Dun! Dun! Dun! Dun! I've done the ton!

The winter blues' bloglag hinting at outright blockage since my last post three weeks ago has been all the more trying for yours truly because this post marks another small landmark for 2009 here at RD/KA!:- my 100th post; more in one year than any since 2005, when I began to blog.

I didn't expect to take nearly 4 years to surpass in some 10 months what I'd first achieved in less than 5. So this is very satisfying let me assure you dear readers. RD/KA!'s 5th birthday is next year; if the bloggery continues in this vein, then I would hope to see 2010 marked also by my 500th post. Fingers crossed I guess. :0)

To celebrate I'd like to look ahead at what the rest of 2009 and then 2010 might bring here at RD/KA!. But first, naturally enough...

Boardgames roundup
There's been plenty of FtF gaming in since my last post, a cheering total of 20 plays of 7 different games in 6 sessions through those 3 weeks.

Carcassonne
As I noted in passing last month, after languishing on the shelf for more than 2 years, the highly esteemed tile-laying game Carcassone finally returned to the table a couple of months ago. Of the regular crew only Gav had played it before, but the game has quickly worked its charms on everyone else who's played it. Early results have shown Gav is as much the player to watch at Carcassonne as he has recently shown himself to be at Settlers.

In a nice change, 2 of my 7 games of Carcassonne this month were played on a visit to a friend- Mike, and his girlfriend- Antje. Antje had played the game with her German mother and was keen to give it another go. Cue a pleasant evening. It turns out that Antje's not played Settlers yet, so I'm hoping that another pleasant evening will be on the cards sometime soon. =D

Ivanhoe
In the same vein of old games and new gamers, a recent Friday night visit on Badger's part took an unexpected turn when we were joined by my neighbour- Liam (last seen fantasising about being Rommel). A couple of hours' blether later it was clear Badger and I weren't going to be playing the expected Conflict of Heroes. So I suggested a 3-player game of Ivanhoe, Badger's and my recent filler of choice. Liam accepted cheerfully and went on to win 3 of the 4 games we played. He'll be back! B-)

Conflict of Heroes
Badger'd made a previous appearance, at which we had played Conflict of Heroes, naturally enough. We moved on to the next 2 scenarios, and... there were tanks, at long last! I only had 2 puny Russian T-26's, but was able to use them to great effect because I deployed them hidden to ambush Badger's German column entering from the board edge. Another highlight of this game was the chase: one of my T-26's trundling around in circles as it tried to evade the pursuing German tank. I won that game, and we both already look forward to the rematch. ^_^

Wings of War
The first choice of game being Andy's a couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves taking to the skies because Andy wanted to give his new in Wings of War: The Dawn of WWII a run. We ended up playing a game each of WoW-W1 and WoW- WW2:

• Andy and Donald each took a Bf109 against my Spitfires.
• Andy and my WW1 Central Powers against Donald and Gav's Allies in Wings of War WWI: Famous Aces and Watch Your Back. We settled on a single-seater and a two-seater each:
  

1. A pair of Roland C II's, a Fokker DVII and the Red Baron's Fokker Triplane for Andy and I.
2. A pair of DH4's, a Sopwith Camel and a Spad XIII, for Donald and Gav.
   

As before we used Andy's collection of WW1 models for the game.

A couple of pictures as the dogfight starts to get intense

I confess that the irresistable toy value of these aside, I had been originally sceptical of their merits as playing pieces, because I thought they'd overcomplicate dealing with what I'd remembered as the commonplace of airplane cards overlapping. It turns out that using these models in WoW is nowhere near as footery as I'd feared; in fact it might well be that they're easier to use than the cards, as well as being much more attractive.

Andy and I are talking about putting together a Wings of War campaign game of some sort. We're hoping that this might prove more popular than our our late, unlamented attempt at a Crimson Skies campaign. We'll find out once we get it rolling I guess. :-\

Fluxx and Munchkin
Dave made one of his welcome appearances last Sunday, making 3 with Donald and myself. These 2 fillers appeared on the table after he'd been introduced to our current favourite Euro- Carcassonne, naturally enough (at which Donald won 2 victories suggesting that Gav might have to look to his laurels).

Both Fluxx and Munchkin were new to Dave, but that didn't stop him sharing the honours with Donald- 1 game each of both. Donald found these results particularly pleasing: because I'd scored a duck on the day (probably because I should've known better than pick up a duck in a dungeon); a victory to be added to his February trouncing. :-/

Descent
Donald couldn't resist the lure of the 'Seat of Power' when his choice of game came up. So it was that we descended once more 'Into the Dark'. I was really pleased to play Descent again a year after our previous run through the quests from the basic set. This was just a trial run so that Donald could get used to the role of the Overlord before we move on to the adventures from The Well of Darkness. I'm really looking forward to this! ;)

Friday night firefight, Saturday night swordplay

The D.I. reached new extremes last week, as some of my readers already know. To equate this suffering consciousness to the grief of bereavement, breaking up, or some similar personal tragedy will probably surprise no one, but the sheer relentless physicality of my belabouring brainwaves is something I believe confounds the understanding of people whose empathic imagination avails them of naught but notions of feeling 'a bit down', or somesuch. In any event I consoled myself with a bash of light reading after the heavy duty WW2 history which'd been my recent diet. But it was writing last Tuesday's article that helped more than anything else.

Conflict of Heroes
Thanks to the DI it's a fortnight since I've played any boardgames. The old phrase 'got any gaming' doesn't work anymore. My ongoing life as a mobster in Mafia Wars @fB means that I'm gaming online all the time, albeit in a restricted gamespace reminiscent of a laboratory test rig for rodents: XP! Loot! Levels! -: lovely! More? Better still. Rinse and repeat.

Anyhoo, Badger was round a couple of weeks ago. The pair of us were still looking for the light relief which has characterised our recent gaming; and I was looking for something in the WW2 line a bit more substantial than Memoir'44; all of which proved an auspicious moment to introduce Badger to Uwe Eikert's highly successful entrant into the WW2 tacsim scene, Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear - Russia, 1941-42.

Scenario 1 - Partisans: In the belly of the beast
The second World War's second summer campaigning season draws to a close in the heart of Russian Europe. Hitler's Wermacht is within sight of the gates of Moscow and the Soviet regime of Bolshevik infamy is soon to celebrate a 24th birthday widely expected to be its last. Remnants of the shattered Red Army surviving in the blitzkrieg's wake go to ground and regroup to wage partisan warfare against the crucial weakness of the apparently invincible panzers: their ever-lengthening supply lines.

It'll've been about a month now since Priliuki - a small town some 100km east of the Kiev landbridge between the Pripet marshes and the Dnieper - came under fascist occupation, barely enough time for senses to've recovered from the shock of impact. Those few short weeks later handfuls of desperate and determined men are already launching their lilliputian barbs against the Nazi goliath. On this day the partisans don't know their plans are betrayed and the Germans've decided to spring the ambush.

Scenario 2 - The Gap: Woke up next morning
Scenario 2 rewinds those 3 months to find the situation little better for the Russians some 650km almost due west. A striking feature of the early days of Barbarossa that summer, and one often overshadowed by the image of the blitzkrieg Goebbels carefully crafted, was the extreme unpredictability of the Russian response. All across the front entire divisions were disappearing into the German bag without a fight; yet here and there stubborn units threw spanners into the Wermacht's works as they found the wherewithal to resist in the face of a military onslaught hitherto unprecedented in its might and success.

Set in Poland the day that dawned after this stupendous blow first struck, scenario 2 represents a more conventional advance to contact. The Russians have found some terrain in which they can make a stand. Every bit as desperate though probably less determined, these units caught in the first wave of the fascist horde have no option but to sell themselves as dearly as possible for the sake of buying a bit of time which might add up to something if the action were to be repeated often enough elsewhere.

What went down
We played #1 twice, swapping sides- the honours were shared (we-ell, Badger did win our first game); and #2 once, with me as the Russians.

Score
Badger 1
Me 2
:0)

Afterthoughts
I was really pleased to play CoH again at long last. The 9 months since I first played have seemed much longer as I kept looking up to see the game stay on the shelves where it's rested for so long. I can report that since then, surprise surprise, there's been a bit of an online backlash against CoH, with fans of other WW2 tacsims recanting their initial enthusiasms with all the chagrin of the self-annointed prodigal (no names, no packdrill, since I'm not dealing with any of this in detail; you can check appropriate places at BGG and CSW if you're at all interested).

I can see no good grounds for this myself, and am left with the impression that people were largely blaming CoH for not being the game they thought it was going to be; as opposed, that is, to letting CoH be the game its designer wanted it to be. I've followed the online CoH chat enough down the months to know that sure, there are some greater or lesser technical errors in unit representation, while the core system needs work if it is to survive intact the demands that will be placed on it with the range of supplements Academy Games have planned for CoH.

Conflict of Heroes's merits were all on show in our 3 games:

• It is incredibly easy to teach:

1. The graphic design makes the playing pieces easy to understand and interpret.
2. The alternating sequence of play enables the 'pick it up and run with it' approach to teaching so ably supported by the essential simplicity of the core system.
3. Scenario 1 has a near ideal low unit count, a limited range of terrain types, and an easy prescribed setup; so that it is almost absurdly easy to get it started.

• Even at its most basic CoH is very rich:

1. For all its simplicities, scenario 1 enjoys variations even in deployment alone sufficient to leave it still feeling fresh to me; I can only assume that this effect will be magnified in the more complex scenarios.
2. The impulse-driven Igo-Ugo turn sequence has been artfully constructed so that no decision to commit a new unit to the fray can be taken lightly; ie. it keeps you on the edge of your seat all the damn time!
3. The Action cards and the Hit counters are systems which add layers of chrome sufficient to satisfy this grognard.

• The game is very dynamic:

1. In another short session and with Badger a newb, we managed to play 3 games in no more than that many hours.
2. The pieces move across the map with zip sufficient to allow players to attempt manoeuvres of satisfying scope.
3. There is a brutal brevity to the combat system which allows local decisions to be forced and that contact's consequences to cascade across the battlefield, even in the short 5/6 turns which is the typical scenario length.
   

Badger took to the game quickly and declared himself satisfied, so I'm hoping that we'll see some more CoH at the earliest possible opportunity. Who knows, I might even get to use some tanks.

I should note here that Badger and I were playing the mutant 'not quite a 2nd edition' CoH which patches CoH:AtB with new rules from its sister game, Conflict of Heroes: Storms of Steel! - Kursk 1943. The changes are to the core rules for activating units and to the rules for group activation- very important mechanics in other words; and I have to say that I think they are well worthwhile if not utterly necessary. I find myself wondering how many of those naysayers would feel differently if they'd seen the game in action with these changes? It is to the credit of Uwe Eikert and those at Academy Games that they've taken so much internet criticism on board and come up with a better design at the end of it all.

Ivanhoe
A friend was visiting that same weekend. Although he's played computer games, Willy (previously seen accompanying me on my recent trip to the Imperial War Museum) has played no boardgames since the his family boardgames days. He was interested in having a go. I thought that Ivanhoe would be suitable for a newb.

I was right. Willy took to the game like a duck to water, and pulled off a creditable outright draw. That is to say, we were tied on all 3 of the metrics my notes enabled:

• Games won.
• Total number of tokens won.
• Greatest margin of victory.

Score
Young turk 6
Brave Sir John 6
:-\

Afterthoughts
I always enjoy a good session of Ivanhoe, and that night was no exception. Willy was a quick learner and was soon playing like a pro; eg. there was a moment when, sitting on 4 tokens Willy just needed a single colour. Fearing a lead of that colour as a punt at the very least, I was puzzled when Willy made what looked like a weak lead. My puzzlement lifted when, holding the lead he promptly led the winning purple 7 which'd been prohibited the previous turn. I was impressed.

All that aside, I was also pleased the way that Willy quickly 'got into character'; that is to say: I was gratified by the way he took to Ivanhoe's expression of its theme. Regular readers might remember I commented once before that I think Ivanhoe is more thematic than it's typically given credit for, perhaps even that I addressed the issue tangentially some months back; so I was pleased to see this.

I'm not going to go into detail about this right now (I'd never get this post finished otherwise!); instead I'll just note my suspicion that some people might have expectations inherited from more obviously tactical skirmish boardgames or RPG's that confound their ability to interpret Knizia's method of abstracting the game from its theme. More another time no doubt. ;)

Again, the toasters' offensive

No, not some Philip K. Dick story; nor even another glorious Cylon victory for yours truly; but a return to the topic of my last post, in which I'd wanted to tease out the implications of the issues that've come up across the table during our games of Battlestar Galactica. Arriving later that same Sunday Donald convinced me that I'd been too allusive altogether, because he'd come away with the impression that I don't like the game. I couldn't let this misconception lie.

All carping aside Battlestar Galactica is my #1 multiplayer pick of 2008. It's a long time since a multiplayer game has hit so many high notes in so few plays (7, to be precise). Regular readers should remember that those 'procedural limitation' caveats I've maintained these past 9 months stemmed in the first instance from my experience of Arkham Horror, FFG's shiny new edition of the cult Call of Cthulhu boardgame. This had palled very quickly for me when, during a break from my Ashes of Middenheim campaign, and after a couple of plays whose inevitable clunks and fumbles almost span out of control under the weight of 6 players, Gav and I cakewalked a 2-player teamup against Cthulhu.

Shallow gamespace souring a game in which I was otherwise willing to invest time and/or money wasn't a new experience to me: GW's Chainsaw Warrior and AH's Patton's Best- both 1987, are two noteworthy examples. Like Arkham Horror, both games enjoyed some mechanics slick enough to be briefly atmospheric; in fact, losing half my crew when my Sherman was shot out from under me in my lone game of Patton's Best stands out as an incident as utterly shocking as any in my gaming career. Nonetheless these solitaires barely qualified as puzzles. Willing suspension was therefore rapidly suspended and the games were put aside never to be revisited.

Uninteresting save as historical curiosities these games might be, but more pointless even is a children's cardgame I learned as Strip Jack Naked, more commonly known as Beggar-My-Neighbour. This is the only game I know which is decided by the setup, in this case the deal. Check the rules and you'll see: the players simply carry out a process in which they neither make decisions nor change the order of the cards (grab a deck of cards and run through a few penalties if you don't believe me); ergo a fixed outcome derived from a single event- the deal (we stopped playing this game once we'd figured this out, naturally enough).

Simple as they are, even Noughts and Crosses or Snap allow players' decisions to determine outcomes; and exercises in random generation Chainsaw Warrior and Patton's Best might be, but their gameplay consists of an authentic plurality of events, not the singularity that reduces Beggar-My-Neighbour's gamespace to an effective null, less even than a simple coin toss by virtue of the overbearing weight of the system of a game mathematicians believe is capable of playing forever once begun.

The inherent limitations of its solitaire engine notwithstanding, Arkham Horror did bring something new to the table with that cooperative gameplay- a genuine puzzle:

• In the form of cooperative problem solving.
• And with the content of the friction as players negotiate their way to their solution, or not; friction which, it must be remembered, can be as much sheer whim and fancy as it can be simple poor judgement or bad luck.

Unfortunately, this new dimension Arkham Horror brings to the solitaire engine's gamespace can't save the game from its poor expression of the quintessential Lovecraftian themes of cosmic horror and irresistible ruination. Why? Because no one is ever turned, whether by possession, greed or madness; and no matter what happens everyone stays in the game until the final encounter. Not much jeopardy in Arkham Horror's Cthulhuverse in other words; and even less paranoia.

All of this is why I've been holding out on Battlestar Galactica for so long: disappointed more than once down the years as I have explained, I was afraid that BSG's variant on the solitaire engine represented by the Crisis deck would ultimately prove similarly limiting to the promising Loyalty rules, so again scuppering the game's thematic expression.

Those recent games which had fallen rather flat had begun to convince me that this was already happening. Moreover Gav had pronounced his hardening dislike, which fed that conviction. I feared that gameplay was threatening to become utterly stereotyped thus proving BSG no better in the end than Arkham Horror. But, as I said last time: Gav still hasn't played a Cylon; I'd really like to think that he'll see that BSG is a whole different kettle of fish once he's had a taste of that. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
Battlestar Galactica boardgame:
- My 2009 gaming wishlist #2
- Done down by dastardly Donald's devious duplicity!
- The fickle finger of fate
- Toasters, toasters, everywhere!
- A moment to marvel at...
- The end is nigh?
- What price survival?