inconsequential ruminations

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.

On a whim, I gave BrettspielWelt another shot and I am delighted to say that it is actually usable now. Rather than starting in a shoddily drawn 1980’s video-game world, you go straight to a simple page where you see open games waiting for players and there is a nice selector for starting new games on the right.

Performance seems to be faster too, but that may just be that I have upgraded my computer and ISP since I last tried BSW. The Java client still has that weird height/width problem with the game window, but at least I remembered it from last time.

The game design is also better. I tried Caylus and Saint Petersburg. Caylus is very impressive and could even be better online. St Petersburg is just serviceable – the user interface of the Westpark Gamers installable version is much better.

Please Skype me if you want to play.

Tycoon



Four of us played Wolfgang Kramer’s Tycoon last night. I had to persuade the boys a bit as the horrendous box cover is almost on a par with my Schmidt version of Acquire.



I have played Tycoon twice now and it is not too bad. It was one of the first area majorities games. By modern standards it feels a bit mechanical and slow at times, but that might partly be my bias against the ugly components.

There are at least two unclear rules:

1. For scheduled flights you cannot move less than the alloted number of spaces.
2. When you take out a loan, you cannot do anything else, including buying tickets.

Apart from the ugly plastic 80’s components and these rough edges in the rules, Tycoon is a winner. Money is tight and you have to think ahead. I thought about writing an exhaustive review, but just read Mike Siggins instead.

The new El Capitan reworking just released at Essen is definitely worth a look. Apparently the rules have been updated and the new components from Mike Doyle are gorgeous – no plastic in sight.




For Sale

We also gave For Sale another quick spin. This one is so reliable. I have upgraded it to 8/10.

I recently found a fanzine about the UK board games convention scene – The Queen’s Lane Advertiser.

I enjoyed Essen last year very much, but I’d like to try something closer to home and less hectic, so I’ll keep an eye on this.

I put together a quick RSS feed for the fanzine using PonyFish.

I have been playing at the play-by-web site Yucata.de recently. I played there about a year ago, but it has moved on significantly.

The list of games has grown and it seems more refined. It is still an amateur site, with a couple of strange user interface quirks, but it is very fast and easy to use.

The game selection work really well for PBW too. Short and sharp games like Pente and Saint Petersburg are typical. I have gone off playing heavy games like wargames online. Getting back into the game situation every turn takes so long I find it stressful. The games at Yucata are pitched perfectly for my current tastes. Super Duper Games is another site that has games at this level, but last time I played the site was very slow.

So far I have tried:

• Capt’n W. Kidd – a game of fighting pirates maneuvering for position on a ship’s deck. You are trying to surround and crowd your opponents pawns, while moving along ropes. It has capture rules similar to Go. Not bad.
• Just 4 Fun – Go-Moku/Renju but you can only play stones when you have the right total of number cards. Too luck-dependent.
• Chinagold – Weird area control game. I did not really get to grips with it. I like abstracts with a little excitement and this has none.
• Hey! That’s My Fish! – This is the best of the bunch so far. It reminds me of Amazons, but played on hexes and capturing variable points for each move. This would be a nice Christmas gift for an eight year old.

It is a very nice site. I have donated a few Euros. Please challenge me to a game. My user name is icheyne.

To my surprise I have become slightly addicted to Warbook, a basic, but fun, Facebook-based massively multiplayer fantasy spreadsheet game (MMFSSG).

Like all these games, there is no real goal, but it is fun bashing others and being bashed. My Warbook name is inicehyena. If you want to play, please comment here and I’ll send you an invitation, getting me a referral bonus…