page count for rules and playbook have to be laid out and edited. The rules themselves must be pared down for clarity, the modified component list, and accessibility (you'd be amazed how many designs contain enough chrome to choke an elephant when they first go to the publisher). And the publisher has their own issues - finding the right price point, making sure it's something that will sell, etc. It's a difficult job. This guy, he shouldn't be given this job again, as he very nearly killed a cutting edge game through sheer incompetence. There, I've said it publicly. I've been told this privately by at least 15 people who are afraid to stir up the waters on CSW (BGG is more tolerant, other than above-mentioned chuckleheads), and I'm saying it for the world to hear. Don't let this guy develop again, I will not buy a game that he's worked on unless the game is on the fifth iteration and is now bulletproof (such as Musket and Pike). 

If I were going to do it over again (and keep in mind I've spent something like 60 hours on this game getting to the point where I felt I could get through *one* mission), I'd stick it on the shelf and pull it out in a year when they have a usable set of rules. Because it will come to rule your life if you're determined enough to learn it through multiple sources of information. Writing a thesis was easier. 

However, once there *is* a useful ruleset, if you have the slightest interest in mid-20th Century squad-level tactical warfare simulations focusing on command and communications (and while that may sound dry, it's not - think of playing the Luftwaffe in a Battle of Britain game where you plan the raid in advance then see how things turn out; it's like that but more interactive), this is *the* game on the subject. There is talk of future modules (this one covers Korea as well as Normandy and Vietnam Lowlands, and focuses on one infantry division), and I can see how this could be translated into any conflict since 1925 including Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, just about anywhere the US or any Western power has seen action. And it is, Solitaire ASL aside, the only solitaire boardgame at this level out there (Ambush and it's followons are OOS, and haven't stood up well over time in any event - the paragraph lookup system was novel, but there was no replayability and it was far too easy to lose your place if you read the number incorrectly). 

Wait until there are a few more learning aids out there. I will post once I've started to put up my FoF For Dummies videos sometime after the VASSAL module comes out. 

GMT, please please please please - I love your games, and love that you try to get a lot of them out at the holidays. I don't love it when you aren't paying attention to what you publish. Please keep it down to a volume that you can actually handle in the future. This was too many games in too short a time, and I hope that you would have caught it under different circumstances. You almost killed a very good system. 

Yet More Gaming!

Mike's holiday all-day game session was so much fun, I decided to keep the party going - especially for those who couldn't make it last Tuesday. A lot of people showed up - Mike, George, Pradeep (a friend of George's), Alex, Chris, Ken, JD, Matt R, Jeff, and myself. That's a houseful, and we managed to stick to (mostly) two tables. We also got through more than three pizzas and a lot of snacks. 

First on the table was a quick round of Mamma Mia!, one of my favorite light games of all time, and one that Dave claims he won't play with me because I'm too good at it. Not today, as I sucked mightily with only two orders filled by game end. George was in the same boat, Matt and Mike did somewhat better, but first-timer Pradeep got seven of his eight orders filled. Clearly we'll need to watch him closely. Jeff, who got my address from our group database (which I did not know existed, and had information from more than six years ago in it), had showed up at my old house about 20 minutes away, but we waited for him to arrive before starting our next game.

Which was Power Grid, using the US map and excluding the NW part. We weren't sure which of the two western areas to exclude, and so we diced for it and the Great Northwest lost out. I will not lie - I consider myself a pretty good Power Grid player, and feel I do well in estimating how much money I will need during the course of a turn, even if I'm placing cities and gathering resources last. And I was - I built one or two extra cities on the second turn, putting me permanently in first place for most of the game. I made good choices when it came to power plants, getting just enough to do what I needed and not a lot more, and was able to power them most of the time (I was short only in the first couple of turns, mostly because I wanted to establish my territory early). 

This strategy worked pretty well for me - I was the second to place my initial city and picked the NE corner near NYC, and never hurt for places I could expand to. It should be noted that you play with only five areas (not six) in a six player game, the trigger to go to Step 2 is six cities built instead of seven, and the game ends when someone has built 14 cities. 

My initial purchases were for garbage (something I rarely had competition for), then a mixed oil/coal plant, and a low end wind farm. Mike was going for the nukes, and everyone else seemed to be running into placement problems as the game went on. Only one person went West, and that was first-timer Pradeep, who seemed to run into cash problems pretty regularly. Not surprising for a new player, but it didn't affect me much as he was firmly established in the Mississippi Valley, while I was on the other side of the Appalachians right up to the end. 

Then came the fateful turn, the one where I realized that at 11 cities built and good income for the past several turns, and the capacity to power 12 cities (and no one within reach who could beat me, although I was a little concerned about Mike), that if I built up to 14 I'd almost certainly win. Even better, I needed two garbage to fill out my resources, and thus had almost no costs above having to buy an extra power plant and replace one of my old ones. I replaced the garbage driven 3 plant with a garbage driven 5 plant to get to eight, and spent a bit more than I wanted to, but was still in good shape. Mike noticed by the time we got to buying resources that I could end the game if I had enough cash, and that was a true statement - I had close to 100 Electro at that point after buying my plant. I was able to build three more cities easily, and no one else was able to power more than 11 plants, and thus I pulled out the win right after we'd gotten to step 3. A really fun game, and I have no idea how I was able to pull ahead and stay there for so long. I blame my opponents. ;-)

Ken, Chris, Alex, JD, and the pizza arrived about this time, so after a little chewage we split up into two groups. Mike, Ken, Chris, Alex, and JD all played Indonesia, the "small" Splotter game from the folks who gave you Roads and Boats, while Pradeep, George, Jeff, Matt, and myself tried out Android. For about five hours. And got through half of the game. 

What to say about Android? It's unusual in many respects - very strongly themed, asymmetrical player characters, bit-rich enough to make Le Havre blush, gorgeous to boot, and some very clever interlocking subsystems. There's the Conspiracy, there's individual plots, there's the whole Light/Dark shifting system that encourages you to screw the other players, the novel vector-based movement system (with calipers, no less). There are two evil corporations to blame, witnesses/suspects to pin the crime on (or gun down), a multi-faceted economic system in the form of "favors", and more options than you can shake a stick at. 

And Fantasy Flight didn't even tell us it was coming. 

Make no mistake, this game is a monster. So much so that I wouldn't consider playing with five players again. It took up my entire kitchen table and we had so little space we had to put four of the six suspect sheets on a box full of wine next to the table. Explaining this game is a bear, and I really wish I'd spent about an hour coming up with a cohesive plan as to how to explain it all. Fortunately, everyone seemed to get *most* of the rules down. Strangely, people really struggled with the whole "negative means innocent" thing, despite me explaining that you have to *prove* guilt, and the numbers measured guilt. I must have gone over what the Perjury tokens did about 30 times, pretty much every time someone drew a non-numeric piece of evidence. The thing we didn't have trouble with, or at least too much, was the whole lightshift/darkshift idea, especially since Matt figured out that there was a direction arrow on the top of all the Twilight cards that made it easier. My thematic explanation is that you "bank" up a bunch of light points when you lightshift, and spend them by moving toward the dark side when you play a light card. 

Much of the time was spent figuring out what you could and couldn't do, and reading the cards, and figuring out a few things (like whether or not you draw a card if your hand is full but it's not by your choice, such as with a Dark card played on you - the rules are a bit vague, although there is a reference buried in one section, and most of the other mentions of the rule say you can't draw over the hand limit under very specific circumstances, leading one to suspect that there might be exceptions). This is *very* clearly a game where you need to understand what every detective playing can do, what will bring them success, and what you can do to bring them down. Yes, you get a sheet explaining all of that, but to be honest there is so *much* going on in the game that I was suffering from a certain amount of sensory overload (and I was teaching the game, as well!)

After the first week, we all decided to pack it in. There was a *ton* of evidence on each of the suspects (this was how most of us spent our time), the Conspiracy was almost entirely filled in, with some very interesting paths (some destinations have five, count 'em, five links), but when it came down to it, Mark Henry had gotten the most evidence against him (poor little clone!), giving Matt an extra 23 points thanks to the Conspiracy. He also did quite well with Conspiracy markers. To be honest, I was focusing on keeping my plot going in the right direction, which turned out well, and trying to raise some money for Rachael (which I forgot to add into my final score of 44, which should have been 46). Matt, however, nailed it with 88 points. 

I can see how there was a real rush to fill in the Conspiracy on a regular basis because of the extra VP for filling in a row or column, but at the same time it seemed to me that this also gave everyone enough information that we'd have been vying for the various favors that now had VP during the game as well as trying to kill suspects. Hard to say. I do know that I found this game as difficult to keep track of as a monster wargame, as everything interconnects - the personal life of the detectives, their personal ambitions and flaws, the twilight cards, the conspiracy - it's really an amazing design in many ways, but it will suffer from being a high end game, something that casual gamers might buy, but would only play once. This game is for the hard-core, and you know I'm talking to you.

Now that I've played, I feel like I could get the teaching down a bit quicker, but it will still take 20 minutes or so. Everything hits at once, so no chance to teach a little, then have people learn other stuff as it becomes relevant. I'd also play with three, four tops unless you like a lot of downtime. I missed playing Dark cards several times because I was looking up rules and didn't realize people were halfway into their turns much of the time, and that's a really critical part of the game. 

On the plus side, every character has different strengths and weaknesses, and while that 15VP for nailing the guilty party is a pretty nice bonus, at the same time you can do just as well if you have good happy endings to your plots, maybe more if there are a lot of links to bonuses in the conspiracy. As such, there's an incredible amount of depth in the game (and to the backstory - it's essentially Blade Runner with a space elevator and a moon base added in), and if this is the sort of thing you like (and you have the space, time, and friends to play with), you'll enjoy it quite a bit. 

One last thing - This is not a "figure out who did it" game. It's a "nail the evidence to the person you want to go down for the crime" game, in practice if not in theory. It's a bit like Schroedinger's Cat - some one is guilty, but you won't find out until you end the game, and right up to that point no one knows who it is and in fact *cannot* know who it is - there's no smoking guns, no damning testimony, just a rather abstract system that will drive mystery fans nuts. No, this game is about the detectives, what drives them, and what drives them slowly insane. As a man who sees people as deeply flawed, no matter how good their intentions are, this game speaks to me in a very visceral sense in much the same way that Bstar-G speaks to my occasional paranoia, and I hope to see it on the table often once we start getting a few more people up on the ruleset. 

I'll say this - there is no way I'm teaching this game at a con, or even playing it unless I know the parties involved. Take that as you will.

The Indonesia game (which had morphed into an Acquire game) upstairs finally broke up, and we were back down to six, with Ken taking the place of Jeff in our initial group. Ken and Pradeep hadn't played Medici before, and Matt did a great job of explaining the rules. Off we went! I started with a focus on fur and cloth, but Mike screwed me up by collecting fur as well. Since he would bid after me in nearly every auction, that didn't bode well. What really nailed me, however, was mis-remembering my color (I was black, but thought I was green for 20 seconds), and when Ken bid 26 on a very nice Gold/5 Fur/5 Cloth set, I thought I wouldn't have any money left for future bids (I would have one slot remaining), so I passed. In fact, I had 32 points, and this would have fit my hand quite well. I ended up having to draw at the end of the round, and drew utter crap. My own fault, but it killed me in the game and I ended up a distant last. I can't quite remember who won, but I do know that four players (Matt, Ken, George, and Mike) all finished within a few points of each other, perhaps one or two points separating each one. A phenomenal game, just one I played about as badly as I've played ever. 

However, there were many cries of "21!" throughout, so my now legendary overbid from years past lives on. Yay.

George, Matt, and Pradeep all took their leave at this point, and Mike, Ken, and myself played one last game: Ticket to Ride: Go Home Santa, The Freakin' Holiday's Over Edition. Mike and I had played at Salishan in early December, and Mike won by consistently drawing routes that fit in with his Oslo/Stockholm/Helsinki axis. This time, I went for the same route as Mike had before, and it was clear we were going to compete for these routes regularly. I would steal one from Mike, then he'd steal one from me. Ken, meanwhile was running the other arm of the X from us, going from Helsinki in a northwesterly direction, the only person really going into northern Sweden/Norway.

At least, he was right up until Mike played 15 cards to take the long Murmansk route. Ken realized that he too needed to get into Murmansk, and snapped up the other route into that city, screwing Mike up to no end. We were all drawing tickets like madmen, so much so that there was a single ticket in the deck at game end. I got kind of lucky with my draws - the initial draw gave me four similar tickets, and I was able to get two out of the next one, and singles out of the next two (although the last one gave me a bit of a scare as time was clearly running out). Ken ended the game by playing all of his trains, literally, including a one-spacer for the very last turn of the game. 

At this point, Mike had a commanding lead, and if he could generate the most tickets he's be a winner. Imagine my surprise to realize that both he and Ken had unfinished routes, while mine were all completed! In fact, I'd been able to lay five or six more trains down during the last couple of rounds, which is unusual for me (I'm usually finding out about that time that I'm not going to finish what I started). Mike got up over 100 points in the final tally, Ken was behind him about 15 or so points, and we stopped counting my points once I got to Mike's score and still had five tickets left to score. I guess I done good. 

Ten more hours of gaming, with barely any time wasted on managing the dogs, eating, eliminating, all of those pesky distractions. Thanks to all who attended, especially Pradeep, who got thrown in the deep end in a big way, and took it all in stride. It was also nice to game with George and Jeff again, but to be honest it's a great group and just about anyone is my favorite partner when it comes to the Rip City Gamers. 

Of course, we were having all of this fun as the news of Israel invading Gaza was coming over the airwaves. I do not pretend any favoritism in this conflict - I think both sides make good points as well as bad - but I do know that this part of the world will never know peace as long as Israel exists as a state. I have a rather uncomfortable feeling that had the Confederate States managed to secede successfully (and in many ways, they actually *did* after Reconstruction failed and they set up an apartheid system that lasted for nearly 100 years - I *do* "read books" from time to time), that we would be fighting the same kinds of battles with them. We are all deeply flawed, and sometimes it just breaks my heart.