Note To Self:

Two six year old girls, two two year old boys, a lot of sugar, and time spent in an unsupervised gaming room with a tray full of SPQR counters is to be avoided. On the plus side, I *was* smart enough to put the game board with the prepared Heraclea scenario in an art tray so it stayed intact. 

I had a nightmare last night that they got into the Case Blue and DAK 2 boxes and proceeded to empty every tray and ziplock into a large pile in the middle of the room. I may need sedation tonight.

New Horizons

Such a noble and exciting sounding title, and yet this entry is only about me trying out a couple of "new" wargaming companies' offerings. In this case, Khyber Pass and Victory Point Games.

Starting with the Khyber Pass games. KPG is primarily known as a desktop publishing outfit (DTP) where you get a kit to put together the game. I have to be honest - I really find this sort of thing annoying more than anything else, and I'd rather pay the extra money to get components that are at the very least in a form where I don't need to do much more than I would with a professionally printed and published game. 

Fortunately, KPG has begun to put out games that *are* in such a form, if only in the fact that they've put together the parts themselves, at least for most titles. The exception is B-29 Superfortress, a solitaire game based on the old AH chestnut B-17: Queen of the Skies. So it was that I ordered that title, along with a two-game package on Communism in the West that has a game on the Cuban Revolution along with a smaller version that tackles Che's attempt to export revolution to Boliva some nine years later. I got the latter package more because of my interest in things Cuban, and I understand that the Che game requires perfect play from the revolutionaries and even then it more or less comes down to a die roll or six to see how things end up. Worthwhile as a historical study and solo game, or to introduce non-wargamers to area movement games. Cuba seems to be more interesting, but still not something I'm dying to play so much. Perhaps not the best choice of games, but then again KPG focuses on less-gamed conflicts and none of the others really grabbed my attention. I plan to play B-29 in the very near future and will give my thoughts on it, although again, this is more of a simulation than a game, and so it will make for a more interesting writeup than a game, per se.

Components in both games were passable quality for wargames, although the tables that are necessary for B-29 came in booklet form (which means constant rifling through it) and quite a bit of unentered errata, which I find surprising considering that KPG's website's support page doesn't seem to exist. I'm hoping to find a set of tables that are on heavy stock instead of in book form, and have been corrected. I'm unlikely to do this myself. However, there may be hope in the VASSAL form of the game, which I could see playing regularly, especially if I hooked up with one of the many groups that is running group simulations online. CitW has slightly weaker components, although also considerably less material requirements, with two small maps, two rules folios (one is just a heavy stock sheet), and relatively few counters. CitW required it's counters to be trimmed on the sides as well as the corners, but B-29 had professionally printed and cut counters. 

The other company I'm trying out is Victory Point Games, the brainchild of Alan Emerich, who has developed many games and was the primary force behind Totaler Krieg. Rather than just having a DTP company, he also uses the company to teach wargame design to students, who assemble the DTP components. There are four different lines I'm interested in, so I got four different games:

• Battlesson Series - Israeli Independence: This is a solitaire game that has, count 'em, ten markers. I may have overcounted. The game also comes with cards, which are the primary driving force in the game, the counters only show how the Israelis are doing on the various fronts with Syria, Jordan, Egypt, etc. I also got the expansion. This series is intended to be introductory (most of VPG's offerings are), but include extra materials to give greater insight into design choices and help out new gamers. 
• Ancient Battles Deluxe: This is the base set, which has two expansions for more elephants and cavalry. A revisioning of an older title, this new edition gets rid of the CRT in favor of a new system I haven't really looked into much yet. It's the biggest of the lot, with four sheets of counters (double-sided, no less!), two maps, and everything in an 8"x11" ziplock instead of the smaller half-sizes that everything else comes in. A quick punching of the markers used to record hits has shown that many of them are incompletely cut on the back side, making extraction a challenge and two have been destroyed in the process (not a big deal), and about 15 unpunchable and requiring cutting or some other method, which is not terrible but will be a trick as they are round. These counters require considerably more work to trim than the KPG offerings, as they are basically stickers with the counter art stuck onto thick card and diecut, and the sticker media is a bit harder to diecut, apparently. My only complaint so far. 
• Paul Koenig's D-Day - The British Beaches: One of a series of three packages that treats each beach in D-Day separately. There is a set of series rules that are four pages long, another page of optional rules, two pages with extensive examples of play, and another sheet that covers the individual beaches. My package came with Gold and Sword, there is another for the Canadian beach Juno, and another for the Utah and Omaha. I got the one I did thinking that my good friend Mike, an ex-pat Scot, might be more likely to give this a try with the Brits stuck in. No ZOCs in this game, as it's a very low level (company/battalion) and there's no way to produce a defensive line other than to leverage the terrain. Very promising, and this will be the first of all of these games that I try out, possibly today. Counters are similar to in Ancient Battles Deluxe, and the square counters did require some cutting to get out cleanly, as well as extensive trimming, although the round markers came out easily. I'll probably have to spray these in the future as the paper looks like it won't stand up to oily skin at all. Like the Napoleonic 20 series, this one only uses 40 units for the entire game, 20 per side. 
• Napoleonic 20 - Waterloo 20: I blogged on this game after playing in Eugene a couple of weeks ago, and the reason I was willing to try VPG games. 

Interestingly, I also have Drive on Metz, which came with the 20th issue of C3i a few months ago, and was intended to get people interested in VPG. Since DoM was a reprint of a Jim Dunnigan game that he included in a book on wargaming in the 80's, it wasn't something I've pulled out despite the professional production. 

While I'm glad I don't have to build my own counters, at the same time I do wish that their die-cutting process was a little more effective. VPG states in their documentation that components are sold as-is, which means that you want to be pretty careful with these compared with other games. However, the prices are rock bottom (around $15 per game if you buy from their website, and the shipping of all of these games was very fast - two to three days for each, compared with Avalanche who took nearly two weeks to ship a single unmounted map that was missing from an earlier order), and at least two of the games will definitely fit a niche for introducing more people to wargaming, or at least give us excellent shorter and smaller games for lunchtime or travel play. 

I plan to get B-29, D-Day, and Israeli Independence on the table this week, and will report on each as I get through them. After that, time to move on to Heraclea and continue with Project SPQR.

Project SPQR, Pt 1 - Bagradas Plains

A couple of years ago I blogged (with pictures!) on playing through one of the scenarios from GMT's Great Battles of History - SPQR game using the Simple GBoH ruleset. Bagradas Plains is one of the very few land battles from the first Punic War and wasn't much of a challenge for the Carthaginians, with the Romans going down twice in a row. 

This year, one of my gaming goals is to get through all 14 or so of the Deluxe SPQR scenarios using whatever ruleset I feel like at the time, which for now means the Simple rules (the "normal" rules, while in their third iteration and theoretically in good shape, are 32 pages and that game requires more markers than I'm going to know what to do with). I had intended to get through one or two before the start of the year, but a grandchild and the Death March that was trying to grok Fields of Fire became put the kibosh on that idea. Still, better late than never.

Simple GBoH is one of those strange beasts that works up to a point. In all three of my Bagradas Plains exercises, I tried to use the Romans as they were modeled to be. You run the Velites up to the front, throw a few javelins around, they run back. The Hastati charge up, and when they start looking ragged you pull them back and insert the Principes, which can take a lot of damage. Through all of this you are hoping that your Roman cavalry will hold out for at least long enough to keep the much better Carthaginian cavalry from worrying your flanks. 

The problem with Bagradas Plains is two fold. First, it's a tiny Roman army, and not deployed in double depth (stacking the legions together), so they have very exposed flanks. Second, the Carthaginians have a huge line of elephants deployed in the front, which creates more trouble. The Velites aren't faster than the elephants, so they can't just melt away when the elephants get close, although they can use reactive missile fire when the elephants engage to shock. Worse, if by some miracle the Velites could manage to start a turn exactly two spaces away from elephants so that they could use their Hit and Run tactics, there's a negative DRM against them if attacking said elephants. As such, the Velites are kind of useless against this kind of skirmish line. Making things worse, the elephants are only worth two rout points each in this game, whereas the Velites are worth five each, so trading units isn't going to cut it (although there are about twice as many elephants as Velites). 

As such, I decided that the Velites would have a much better time of it trying to hurt the elephants by letting them charge in and at least get the chance to cause rampages if they hit with a reactive missile attack. The results were about what you'd expect - the elephants are more or less expendable from the Carthaginian perspective, so the Romans end up beating up their Velites and Hastati just clearing them out, while the Carthaginians move up their cavalry to engage and wipe out the Romans cav. Fortunately for the Romans, the Carthaginians felt like pursuing the routing Roman cav, including their leaders, and as such that threat was at least taken away in large part. 

However, the elephants caused so much damage that the Romans couldn't withstand more than a few rounds of the Carthaginian main line crashing into them, with the phalanxes on the Roman right and the Celtic infantry to the right. Cohesion hits in Simple are a bitch - they never go away and they have an enormous effect on your ability to fight. It wasn't long before the Romans passed their 120 rout point limit and once again lost the day.

It's a good learning scenario in some respects (scope, for one, and limited missile troops), but in almost every other it's not a great way to learn to play a Roman legion. 

With the "learning scenario" down, it's on to Heraclea and the Tarentine Wars, where our man Pyrrhus got famous, he of the "Phrrhic Victory" where you win at such a high cost that you really end up losing. From this point on, we play the scenarios in historical order. Again, this is only the scenarios that come in the Deluxe third edition box, which means most of the scenarios from the original four expansions (both of the Tarentine War scenarios are from one of these), as well as a few that were originally published in other forms. 

Luck-Based Gaming

I'm sure I've written on this before, but it's always good to fill time while I'm waiting for a phone call. So here we go with an essay on the role of luck in games.

Luck in gaming takes many forms, but usually it boils down to one of three situations:

1. Take one of  a limited pool of options/resources, which is now not available for some period of time that may include the remainder of the game. Chit pools, cards, etc.
2. Take one of a limited number of results, which are always available. Usually in the form of rolling dice to achieve a specific result (e.g.; hit on every '6') or on some sort of results table (e.g; a combat results table).
3. A combination of the above, usually in the form of a random events table where once a specific event has been rolled you ignore it (or roll again). Much rarer in practice.

To my knowledge, luck is ubiquitous in gaming. Even games that don't seem to have any luck element at all (the 18xx series of games, chess, etc) actually have a strong luck element in the form of who goes first, which in these games tends to generate a person who drives the game forward early or a set pattern of moves, at least with experienced players. 

Luck is used to achieve several design goals depending upon the game. Most wargames use luck to select from a potential number of outcomes to an action. For example, the result of entering into combat is often achieved by rolling one or more dice and referring to a table of results based on the specific situation such as a ratio of the combat capabilities of the forces involved. Using an odds-based combat results table (CRT) as implemented in 60's-era Avalon Hill wargames, you refer to the column that matches the attacker:defender strength ratio (e.g.; 3-1), roll a d6, and get a result ranging from one side being destroyed to one side retreating to somewhere in between. 

A popular trend in wargaming has been the so-called "card-driven" wargame, or CDG, which uses cards to "drive" the game forward by making them the basis for not only activation of units, but also to reflect socio-political events of the period. Where the combat is usually resolved via dice, the flow of the game is dictated to some extent by the cards in play and how each player uses the hand they are dealt. Often, you must draw and play specific cards in order to receive additional combat units, or to allow specific actions on the board. This sort of luck element can be thought of as "front-end" luck, or luck that dictates player actions, whereas the CRT tends to produce "back-end" or "results-based" luck as an end product of the player's actions. 

Some games use cards to dictate front- and/or back-end luck, but when you get down to it, all luck is simply a matter of probability, so long as you consider the design intent. Fields of Fire is an excellent example of a game that uses cards to generate all probability, even though in almost every case the intent is that the success of a given action is based on all of the cards being present in the deck at the time of drawing. By this, I mean that even if you are halfway through the deck, the intent is not that you would remember that X cards have included the "Cover" keyword that have been discarded out of Y cards available in a full deck, although there are players who might be able to recall that sort of detail on cards that can have as many as 25 bits of information on them. The reason cards are used is not to fulfill a goal of having a closed pool of resources/results, but to easily generate random numbers in ranges that are difficult to generate with regular or semi-regular polyhedrons such as cubes and decahedrons (10-sided dice, which aren't Euclidean, but work just as well as their more regular brethren). If you need to generate a number between 1 and 7, you have to either roll a d8 and reroll the '8' result, or else find another way to generate it such as a card pull. Interestingly, given that the Action Deck in FoF doesn't have a number of cards that divides evenly into 7, you will get an uneven distribution of probability using this method, and in fact will run into this situation for almost any number of cards other than 60 in the deck (which will support even distribution of the ranges of 1 to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10, but not 7, 8, or 9). 

On the other hand, you have a game like Combat Commander, which also uses cards to generate actions (although, in a strict sense, this is not a CDG as defined by games such as We the People and Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage). In this case, however, the cards are convenient not because of non-Euclidean probabilities, but because they are used as "money" and collected and spent over time. FoF, on the other hand, generates a probability that exists at a specific instant in time with no resource management element. At the same time, the cards are also used to generate "instant" probability, in this case not only a 2d6 result, but also die "triggers" that can take effect if generating this specific bell curve, and also random hexes on a map. By using a 72-card deck, all of the 36 different possible 2d6 dice results are represented equally, although it's pretty easy to keep track of how many 12 results show up if you're paying close attention. 

Let's examine the use of the varying methods of resolving combat, which generally boil down to one of three methods:

1. CRTs based on odds, strength, or differentials,
2. Rolls "to hit" based on a target number, occasionally resulting in "buckets o' dice",
3. Differential combat using rolls to augment combat strengths, which are then compared.

CRTs have been around forever, but they are continually used in interesting ways. For example, Advanced Squad Leader, which resolves combat based on one unit firing on another (common in tactical level combat), uses the actual combat strength to determine the column in use. Waterloo 20 uses a differential (-1, 0, +1, +2) between fighting units to determine column. In all cases, it's fairly easy for players to understand which column a given combat will take place on (barring the use of action or combat cards that will create SNAFUs for one or both sides) and judge their actions accordingly. Also, this tends to generate a relatively small set of results. In Paths of Glory, where both sides roll dice based on their combat strength, then compare those numbers, it requires more work to figure out what percentage of the time you are likely to get a larger result than your opponent, but it's manageable. With a game like Successors, where the Battle Rating of your general will determine the lowest possible individual die results when rolling a 2d6 result (a '4' rating would change a roll of 1,6 to 4,6, for example), things get a little more complex. The important element remains that the bounds on the results are fairly set. 

With the "to hit" method, you roll dice based on your combat factor, usually one die per point, and achieve successes based on how many dice meet the necessary criteria. War at Sea is a seminal game that used this method - If you fired on an enemy ship and your ship had four attack factors, you'd roll four dice and every '6' result (taking into account die roll modifiers, or DRMs) resulted in a point of damage for the target. Great War at Sea takes that model and adds in various other elements such as what part of a ship was hit, the size of gun firing compared to the armor of the target that was hit, etc. Other games, such as Wellington and Kutuzov, use both the hits to determine how much damage happens to the target, but also who wins the battle by comparing total hit/disruption results. 

The "to-hit" method has it's advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, it's easy to compute the number of successes you should have given the number of dice that you're rolling and the range that results in success. In War at Sea, for example, assuming no modifiers such as the Germans getting a +1 drm and a 6 being a success, you should see one success on average for every six dice you roll, thus a ship with a firepower factor of three should score one hit every two times it fires, or a 50% of scoring at least one hit (more or less - I understand that the math gets a little more involved). Also, because you are rolling a lot more dice, you should see a much more normal bell curve over time. 

The disadvantage, of course, is that you can get results that fall far outside of the standard deviation, both in and out of your favor. Rolling eighteen d6 for a 5-6 result gives an average result of six successes, but you may get as many as 18 or as few as 0. Where the CRT gives you a limited range of results but potentially skewed results with fewer rolls, the to-hit method gives you a more statistically balanced result over the course of the game, but with the chance (admittedly small, but present) of a wider range of results. 

Differential combat, such as is used in Unhappy King Charles and Combat Commander, has it's own danger. In a game such as We the People or Hannibal, where combat is relatively rare (these are games of maneuver, bluff, and combat is resolved through the use of battle cards, an entirely different method), the opportunity to see games go south through consistently bad die rolls is more likely. I played a game of Storm Over Stalingrad, which uses this method, and my dice were either in the 10-12 range or the 2-5 range throughout the game. In fact, I won largely on getting a lucky roll or 12 at exactly the right time to kick the Russians out of the final victory area I needed to take on the last turn. The problem wasn't that you could end up with a 12 result that would accomplish your goals, it was that you rolled 2d6 roughly 25 times in a game. Unhappy King Charles has gotten the same complaint - not *enough* luck in a game where you can be devastated with an unlucky roll at a key moment. 

Of course, any game that involves luck also contains that caveat - some rolls/draws are more important than others. In a game like Paths of Glory, the common wisdom is that you prepare for the worst and hope for the best, and some games allow you to do that to a great extent. Still, I've lost games of Paths when my opponent went for that 1-36 chance at the end of a turn, and if it worked then I'd have half of my army out of supply and thus lose them permanently, effectively ending the game. While it's arguable that players should be aware of those possibilities and guard against them, it's also true that in many cases there is no way you can effectively do that (I'm thinking about the Near East map in particular, where the Turks can barely guard all of their fronts at once, and the MEF is more effective as a threat than as an actual played event). 

There is, to the best of my knowledge, no real way to mitigate luck at that particular level. You will always have critical points where an outlier result will determine a winner, and wargames are complex enough that it's nearly impossible to design the game so that those events don't occur. If you can't handle that sort of result, it's best for you to not play that particular game if who wins is important to you. While I understand that it's frustrating to play a long game that is well played by both sides throughout, only to result in a series of chance events that hands the game to one side or the other, at the same time wargames are about history and story and understanding the situation. If you are playing solely for competitive purposes, you will often find yourself frustrated with the results. 

On the other hand, some of us seem to consistently run afoul of chance elements in games, as Mike did in his game of Storm Over Stalingrad (not the same game as I played), where he rolled an average of 4 on 2d6 over several attacks at the start of the game, while his opponent rolled an average of 10. This sort of thing seems to happen to Mike on an astonishingly regular basis, to a point where you have to wonder if he didn't do something really bad in a past life. Multiple games of Glory III were ruined for him through consistent bad die rolling. 

Of course, the components you use for chance elements need to be of a certain quality. I've gotten dice in games that clearly favored specific rolls (the German die in WW2: Barbarossa to Berlin, for example, rolled one number higher than a 3 an average of once in ten rolls over a couple of games, indicating that it was off-balance), but you can always buy balanced dice or make sure that your card decks are thoroughly shuffled (or use a electronic die roller, such as the excellent Dicenomicon app for the iPhone, which will generate any range or result set you wish). 

I've been talking about wargames, where the point is to simulate a potential range of results based on the historical record as well as weapon system capabilities. There are many games that introduce a luck element solely to balance the playing field between experienced gamers and those with less experience or cognitive skills (such as children). These games tend to have different design goals, such as to teach basic skills such as numbers, colors, set collecting, etc, or to be experiential in nature, where it's the ride that's important more than who gets to the finish line first. Others try to evoke a particular theme or mood, and so the luck element tends to be more capricious and (if done correctly) entertaining. However, since my focus is on luck as a design element intended to encourage specific play styles or to generate a set of results, I'll ignore these for this essay.

Finally, I'll mention the appropriateness of luck in game design. On occasion, a designer will insert a luck element into a game for no other reason than what seems to me to be laziness. Two games that I'm less interested in playing because of poor design are Agricola and Age of Empires III. Agricola is a tight design with a lot of thought and preparation required of the players, but that inexplicably added in a major random element in the Minor Improvement cards. Because the luck in this case can't be mitigated (you get random cards dealt to you, and it's what you get to work with), and because it's player specific (you can get great cards while your opponent gets a handful of crap), the net result is that the game can buff or nerf players right out of the gate. Fortunately, there is a drafting variant for this cardset that fixes the problem. 

Age of Empires, on the other hand, uses a heavy luck element for it's Discovery mechanism. Not only do you take a chance if you don't go strong with your units if you try to discover new areas, but you may have gone strong to get a nearly useless result. At the end of the game, there often isn't much you can do other than take a chance on whether or not you find a Discovery card that pays off well (there are two in that particular deck), so an identical investment in resources can benefit one player much more than another. The designer isn't exactly known for his tight efforts, so this isn't a big surprise, but in a game that was otherwise very well thought out, this was lazy design. I spent some time trying to come up with a more equitable way to implement discovering new territory, but was unable to do so within the design itself. A better solution would have been to have discoveries made on a timetable, and then allow the various players to take advantage or not, rather than to force them to devote resources to the crapshoot in order to move the game along.

I'm sure there are other aspects to luck in gaming that I haven't touched on, but I'm also fairly sure that I've lost most of my readers who started out this post with me, so it's time to stop typing. May your dice never fail you in the breach, and may all of your event cards be timely.

Whole Lotta Gaming

Mike and I (along with KC, who was meeting Rita at the event) drove down to Lorna's big gaming event in Eugene, OR, on Friday morning. I'm fortunate to have my sister living down there, and she's happy to let us stay at her place, which is about five minutes away from the venue, and there was room for both Mike and myself. 

Lorna puts on a great party - lots of giveaways, contests, breakfast food, and a good group of people that seem to come from as far away as Walla Walla, WA. If you've never heard of it, they have awesome onions there. 

I won't do an exhaustive list of games I played, as a) it wasn't that exhaustive, and b) I'm not at all sure I could remember all of them. There were some shining (and not quite as shiny) moments throughout the weekend, and here they are:

Android - My first playthrough of this monster "experience" game, with five people at my house last month, was a bit of a mess. I had not yet fully learned the game, and so spent most of my time looking up rules, and after five hours we'd gotten through half of the game. This time out, we had three people (at my insistence, although to be fair only three people showed up to play), and I had a session under my belt. The result: 45 minutes of 'splainin' the high-concept sections of the game, followed by a three hour complete game session where we actually finished. Really. I'm pretty sure that every player adds about an hour to game time, and while people need to be fairly aware of what the other players are doing because of the chance to play Dark Twilight cards, for the most part it's all downtime. Three is, I suspect, the sweet spot. 

I did forget a couple of rules, but to be honest, this game is so involved and has so many subsystems that it's not a huge surprise. Both Lorna and Kevin felt that they had gotten about as much information as they could during my explanation, and that it really required playing the game in order to get to a point where it would be a more immersive experience. Me, I was so busy checking the details that I again didn't get as into my character (I was Floyd) as much as I would have liked to. 

And that is really the rub in this game. To appreciate it, you need to really get immersed in the backstory, which is extremely rich, as rich as any game that isn't backed by a franchise (Bstar G) or literature (Lovecraft) can be. There is a ton of flavor text, but most of the time you just skip reading it because you want to move on to other things. However, reading it ahead of time would make the characters really come to life, but when you're learning that's just a bit more than I think people are willing to do. I like this game a lot, and think it's a very deep game with lots of options, but you need people to play who are into it to make it really successful.

That said, the game moved along quickly, and while I struggled to get my Twilight card shifting done correctly, and felt like the plots were kind of ignored (especially handing people bad baggage), it was four hours that moved along very quickly. Considering that the four-player game of Le Havre I played the day before (and that will be the *last* four-player game of Le Havre I play - see below) took just as long and was painful rather than fun, I think this is one I'll try to get out at weekend and retreat sessions. Only with three, though.

Le Havre - While I suspect the jury will be out on this game for a little while because of all the options that people can take, I really like it. Except with more than three. I played two games, one a three player with KC and Rita, and a four player with Greg, Murray, and Aaron. The three player game I felt as though there was tension as to whether or not I could use the buildings I wanted to use, and I felt like I was on top of things the entire game. In the four player game, I did one dumb thing (didn't convert a clay to brick, not realizing that you can use brick as clay, and ending up wasting a cycle as a result to generate more brick), and got completely screwed up. One thing about this game, if you forget that you need to have a particular resource (such as, oh, money/food to pay for using a building, or to pay interest), you can get into some serious trouble. Forgetting that I could have sold a building to generate money, which I absolutely would have done had I remembered the rule, didn't help. As such, Aaron was exactly where I *had* to be for the last seven or eight turns, making it a particularly frustrating game for me. Greg finished behind me, mostly because he never did build a ship to mitigate his food situation, but otherwise it was perhaps one of the least satisfying gaming experiences I've had. At the same time, the three player game was great, and I did quite well. Perhaps with four or five you must be considering two or three (or more) different paths you can take if you don't get what you need, but to be honest I really think the problem is that you have two (and occasionally only one) cycle in a turn to generate food, and the result is that you spend a lot of time in the late game doing just that unless you've been able to get your shipping going. 

Red November - A coop game in a tiny box and a lot of controversy on the 'Geek as to the rules. Here's the thing - we had to look up exactly one rule. We didn't play everything correctly the first time, but I had it all figured out by the time we finished. It's just not that difficult a game to get *if* you do a run through and do a little study ahead of time. I could teach this in 10 minutes now, and play a four-player game in less than two hours easily. We ended up dying right at the 10 minute mark because so many timed destruction events popped up at once. We were using the Less Lethal Dying rule, which was good because my only slightly inebriated gnome managed to faint in the missile room, putting me out of the action for about 15 minutes while everyone else ran around like crazy. One note - if you have time to take care of a problem, take care of the problem right then. Don't think, "Oh, we have *lots* of time!", because you don't. Not really. Where Ghost Stories is simply brutal and unrelenting, this game is hilarious and unrelenting. Read the rules *very* carefully (note that using time to move is not the same as using time to perform actions), and you'll have no problem at all. Recommended.

Lightning: D-Day - I'd planned to sell or give away this game at some point after George and I tried it a few years ago and found the rules lacking. Lacking actual rules, as it turned out. In truth, the game is pretty fun once you get the FAQ and find out how things work. I wanted to give it one more go after reading a few reviews online saying that the FAQ cleared many things up, and so I ran a quick solo runthrough of a couple of turns, and Mike and I played later on. While I won handily (I'd been pushed off of a couple of beaches, but three reinforcement cards late in the game saved my bacon), I think this is a very good lunchbreak game, and I'll be getting the Midway and North Africa games as well now that I understand the parts I was missing. Good light 30 minutes of war-themed fun.

Roll Through The Ages - This is one of the new Gryphon Games titles, produced by Funagain and distributed through FRED. It's a civ-building game, but using dice, a heavy wooden board to track your resources with pegs, and a huge pad of scoresheets. The game weighs more than Around the World In 80 Days, and takes up one eighth the space! You roll the dice, choose to reroll a couple of times if you wish, and then feed your cities, build monuments and more cities with workers, and get more resources to build developments that give you special mutant powers. The wooden dice are a bit of a problem (I can see them wearing over time, although you could put stickers onto any dice and fix them), and God help you if you play against someone who can't immediately see what combinations they want/need, but I could see this being a fun game to travel with, so long as you have room for the wooden resource trackers. I've seen Cribbage boards with less mass than one of the four that comes in this game! Otherwise, a cute little multiplayer solitaire effort with a place in my admittedly oversized collection.

Waterloo 20 - Alan Emerich is a name well known to gamers as both a developer and a teacher (his Rome On 640k A Day hint book for the original Sid Meyer Civ PC game set the standard more than a decade ago), and he has a DTP company that puts out small wargames called Victory Point Games. Make no mistake, these are truly DTP games, and if you expect polished GMT-style components, you'll be disappointed. However, this Joseph Miranda title (the 20 refers to a game series where there are 20 counters in the game, which I suspect means "per side" unless you aren't counting things like dummy or breakdown counters) was very engaging and a lot of fun. At $20 a pop, which was enough to buy three AH wargames back when I got interested in them in the mid-seventies, I was impressed enough to decide to pick a few up myself. One note - morale plays a huge role in the game, and spending the morale points early to boost your combat chances should be done sparingly. As it was, both Andy and I were pushing the bottom of the barrel on the second day of the battle, and I ended up rolling a couple of exchange results that sent me through the floor. This game is easily playable within 60 minutes once you know the system (Jena 20 is the other I'm aware of), and there is a lot of game considering the ultra-low counter density. 

There were other great games (TtR Card Game, Manoeuvre, Aquaretto, Pompeii, and I'm sure at least a few more I've forgotten), but those were the highlights. While I didn't get lucky with any of the raffles (I was surrounded by people at my gaming table with swag on multiple occasions), I did manage to snag a complete and unworn (other than the box) copy of France 1940, the old AH shot at the campaign. I'd had a copy in high school, but sold it when I got out of college. It was nice to put my copy of Quest for the Dragon Lords (unplayable, from what I could see, or at least so luck-driven as to be unplayable in RCG circles) and get this back in return.

Thanks to Lorna, Bryon, Funagain Games (who put up a bunch of prizes), and everyone else who helped put this weekend together. As someone who hosts nanocons at Sunriver twice a year, I know how much work it is just to get *that* far, much less rent a venue or run giveaways. Very impressive work!