Nothing like a Day of the Devil for gaming.
FYI, many scholars consider 666 to be a misprint of 616, much like the mistransmission that resulted in Moses crossing the Red Sea (it was the Reed Sea - and for those who argue that the Bible wasn't written in English, the transcription error was essentially the same in Latin). Many believe it is a numerological representation of a name, understandable as Hebrew letters are also their number system.
Anyway, I'm typing this, so apparently the Second Coming is still pencilled in sometime in 2009.
Matt wasn't feeling well, so I took over the hosting duties. This worked well since I'll be out of town in two weeks when I'd normally be hosting. Chuck, Wes, and Carey joined me in playing a couple of great games.
First up was San Juan with Chuck and Carey, as Wes was coming in a bit late. We normally play this game very quickly, but it was only the second playing for Carey. I'm learning that this game is best when it's played at a blistering pace - but then isn't everything? Chuck creamed us, scoring almost as many points as Carey and I combined. I went with a Chapel early, but I had trouble generating enough cards in my hand to get me where I needed to be, and was actively avoiding the Grange Hall, erm, Guild Hall strategy, which is usually my go-to tactic, but I wanted to try something different. Sadly, the strategy worked very well for Chuck.
Wes showed up, and I took the opportunity to pull out AH's year-old-title Nexus Ops. Think Risk 2210 with a variable hex board, fluorescent rubbery figures, and wacky secret missions and action cards. Plus, thankfully, a short playing time (60-90 minutes, our game was about 75 including teaching) and a very streamlined sequence of play. One of the things I like about the game is that you can be beat down by the other players and still win on VP. Most other games of this type require you to "take the board" or at least be well on your way, but this game rewards tactical play as well as strategic.
Chuck, of course, hated it.
Carey and I came out strong, and while I had a lot of territory and income, I wasn't getting secret missions that were giving me decent points until later in the game. In fact, at one point I was pretty sure I could win by taking my Giant Flying Bug piece to the monolith in the middle and winning a battle, but sadly Wes had taken his Rock Striders off of the space right before my turn, depriving me of something like 7 VP in my final turn. Carey had done quite well with his VP, and by leaving a Leaping Lava Lizard alone in a space he was able to take it and win the game.
I have to admit, while I own lots of games like this, I really don't like playing them. I sold my copies of A&A:Original/Pacific/Europe (I kept D-Day, it's quite a good 2-player game), along with a bunch of the early Eagle Games titles, but this one is a winner in my book. Short play time is a big plus, as is the story arc (you start small, expand and explore, and then fight). The "monolith" is a particularly crappy component, but otherwise the pieces are nicely done. The backstory is a bit wacky (armies fighting for mining rights on some planet with very large bugs), but what really matters is the game, and I for one had a great time.
At this point Chuck left in disgust :-) and so Carey and Wes and I played a quick game of Zircus Flohcati, a great little card game about setting up a flea circus. You want to collect the highest card you can in each of the ten suits, each suit a different act (The Great Flea-dini, for example), but also want to get "triples" of the lower scoring cards in order to get 10 point bonuses. During your turn, you can turn over cards until you decide to stop and pick one of the face up cards, or you turn over a card whose suit is already exposed and get nothing. The cards are still there from the previous person's turn, so you may or may not be setting them up when you turn over cards. Playing time is about 20 minutes, and aside from six "action" cards that trigger specific events, the game is language-independent. Since you don't have to worry about the action cards until they get turned over and it's all public anyway, this isn't much of a problem.
I won by getting all of the suits in hand, with 39 points in six of the suits (the highest card in each suit is a 7, so three sevens and three sixes isn't too bad), plus a triple and the ten point bonus for going out first.
We are overloaded with great filler games - Money, Katzenjammer Blues, Geschenkt (No Thanks), even San Juan (we play very fast). This one needs to come out more often, it really is a fast, fun game that's extremely easy to teach and it has a great "chicken" element that I love.
Thanks to everyone who attended!
Friday, June 09, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Silent War - Updates
I haven't really updated my Silent War campaigns lately, so here's a brief update on the two campaigns I've started since the initial report.
First up was the 1942 Solomons game. This 5 month mini-mini only uses three OpAreas and around 15 subs total, and focuses on the period surrounding the invasion of Guadalcanal and the other islands in the Solomons chain in the South Pacific. A very quick game, I finished in a couple of evenings. Quite interesting is the fact that you start out with a bunch of old S-boats that get replaced with some of the early Gato subs. What a difference! A good second game after doing the Dutch fleet, as you can start sinking ships in earnest. Plus, you get bonuses for sinking capital ships of the IJN (heavy cruisers and up). I finished this one a couple of weeks early with a decisive victory, so I must be doing something right.
Next up was the year-long (52 turn) 1942 campaign that starts in July, just after the changeover to War Period 2. Unlike my earlier campaigns, this one uses the entire map and all of the US subs (in service, of course). There are typically something like 23-25 subs on patrol at any time, plus another 20 or so in dock or waiting to go out to sea. I've been playing for more than a week, including a weekend when my wife was out of town, so I've put in something like 12 hours (about an hour per week). At this rate, I'll finish by the end of the summer!
The big problem with a campaign this large and this long is, of course, that I desperately need a place to keep the game set up, and I don't have that kind of space in my house. I'm anxiously awaiting a cyberboard module (and a stable version of Boot Camp so I can run it on my MacBook Pro) so having the board set up won't be an issue. I'm seriously considering writing a Java app to handle the search/combat portion to speed things up, I figure I could finish a week in 15 minutes if I didn't constantly have to draw counters out of cups, not to mention reseeding the cups every month so that I no longer "know" that one of the meatballs in the C cup is a Diligent Escort, which can ruin your day really fast.
Anyway, the point of this particular campaign is to get to War Status 3 as quickly as possible. Getting there in 12/42 is very good, although you need to have sunk something like 225 ships (I'm at 150 in early October) and about 1,150 tons (I'm around 600). On the plus side, I'm pretty sure to pass the November 620 ton mark that allows me to continue. I have a long way to go, although I'm sure I'll have to gear myself up to set the game up again once I get in July and have the time to play again (vacations and family visits will prevent any play between now and then).
I'm not sure I'll set up another campaign game with the physical game, it simply takes too long. However, for the 3-6 month campaigns that only use a portion of the board, the game is quite enjoyable, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the subject matter and enjoys solitaire wargames where the story is as important as whether or not you have meaningful decisions (you do, but combat is random enough to drive 18xx fans nuts).
First up was the 1942 Solomons game. This 5 month mini-mini only uses three OpAreas and around 15 subs total, and focuses on the period surrounding the invasion of Guadalcanal and the other islands in the Solomons chain in the South Pacific. A very quick game, I finished in a couple of evenings. Quite interesting is the fact that you start out with a bunch of old S-boats that get replaced with some of the early Gato subs. What a difference! A good second game after doing the Dutch fleet, as you can start sinking ships in earnest. Plus, you get bonuses for sinking capital ships of the IJN (heavy cruisers and up). I finished this one a couple of weeks early with a decisive victory, so I must be doing something right.
Next up was the year-long (52 turn) 1942 campaign that starts in July, just after the changeover to War Period 2. Unlike my earlier campaigns, this one uses the entire map and all of the US subs (in service, of course). There are typically something like 23-25 subs on patrol at any time, plus another 20 or so in dock or waiting to go out to sea. I've been playing for more than a week, including a weekend when my wife was out of town, so I've put in something like 12 hours (about an hour per week). At this rate, I'll finish by the end of the summer!
The big problem with a campaign this large and this long is, of course, that I desperately need a place to keep the game set up, and I don't have that kind of space in my house. I'm anxiously awaiting a cyberboard module (and a stable version of Boot Camp so I can run it on my MacBook Pro) so having the board set up won't be an issue. I'm seriously considering writing a Java app to handle the search/combat portion to speed things up, I figure I could finish a week in 15 minutes if I didn't constantly have to draw counters out of cups, not to mention reseeding the cups every month so that I no longer "know" that one of the meatballs in the C cup is a Diligent Escort, which can ruin your day really fast.
Anyway, the point of this particular campaign is to get to War Status 3 as quickly as possible. Getting there in 12/42 is very good, although you need to have sunk something like 225 ships (I'm at 150 in early October) and about 1,150 tons (I'm around 600). On the plus side, I'm pretty sure to pass the November 620 ton mark that allows me to continue. I have a long way to go, although I'm sure I'll have to gear myself up to set the game up again once I get in July and have the time to play again (vacations and family visits will prevent any play between now and then).
I'm not sure I'll set up another campaign game with the physical game, it simply takes too long. However, for the 3-6 month campaigns that only use a portion of the board, the game is quite enjoyable, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the subject matter and enjoys solitaire wargames where the story is as important as whether or not you have meaningful decisions (you do, but combat is random enough to drive 18xx fans nuts).
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Hannibal Rides Again
My very favorite wargame is the AH chestnut, Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage. Sadly, I haven't played this title since I had a spate of five games in 36 hours at the WBC tournament in 2004. I played Carthage in four of the five games, and won the first three, later losing to the guy who won and missing wood by a die roll or two in my final game. Chuck was one of my opponents in that tournament, and I'm sure he was looking for a chance to get me back. Well, here it was.
Hannibal is the reference for all of the shorter (less than six hours) two-player card-based wargames. Considering that it was the second title in the series after Mark Herman's We the People, it was an amazingly tight design, especially after the 2nd edition rewrite. I myself have never played 1st edition more than a couple of times, as the 2nd ed rules are so much easier to follow (especially for consular armies). After a few stabs at Twilight Struggle, I really have to wonder why I bother with that flawed design when H:RvC is around.
Me, I prefer playing the Carthaginians, and I like taking the heffalumps over the Alps. Getting Gallic allies (CUs are hard to come by in this game!) once I take attrition made this a mandatory strategy, once I'd locked up Idubeda in Hispania. Of course, I roll a six for attrition with a fully loaded army, knocking me down to seven with one elephant. Not a great start, but I did get back up to 9 with the reinforcements. Note to self: leave a CU with Mago in Saragentum when you leave. At least I remembered to leave Mago this time.
Hannibal was getting off to a good start in Italy, grabbing a couple of spaces in Samnium by the end of turn 2, when Chuck decided to be aggressive and took an army into Western Numidia. Unfortunately, I'd already blown 5 CUs when they sunk with Mago, and a later run with Mago and some CUs to cut off the Roman bridgehead also sank. By now, Chuck had two armies in Africa, and Hanno was getting punched around quite a bit. By turn 5 I'd lost both Numidia's and was losing Carthagenia. At one point, Longus was sieging Carthage while Hannibal was sieging Rome with the siege engine!
When it was clear that my rolling wasn't going to be helping me out, I decided I had to send Hasdrubal with most of the Spanish army to Carthage to save it from Longus. He landed successfully at Utica, then managed to smack Longus around significantly. This was a crucial battle, as there were now three Roman armies in Europe!
Having saved Carthage for now, I sent Hannibal against Africanus, who sadly never made it to Africa. After three battles, I managed to kill the bugger, and could focus on retaking Africa. By the end of turn 8, I was poised to kick the Romans out of Africa completely, and while I'd lost two of the three provinces I had controlled in Italy, Rome was down to around 10 CUs on the board and things were looking good. My hand helped some - I didn't get any really useful cards such as Diplomacy or the good Hannibal cards, but I did have a card that wiped out Celtiberia (which I'd already lost three times during the game), and my hand had 7 3 cards and two 1's.
I'd already taken Capua via a card play, so I knew that all I needed was 9 provinces to win. The trick would be to keep Numidia from being wiped out. The problem was that Spain was all but undefended. In the first couple of card plays I managed to destroy the last of the Romans in Africa, controlled both Numidias (with CUs on three spaces in each province to make them revolt-proof), but by then Scipio the Elder had gone to Spain and I had to hope that Chuck had a lot of 1 cards.
After sending Hasdrubal and Mago to Spain to pick up the units that had been collecting in New Carthage and confront Scipio, I still had my hands full. I'd been so busy taking back space that I hadn't been able to build my holdings in Spain back up, especially after Celtiberia had revolted the previous turn. Chuck spent a lot of cards gaining those areas, but he needed an army to keep them, and I had an opening. Hasdrubal made an attempt on Publius to knock him out of Baetica (he already had Idubeda and Celtiberia), but I lost the battle and was barely able to get Mago up to Idubeda in order to steal one extra province back (and Hannibal, now alone in Italy, to take back Samnium). Had I left Hasdrubal and one CU in Baetica, I could have forced Publius to fight one more battle with Mago to take back Idubeda, but I hadn't been thinking that far ahead.
As it was, I'd already lost one card (amazingly, one of my 1 cards) to an intercepted message, so Chuck used his last three cards to good use to take Baetica and win with 9 provinces. Certainly one of the closest games I've played (the closest came down to a 50% die roll at WBC), and certainly a moral victory for the Carthaginians who were within two siege points of giving up Carthage itself.
Thanks, Chuck, for playing what has to be one of the top 10 wargames of all time, certainly the most elegant of the CDGs. This one will come out at WBC West (my own wargaming micro-con in July) for sure. I can only hope that MMP's Shifting Sands title, in preorder for years, will be half the game this one is.
Hannibal is the reference for all of the shorter (less than six hours) two-player card-based wargames. Considering that it was the second title in the series after Mark Herman's We the People, it was an amazingly tight design, especially after the 2nd edition rewrite. I myself have never played 1st edition more than a couple of times, as the 2nd ed rules are so much easier to follow (especially for consular armies). After a few stabs at Twilight Struggle, I really have to wonder why I bother with that flawed design when H:RvC is around.
Me, I prefer playing the Carthaginians, and I like taking the heffalumps over the Alps. Getting Gallic allies (CUs are hard to come by in this game!) once I take attrition made this a mandatory strategy, once I'd locked up Idubeda in Hispania. Of course, I roll a six for attrition with a fully loaded army, knocking me down to seven with one elephant. Not a great start, but I did get back up to 9 with the reinforcements. Note to self: leave a CU with Mago in Saragentum when you leave. At least I remembered to leave Mago this time.
Hannibal was getting off to a good start in Italy, grabbing a couple of spaces in Samnium by the end of turn 2, when Chuck decided to be aggressive and took an army into Western Numidia. Unfortunately, I'd already blown 5 CUs when they sunk with Mago, and a later run with Mago and some CUs to cut off the Roman bridgehead also sank. By now, Chuck had two armies in Africa, and Hanno was getting punched around quite a bit. By turn 5 I'd lost both Numidia's and was losing Carthagenia. At one point, Longus was sieging Carthage while Hannibal was sieging Rome with the siege engine!
When it was clear that my rolling wasn't going to be helping me out, I decided I had to send Hasdrubal with most of the Spanish army to Carthage to save it from Longus. He landed successfully at Utica, then managed to smack Longus around significantly. This was a crucial battle, as there were now three Roman armies in Europe!
Having saved Carthage for now, I sent Hannibal against Africanus, who sadly never made it to Africa. After three battles, I managed to kill the bugger, and could focus on retaking Africa. By the end of turn 8, I was poised to kick the Romans out of Africa completely, and while I'd lost two of the three provinces I had controlled in Italy, Rome was down to around 10 CUs on the board and things were looking good. My hand helped some - I didn't get any really useful cards such as Diplomacy or the good Hannibal cards, but I did have a card that wiped out Celtiberia (which I'd already lost three times during the game), and my hand had 7 3 cards and two 1's.
I'd already taken Capua via a card play, so I knew that all I needed was 9 provinces to win. The trick would be to keep Numidia from being wiped out. The problem was that Spain was all but undefended. In the first couple of card plays I managed to destroy the last of the Romans in Africa, controlled both Numidias (with CUs on three spaces in each province to make them revolt-proof), but by then Scipio the Elder had gone to Spain and I had to hope that Chuck had a lot of 1 cards.
After sending Hasdrubal and Mago to Spain to pick up the units that had been collecting in New Carthage and confront Scipio, I still had my hands full. I'd been so busy taking back space that I hadn't been able to build my holdings in Spain back up, especially after Celtiberia had revolted the previous turn. Chuck spent a lot of cards gaining those areas, but he needed an army to keep them, and I had an opening. Hasdrubal made an attempt on Publius to knock him out of Baetica (he already had Idubeda and Celtiberia), but I lost the battle and was barely able to get Mago up to Idubeda in order to steal one extra province back (and Hannibal, now alone in Italy, to take back Samnium). Had I left Hasdrubal and one CU in Baetica, I could have forced Publius to fight one more battle with Mago to take back Idubeda, but I hadn't been thinking that far ahead.
As it was, I'd already lost one card (amazingly, one of my 1 cards) to an intercepted message, so Chuck used his last three cards to good use to take Baetica and win with 9 provinces. Certainly one of the closest games I've played (the closest came down to a 50% die roll at WBC), and certainly a moral victory for the Carthaginians who were within two siege points of giving up Carthage itself.
Thanks, Chuck, for playing what has to be one of the top 10 wargames of all time, certainly the most elegant of the CDGs. This one will come out at WBC West (my own wargaming micro-con in July) for sure. I can only hope that MMP's Shifting Sands title, in preorder for years, will be half the game this one is.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
South Tuesday Session, 5/30/06
Carey and Tim joined me at Mike's for an evening of close calls. For me, anyway.
First up was Quo Vadis, a game I've never been fond of. As the baby in my family, I tend to avoid confrontation, and negotiation often feels very confrontational to me. I really hate buying cars. In this game, however, I felt less threatened by the particular mix for reasons I'm not clear on myself.
In this game, my third playing, I had an actual plan: focus on the lower right side of the board (there's a committee of three in the corner), start working up the path of singles just to the left, and try to clog up the single path out of the lowest "five" committee (which worked really well). I was very aggressive in getting the first piece into the top committee, and was successful when I'd put Caesar in the path from the rightmost three committee feeding into the top slots and everyone else apparently had other things to do. At that point it was all about getting laurels, and I felt that I was doing well catching up to Mike and Carey, who had the tallest stacks of counters.
In the end, everyone had gotten someone into the top committee, although Carey got there last. We didn't need the tiebreaker as it turned out, darn it, as Carey edged me by a single point, with Tim and Mike right behind. The final scores, IIRC, were 35-34-33-30. A very tight game, certainly a "half-turkey" if you are using the Dave definition.
Next up was Evo, Joe Steadman's favorite game. Tim got off to a very strong start in this game, getting the first egg and thus the only one to produce two dinos per turn for a while. I went for a balanced strategy, ending up with three legs, two fur/parasols, two eggs, and a long tail. I also had one of the two horns (the other showed up at the end of the game), which I used my card that forced people to pay three more mutation points to keep bidding, a ploy that worked.
Sadly, I was paying one or two more mutation points and not getting extra dinos early on, so I was falling behind. Also, I wasn't being aggressive with my horned dinos early, and on my second attempt I lost a dino that shouldn't have been moving anyway (I ended up screwing up the move and losing an extra dino to climate). Getting knocked down to four dinos at that point ensured that I needed to hope for a long game.
Indeed, I did a good job of coming back, being within two points of my closest competition and six behind Tim when the meteor got to the 1-2 space. And, of course, it hit the planet. Carey had a +2 point card to give him second. I think I'd have been right in it had I not made that one poor decision in the midgame.
Also odd in this game was the climate: other than a single roll that moved things backwards, and a couple of climate cards that skipped over the beach or mountain climates, everything went like it was supposed to. Every other time I've played the game there were as many wacky climate changes as normal ones, but this one went in the right direction.
Having made it this far to be thwarted in my efforts to win a game, we next tried out a wacky little title Mike got in Essen called Fruit Thief. I could be very wrong in remembering this title. Clearly a very light title (each player turns over one of their set of 10 cards, then secretly choose which of the cards you want to visit, then get points based on who went where). That's the whole game. It was cute, and very light, and would be a good family game. I was once again within a point or two of winning (IIRC, the scores were almost identical to Quo Vadis), but Carey edged me again. Damn you, Carey!
We had time for a couple of hands of No Thanks, also called Geschenckt. This is another very light game, but one that requires a certain amount of triage, which I really like. This is the game I am most likely to teach non-gamers to play, as it teaches very quickly and plays fast as well. In our first hand, I started out with a lot of almost-neighbor cards, and managed to get a few of them connected up to save points, but more important was not running out of chips. In the second hand, I ended up with one of the 30 cards early, then proceeded to draw a few more in sequence - guess I should have shuffled better! I let one go around the table a couple of times before raking in the chips and the card, but decided to just take the next two in the sequence. There was one more card that I nearly took later in the hand, but Carey had run out of chips just before I was going to pick it up. I ended up winning the two hands by about 10 points. Finally!
The whole key to No Thanks is simply not to allow yourself to run out of chips. Taking a few larger cards early actually gives you a little flexibility, not to mention chips that give you time as well. Light it may be, but there is enough depth, suspense (you never know what cards aren't available), and speed to make it perhaps my favorite quickie game, certainly better than For Sale.
Thanks to Mike for hosting, as always.
First up was Quo Vadis, a game I've never been fond of. As the baby in my family, I tend to avoid confrontation, and negotiation often feels very confrontational to me. I really hate buying cars. In this game, however, I felt less threatened by the particular mix for reasons I'm not clear on myself.
In this game, my third playing, I had an actual plan: focus on the lower right side of the board (there's a committee of three in the corner), start working up the path of singles just to the left, and try to clog up the single path out of the lowest "five" committee (which worked really well). I was very aggressive in getting the first piece into the top committee, and was successful when I'd put Caesar in the path from the rightmost three committee feeding into the top slots and everyone else apparently had other things to do. At that point it was all about getting laurels, and I felt that I was doing well catching up to Mike and Carey, who had the tallest stacks of counters.
In the end, everyone had gotten someone into the top committee, although Carey got there last. We didn't need the tiebreaker as it turned out, darn it, as Carey edged me by a single point, with Tim and Mike right behind. The final scores, IIRC, were 35-34-33-30. A very tight game, certainly a "half-turkey" if you are using the Dave definition.
Next up was Evo, Joe Steadman's favorite game. Tim got off to a very strong start in this game, getting the first egg and thus the only one to produce two dinos per turn for a while. I went for a balanced strategy, ending up with three legs, two fur/parasols, two eggs, and a long tail. I also had one of the two horns (the other showed up at the end of the game), which I used my card that forced people to pay three more mutation points to keep bidding, a ploy that worked.
Sadly, I was paying one or two more mutation points and not getting extra dinos early on, so I was falling behind. Also, I wasn't being aggressive with my horned dinos early, and on my second attempt I lost a dino that shouldn't have been moving anyway (I ended up screwing up the move and losing an extra dino to climate). Getting knocked down to four dinos at that point ensured that I needed to hope for a long game.
Indeed, I did a good job of coming back, being within two points of my closest competition and six behind Tim when the meteor got to the 1-2 space. And, of course, it hit the planet. Carey had a +2 point card to give him second. I think I'd have been right in it had I not made that one poor decision in the midgame.
Also odd in this game was the climate: other than a single roll that moved things backwards, and a couple of climate cards that skipped over the beach or mountain climates, everything went like it was supposed to. Every other time I've played the game there were as many wacky climate changes as normal ones, but this one went in the right direction.
Having made it this far to be thwarted in my efforts to win a game, we next tried out a wacky little title Mike got in Essen called Fruit Thief. I could be very wrong in remembering this title. Clearly a very light title (each player turns over one of their set of 10 cards, then secretly choose which of the cards you want to visit, then get points based on who went where). That's the whole game. It was cute, and very light, and would be a good family game. I was once again within a point or two of winning (IIRC, the scores were almost identical to Quo Vadis), but Carey edged me again. Damn you, Carey!
We had time for a couple of hands of No Thanks, also called Geschenckt. This is another very light game, but one that requires a certain amount of triage, which I really like. This is the game I am most likely to teach non-gamers to play, as it teaches very quickly and plays fast as well. In our first hand, I started out with a lot of almost-neighbor cards, and managed to get a few of them connected up to save points, but more important was not running out of chips. In the second hand, I ended up with one of the 30 cards early, then proceeded to draw a few more in sequence - guess I should have shuffled better! I let one go around the table a couple of times before raking in the chips and the card, but decided to just take the next two in the sequence. There was one more card that I nearly took later in the hand, but Carey had run out of chips just before I was going to pick it up. I ended up winning the two hands by about 10 points. Finally!
The whole key to No Thanks is simply not to allow yourself to run out of chips. Taking a few larger cards early actually gives you a little flexibility, not to mention chips that give you time as well. Light it may be, but there is enough depth, suspense (you never know what cards aren't available), and speed to make it perhaps my favorite quickie game, certainly better than For Sale.
Thanks to Mike for hosting, as always.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Weekend Wargaming, 5/27/06
Cruelly trapped at home with my dogs while my wife is out having three martini lunches in San Francisco, Chuck was kind enough to come save me from an afternoon of trying to sink Japanese shipping in a solitaire session of Silent war. So what did we play?
First up was Twilight Struggle, which Chuck has compared to dating for personality. The game went to turn 9, and I as the US was actually doing pretty well considering. Chuck bid 2 for the USSR (a low bid, I have learned, although I don't believe the bid had an effect on when the game ended). However, getting the two scoring cards for areas I was going to lose in killed me, again through no real fault of my own.
I made one or two errors, the first being not playing Defectors for the headline phase in the mid game, although the effect of this was minor. The bigger mistake was playing Allende instead of another card in my hand that let Chuck into South America (although, frankly, all he needed was a successful coup). When I got the South America and Asia scoring cards in that last hand, I knew I was dead as Chuck was going to pull down tons of points, enough to win handily.
Chuck, for his part, misplayed when he got the chance to order my hand (the one full of his events) and left the one that allowed me to discard a big card early in the mix. His card got discarded, of course - I had Suez Crisis, Muslim Revolution, and The Reformer, none of which I was anxious to play, and got away with just Suez getting done (when Chuck already controlled France and Israel).
What totally killed me was having Red Scare after Red Scare played on me, at least three of the nine turns. That's about 20 OPS points lost, and the space race suffered as well when I wasn't drawing sufficiently large enough cards. How I made it into turn 7 only a handful of points down, I don't know, but none of it mattered when the scoring cards started coming out.
I'm afraid that this game lives or dies on the deal. While I'm the first to admit that Hannibal has the same problem in close games (what you draw on turn 9 will determine the winner, I've found, but again only in close games), TS seems to have that problem throughout the game. Combined with the double punishment of scoring cards that can hurt you, I am ready to pronounce the game broken as a wargame, even with bidding. What a disappointment after such an exciting first game played with the incorrect rules!
Still, it was fun up to that point.
After lunch, we tried out Decision Game's ACW card-driven title "Battle Cry of Freedom". Despite the usual Decision "rules" and enough text on your hand of 13 cards to require 5 minutes of reading every turn in the early going, this seemed to be a fun little title. Yes, the luck of the draw is much larger here, although I think it's better than in, say, Blue vs Gray, where you are dependent upon drawing both useful combat units and generals. Cards have multiple uses, which is nice and makes hand management important. While the Union generally dictates pace, the Confederacy has the chance to mix it up a bit with certain types of cards.
Why would I like BCoF and not TS if they're both luck heavy? The answer is that BCoF allows you to get into trouble in a specific battle, but you are not likely to lose the entire game because of one bad hand. Plus, every card in BCoF is usable for at least a Frontal Assault at +1, so you get something for your trouble even if the cards aren't playable.
What I did notice (and would like to see if we got this part wrong, we seemed to get a lot wrong), was that bad generals seemed to be clogging up my hand much of the time. Given the South's leadership advantage, this seemed to me to be a problem with not much of a solution - you can only discard one general per turn, and when half of your hand is useless cards (they can't be used for the Frontal Assault, they are just generals), you are in trouble unless your opponent has the same problem.
Also, there was no way to differentiate generals that had been pulled from a theatre from those just drawn (the latter *must* be placed in specific theatres initially), which is why I'm wondering if perhaps that particular element was played incorrectly. Not that it mattered, we played through about a third of the game and I had done well at holding Chuck off up until my generals became a problem. Hard to say who would have won, although Chuck's infrastructure was doing much better than mine, creating a snowball effect that would almost certainly have doomed the South.
Regardless, we had fun playing both games, and it was a nice way to spend a rainy spring Saturday in Oregon. Thanks, Chuck!
First up was Twilight Struggle, which Chuck has compared to dating for personality. The game went to turn 9, and I as the US was actually doing pretty well considering. Chuck bid 2 for the USSR (a low bid, I have learned, although I don't believe the bid had an effect on when the game ended). However, getting the two scoring cards for areas I was going to lose in killed me, again through no real fault of my own.
I made one or two errors, the first being not playing Defectors for the headline phase in the mid game, although the effect of this was minor. The bigger mistake was playing Allende instead of another card in my hand that let Chuck into South America (although, frankly, all he needed was a successful coup). When I got the South America and Asia scoring cards in that last hand, I knew I was dead as Chuck was going to pull down tons of points, enough to win handily.
Chuck, for his part, misplayed when he got the chance to order my hand (the one full of his events) and left the one that allowed me to discard a big card early in the mix. His card got discarded, of course - I had Suez Crisis, Muslim Revolution, and The Reformer, none of which I was anxious to play, and got away with just Suez getting done (when Chuck already controlled France and Israel).
What totally killed me was having Red Scare after Red Scare played on me, at least three of the nine turns. That's about 20 OPS points lost, and the space race suffered as well when I wasn't drawing sufficiently large enough cards. How I made it into turn 7 only a handful of points down, I don't know, but none of it mattered when the scoring cards started coming out.
I'm afraid that this game lives or dies on the deal. While I'm the first to admit that Hannibal has the same problem in close games (what you draw on turn 9 will determine the winner, I've found, but again only in close games), TS seems to have that problem throughout the game. Combined with the double punishment of scoring cards that can hurt you, I am ready to pronounce the game broken as a wargame, even with bidding. What a disappointment after such an exciting first game played with the incorrect rules!
Still, it was fun up to that point.
After lunch, we tried out Decision Game's ACW card-driven title "Battle Cry of Freedom". Despite the usual Decision "rules" and enough text on your hand of 13 cards to require 5 minutes of reading every turn in the early going, this seemed to be a fun little title. Yes, the luck of the draw is much larger here, although I think it's better than in, say, Blue vs Gray, where you are dependent upon drawing both useful combat units and generals. Cards have multiple uses, which is nice and makes hand management important. While the Union generally dictates pace, the Confederacy has the chance to mix it up a bit with certain types of cards.
Why would I like BCoF and not TS if they're both luck heavy? The answer is that BCoF allows you to get into trouble in a specific battle, but you are not likely to lose the entire game because of one bad hand. Plus, every card in BCoF is usable for at least a Frontal Assault at +1, so you get something for your trouble even if the cards aren't playable.
What I did notice (and would like to see if we got this part wrong, we seemed to get a lot wrong), was that bad generals seemed to be clogging up my hand much of the time. Given the South's leadership advantage, this seemed to me to be a problem with not much of a solution - you can only discard one general per turn, and when half of your hand is useless cards (they can't be used for the Frontal Assault, they are just generals), you are in trouble unless your opponent has the same problem.
Also, there was no way to differentiate generals that had been pulled from a theatre from those just drawn (the latter *must* be placed in specific theatres initially), which is why I'm wondering if perhaps that particular element was played incorrectly. Not that it mattered, we played through about a third of the game and I had done well at holding Chuck off up until my generals became a problem. Hard to say who would have won, although Chuck's infrastructure was doing much better than mine, creating a snowball effect that would almost certainly have doomed the South.
Regardless, we had fun playing both games, and it was a nice way to spend a rainy spring Saturday in Oregon. Thanks, Chuck!
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