Recent Gaming Wrapup

Quite a bit of gaming in the last couple of days, here's a quick wrapup:

1) Pursuit of Glory - I wrote a first impression of this more focused follow-on to the classic Paths of Glory card-driven wargame that took the system to new heights. Of particular concern was the new game's rulebook, clocking in at a whopping 48 pages. As comparison, the WWI monster Twilight in the East: 1914 has fewer pages of rules. After a "discussion" (as much as you can have trading posts on the 'Geek) with the designer, my impression is that the rules were vetted through ConSimWorld, and we all know how well *anything* by committee goes. By comparison, Paths rules were 16 pages. The designer tells me that Paths also had a 27-page FAQ, which is not surprising given the unexpected relationships between various events could be. 

That said, I went through the sample game, read the "quickie" new and modified rules (a two-page cardstock play aid), read through the rules (they've mentioned which are new, although often there are one or two changes in an entire paragraph, or that mention specific areas of the map, but it's still not a quick read), and started a new game that I've gotten into turn 3 so far. I can only do about one turn at a time, as parsing the board for both sides, trying to understand the various implications of events, etc, tends to make my head hurt the first couple of times out. 

So - how does it look? So far, very promising. The game is not, as may or may not have been suggested, a game you can learn on your own from reading the two page quickstart guide. There is a huge amount of chrome, enough to make Paths look like it was stripped down to nothing. There are tons of special units, each with special rules, a good dozen different nationalities, many with special rules, limits on where certain countries can place certain types of units, all sorts of craziness with the Turks' replacement factors, ways to build up small units into larger ones, and we haven't even started with the Russian Revolution (which is, for the vast majority of games, a foregone conclusion). If you were hoping for a carbon copy of Paths that you could open the box and start playing in 20 minutes, you will be sorely disappointed unless you know someone familiar with the game who will act as your opponent.

In my game, the Caucasus is not exactly stalemated, but there hasn't been a lot of movement (although there has been a lot of buildup). Persia remains neutral, mostly because the Russians felt that their numeric inferiority on that front when they had the card was going to be a liability. The Jihad level is at 5 or 6, and let me tell you that the quickest way to lose this game as the Allies is to ignore this as every time a new tribe counter shows up and often on one of the Allies' VP spaces. Interestingly, on turn 3 both the Bulgaria and Romania cards showed up in player's hands, but Romania won't really enter the war until Bulgaria does as you need to have an Allied large counter in the Balkans and that doesn't happen unless you start an invasion. Which the Allies did, but in Gallipolli. Also interestingly is that the Turks are trying to hold the Allies to their Beachhead because they hold the Verdun card which will either give them VP or force the Brits to lose units (not a good choice for them since they don't have that many on-board now), but they have to play it before the Allies get onto dry land. 

Also interesting is that by far the majority of Allied cards in their Limited War deck bring reinforcements onto the map. You can see that this is a game that the Central Powers want to get the upper hand quickly, then hold it, as their manpower issues can only hold them back. 

A game with this much story to it deserves a few good playings before giving it a thumbs up, but right now the literary aspects are very strong. If nothing else, this game will give you a very good sense of the war in this theater. If you've never played Paths or any other relatively complex CDG, or found them to be more than you could handle, this game will be no different.

And talk about a busy map. My god, there's stuff everywhere. It's a bit difficult to parse at first, but everything eventually makes sense. 

2) Conflict of Heroes - Taught this to Matt R on Monday night, we had an interesting game. I've been in contact with the designer due to me getting the incorrectly assembled rules (and you don't just open the staples and put it back together, this game has a huge square rulebook and it's *glued) together), and I have to say that any concerns I had about this game being distributed by Phalanx Games in the US was unfounded. Uwe Eickert is extremely responsive, friendly, and helpful. 

We played the first scenario, and I was again the Russians. It was looking good and I'd held off the Russians from the control marker through turn 3, but Matt nailed two of my units (one with a FOOT KILLED combat chit, the other with a 12 dieroll when he only needed an 8, enough to kill it outright). As such, I just didn't have the operational capacity to hold him off, and he ended up taking the space at the end of turn 4. I was able to bring in my SMG unit to challenge him at the start of the next turn, and even got initiative on turn 5, but had a 2 result in close combat. At that point, he killed that unit and I was left with the slowest MG squad on the planet that was too far away. 

While I've only played the first scenario (three times now), I can say that I am very high on this game. There are no leaders, which seems very strange at this level, but they're abstracted into the command point system, which is brilliant. If you found Combat Commander far too chaotic for yourself, you wish wargames came with mounted boards and huge counters, and like low complexity but lots of chrome built in that doesn't get in the way of the game, this may be the one for you. Highly recommended. 

3) Descent - The Road To Legend - JD, Laurent, and Alex took on the role of the good guys, first going after the Overlord's lieutenant in Dawnsmoor (who had built up two siege markers), and driving him off. I need stronger critters now that the heroes have gotten some good loot, it's very difficult for me to take on someone with five armor and get very far. Worse, they have a breath weapon that makes it nearly impossible for me to set up in the smaller dungeons without risking serious wipeage in the first round - I lost almost an entire dungeon level of critters who were only able to take one or two shots total. 

On the plus side, I have enough XP at this point to have three lieutenants which will make it very hard to go after them all as they start to raze cities. Also, I should have enough XP after this dungeon (assuming I manage to actually kill one or two of the party) to upgrade one of my critter categories to silver, which will make a very big difference in how much damage I can do. That's excellent news, as the good guys are already well-geared and this should even the scales a bit. I will probably pick the Beasts since that's the cheapest option. It will be important as my lieutenants are very tough, but require some backup from their minions, and right now most of the minions are pretty useless.

What's been very interesting about this game is that it is not getting old even after several months of play (although only once a month). What's keeping things interesting is that the strategic situation changes as the game moves on, and now that I have three lieutenants on the board the party will need to make very tough choices if I spread them around. Since I can always have the lieutenant run if they are placed near an exit, so long as the party doesn't get an absurd number of hits in a single round and kill them I can generally get away. At least I could with the first one, as he was immune to the Grapple ability one of the party has that essentially freezes an adjacent unit in place. This alone has been the biggest problem for the Overlord, enough that I almost think in this game it's too powerful and would have to consider watering it down, especially as in these smaller dungeons you can just forget spawning more monsters. My biggest asset is trying to get the card that lets me draw more cards more frequently - after my units were wiped in the first level I have zero chance of going through my deck twice this time out, which means a lot less conquest points for me. 

Anyway, it's been a fun ride, and while I'm not sure that it will hold up over 15-17 dungeons (we're on number three!), it definitely brings life to this title, one that I had trouble finding time to play more than once or twice a year. 

I plan to continue with the Pursuit of Glory game tomorrow. I'm also very interested in Bitter End, a low-complexity game on the German relief effort of Budapest in 1945. Two mapper, so not something I can set up and tuck away, but definitely a light ruleset and some interesting situations. The map is a bit of a horror, though. 

Goodbye, Mr. Reinhard

The first part of the newspaper I read is the Op/Ed section. When you understand that newspapers are not about news but about selling advertising space, you also understand that there are a lot of stories that are misreported, sometimes grossly. The use of innuendo (words like "accused," "suspected," etc) are tossed in to cover the paper's legal butt, but most of the people reading an article tend to equate "we think he might be guilty" to "he's guilty". 

As a liberal, I feel it is my duty to read not only the opinions that I agree with, but also with those I don't. As such, I feel I have a pretty good sense of who can back up an argument and who can't, as well as the general tone of the regular writers. I've even seen one writer, who used to be funny, become a voice of vengeance against the Iraqis after 9/11 (and you see the logical problems already here), only to participate in the war as an embedded reported and be the first well-known journalist to die in the conflict. Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for.

There are, of course, people who are there solely to prop up their ideology regardless of whether the individual issue has merit or not. It happens on both sides, but there have been a handful of conservative columnists who constantly seem to be willing to sell their ethics and morals down the river on single issues because it's what their "side" stands for. Charles Krauthammer, Rich Lowry (who fired a columnist from The National Review because the columnist, son of William Buckley Jr., endorsed Obama), and David Reinhard, our very own conservative at the Oregonian. 

On Sunday, Reinhard announced that he was tired of all the liberal hate in Oregon and decided to hang it up after the election. He spoke of several anecdotes where people had sent him his column covered in feces, or removed W bumper stickers from friend's cars, or other outrages to his conservative values. I can definitely see how annoying that sort of thing would be, and it says quite a bit about the people who react in such a way rather than engaging in civil discussion.

I by no means want to excuse or condone the behavior that David mentions in his column, but I find it specious for him to state baldly that liberals are the ones at fault here. Not when Rush Limbaugh was putting Hillary Clinton's head on a chihuahua body twelve years ago on his short lived television show. Now that The Daily Show gives them some of their own medicine back (and in a fairly non-partisan way - Jon Stewart mocks pretty much everyone he thinks is an idiot, with the main target being the media even more than W), it's not fair? After eight years and an electorate that is in shock about the abuses of power brought by single-party rule, he can't understand that there is tremendous frustration out there and that people tend to kill the messenger? 

He shouldn't be in this business if that's the case. And apparently he won't be.

Understand, I want to see a conservative columnist in the Oregonian. I want to see an extremely good writer, one who can back up their claims with something more than cherry-picked data or repeating Party talking points. Someone who can see the other side clearly, but simply doesn't agree with it and can state in a clear and concise manner why. 

David Reinhard was not that columnist. Rich Lowry is not that columnist. Charles Krauthammer is not that columnist. 

Good columnists aren't apologists who try to cover their "side's" ass every time they make an enormous mistake, such as including the right-wing propaganda film "Obsession" that denigrated Muslims and Islam as an "advertising supplement" when what it really was was a choice to take advertising revenue at a time when newspapers are struggling. If that's the case, sell the whole thing to Loren Parks (famous Oregon conservative known for throwing a lot of money at our ballot initiative process that we tend to see right through). At least then we'd know the paper was a Party propaganda organ and ignore it. Of course, any time anyone disagrees with something in the paper they scream that the paper is clearly in the hands of liberals (or conservatives - many people have no sense of context or proportion, apparently), but there's Fox News and then there's everyone else.

The good columnists, to my eye, are people like David Brooks, George Will, Debra Saunders, aren't featured often enough in the Oregonian. In general, they call an argument on it's merit rather than it's affiliation, and that's great. I may not agree with either their argument or their conclusion, but at least they write rationally and make me consider the issue more closely. 

The bad columnists apologize, call people names, smirk, mock, dance around logic like it was a live downed power cable. Reinhard did all of these almost without fail. Of all of his columns (and I've read a great many of them over the years), very few were what I'd call "charitable". By contrast, his liberal counterpart at the paper, David Sarasohn, regularly wrote about non-political issues. When Sarasohn was writing about Darfur, Reinhard was defending torture at Gitmo. When Sarasohn took a political argument and satirized it, Reinhard was a blowhard with no sense of humor. 

Perhaps the biggest indication of this was the portrait of the columnist. For a very long time, Sarasohn's smiling face, laughing at a private joke perhaps, was a clear counterpoint to Reinhard's sourpuss. At some point, the paper made him smile for his picture, which he complained about in that column, but it's always looked disingenuous to me. 

So goodbye, Mr. Reinhard. You weren't very good at your job, apparently - Oregon hasn't been a battleground state in this election for an instant, and we still have the same proportion of Democrats to Republicans in our representation at the national level (we went rather hard to the left in 2006). I can't recall a single time you called out George Bush for erring in a period that saw a long laundry list of mistakes that will cost your children and mine for decades, but you sure tried to spin every one of them so that he looked like a genius. That's not political discourse, it's bad salesmanship. 

I am sorry that you were forced to endure some very nasty (and almost certainly anonymous in many cases - I'm talking to you, Mr. War Of Northern Aggression) mail, and if anyone went after your family - well, there's crazies on both sides of the aisle and I can't imagine that you think you're alone in this. I don't condone it in any way, and the people who would take their argument with you into your private life clearly have serious issues of their own that I hope they can resolve in more productive ways. 

You can complain about Oregon all you want, that we have a lot of very mean liberals. What we really have, though, aside from the requisite number of people off their meds, is a very large number of extremely frustrated people. Not where I live, of course. Where I live, *I'm* afraid to mention that I'm a liberal, although I strongly suspect that the earring I wear gives it away. Where I lived before, the shoe would have been on the other foot. That's why I don't put out political signs in my yard - not because I'm afraid, and not just because the homeowner association won't let me, but because I think that a sign that says "Obama/Biden 2008" is a slap in the face to both my neighbors and to reasoned discourse. If we want to discuss politics, then by all means let's discuss it. 

If all we're going to do is debunk Republican Party talking points, however, there's about as much discussion there as if I were to try to convert you to a different faith. At that point, reason is no longer a tool or an option if you believe what a single political party in this country tells you, any more than if you believe what a single church tells you. No one has the monopoly on truth or righteousness, no matter how much we seem to need to believe that, and it's the people who cling unswervingly to a fixed universe who seem to be the ones getting us into trouble all the time. 

Note, I'm not disparaging religion here. I'm disparaging the blind following of religion. A radical fundamentalist Christian or Jew putting out a missive like Obsession (which uses point data to paint an entire picture) is as blind as a Muslim suicide bomber blowing up a school bus. What I'm saying is that arguments need to be weighed individually and in context, not in the vacuum of ideology.

Mr. Reinhard, I wish you the best, and I hope that your experiences with the blind haven't in fact blinded you further. Many of us who opposed the Iraq War back in 2002 and who tried to be voices of sanity in a country that came pretty close to rounding up Muslim's after 9/11 (see the FBI's gross mishandling of the Brandon Mayfield case, which happened in Oregon, as just one well-publicized example) went through similar things, including being sent to jail for protesting our government's actions. Hate isn't limited to one political or religious ideology, my friend, and it's sad that you couldn't see that your own actions contributed to that environment. 

One tip though - stay away from writing or sales. You weren't very good at either. I would instead recommend choral music directing, and you were very good at preaching to the choir.

Pursuit of Glory - Second Look

I've had a little time to look at the rules for Pursuit of Glory, run through the sample game, and run a few turns on my own. Like Paths, this will be a game where you learn considerably by playing others, so I'm looking forward to the VASSAL module when it comes out.

After looking at the rules, this is clearly a case of the rules writer preferring to repeat rules in the book rather than referencing them. This is usually a mistake that happens gradually - a rule gets added in one place, then the rules get bigger, and it gets harder to wade through them easily. Having rules in multiple places makes it much easier for a rule to be stated incorrectly in one spot but not in the others (or to miss places to make changes). With some discipline, more concise and focused writing, and stating rules once, I believe this ruleset could be shaved down to 30 pages or less. 

If you have played Paths of Glory before, Pursuit won't be difficult to pick up. If you look at all of the changed sections of the rulebook, there seem to be tons of places where things were changed. Because of the loose writing style, however, it's not as bad as it looks. My recommendation if you're a Paths player: Skim the Advanced Quick Start Guide, ignoring the sections on references to the rules. Then set up the sample game in the playbook and run through it, looking up *any* rule you didn't expect. Note that I found several actions in the sample game that were either impossible because the unit wasn't in the space (or because they'd forgot a unit was in a space), or misrepresented a rule (Severe Weather roll for a Tribal unit, placing reinforcements in a non-railroad space when the card called for it). By reading the rules carefully as you go, you'll get a much better idea of how things work. 

Next, read the Player Notes as a starting guide for what card plays are important if you wish. I find this sort of thing to be most worthwhile early in the learning process, as players will debunk most of the strategy tips within a year or so, so might as well use it now. Also skim through the rules, reading sections that you find interesting (such as the rules on Jihad and the Russian Revolution). Then set up the starting game and roll with it for a while.

A few notes about the counters: I'm told that the designers found that there were plenty of Fort Destroyed counters, but if the Churchill Prevails event goes well you could use up seven of them in no time at all. If the Fao fort in the Persian Gulf falls on the first turn, that's eight of the twelve counters, and the only other ones are on beachhead counters that you might need later on. I also have severe doubts that the control markers will be enough either. Most surprisingly, there are *no* counters for more than a handful of events, and those are ones you track on the board. When you play, say, Pan-Turkism, which is a prereq for several cards, you have to simply remember you played it by placing it on the table or simply using your memory. I can understand that they needed a lot more markers for this game (my God, there are a lot of little cardboard pieces on the board when you start) than usual, and they simply didn't have space for the event chits. A minor nit, but I always liked putting them on the turn record track as the game went on to see the story as it unfolded. 

All in all, the game is not any harder to learn than Paths, although there is definitely as much if not more chrome. Turkish Withdrawal; Severe Weather; limited placement of LCUs, both in the various "restricted" areas and TU/TU-A/BU units in swamps; irregular and tribal units; uprisings; limited Turk RPs; the Galipolli map; dozens of special units; it's a lot of chrome. I think it's necessary for a historically accurate game, but it's a lot of chrome and it speaks volumes as to why the theater hasn't seen a lot of strategic treatment in the past - Great War in the Near East struck me as problematic because there didn't seem to be a lot of reasons to behave in a historical manner (why not build the Sinai pipeline in 1914?), this game puts a lot more restrictions down, but mostly they are encapsulated and can be learned as you encounter them. 

Is it a fun game? So far it looks very promising, and the fact that there are two shorter scenarios that can ostensibly be played in an evening (4 hours) is a good thing. Knowing that the Russian Empire will fall at some point (and it will) is also a good thing, although allowing the Allied Player to delay it is a nice touch.

One huge nit that I'm astonished made it into the game. One of the biggest complaints I have about Paths is the attrition rule: at the end of the player actions, OOS units are immediately permanently eliminated. That's not a huge issue in and of itself, but it gives a large advantage to the player who plays a card last because they always have a chance to extract themselves from a bad position, while the starting player can get into trouble on the last player's card play and have no recourse. That puts a non-design burden on the player who plays cards first. I asked the designer of Paths about this, and he said it was *not* something he put into the game intentionally to gimp one side or the other. It was simply there to force players to keep a solid front of units. However, the reality is that the last player can take a low odds risk to cut off the other players units - I know, it's happened to me, and not because I wasn't set up well. It required a 6/1 dieroll, and the player got it, and I lost the game when he cut off three GE armies on the Western Front early on that I wouldn't see back. The shoe is on the other foot now, with the AP going first, but that's hardly a balancing mechanism - there is no connection between the games other than trying to keep the rules as similar as possible. Given that there is quite a bit of new material, that's kind of a specious argument. I use the Barbarossa to Berlin rule, where attrition for the starting player is figured at the end of *their* last card play, which makes the rule fair while maintaining the design choice's logic. 

I get shouted down a lot by people who disagree with me on this as it's been argued to death, but the simple fact is that the rule as written gives one side an advantage that was never intended as a balancing mechanism. That Ted Raicer never changed the rule speaks more to his ideology of changing as little as possible in the game once it's published, and I always play with the modified rule when my opponent allows it. After the last eight years in US politics, I think we now understand that ideology should never be the last word in anything. 

It's a nit, but it's the nits that can be visibly demonstrated and aren't fixed that really bug me. Obviously. 

All of that said, I'm still excited to give this a try, and that says something with *so* many titles competing for table space and time right now. I just got another *five* wargames from GMT for their big end-of-year clearance sale. If anyone can recommend a good psychiatrist, that might help.

Pursuit of Glory - First Look

Few games have been as anticipated (by me, at least) as Pursuit of Glory, the "sequel" of sorts to Ted Raicer's Paths of Glory. Like Paths, it's set during The Great War, but focuses exclusively on the southern Balkans and through the Middle East. While Raicer did not design this one, he did give it his "blessing" to use the Paths system as much as possible. Paths was arguably the first "big boy" version of the Card Driven system pioneered by Mark Herman and later brought to maturity by Mark Simonitch in Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage. Paths took the CDG system into the 20th century with lots of combat units (rather than one or two armies and a few loose CUs scattered around the board), a CRT rather than Battle Cards, and multiple fronts. The game suffered a bit from trying to include the Near Eastern theater, which almost required a different set of rules - my guess is that more than half the chrome in Paths was needed for that very reason.

As such, I was very excited that Pursuit (thanks, guys - PoG is now ambiguous. Nice work.) because all of the chrome would be directly in the system and not in just one area. Plus, it's a subject rarely covered in any detail in wargaming. The Great War in Europe Deluxe, another Raicer title, did feature a map devoted to just the Near East, but again there were so many extra rules and nothing really driving political and thus game behavior that it felt kind of strange. 

This is strictly a first look at the game and it's components - I have not yet gotten through the rules (and what a surprise *that* was) or even set the counters up on the map. This is in no way a review or judgement of the game as a game, strictly as a listing of what's in the box and my initial impression of it.

The map itself is surprisingly dense, almost to the level of For The People. Once you realize that this is less than one panel in the Paths map, now blown up to 8x size, it seems a little strange that there's so many places there. Of course, this *is* the cradle of civilization, but it's still a bit disconcerting. Places that didn't leave a lot of room for maneuver (the Caucasus, for example) now have some options, but places like the Sinai and the route along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from Basra to Baghdad are still going to be fairly channeled. The colors are occasionally garish (there's a little purple in the mix on the background), and I have to wonder if the registration came out differently than they expected. They certainly made good use of space, with boxes and information tucked into every corner. A triumph of function over form, which is not altogether a bad thing in my mind. Of course, there is an inset for the Gallipoli area, as well as some extra rules governing movement and combat there. We just can't get away from the chrome. 

The counters will be very familiar to Paths folks. There are still LCUs and SCUs, but now the SCUs can be formed up into LCUs (and broken down if you use the optional rule). This dichotomy of scale is the differentiating factor in Paths over previous games, and the thing that makes these titles work so well. You can have small units holding the line while larger units do the fighting, a very elegant way to implement concentration of force, and it comes into it's own here. There are also many counters to remind players that various events have taken place, as you would expect. Surprisingly, there are quite a few Indian counters, something that was limited to a few events in the earlier game. ANZAC units and Turkish-Arab units are also broken out from their parent countries/militaries. Finally, there are also irregular and tribal units, which are pretty limited but can cause headaches in your backfield if you aren't paying attention. Like the MEF in Paths, they are almost better as a threat in being rather than actually getting played.

The decks are about what you'd expect, and very similar in construction to Paths. Each side has its own deck, subdivided into Mobilization, Limited War, and Total War groups. The pictures are grayscale as before (the entire world was grayscale up into the 1930s, you know, and before the camera everyone consisted of oil-based paint), and the earlier typography and iconography is in place - X/y number to denote Ops/SR, and in roughly the same distribution. The events that seem to be really critical in this game concern the spread of Jihad throughout the Muslim world (even into Afghanistan - the more things change, the more they stay the same), the construction of the Berlin/Constantinople railroad (and the follow-on into Baghdad), and getting Lloyd George into command in Britain so that he can unleash Allenby out of Egypt. 

There is a lot of paper in this game, more than I would ever have imagined. There is a folded cardstock sheet giving quick descriptions of the game for both new players and for experienced Paths players (although make no mistake, you aren't just reading this thing and jumping into your first game - there are extensive additions to the system). Other cardstock sheets repeat information on counters, good rules to keep in mind, setup information (yay!), and the standard charts and tables (although there is only one of these, GMT typically makes these materials available online and it is very easy to print your own second copy). The CRT is very similar to Paths, although the SCU table appears to be a bit more deadly than before. 

It is the rules that are the biggest surprise. Paths had perhaps 16 pages of rules in a fairly good-sized font. The Pursuit rules take up a full 48 pages of fairly small type. There are the usual counter/marker pictures (a must for games like this - they act as a localized table of contents when you are wondering about specific rules), illustrated examples, but make no mistake - this game has a lot more rules than Paths, or at least they spend a lot more time covering minutiae. Fortunately, the "new" rules are clearly marked so that old-hands can read a subset and get going. A casual glance through the rules suggests somewhere between 30-50% of the rules are new or modified, so again, this is not a game you should just set up with your buddy and start playing. Regardless, this is far from a "first" wargame - given the rules density, I'd put it at something like one to two points on a ten point scale above Paths, perhaps a 6 or 7. I felt that Kutuzov did similar things to the Wellington system. Not a bad thing by any measure, but just something that buyers need to understand.

There is, thankfully, a playbook as well - this is a lot of material for a game like this, more like I'd expect in, say, a Vance von Borries East Front game. The playbook adds some optional rules (AIEEEE!!!! More Rules!!!!!!), as well as repeats of the setup info, a sample game that runs for two turns, strategy guides for all sides and nationalities, and (thankfully) detailed descriptions of the various card events in the game, which include some clarificiations. This is nice to have up front, although having materials I need to access during the game in the Playbook is something I find a bit annoying. Maybe they're on cardstock somewhere and I've missed it. 

Thankfully, the designers included a handful of "critical use" cards that they recommend you either hang onto until the time is right, or play immediately once you get them. Most CDGs have cards like this (in Shifting Sands, you could be punished for *every* card you didn't play because of the huge number of cards that kept getting added to the game), but it's nice to know that from a design perspective, some are more important than others. The game may end up ignoring their advice, but at least we understand that there are some fulcrums of history that were crucial to what followed, and this game tries to honor them appropriately.

Both the Playbook and Rules are printed on stock that seems like it will not last very long. Given the huge amount of paper included, this isn't a huge surprise - you have to cut costs somewhere. Comparing the stock to that of the game-specific book from MMP's new SCS title, Rock of the Marne, there's simply no comparison. Pursuit's book's paper isn't as bright, is more translucent, and just feels flimsy. However, given that most people will print out a new set of rules (although at 48 pages, this is not cheap for the end-user in ink or toner), I guess that it's a logical place to scrimp. Hard to fault that. I do recommend that you print out a new copy of the rules to keep yours looking nice as soon as they are available, and these days that means about a week or three. 

Finally, there are three scenarios that come with the game, a welcome addition for those of us who can barely get through half a game in a day. The first scenario runs from 1914 through Spring of 1916, and focuses on the initial moves, the rail line to Berlin, the war in the Caucasus, and the introduction of Bulgaria and the defeat of the Serbs. In historical terms, this was the period marked by the Mobilization and Limited War events. The second scenario picks up where the first left off, and continues through the rest of the war - the building of the infrastructure in the Sinai that allowed the British to press into Palestine and Syria, the collapse of the Russian Empire (in this game it is a given, as it should be, although exactly when it collapses is pretty important), and Romania's entrance in the Balkans. Of course, there is also a campaign game that covers the entire war. Given that the timeframe and turn length are the same as Paths, I'd assume that this game will take about the same amount of time to play once you've gotten a little experience. 

I'm still very excited to get this on the table, but getting a rulebook that looks to be *more* dense than OCS really has me wondering. I'm hoping that the bulk of it has to do with Gallipoli, Jihad, and other chrome (the "other" rules section takes up seven pages), and that most of the changes are more minor than they appear. Still, this is not what I was expecting at all, which goes to show just how much of a compromise the NE portion of Paths was. On the plus side, like all CDGs this title looks to spur interest in a topic that has been more or less ignored by most wargamers, and now it will be much easier for our community to have some starting points for further study. 

I will post further comments once I've actually pushed some units around. 

At Last, The October Surprise(s)

Ever since TV became the dominant medium in political races (the Internet is not quite there yet, it's too easy for people to choose sources that only agree with what they already think - although Fox News is certainly trying to leverage that predilection), we've been granted the concept of the "October Surprise". As the election draws nearer, that one bombshell that the opposition has kept in it's back pocket lo these many months gets pulled out and tossed onto the bonfire. With George H.W. Bush it was information strongly suggesting that he had been aware of the guns-for-hostages deal with the Iranians leading into the 1980 election of his running mate, Ronald Reagan. In the end, Willie Horton and the looming threat of black men raping white women throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts won the day, but I'm sure Daddy Bush was sweating for a while (and in fact, the race might have turned out differently had it taken place two weeks prior). 

This weekend, we got not one, but two October Surprises, and these will not only kill John McCain's chances at a presidency, but stand to greatly improve the chances of the Democrats getting a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate of 60 votes (they can no longer count on Lieberman, who is for all practical purposes Republican at this point). 

First up was the revelation that Freddie Mac paid a considerable amount of money to a GOP firm to tank federal regulation in 2005. This was after the entity, long a Democrat stronghold, went under Republican management after the 2004 election. Conservatives have been pointing to Clinton-era legislation as the source of problems in Freddie Mac that in turn led directly to the $700,000,000,000 crisis (plus a few hundred billion here and there for good measure), but it turns out that it was the Republicans putting the last nail in the coffin. While Americans have a lot to be worried about (climate change is arguably the most pressing), we get pretty fussy when there's a leak in the wallet. We also tend to think that if a stock is valued at a given rate that it will only get better and not worse, so when over a trillion dollars in assets disappeared down the rabbit hole recently, we tended to forget that until those stocks are translated into cash, they're just paper. Unfortunately, far too many people chose to live as if that value was somehow guaranteed, and their anger will be focused on whoever they decide is at fault. Given that the Republicans have more or less run the government for the last eight years, this shouldn't be a huge surprise when it's the people in charge.

Note: yes, I'm aware that the Democrats controlled the House for the past two years. They certainly didn't control the Senate. They also didn't have veto power, nor the votes in the Senate to override a veto. Or a filibuster, which the Republicans have been very good at. I find it ironic that it is this very lockstep mentality which served the Republicans so well for so long will be the lever that destroys their power at the Federal level for at least two years. 

The second surprise was Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama. Powell says that race has nothing to do with it, although certainly he understands both how far we've come and how far we have to go in America in that regard. Instead, he claimed that the pick of Sarah Palin showed extremely poor judgement, that McCain has not had a cohesive economic thought yet, and that he did not like the direction of the Republican Party. Given that they tossed him to the UN with marginal (and, eventually, bogus) evidence to make the case for invading Iraq, then tossed him from his position because he wasn't slavish enough while keeping Rumsfeld on, who should have been sacked within two months of the 2003 invasion, I can't say that this isn't a very bittersweet play by Powell, a man who people thought could be our first African-American president. BTW, he had nice things to say about Obama as well, but you know that revenge is a dish best served cold. 

Don't be surprised if Powell doesn't end up with a cabinet post in the Obama administration, maybe even his old one. I don't know if he was actually any *good* at it, mind you, but I could see him being asked. I know he has no desire for elected office, but if there was a "real" American, one who cared about the country rather than his party in the Bush Administration, it was Powell. He has no place in the Republican Party now, any more than Lieberman does with the Dems.

Two weeks before the election, with so much early voting going on (we live in Oregon, which has perhaps the sanest and cleanest balloting system in the country, and so already have our ballots), this was probably the time to make these moves. I have no idea who revealed the Freddie Mac information, and Powell certainly wanted to make as much of an impact as he could. However, even with the polls leveling out (as they do in the weeks right before an election) this thing was over after Palin's first interview with ABC News, and buried after the Couric interview. At that point, the only people Palin was impressing (in a favorable way) were the people with ideological blinders on. 

Barring an equivalent Surprise from the Republicans (and their lack of substantive issues - "socialism" is a joke when your party just socialized private loss), I predict a landslide win for Obama, more than 10 points and a 350+ electoral vote win. I'm not as sure of a filibuster-proof Senate, but I think that there's more hope today than there was yesterday (and it was looking like about a 30% shot then). When it comes right down to it, people will step in the booth, look at the ballot, and say to themselves, "I just can't vote for these clowns again." With that comes the second thought, one I've been having for about two years now, "I sure hope the Dems can do this right, because if they can't we are well and truly screwed." Because there are going to be too many issues we can no longer ignore, one of which would normally be cause for extreme alarm. Now, we have a world that hates us, both other countries and Mother Nature, a financial system that was clearly a house of cards thanks to a lack of regulation and rampant greed, and entanglement in a country we went to war with illegally and immorally that flushes vast sums of money down the drain. We have national debt up to our eyeballs, mostly accrued to pay for said war. There is no more wiggle room in a situation that requires immediate and correct action, and God help us all, regardless of who is in charge, if we don't get it right and get it right pretty damned quick. 

Me, I'm strongly considering buying that compound in the mountains and learning how to operate firearms.