inconsequential ruminations

I may be years behind the bleeding-edge, but I have been playing St Petersburg a lot recently online at Yucata or against the Westpark Gamer’s offline version.

I underestimated this game. It is true that the only path to victory is collecting aristocrats, but it has subtle strategic qualities that I only recognised after multiple plays.

The offline version has fiendish AI. In two-player games, I now beat it about 50% of the time, but I have played at least ten games. Definitely try it out.

Here are the podcasts I subscribe to at the moment. I change them often, but this is the current snapshot.

I have a lot of podcasts on this list, but I am ruthless about skipping out of them when they get boring. I might still have to trim the list as I now have over seven hours of audio queued on my Samsung YP-U2 MP3 player.

I have linked to the podcasts’ news feeds, rather than the websites themselves.

Games
Moritz Eggert – best bit of the Dice Tower although Gamer Tech is good too.
Point to Point – a little too focussed on competitive play, but otherwise excellent.
Roll 2d6 – rarely updated and focussed on American-style games, rather than Euros, but very well done.
The Aldie Show – Aldie holds his own as a solo podcaster
The Board Gamer – On hiatus. Steve is in my games group.

General Interest
BBC World Service documentaries
The Economist – summary of last week’s news.
The World Next Week – summary of next week’s upcoming news
Military History Podcast
Mark Kermode’s film reviews – my favourite podcast bar none
History Podcast
Radio 4 Choice

Linux, Science and Tech
IT Conversations
Sourcetrunk
Lugradio – Linux podcast. Juvenile, but otherwise good.
Security Now – was excellent, but has recently become at least 30% adverts.
Linux Reality
The Linux Action Show
The Linux Link Tech Show – sound quality is poor and they edit nothing, but these guys do the best interviews
FLOSS Weekly
Science Friday
The Real Deal

Last night Charles Vasey taught me Squad Leader. A painful experience. I hope to return the favour soon.

It is nothing like as complicated and slow as I thought. Rather like the ASL Starter Kits, you are taught in stages. To play the first scenario, you only have to read seven (dense) pages of rules.

We finished in two hours, but we could do it quicker, especially at Charles’ speed. Rather like Chess, once you let go of a piece you have to leave it in place. You cannot examine stacks or check line of sight (LOS) unless you intend to shoot. If there is no LOS, you lose the shot. Charles, an evil bully, loves this and punished the quivering noob mercilessly.

I have a lot to learn about the tactics. Probably the most important first lesson is that running across open ground in front of machine guns is a very bad idea.

In this screenshot from VSQL, the Vassal module for Squad Leader, the Germans were firing along the black lines and the Russians along the red. The two long black arrows were devastating fire lanes. If crossing these, expect your troops to suffer a morale check, half of whom will fail.

As the Russians, I held buildings E4, J2, N4 and M2. Half my troops were ordinary. The rest were Guardsmen toting submachine guns in E4. Charles, held buildings H5, K5, L7 and I7. I7 was a particularly nasty machine gun nest. I had the advantage in numbers. He had the advantage in weaponry. I had to capture two of his stone buildings.

After an ineffectual first attack, Charles wiped out my ordinary troops by the end of the first turn. We managed to forget his first round entirely, but it did not matter as the Germans had already minced my cannon fodder.

In the second turn, I charged F5 with my guardsmen. Half of them survived the hail of fire from J4, who jammed their Light Machine Gun (LMG).

In the third turn, I had taken the entire F5 building, but the machine guns in I7 destroyed the remaining guardsmen completely. I had no hope of capturing two buildings, so resigned.

It was short, but I still really enjoyed it. Charles seems keen to play more, so I’m game.

I have an eBay bid on a Squad Leader set for £1. At that price it would be rude not to buy.

I spent 5 and a half hours of my life enjoying Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage last night. Rob came over and we had a titanic struggle.



I tried to play Hannibal several years ago, when I had my gaming rebirth. I bought the Avalon Hill version over eBay, before prices went crazy. I persuaded my brother to try it with me and we learnt that sad, painful lesson that you must always read war game rules thoroughly before you play them – ideally both players should. That should be part of a mental health warning on war game boxes. Anyway, it was a major disaster, putting me off war games for years and putting my brother off games in general. Now after playing games like Monty’s Gamble and Ardennes ‘44 (also by Mark Simonitch), Hannibal does not seem too bad.

The new Valley Games version looks absolutely fantastic, with top-notch artwork that is perfectly usable. I am really looking forward to getting the preorder bonus General miniatures. The Roman and Carthaginian dice are a flash of genius.



Most importantly, the rules are nearly perfect. We had almost no questions. The original rules were good anyway, after several revisions from the earlier version, and Valley Games made no mistakes.

I find the level of whining from the BoardGameGeek community at Valley Games totally mystifying. The interview at Boardgame News was harsh too. These people deserve proper respect for doing such a good job. They have delivered a game that no one else could with no major problems. No one enters the game business looking for fame and fortune. They do it from the love of the games. At the end of the day, we all have tons of underplayed games on our shelves – so why give these guys so much impatient abuse?

The game play is very similar to We the People – so similar that I am surprised their BGG ratings are so different. It was good for me in this game that I had played We the People so recently.

From a strategy point of view, a few things really stuck out for me:

• strong attacks into Italy will be tough to pull off – has anyone reading managed to sack Rome?
• combat tends to be inconclusive, unless you can surround the loser with political control markers and combat units.
• it is difficult to convert your enemy’s political control markers without overwhelming force or the right strategy cards.

I should probably read Andy Daglish’s strategy article, but the fun for me is to work it out for myself.

Game balance seems to be very fine. According to the World Board Gaming Championships report, players were only bidding one to two political control markers to play as the Carthaginians.

My only real complaint is about the Battle Cards. They add lots of time, for not much strategy. For smaller battles towards the end they became quite irritating. There is a controversial CRT available, based on some probability analysis of the battle cards, claiming to be accurate to 2%. It does miss out some tactical subtleties, but I suspect it would be worth it for the increased speed.

I did not mind playing this for five and a half hours at all. We chatted a lot and took it easy. Next time we will definitely bring it in under four hours, possibly close to three.

9/10 after one play – the only way is up.