B-29 Superfortress Review

Here's Part 4 of my "try new companies" out resolution. This time, we're looking at Khyber Pass Games' only "boxed" professionally produced title, B-29 Superfortress. The game is a direct descendent of the old-school Avalon Hill solitiare game, B-17: Queen of the Skies. B-17 is an interesting simulation, but with very few decision points to be made. The meat of the game is to get as realistic an experience as possible with a board game over many missions bombing Japan (and occasionally Iwo Jima in the early missions). Like it's predecessor, the "fun" is in seeing what happens over the course of the campaign, not only to your aircraft but to your crew, whom you are encouraged to name. As the campaign goes on, your crew improves in their skills on various die rolls, and my experience is that once you have a good feel for the system that you can fly about one mission an hour barring frequent and constant annoyances like flak bursting around you or enemy fighters attacking you, which can add some time to the game. 

The B-29 was a much different plane than the B-17, almost from a different era. It had to be in order to reach the Japanese home islands from their base in the Marianas Islands, specifically Tinian. As such, instead of five or six cardstock sheets of tables to roll on for various game functions, there is an entire booklet, and believe me it's full. Full of tables, full of notes, and full of errata. Because the game can pretty much be played solely from the rules and tables (there are various play surfaces, but to be honest you could keep track of everything on paper just as easily as sorting the counters), KPG doesn't make the rules or tables available online as "living" rules, such as GMT does, and so you have to either mark up your rules and charts or constantly refer to them. I find this mildly annoying, and wish that KPG would make an updated rules/charts PDF file available to people who have purchased the game with proof of purchase. I chose to mark up my booklets to some extent, which doesn't bother me, but I know some for whom this would be a deal breaker, especially considering that the game is fairly expensive. 

The components are pretty nice, fairly lightweight counters ranging from 9/16ths through better than an inch (for the fighter tokens, of which there are a ton - this could have been cut by 2/3rds if they'd added some Ace/Avg/Grn tokens to place on the fighters, of which you usually get one or two in a given combat). The diecutting process also was done so that there is a bit of flash along the sides of the counters, which wasn't bad enough for me to feel like I needed to trim. The map is horrendously oversized for what is needed in this game about four times too big. If space is an issue, you'll wish they'd kept the scale down, although my suspicion is that they wanted to make it "bigger" than the B-17 sheets. Unlike B-17, there is no map of the region you fly through, mostly because at the B-17 scale you'd have bands and bands of open ocean followed by a very small area of the concentrated Japanese Islands. So we get a color coded track instead. To be fair, that doesn't bother me too much.

There are also a few sheets included that you can copy for the mission log, the campaign log, and another sheet that is used to mark damage to urban areas over time. All of these are on heavy card, which is silly because you'll never use them but instead copy them (or download the pages from KPG's website). Better to have included these in the rulebooks, or given you a few lightweight copies to use until you get your printer fired up. 

I'll also note that this is a $50 game that comes without dice, and you'll need two d6's. I understand that small publishers have to deal with a lot of issues when putting out pro-level packages, and that $1 spent on components can end up costing the consumer $5 or even $10 by the time they go through distribution and shipping, but in this case the game was purchased directly from the publisher and I just don't see why some of these issues couldn't have been seen ahead of time, especially if they've been exposed to other wargame publisher choices. 

Enough whining about the components and four pages of errata (blessedly, in fairly large type). How does the game play?

First of all, the B-29 was a bigger plane with a lot of forward-looking systems such as fire control computers, pressurized crew areas, an eleven man crew, and some very heavy artillery to protect itself. It was also just barely able to do the job - if everything goes right, and you're taking off from the Marianas, you'll have enough extra fuel for five or six extra turns on the way back, or three if you run into trouble on the way out. If you aren't carrying extra fuel tanks, it will be very tight indeed. There's also a Random Event table that I foolishly thought you rolled on every turn - they say the plane was buggy, but on my first mission I had two engines go out and the bomb release mechanism go south before I even formed up with the other bombers. Fortunately, I later figured out that you roll 2d6 to see if you roll a '12' *before* rolling on the table, so actually no damage had occurred at all. 

One of the interesting parts of the game is that you form up with the other bombers three zones into your mission (as soon as you can get to high altitude), and how well that goes can have a big effect on how everything else goes, especially if you are trying to fight off those enemy planes. Of course, night missions don't include any forming up, as they just flew in a big stream (and there are considerably more rules if you are doing something at night, such as searchlights, modified fighter combat). For most turns, you'd check the weather (which sometimes can slow you down on the way in because of the jet stream - something no one knew about until they tried flying at high altitude to bomb Japan), which (like most things in the game) has the potential to go horribly horribly wrong, and see if you get the dreaded Random Event, so those turns generally go quickly. For the first few missions, you'll also need to check to see if any of the Japanese planes at Iwo are going to come after you, at least until the Americans take the island. Once that happens, you can even start from Iwo, which really takes the fuel pressure off. 

One thing that you *do* do is have to make sure you're on course to the form up point. That's a good thing, because it shows just what a bunch of hocus pocus flight over the vast Pacific was. If you are "lucky" enough to be the lead plane in the middle layer of the formation, or it's a night mission, you get to check in every zone. The navigation is interesting enough, but it involves five different dice rolls just to get the modifier to roll to see if you're on course or not. Out of the two missions I've flown, I got off course a bit once before I met up with my homies at the form up point, but I was also assigned to be the lead plane. Since it was my first game, I changed that so that I was no longer in the lead as I wanted to get a feel for the system, not crap out my rolling wrist. You literally roll for piloting, dead reckoning, radio navigation, celestial navigation (by the stars), and by observation. There's a nice track to keep everything straight, but man oh man will that make this game less interesting for me. At least the first ten missions are automatically Day missions (right up until we take Iwo). 

There is little chance of air combat until you get near Iwo and again once you get near and then over the Japanese Islands. Like B-17, there is a "gazetteer" that gives you a modifier for potential air contact, whether you're over water or land (and what land mass), and whether the area has heavy AA or not. These turns are much like the over-water turns, except you also check for fighter interception, which is far from a sure thing, and of course the bombing run once you get over target. Fortunately, no flak attacks until you're over target for some reason, although they do get two shots at you as you start the run and as you're leaving the scene. 

Both combat and bombing also contain several tables for a variety of elements. Interestingly, your only real decision points are whether or not to attempt to be evasive (and early on you don't get that choice if you're in formation or it's daytime), who can fire guns (and they all have a ton of ammo unless something's gone horribly horribly wrong). Everything else in this game pretty much happens to you, other than deciding whether to abort, dive to low altitude (and out of formation) if your cabin pressure drops (frostbite - it's not pretty), and whether to turn off the cabin pressure if you think something is going to attack you. 

My first mission went very smoothly, a little too smoothly. No fighter interceptions (a bit disappointing as I wanted to see how combat worked), no flak hits over target, back to base with no excitement whatsoever. I also completely missed my target, which in this case was considered a "draw". My second mission (and the last one I've completed) also went smoothly right up until I flew near Iwo on the way out and ran into a Zero that actually dropped bombs into the formation and nipped my rudder! A George flew by without causing any damage as I approached the Islands, but the scary part was getting five flak hits on my plane. Anyone who has played B-17 knows that all it takes is one bad roll during damage and things go horribly horribly wrong. I got very lucky - the only real damage caused was to knock out my alarm bell, which would only be a problem if something worse happened.

The bomb run itself went well - I hit the target (which is not easy to do early in the game with inexperienced crew, and nearly impossible if something has broken) and managed to do damage with 30% of my bombs (only used if you want to get an average over the campaign or if playing multi-aircraft missions, as is often done online). As long as you are on target and get home safely, you're good to go. On the outgoing leg, I got attacked by two more George's, one of which I shot down before it got close enough to do damage, and the other failed to cause damage to my aircraft. Going back over Iwo it was nighttime, so no danger there. My nighttime landing went smoothly, and the mission was a success! Even better, my crew were all uninjured and had two missions under their belts. Seven or fewer missions generally means they're green, 14 or more means they're veterans. You need thirty five missions (not counting ones where you abort early) in order to be sent home, for those of you playing the Catch-22 variant of the game (joke - there is no such variant). 

There is, however, a Korean War variant coming out sometime this year. That may or may not be interesting to me. You see, this is the sort of game that I find interesting right up until I lose my entire crew and aircraft in a single mission. While there are painfully few decision points, the entire point of the game is to get a (much safer) simulation of flying these kinds of combat missions. When my mother married a retired Army Air Corps bombadier who flew missions over the Aleutians in a B-17 in WW2 (and was later "volunteered" to go back into the infantry to invade Okinawa), that game became marginally more interesting to me because I was thinking of the men in these aircraft. Getting the chance to go onboard a functioning B-17 with Colin was also very interesting, although I didn't want to pony up the $400 it would have cost to actually go up in the air in the thing. I'm not stupid. However, slogging through 20 missions only to lose all of your carefully and slowly gained experience and skill because you rolled boxcars at the wrong time is an exercise in frustration for me.

My point is that this is the sort of game you play not to see how successful you are, as you have very little say in your success, but rather to relive a bit of history in some small way. Most solitaire wargames fall into this category, but the bomber command games especially so as they were trained to do very specific things in very specific situations and to give more leeway than that would not be true to the conflict. Me, I start to feel connected to my virtual crew and get upset when someone dies. I have the same problem with Ambush!, with B-17, with Patton's Best, any of the games with a small roleplaying element. 

The cool thing about this game (and about B-17) is the presence of online players who form virtual wings, then fly the same mission "together" (usually within some period of time, such as a week), and use their combined data to give a broader sense of the men and aircraft that fought this part of the war. Now that I've gotten through a couple of missions, I may look to join one of these groups if the play frequency isn't too harsh (once a week would be just right, especially as it's only one hour or so for me to fly a mission), and that may be even more rewarding. 

Colin didn't like talking about combat itself, as is true of many of the vets from WW2. He did, however, enjoy talking about the camaraderie of the flight crew, about how they bombed a whale (they thought it was a sub right up until they hit it), about the dog he had in the Philippines, that sort of thing. Hearing him talk about what it was like to be in the air in a B-17 is a memory I sorely wish I'd recorded - Colin died in early 2009 from complications from Alzheimer's disease, and by the time I thought to formally interview him it was too late. 

Colin, I know you didn't fly any combat missions in a B-29, but you are my starting pilot for what missions I do get through. I also know that while you hated the fighting part of the war, you loved being in the Army at that time, and had many wonderful memories of people and places. I hope that wherever you are, that you get to relive those fond memories, and that you know that I and many others honor you and your fellow servicemen and women's sacrifice and effort in what increasingly seems to have been the last "good" war. 

If reliving history appeals to you, and you don't mind the game playing you more than you playing the game, this one is worth a try, especially with B-17 long out of print. The errata is annoying, and there are a few things that simply aren't discussed (such as the sequence of play - it's more or less the order of rules as presented), but it's an easy game to learn and there is a *ton* of designer and historical information contained within the rules and charts booklets. As such, this is a game for the historian more than the gamer, but well worth the time to get to know if you don't mind a ride. 

Paul Koenig's D-Day: The British Beaches: Sword

For part three of our tour of a handful of Victory Point Games titles (the first was actually my play of Waterloo 20 from EGG, the second was Israeli Independence), we turn to the Historical series and it's sub-series, Paul Koenig's D-Day. There are three packages in the series with five total "games", each sharing the same general ruleset with a very small number of special rules, different maps and units for each invasion beach, and grouped according to the nationality doing the invading (it was all pretty much the same nationality doing the defending). 

Like the Napoleonic 20 series, PKDD maintains a design limit of 40 counters total for the entire game, including some markers (although there are other markers used for replacements, damage, and a few other things that don't count, apparently because they are round instead of square). For this game (meaning the Sword Beach map and counters) there are 12 British units, one game turn marker, seven activation chits, 12 German units, five artillery markers, and three Allied support markers making up the 40 counters. 

Units are very simple, with NATO symbology (armor, infantry, paratroop, glider, and heavy weapons, of which only the last has a game function), containing a single combat value and movement points, which range from 6 to 12 depending on type. The back of each unit shows it's starting location or turn of entry. Units are grouped by their higher echelon, shown as color coding in their symbol. I personally am not color-challenged, but do think that it would be easy for publishers to take this into account when devising their human factors. It is possible that the units do have some other way to distinguish the parent organization than background color that I simply missed because the color was able to do the job for me, but if they didn't they should have. 

The maps are small, on the order of a sheet of paper, but are very functional and with oversized hexes, for a map that's roughly 10 hexes wide by 14 hexes deep. It's not a huge play area, but it's effective given the small number of units. The landing beaches are in the NW corner of the map, with the major city that you are to capture nearby, with the Pegasus Bridge causeway to the south. The map also contains all of the tables you'll need, none of which affect combat per se. There are several terrain types - city, town, clear, beach, bocage, swamp, and road, with river hexsides. Terrain affects both combat and movement in most cases. 

The round damage markers are a clever idea, although there is still that color-challenged element. When a unit takes damage, it places one of the larger round damage markers on it's one-hit side under the unit, so that you can clearly see the light yellow color as a halo effect. If the unit takes a second hit, you flip the damage marker to it's orange two-hit side. The third hit removes the unit and the marker. It's very effective, although again not so much if you can't distinguish the colors, and in poor lighting that could be a problem even if you see color just fine. Again, I did not have a problem easily seeing a difference. 

The game is made up of a series of turns, eleven in all, two of which are night turns that allow both sides to recoup their losses and for the Germans to redeploy to a certain extent. The sequence of play is activation based, which makes for good extra tension as you never know who will go first, although in some cases (as with all such games) it can determine the winner in a close match. 

Day turns (three to a single day before you get to the night turn) consists of three phases, the first of which is only important for the first three turns, at least in Sword. First, you land at the beaches according to the beach-specific schedule. For Sword, there are three landing points, and for each landing point you have three British units, one showing up each turn during the day. For each unit landing that turn, you roll on the Landing table for that turn number, which represents the pillboxes and other beach defenses the invaders have to wade through. The first turn is the roughest, as you'll average one hit per unit, although it gets better as the day goes on and the defenses are eliminated on a schedule. On the first turn, you also roll not only for the landing 1st Airborne units, but also for any German units they land next to. Since these spaces are pre-determined (there's no randomization for where they land), that means five extra rolls on this table. Of course, after all of the units have landed at the end of the first day, you don't need to continue with this phase starting with the night turn 4. 

The second segment of the day turns is to determine support. First up is to see who has arty support, done by rolling one die per player and giving the difference between the dice to the higher rolling player, so a German 3 and a British 5 would give 2 arty markers to the Brits. Next, the Allied player rolls for air/naval support, which is simply 1-3 markers based on a table with even chances of each result. There is also an optional rule that you can use to try to gain a Leadership chit that gives you a one-time bennie, but I found myself unable to remember to use the arty/support as it was and left this optional rule out for my first game. 

Now for the meat of the game, the activation phase. All of the activation chits are placed in a cup and drawn one at a time, with the player owning those units activating them once their chit is pulled. You have four choices for activating units (five with the replacements optional rule, which I didn't use but would recommend): you can fire at full value, you can move, you can mobile assault with half your movement and firepower, or you can pass. If you fire at full value, you can't move the unit, although the Germans have the option of retreating before the Brits fire, in which case the firing unit may then convert to mobile assault. Heavy Weapons units may fire at range (two hexes) for half their attack value. If you mobile assault, you can move and then fire, or vice versa, but can't move/fire/move. When you fire in this mode, you only get half of your attack value, but since fractions round up in this game, it's not as bad for many units as you might think. You may also move into a unit's space to assault them at additional cost during both move and mobile assault activations, and for mech units with large movement factors there's an optional rule that will allow you to continue movement if you're successful. You can also simply pass with the unit. It is worth noting that you *can* group units to fight together, but only if they have exactly the same type of activation, so you can't move a unit up to help with a Fire activation, as the moving unit would be performing a Mobile Assault activation. Indirect fire is a Fire activation, so you *can* include it if you want.

I should also mention at this point that the game has no Zones of Control (ZOCs). That's right, none. This isn't surprising, as few tactical games do (mostly because opportunity or reaction fire fulfills the same effect). However, the reaction part is not present in the game. This means that often you'll need to consider movement carefully, as you don't know most of the time what formation will be activated next. I consider it to be a plus in this game, but you may be fussier than me. Right!

Combat is fairly straightforward, but requires careful thought. This is a game that clearly demonstrates that you can have a robust and interesting combat system without a lot of rules but that will still force you to consider the entire turn. First, you compute the attack value, taking defensive terrain and the mode the attacker is in into account. For example, a 4 AV unit Firing into a town space would  have an attack value of 3, and the same unit assigned a Mobile Assault activation would attack at 1 (4 halved minus 1). Two hits on a unit will also reduce it's combat value by 1 as well.

Next, the attacker decides whether or not to assign support, with limits of one arty and two Allied support tokens per attack. The defender can respond with the same numbers. Each support token assigned raises or lowers the attack value accordingly. In our Fire example, adding one arty to the attack and two support to the defense would result in the attack value lowering to 2. 

Finally, the attacker rolls 1d6. If the number is below the attack value, the defender takes a hit, and may choose to retreat one space if they wish with no additional effect. If the number is above the attack value, there is no effect. If the number hits the attack value dead on, *both* units take a hit. That means that if you are attacking with a unit that can't do better than a 1 attack value and that has two hits, it will only inflict a hit if it dies in the process. There is no advance after combat. There is an optional rule that I recommend that prevents damage to a unit inflicting indirect fire on a target unless the target is capable of indirect fire back. 

Assaulting a unit in it's hex is slightly different - in this case, terrain plays no part, but the defender may fire at the attacker using the exact same process above. If they inflict a hit, even via an exchange, the attacker retreats back to the hex they entered the assault hex from and the assault is over. Otherwise, the attacker may then attack using the same process, this time with the defender forced to retreat if they take a hit. The example of play included with the game mentions that if both units take a hit in an assault that both must retreat, but the rules don't state that in any form, and I always take the rules over the examples. If neither unit is able to inflict a hit, then both units have the option to retreat (although you'd expect the defender to be the one to do so as there's no incremental damage inflicted in the process, and the attacker came into the hex so you'd imagine they'd be there for the duration). 

On night turns, both sides roll for replacement points, with 1-5 giving that many points, but 6 resulting in no RPs at all, which can be devastating for the Allies for reasons to be seen later. Each point removes one level of damage, so a unit with two hits can be returned to undamaged by spending two points. Then the Germans can then redeploy up to half of their MP for units that weren't replaced. 

Victory is determined after the 11th turn (9th day turn, or three full days) by a point schedule that is largely determined by which beach you are playing on. In Sword, you get 2 points for controlling hexes bordered in red (the city and the three Pegasus Bridge complex hexes, which count as one hex for VP), one point for each town. The Germans get points for killing Allied units (one per unit), so it's important that the Allies manage their losses, and a good reason to use the replacements activation optional rule (not to be confused with the night replacement, which isn't optional). The Allies get points for exiting undamaged units off of one of the three marked roads on the map as well, but this is a pretty bloody game and it's difficult to get undamaged units *onto* the board for the Allies. High score wins. 

In my game, things went really well for the Allies for the first couple of turns. They wiped out the Germans on the beach, although they also lost their Airborne unit at the bridges early when the 21st Panzer units assaulted them successfully after the drop had gone poorly. By the end of the first day, they had control of the NW corner of the map and were pressing into the 2VP city. They'd also managed to take the bridges. However, they rolled a 6 during their replacement phase the first night, so no replacements, while the Germans rolled a 5 and were largely able to get back to fighting trim. 

Fighting continued around the three towns on the east side of the board, with the Germans holding one, losing one, and fighting for the other with one of the PG units from 21st Panzer making life difficult along the eastern beach town. In the end, I discovered why it's important to hold onto the spaces you control rather than just giving them up when two units headed for the German controlled town to the east from the bridges, only to have a German unit zip into the area and deny those points to the Allies at the end. The final score was 8 to 5 for the Germans, but it would have been very close had the Allies not given up the 2 points for the bridges to take one point from the Germans for the town. The Allies had lost seven units by the end of the game, which was where most of the German points came from, and no Allied units had been exited for VP heading to Caen. 

Play time for the title is about an hour, maybe a bit longer while you're getting used to the system. Each activation chit only activates three or four units, so play is brisk and combat is quick if agonizing to decide where you want to use your support. I'm looking forward to punching and playing the Gold Beach map and units soon, which don't have the airborne units or the exit rules - it's all about taking VP spaces in that game. I'll also be picking up the other two packages in the series, and I think a "campaign" game played across all five beaches at once would be very interesting as a team game. 

At $15-$16 a pop from VPG's website, these are a steal, and very portable. The map is even small enough that you could play on an airline tray table if you weren't too worried about the pieces falling off and you not being able to get to them on the floor!

Definitely worth a look. A very different scale and mechanisms than most D-Day games, and one that allows individual looks at each beach. 

Israeli Independence Review

As part of my attempt to try games from new companies, I picked up four Victory Point Games titles, as well as three Khyber Pass Games titles. This is the first review of the lot, specifically on the solitaire Israeli Independence game from VPG. 

Israeli Independence puts you in the role of overall commander of the Jewish forces trying to carve out a nation in the aftermath of WW2 and the Holocaust. For good or for bad, they did so largely on the backs of the Palestinians, who had lived in the region for centuries and were in the process of obtaining independence of their own from the British, who controlled the mandate in the region following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WW1 ended. I will not go into the political elements of whether this is a "good" game in that sense any further than to say that I would like to see a full treatment on the conflict that attempted to give both sides an equitable say in how things went. Certainly everyone in Western culture has been paying for the instability in the Middle East since the discovery of large oil deposits there, and yet we as Americans really don't have the vaguest idea of how Israel came to be (or, really, why) unless we have a horse in the race. I certainly don't. 

That said, even were this a two-player game, you aren't going to get a lot of insight into the conflict from playing this game, at least not unless you read the flavor text on the cards. To be honest, I don't think of II as so much of a wargame as a history lesson. The game could just as easily be played using a 5x5 grid of squares with some stones and a little artwork to differentiate some spaces. Because the entire game consists of the five Arab armies (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt) trying to invade Palestine/Israel and take West Jerusalem, and they do that simply by moving along five separate tracks, one for each army. If any of the armies make it to Jerusalem, it will be "next year in Brooklyn". Of course, given that you play the Israelis, that would mean you lose. 

Play is astonishingly simple. The game comes with a deck of 24 cards, of which two are reserved for the "advanced" game. You shuffle the 22 cards, put the five armies in their starting locations, and off you go. In a given turn, you turn over a card, which has a title corresponding to a period or event that happened during the war. I recommend if you play that you take the time to read the flavor text describing the period or event, as it's really all the history you'll get. The next section tells you which Arab armies advance (or retreat, in a couple of cases), sometimes based on the shape of the space they currently occupy (round or square). Once you've done this, you can take a set number of Offensives against the armies, in which you roll a d6. If the number you roll is higher than the number on the army, it retreats one space, otherwise it stays in place. There are frequently DRMs against or for this number specific to the card, so occasionally you'll get bonuses against a specific army (or nerfs against all of your offensives). 

Repeat until either an Arab army reaches Jerusalem, or else you work through all of the cards. If you do the latter, you win. And that's it. 

There are also three "Israeli Offensive" counters that go with an optional rule. You can use these each once per game to take an extra offensive (without any of the drms or other unique elements of the card-based offensives). It's a good idea to wait until the Arab army is right at your door to do this, of course. 

Lebanon and Iraq also have situations where they are removed from the game if they are in their initial position after the Offensives. Obviously, you want to try to achieve this if you can. 

There is also an expansion set that adds more cards, gives a couple of extra rules, and lists the cards if you want to play a "historical" game with the events in chronological order. I have not played with the extra cards yet, but did play in historical order (with the basic 22 card deck) for my first game. There are also rules for building a deck based on the degree of difficulty you want, as the card numbers are in three colors based on the smackage they lay down. 

While I wouldn't call this a wargame in most circles, it is a pretty engaging and quick little game. Obviously, your decisions come down solely to when to use your "extra" offensives (I highly recommend that rule) as well as how to divvy up the offensives on the card. There's nothing like rolling against Egypt, who is knocking on the door, three times and coming up empty every time, especially if Syria is right on the other side of the city. As such, there's really no "perfect strategy" other than knowing that Syria and Egypt are the aggressive states attacking, and most of the game will come down to how lucky you get based on the degree of difficulty.

That said, it's pretty fun for a 10-15 minute game. If you take the counters (eight total!), a die, and the cards with you on a plane, you can most certainly play on your tray table if you have a piece of paper to track the Arab advances on (and know which spaces are circular). 

On the other hand, if your politics in the situation leans toward the Arabs, or if you're expecting a game rather than a diversion, it's probably not a good purchase for you. The price is right - I think the whole thing, expansion and all, was less than $15. The art is very nice, and the rules are very clear (how could they not be?), and there's even a little dissertation in the package on designing and playing wargames, as this is part of VPGs Battlesson series, intended for novices to the hobby. 

Me, I'm glad I got it. If nothing else, there will come a day when I play it on an airplane sitting next to an Arab and I'll have an extremely interesting conversation as a result. 

Tuesday Gaming

I haven't been up to Matt G's place in months, almost certainly since November and perhaps as long ago as October (I write this in February). So it was that I determined to make it to Matt's Tuesday gaming session even though the local news was having a hissy fit about the possibility of the dreaded "Black Ice" possibly covering our roads. 

I'm pretty sure the temperature didn't drop below 38F the whole evening. 

Also attending with me were the ubiquitous Matt, the entertaining Dave, the lovely Rita, and the erudite KC. On the table were The Three Commandments and Red November.

The Three Commandments is much less a Euro than a rather elaborate and very random party game. One player takes the role of the High Priestess (and there were points in this game when being a literally "high" priestess would have made things more entertaining), and is dealt four cards, two from a Red deck and two from a Green deck. The Red cards all state a condition that can be met by the placement or movement of various colored pieces on a game board (I won't go into tremendous detail here, as it really isn't important at all), while the Green cards state conditions that have more to do with general behavior, up to and including "cursing". 

The priestess takes two of the four cards and places them hidden to one side of them, the third card to the other side, and discards the fourth card out of the game. The first two cards are things that the other players will gain points for if they fulfill them during their turn, while the third card will lose them points.

For example, on my first turn, I had two red cards that I put on the "plus" side, one of which gave points if you picked up a piece on the board from one of the triangle areas, the other gave points for each white piece in the center. My negative green card took away points if people acted "macho". I forget what the other green card said. 

Each player in turn then moves one piece on the board from one area to another. Then the priestess puts markers in front of the cards (all hidden until the round is over, which consists of three times around the table) that the player met the conditions of, and tells them their score if they got more than zero points (or that they failed if they got zero or less). If four people in a row fail, the priestess loses and the other players all score 20 points. If not, then after everyone has had three opportunities to move pieces you add up their scores and the priestess gets the same number of points as the person who scored the most in that round. Everyone gets to be the priestess once, and frankly that was just about enough.

It's not that the game wasn't fun. If you know what the various Green cards have on them for behavior (ask permission to take your turn, stand up, hop around in a circle on one leg) there's great incentive to behave in a silly fashion, which in this group seemed to be pretty easy to do. However, despite the fact that I won over Dave by three points, I *never* guessed a single thing on a single card through the entire game. Not once. I had guesses, but they were always completely off. 

And that's really the downfall of this game. Oh sure, it's cute and funny and with the proper inhalants and opiates it could be a real hoot. But there's almost no chance of correctly guessing what it is you're supposed to be doing, at least as far as I could tell, even if you *do* know what all the cards say on them. There just isn't enough time, and no real incentive for you to limit your Green actions to try to narrow things down as it will just help your opponents. 

I'd play it as a midnight game at a con (maybe) or at a gaming retreat (for sure), but it's not going anywhere *near* the To Buy list. 

For our second game of Wacky Game Night, we pulled out Red November, a game I taught (and learned) at Lorna's EGG gathering earlier in the month. I liked the game, and saw how there would be some good strategies for survival, which I tried to impress on the others. We used the Not As Deadly Dying variant, as well as the secret house rule that you could fix a timed disaster as you passed it if there were people behind you on the track (the real rule is that you fail if you do this, but it's too hard for beginners and besides, I wanted a win). 

There are two areas of ambiguity in the rules, of which I think I've come up with my personal preferences. First is that at the end of your turn, it's not at all clear if your Time Token goes on the top of any stack of other players' tokens or on the bottom. The rules seem to lean ever so slightly toward the "top" theory, although I believe that's just incidental, and I think I prefer the "bottom" theory now having played the "top" twice. 

That all sounds so dirty. But it's not, this is a family game. A family game where you are encouraged, nay, required to drink grog on a regular basis. And make regular "faint" checks, which should really be "pass out" checks. This is clearly a game that should be popular on college campuses, right after playing the "high" priestess.

Back to the game. The second rule that's ambiguous is exactly when you "pass" the timed destruction markers. Is it when you land on it? Or when you go "past" it? There are pages and pages of forums with people vociferously debating this point on the 'Geek, all of whom clearly have no lives. Me, I go with the "on is not a pass" camp, solely because anything that makes this game easier is something I'm all for. 

Like most groups playing for the first time (and you should almost certainly have someone who knows the game pretty well the first time you play, as while the rules are complete aside from the above issues, they are a bit difficult to find things in, in no small part because of the nearly unreadable font used for section headers that looks like it was devised by drunk Slavic gnomes, which to be fair is the case), it's a good idea to take every blocked hatch and flooded room very seriously, and go after the various rising pressure/heat/asphyxiation levels in a no-nonsense and diligent manner. I went after the grog pretty early on, while others went for the toys, but it didn't take long before we were up to our elbows in troubles. 

The biggest problem that began to dog us later in the game was a) fainting gnomes (I managed to do this *twice*, dying the second time when my room flooded or caught fire or was invaded by rabid badgers, I was too drunk to remember), b) high pressure and asphyxiation levels, and of course c) the dreaded Timed Disasters. Things went really wrong when Matt and Dave got trapped together in the nose of the sub with no way out because of the fires, and no one was able to help them escape - I was passed out, Matt had gone out to fight the Kraken (and died when he had no way to get back in the sub as fire and/or water was in all of the compartments, and while he could have used an action to Abandon Comrades the rules were pretty clear that you got exactly One Action while you were using the Aqualung, my friend), and KC and Rita didn't have any way to put out the fires, much less stop the Timed missile launch, which of course was the thing that killed us. It's always the missile launch.

On the plus side, I actually made it to 0 time before dying (thanks to the faintage), and everyone else was inside of 10 minutes left when we all blew up. I suppose that's better than dying of CO2 poisoning, or being crushed like fine Italian sardines in a can, or burning to death. Actually, I *did* burn to death. Ow. 

As KC said, there's a lot more to this game that appears at first. I don't think it's as brutal as Ghost Stories (which is unforgiving in it's unwillingness to let you even feel like you're getting a handle on it) and it feels like you can do more in your turn without a lot more downtime than in a micro-action game like Shadows over Camelot. And, of course, as with any coop game, it's a good idea to play with people who are entertaining and think you yourself are funny. This is my current favorite "true" coop game, with Bstar-G holding on as my favorite semi-coop game (and favorite overall, despite the length - it's just so frakkin' well put together). 

Thanks to Matt for hosting, and to everyone else (Matt included) for being exactly the kind of people that I want to play these kinds of games with. I'll burn to death on a gnomish submarine with you dudes anytime.

Coraline

I love computer animation, I love Neil Gaiman (going back all the way to his Sandman comic book series in the early 90's), I even love 3-D movies so long as the 3-D is there to enhance the story rather than be the story. So it was that Mel and I went to go see the new Laika Studios release Coraline today, at the theater. 

Short version: Wow. Worth every penny to see this on a big screen in 3-D. Except for the part that this is clearly being marketed to children, and I fear for the dreams of the 4 year old that was sitting six seats down from us. There is a *lot* of very frightening imagery, only magnified by the 3-D effect, I would not take any child younger than, oh, 10. And even then it would depend on the child. 

Long version: Wow. 

First of all, Coraline was made by Laika Studios, which is based in my hometown of Portland, OR. As you can imagine, there has been serious hoopla about the film here, with the premiere at a theater where they actually put on *plays*. That's f*cked up. We had Teri Hatcher in a strapless dress in downtown Portland. Think Deadwood and you won't be far off from what Portland looks like compared to Hollywood.

(Note to Portlanders: I'm trying to scare them away from moving here. Don't screw this up by complaining that Portland is an awesome city.)

Anyway, it's kind of a big deal. My wife did some modeling for Laika a couple of years ago when they were working up mockups of the sets, and they liked her so much they gave her a mini-tour, so *she* was excited about it. 

I won't blow the plot for everyone, other than to say that this is your age-old story of a child unhappy with her parents and wishing for a more interesting life, only to find herself the victim of that very thing. The final message, of course, is that your life is just fine and you should try to see the value in what you have. I'm all for that, but it's a bit trite on it's own. Fortunately, Neil Gaiman (who also wrote "The Thief of Always" which has a very similar message) manages to make things interesting along the way through how the story is told as much as what the story is.

Like many fairy stories, things come in threes. Coraline (the protagonist) makes three trips to the other world where she is exposed to three fantastic tableaus, certainly the high points of the film in many ways, exploiting the 3-D effect for all it's worth. Then there are three mini-quests that must be undertaken. Gaiman knows his mythology and storytelling, as anyone who has read his American Gods novel or Sandman series knows, so this isn't a huge leap. Like Lucas with the original Star Wars trilogy, he leverages classical storytelling and archetypes to produce a yarn that is both familiar and satisfying.

Which leads me to the 3-D effects. The glasses are polarized rather than tinted, which I think makes for a much better effect. If you've ever seen the old Captain Eo "ride" at Disneyland back in the day, you get a very similar effect - object leap from the screen on a regular basis, fortunately for my 45 year old eyes with some decent breaks to let your head relax a bit. Frankly, I think the effect would make things considerably scarier for small children. As we left the theater, I did wonder if I enjoyed the movie because of the 3-D or in spite of it to some extent. There is no question that it was immersive and engaging and right on the edge of just the right amount. I did find myself thinking two thoughts, though - A) No smokie da magic ciggies before this movie, and B) keep breathing and your motion sickness will abate, the movie's just started and you'll adjust. 

There are some really spectacular scenes that I'll mention for those who plan to see it in the theater, and I don't think I'll be spoiling too much by doing so. First is the clever "de-res" effect that is used in a few places, especially toward the end. I can only imagine that these were the sorts of things you'd think would have been in the author's head as he wrote the book. Second, of course, is the three fantastical scenes I mentioned above, all of which are incredibly creative and engaging, although there's one part that will put your eyes out if you aren't careful. We'll just call it the DDD scene (get it? 3 D's? get it?) 

One other thing that I noticed, and that I *think* was a creative decision rather than an artifact of the filmmaking and/or 3-D rendering process, is that the movie feels like there's a little bit of jitteriness to it, almost as if you're watching an old movie. It's very subtle, but sometimes it feels like stop-motion photography, a la Ray Harryhausen (Sinbad, anyone?) I noticed some puppetry credits, so perhaps this was both intentional and part of the filming process. 

With so many 3-D movies coming out in the last year or so, almost all aimed at children, it's nice to get one that's aimed a little older and darker. I will be very interested to see if the DVD that comes out will have 3-D specs that come with it, although you'd really need two pairs for many consumers, meaning a much larger box (these specs were very nice, being plastic instead of cardboard, and fitting nicely over my own glasses). 

As a Portlander, I am proud that such a well-produced movie came out of our provincial little burgh, and hope that you get a chance to see it in the theaters while you can. For my part, I will say that it was almost certainly the best theater-going experience I've had in years, which usually feels like I'm in the Sensory Overload Ride at the You're Too Freakin' Old theme park (see 300 et al). 

As a final note, I'll also mention the music, which was done in part by a couple of very good Eastern European children's choirs, and even Ms Hatcher takes a singing role at one point (which I didn't realize until I'd seen the credits). I found it to be very engaging while not being obtrusive, which is very high praise from me. I'll also note that the scene where the piano plays the man (not a typo) actually plays the correct notes on the piano. I can't tell you the last time I've seen that in a film, usually actors are told to just wave their hands around, that no one knows what they're doing anyway. Drives me nuts. In this movie, even the animation gets it right. Well done!

Highly recommended if you like Gaiman, animation, 3-D, fairy tales, mythology, or all of the above.