"Roll dice and kick ass!"

Wargames, politics and ethics #2: Politics? You can run, but you can't hide

2011-07-28T12:16:00.011+01:00

Broad-brush polemic ruffles feathers

A book I picked up on sight from a recommendation on the WW2 SS Counter Colours thread, Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II's 2008 scholarly study, The Myth of the Eastern Front: the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture was going to become an article even as I first read it – avidly – over xmas last year. Researching for this series- in which The Myth of the Eastern Front was going to feature centrally, I found the military hobbyists' inevitable internet hot flushes in its wake. Inevitable? In response to an academic tome?

The biggest invasion of the
biggest war in history:
a lot there to forget

Yes, because The Myth of the Eastern Front is part analytical historical deconstruction, and part broad-brush polemic against the 'romancers'- promulgators of an idealised vision of the Wehrmacht and the SS as honourable soldiers fighting a 'Lost Cause' against the Red horde. Smelser and Davies root this mythology in the Wehrmacht's 'last campaign': the ex-generals' postwar years of networking and spin aimed at rehabilitating the image of the German armed forces on the Eastern front.

Enemies after a mutually
embarrasing past affair?

As Cold War tensions rose, the wartime memories of the Soviet people's heroic resistance against Nazi Germany became a propaganda casualty. A remarkable act of historical forgetting was engineered, apparently rapid and profound enough to turn around the war generation's own perceptions of the Eastern front's importance in the Second World War largely before they reached middle-age.

Cold War myths deconstructed

Uncle Joe

Smelser and Davies start with the mainstream suspicion of, and hostility to the USSR in America in the 1920s and 30s. They demonstrate how- through massive media coverage of the Red Army's resistance to the onslaught unleashed by Germany with Operation Barbarossa on June 22nd 1941, the American people were won over to widespread sympathy and active support for the Soviet people during the Second World War. Pride of place among the breadth of media sources Smelser and Davies cite should undoubtedly go to TIME, March 29, 1943, the 'USSR Special' featuring Stalin on the cover.

Evil genius,
or just genius?

In over 100 pages of what was then cutting-edge reportage, the magazine celebrates Russia's history, its economic achievements, the diverse peoples and their love for art, culture and sports, and spotlights some key personalities from the Soviet war effort. There's even an article styling Lenin 'The Father of Modern Russia', which credits him as "Perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and telling us elsewhere that "Lenin's genius brought order out of chaos and saved the USSR." You don't have to hold a torch for the former Soviet Union to see that these pages glowing with enthusiasm for the Soviet cause are tantamount to an endorsement of the Soviet regime.

Criminals no more: the German generals in the Cold War

Defeated & dishonoured
in front of the world

In the years immediately following Germany's surrender on 8th May 1945, the Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Military Tribunals make plain the full nature of the war crimes of the German war machine in its genocidal war of conquest and enslavement on the Eastern front. German generals are in the dock, on the scaffold; the General Staff tout court might be next. As the authors explain, these trials weren't even finished before the new realities of the postwar world began to make their impact felt. The emerging crisis in relations with the Soviets meant that political pressure to exculpate the accused and the convicted began to come to bear.

Halder (left) with
'the boss' meeting
Finland's Mannerheim

A significant turning point came when the American army rescued General Franz Halder from a possible war crimes trial on the grounds that he played an indispensable role in the Operational History (German) Section of the United States Army Historical Division. Halder in fact went on to direct the History Section for several years, gathering around him a group of politically reliable former officers to provide the US Army with an appropriate account of German operations on the Eastern front. Then, after the Korean War, the realisation grew that a new German army was needed as part of an anti-Soviet alliance in Western Europe. The surviving German generals became a major asset to the American military.

'The boss' visits
Von Manstein in the
Ukraine in 1943

Figures like Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein enjoyed great authority in US army circles because of their experience fighting the Soviet army on the Russian front. The authority these men and their wartime fellows enjoyed ensured an uncritical, even adulatory, reception for their self-serving memoirs when these were published. The ex-generals' mythologised account of the Wehrmacht's 'clean war' on the Eastern front established as the authoritative version, the way was open for a flood of popular histories, personal memoirs and even pulp novels, all straightforwardly pro-German; all of which in sum contributed to the reimagining of the German attack on the USSR as a war in which German soldiers were cast the main victims, whether of the Russian hordes, the climate and terrain, or the megalomaniacal folly of Hitler himself.

Learning (from) history?

When wargamers confront the political and ethical implications of our hobby, a common argument heard is that wargaming is educational, that it teaches the horror and folly of war by giving hobbyists insight into the human costs of battle. There's more than a grain of truth in this, even if actually anti-war wargamers still appear thin on the ground. For example, I think that the rehumanisation of the enemy is valuable in and of itself because dehumanisation of the enemy is an essential element of war propaganda on all fronts- home and fighting.

But of course, wargames themselves are so abstract and wilfully decontextualised that they themselves can't really contribute much to rehumanising the enemy, or to generating any other insights into warfare as a grotesque human folly. That side of things typically stems from reading around the subjects which most interest you on the tabletop. And insights of this ilk can arise in peculiar ways. For me as a teenage tankie, pictures were particularly influential.

Context is everything

Just regular guys?

Take the picture here on the right (from Brian L. Davis' authoritative German Army Uniforms and Insignia, 1933-1945). This is a less gruesome sample of several pictures which used to fascinate me as a youngster. What drew me to this picture was its sheer mundanity. The contrast between the flanking NCOs' cheesy grins and central officer's forced grin is a very human touch, and the photo looks for all the world like a tourist snapshot. I used to find myself wondering if these guys had any notion of what their futures would bring them.

The German Question: old
& very important

Smelser and Davies' convincing deconstruction of how the German view of the Eastern Front became the official American view after the war casts my youthful musings in a new light. Why? Because I was then simply unaware of how my otherwise perfectly reasonable interest in humanising the enemy was conditioned by the pro-German bias Smelser and Davies explain. That is to say: I always assumed that picture was taken on the Eastern Front. I don't know why, but I did. And when I wondered what might've happened to those three men, I never seriously imagined that they might've been active agents of genocide. For me they were always hapless victims. If that's not an example of the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht' in action, I don't know what could be.

Conclusion
The fundamental point that Smelser and Davies make which is of importance to wargamers is this: an entire branch of our hobby was founded on the bill of goods sold by the German ex-generals during the Cold War. Their agenda- to sanitise the role of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, was both personal and political. The legacy of those efforts still infuses our hobby today. I say this not to point the finger at wargaming as a den of romancers. Instead, I think that this poses challenges to wargamers: to be more critical of those politicised myths; and to find a role for that critique in inspiring new approaches to designing games. It is challenges of this ilk which make me believe that The Myth of the Eastern Front is uniquely useful to wargamers who are interested in new insight into the hardy perennial of our hobby- the 'German question'. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
Wargames, politics and ethics
- #1: Ah, that old bugbear

My first (and last?) game of España 1936

2011-07-16T01:47:00.016+01:00

A long time coming

Regular readers will be well aware that I'm not a negative reviewer as a rule. It's too easy to find negativity on the web, and the first editorial decision I made way back in 2005 was that I wasn't going to contribute to it here at RD/KA!. Also, when I review anything, I've paid for it and therefore have a good reason to want to like it. Every so often though, something comes along which disappoints me sufficiently to prompt a distinct lack of enthusiasm to which I cannot but give vent. Antonio Catalán's game of the Spanish Civil War- España 1936, is a case in point.

Dust off and dust-up

Waiting in the wings

España 1936 is a game I bought on sight when I saw it in Static Games, an FLGS: the subject of the Spanish Civil War interested me and the box ad-copy showed nice-looking components. It then joined my collection of dust-gatherers, where it stayed for a good three years. Only recently, with Liam's newfound enthusiasm for strategic boardgames, did I begin to think that I might finally get a chance to bring España 1936 to the table. My thinking was this game would serve as a useful bridge between Labyrinth and Twilight Struggle on the one hand, and games like Unhappy King Charles! on the other.

And so, on Wednesday night Liam and I sat down to have a go. Five hours later, I'd won the game, but España 1936 had lost the vote of confidence.

Components: a source of satisfaction

The mapboard

Colourful & functional,
but hardly inspired

Let me be clear right from the start: España 1936 isn't a broken game, nor even a particularly bad game, it's just a disappointing game. None of this disappointment came from the components as such, which lived up to expectations. The mapboard is nice. Sure, comparing España 1936's board to those from Labyrinth and Twilight Struggle doesn't flatter the former, but it's still an example of clean and functional graphic design offering nothing to complain about, visually at least. It's also fully mounted, which is always appreciated.

The cards

History, events &
combat modifiers

The four decks of cards: two each for the Republicans and the Nationalists- 1936-37 and 1938-39, are very nice too. The artwork is slightly cartoony in style, but this is a consistent design aesthetic throughout España 1936 and it contributes to the game's strong visual appeal, which is better than average compared to your typical wargame. Each card has three elements- the historical background, the event, and the combat modifiers; and these are all clearly depicted. The graphics for the combat modifiers are particularly good because they distinguish neatly between the two kinds of modifier: bonus/penalty dice; and bonus/penalty DRMs.

The counters

Well laid out with
some neat touches

The counters too are nice. They're one of the game's best features in fact. Their vivid colours and images are more than just attractive, they're also useful in play, making it easy to recognise each side, and each side's different units. And there is quite a variety of troop units on each side. The Republicans have the Regular and Basque armies, the Anarchist and Communist militias, and the famous International Brigades; the Nationalists, their own Regulars, Carlist and Falangist Militias, Legionnaires, the Army of Africa and Italian troops. Each side also has its generals, tanks, aircraft and ships (for the optional naval game, which Liam and I didn't play, so there will be no comments on it here).

Sizes & shapes: smart
graphic design makes
checking stacks easier

What I like most though is the use of different sizes and shapes for different units. There are three shapes: hexagonal- the generals; square- ships; and round- troops, tanks and aircraft, which come in three sizes:

The smallest are the strength 1 and 2 troops.
In the middle are the strength 3 and 5 troops.
The largest are the tanks and aircraft.

This isn't the first time I've seen this: my original Gibsons Games edition of History of the World does something similar, but it's a definite plus for España 1936 that it uses the same approach, whose effect is to make it easy to scan the board for your opponent's concentrations of strength.

Gameplay: familiar features competently executed
The system in general

A handy player aid

In a mere 8 pages of rules featuring large print and several well-illustrated examples, España 1936 features all the mechanics you'd expect of a point-to-point movement wargame:

FAI (Iberian Anarchist
Federation) poster

Controlling/contesting boxes: only one side's troops/both sides' troops in a box. Winning the game is based on controlling objective cities (the yellow boxes): there are several instant victory conditions, the most important of which is probably controlling 7 objective cities. If there is no instant win, the Republican wins if they have combat units in three objective cities at the end of turn 10.
Movement, with the limitations imposed by moving into or out of controlled or contested boxes. Only troops and tanks actually move (aircraft and generals are freely placed); movement is essentially unlimited although units must stop moving if they enter/leave an enemy controlled/contested box.
Stacking limits: 4 troops units/box (generals, tanks and aircraft don't count towards stacking limits).
Supply, with the attendant effects on movement and combat: a box is in supply if there is an adjacent friendly controlled/contested box; troops out of supply can neither move nor attack.

Combat, naturally enough.

There is also an events phase, and a replacements phase on every odd-numbered turn. These mechanics are all straightforward and the rules explain their workings clearly enough. The player aids also help players to keep track of the phases each turn: another plus.

Combat in particular

George Orwell in Spain
(the tallest man in shot)

The rules for battles are the longest single section of the rules of España 1936. They use the tactical battleboard approach, in which each individual battle is broken down into one or more rounds. You can only attack if you've got a general with your troops, so you have to plan your battles carefully when it's time to place your generals- which is done after both players' movement is completed. Sometimes you'll want your generals to lead an attack; other times you'll want to commit a good general to help defend a vital objective city. This element of strategic planning meshes nicely with the additional tactical planning to make for battles which can be both interesting and tense.


Setting up a battle

This picture shows how a battle is set up. The attacker must always use their general in the first round; this is optional for the defender. In any event, no unit may attack or support more than once, although the same defending unit may be attacked more than once. Here, the Republican player has decided to throw everything he's got at the Nationalist's weaker unit- the Army of Africa, hoping that 4 dice with three good positive DRMs will be enough to eliminate it in one round- you resolve attacks by rolling 1d6/combat strength, scoring hits on '5's or '6's. The Nationalist decides to use their general and their Me-109, which'll have a good chance of winning a dogfight against the obsolescent B-XIX; the resulting 4d6 with a +1 DRM should ensure that the Republican's International Brigade won't come out of the battle unscathed.

Resolving the first
round of battle

With the Army of Africa unit eliminated and the International Brigade unit reduced to a 1 strength Regular army unit, the Republican player now faces an interesting dilemma: the Legionnaire's +1 combat DRM and the tanks make it a tough target to take on but if it can be eliminated, the Nationalist will also lose his two tank units. In this situation, both players would probably be looking at their cards to see if they had any combat bonuses/penalties which might tilt the balance one way or another.

(NB. There is a small mistake in the above picture: the Me-109 has a combat strength of 2, and would roll 2d6 in the air combat. Ah well.)

FAI/CNT (National
Confederation of
Labour) poster

The battle system has some crucial implications:

If you want to win a battle in one round you need both an equal or greater number of units and significantly more combat strength and/or support bonuses.
Even then, battles between relatively equal forces- large or small, will commonly end up as indecisive.

This makes sense to me and it means that the combat system, as a whole, is a strong feature of España 1936.

Caveats: the disappointments
Minor: the rulebook

"¡A las Barricadas!"?

The rulebook for España 1936 is written in the so-called 'conversational style'. As such it suffers from the typical problems of rulebooks of that ilk: illogical organisation, no cross-referencing, and frustrating page-flicking as you search for rules you're sure you've read, somewhere. This last problem is compounded by the lack of either a list of contents or an index. OK, the rulebook is short and the rules are simple, but what is there to lose by making life easier on players? Some examples of poor organisation:

The rules for friendly and contested boxes (which are crucial to movement, supply, and winning) appear under 'Components'; ie. before the rules of play as such.
The supply rules appear directly under the 'Sequence of Play'; just like the rules for friendly and contested boxes, these would benefit from appearing in a list of definitions of key terms at the top of the rules of play.

I'll admit that these are minor criticisms, but they highlight the inherent limits of the style of rulebook chosen by Antonio Catalán, a style I simply don't like because problems of this ilk inevitably crop up in my experience.

Middling: the mapboard and the battles

Picasso's Guernica

The mapboard aptly serves its purposes in the game. It's a bit bland though. By this I mean that there is absolutely no terrain differentation at all. It can reasonbly be argued that terrain effects on movement has no place in a game with 4-month turns. But it is hard to deny that Spain itself sort of fades into the background in a game in which ports are the only distinguishing feature of otherwise geographically identical locations.

And the battles? As interesting as they are, the larger battles can also be relatively time-consuming. It's open to question whether the added fun factor the battles bring can really compensate for the game's other shortcomings.

Major: the 'meh' factor? It's all in the cards

Anarchist women soldiers

The cards in España 1936 do exactly what they're supposed to: deliver reinforcements, generate a few other events, and offer opportunties to manipulate your chances in battles. And that's the problem. The Spanish Civil War was above all a war about the fate of a revolution. That is to say: it was all about politics. Unfortunately politics feature nowhere in the game. Sure, there are events which do more than just bring on new units; some of them even interfere with your opponent's plans. Nonetheless, the function of the cards in España 1936 in no way corresponds to their use in CDGs like Labyrinth or Twilight Struggle. The result is that the events are essentially colourless, and hand management and cardplay generates none of the tension which makes the CDGs so gripping.

They shall not pass!

Another issue arising from España 1936's use of the cards is that they're not used to create a quick, alternating-phase turn structure. There are some phases which alternate; eg. placing generals or activating them to attack (or not). The movement phase though is a classic IGO-UGO. This adds a degree of downtime which isn't seen in CDGs. I guess this would decrease with more play experience, but it strikes me as another example of where Catalán's design vision turns round and bites him on the ass.

Overview

Antonio Catalán succeeded in making España 1936 what he wanted it to be: a simple wargame of the Spanish Civil War which isn't shallow, neither in strategy nor tactics. Unfortunately he chose to leave out the politics and so failed to make use of one of the biggest design innovations of the last 20 years, the CDG. The result is a game set in Spain in the years 1936-39 in which Spain, its revolution, and the important international dimensions to the Civil War all feel strangely absent. In short, Catalán kind of missed the boat. As I said above, España 1936 is neither bad nor broken, it's just missing that special something, which it might've enjoyed had it been released ten or twenty years ago. If you're looking for short wargame on the subject, this game could easily fit your bill. If you're looking for a Spanish Civil War CDG, I guess you'll have to wait for Crusade and Revolution: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 to make its way through MMP's preorder system. ;)

Wargames, politics and ethics #1: Ah, that old bugbear

2011-07-14T03:56:00.007+01:00

Reality bites

They're just games, yes?

At some time or another, many wargamers will have found themselves pondering the political and/or ethical implications of their passion for revisiting the past, present and future battlefields of the world with their maps and little counters. This reflection leads some to create boundaries and/or preferences: periods they won't game, sides they always prefer to play, and so on. For me this began in my teenage-tankie youth, when I drew a boundary at 1945. My reasons for this were twofold:

In the late 70s and early 80s- with Thatcher and Reagan's 'second' Cold War at its height, modern warfare was too closely linked to the spectre of global thermonuclear holocaust for it to have any appeal to me.
I felt uncomfortable with the idea of playing games about wars the casualties of which would be actual people living in my own time.

I abandoned this boundary as I grew older. That's not to say that I 'grew out of it', because that would be to imply that there's something immature about the choice to draw and to exercise such boundaries. I've no wish to be so insulting to others who've made these choices.

Who's to say this
isn't a bridge?

No, for me the decision to abandon such boundaries was driven by much more personal imperatives of simple mental survival. That might sound grandiose but it's true. Y'see, in my early days as a student, I got into a conversation about philosophy – as you do – with a guy I met in a student flat. The end result was that I became a convinced strong sceptic; ie. I took seriously the notion that we can't take the evidence of our senses for granted, to the extent that I confronted the proposition that reality was essentially unknowable. This might sound like just another cockeyed bit of undergraduate Philosophy 101. It was. And so it would've remained but for the later emergence of the delusional phase of my bipolar disorder.

Dreams into nightmares

"Pass the dutchie..."

The dangerous confluence of this cod philosophy and my declining mental health began with another typical undergraduate mind game, this time about roleplaying. Following the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and his famous quote "I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man", we used to ask whether we were ourselves roleplaying our PCs, or our PCs roleplaying ourselves.

Apparently somewheres,
I have a readership
of millions!

I took this further, applying the question's method to my games of Squad Leader to ask whether I was just pushing around cardboard counters or actually giving orders to real men who were living and dying at my command. Once I'd thrown the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory into the mix, I was caught on the horns of a real dilemma: radical scepticism meant that I couldn't be sure that I was just pushing cardboard counters around on a map (or playing at being "a renegade ninja who has set out to destroy the evil that spawned him"™); and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory meant that the very act of asking if I was actually giving orders to real men on real battlefields meant that somewhere, I actually was.

Patent bollocks

At this point my survival instinct kicked in and common sense took over: strong scepticism was patent bollocks; Zhuangzi was just an poetic old dreamer; and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory? Well that just has to be pseudoscience, doesn't it? With my maps and counters restored to their real status as cardboard tokens, I decided too to abandon completely my old boundary, which had become a bit porous in the intervening years in any case. This may seem an, erm, eccentric (yes, let's call it 'eccentric', eh?) way to introduce the topic of 'Wargames, politics and ethics'. I guess it is. I believe though that it serves one useful purpose in particular: it shows that no matter where I take this analysis, it's founded on a firm grasp of reality. Quite literally.

Back in black?

Sometimes you can't
help but wonder...

This frankly bizarre route to the formation of my personal outlook on the ethics of wargaming aside, readers will readily imagine the one subject above all which brought political and ethical questions about wargaming to the forefront of the minds of a group of pals in whose company I- as a long-time teenage-tankie and WW2 wargamer, felt right at home. That subject was all-too-familiar popularity of the Germans among WW2 gamers. And, naturally enough, that special fetish held by an uncomfortable number for the 'Übermensch' of the Waffen SS, with their inevitable legions of Tiger tanks. Our discussions in those Edinburgh days led us to the obvious conclusion: that some of these types were more than just a bit dodgy. Beyond that? We just mocked them for their historical inaccuracies

"They had the
better looking
uniforms"

All of which brings us almost right up to date. Early last December, someone started a thread on BGG's Wargames forum entitled 'WW2 SS Counter Colours' (observant readers who follow the link will notice that said thread now resides in the Religion, Sex, and Politics forum, whence it was consigned when the topic unsurprisingly strayed from the 'straight and narrow' of a discussion about wargame counters to the wider political issues of fascism). The OP was asking if- in his 20-year hiatus from the hobby, wargaming had gone PC to avoid offending "Euro Wargamers", because SS counters in wargames are now grey instead of the "correct" black.

No, not that 'counter-culture'

PC gone mad?

It's not my purpose here to revisit that thread's discussion in any degree of detail, because I'm only referring to it to show that certain fundamental issues about the wargaming hobby are evidently every bit as live now as they were 30 years ago. For the sake of a taster though, its 344 posts across 2 months can be roughly summarised thus:

It's PC gone mad (I put my oar in on this issue).
Actually the Waffen SS didn't wear black uniforms, so black counters are ahistorical anyway (sounds familar).
They're just games, so you're dumb if black SS counters bother you.

War is brutal; all sides commit atrocities to a greater or lesser extent; so:

Why make a special fuss about the SS and our cool black counters?
Precisely because the SS were the cutting edge of German war crimes on the Eastern Front, it is dubious to make them look specially cool for no good reason (I commented on this issue- function versus decoration, too).

Those were the main issues around which circled the debate about counter colours before the thread polarised into mud-slinging between liberal anti-Fascism and rampant anti-Communism. So you can see that this familar old issue is not just alive and kicking, but is positively explosive.

And that's it for now. When I return to this topic I'll be looking more closely at the whys and wherefores of wargames, politics and ethics; and the benefits our hobby might enjoy if we were more attentive to these issues, whether we like it or not. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
Wargames, politics and ethics
- #2: Politics? You can run but you can't hide

A bit of this and a bit of that

2011-07-09T23:14:00.013+01:00

Technical problems stop the Panzers in their tracks

Just don't aim for
the window...

Badger came round last night for what was supposed to be another session of Fighting Formations and perhaps some Combat Commander. Unfortunately events were to intervene in the form of the shiny new desktop PC which I had taken delivery of just the previous day. I hadn't had time to set everything up that Thursday, so on the Friday I decided just to wait for Badger's arrival so that he could offer his assistance. It's not that I'm a complete tech-idiot or anything but there are always risks associated with transferring your old system to a new machine, so I felt it would be useful to have Badger on hand.

Just as well too it turned out.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

A 21st century nightmare

It all began when I foolishly simply yanked the USB connector for my external hard drive from its socket in the back of my old machine. When I had the new computer all set up, it kept telling me that I had to format the external hard drive, on which is stored all the work I've done in more than 10 years. You can imagine then, dear readers, how I was feeling at that point. Badger leapt into the breach and, a quick internet search later, he had diagnosed the problem: namely that I had forgotten to 'safely remove' the external hard drive. Apparently it's rare that this will produce problems which, to be blunt, was little comfort for me at that moment.

The Badger saves the day

Simple Green

So, Badger was humming and hawing about how to fix the problem and reassuring me that he was sure my data could be recovered somehow or other, when he suddenly remembered that I have an old laptop on which, some time ago, he'd installed Linux Mint in the hope that he could encourage me finally to abandon Windows (he's something of a Linux crusader don't you know). That effort had failed because, for some reason, we couldn't get that old laptop to connect to the internet to install the updates needed to demonstrate Mint to me in all its glory.

Double phew!

One lengthy boot process later, sure enough, the laptop recognised the hard drive and there was all my data, safe and sound. Phew. Then I had the bright idea that my new computer wouldn recognise the drive now that it had been recognised by the laptop. Et voilà, problem solved. All that remained was to repeat the whole process- because the problem recurred when I when I switched the drive off, then to copy all my data from the external drive to the hard drive on the new machine just to make sure that it is secure. Three hours later, the emergency was definitvely over.

Meanwhile, the shiny shiny?

Wilbur:
looking
good

After all those hi-jinks, what about my new computer? In short, it's fab. Apart from all the usual stuff about the extra power you get when you upgrade, I have to say that a 20" wide monitor is truly amazing: webpages are so much more spacious, and favourite apps like GIMP benefit greatly from the extra width. The only 'downside' is that I'm forcefully reminded exactly how much space is wasted in those green columns on each side of RD/KA!'s venerable classic blogger 'Son of Moto' template. I really will have to do something about this.

Alhambra it is then

The day saved and dinner done, it was too late for Badger and I to start our planned game of Fighting Formations. Liam was visiting too, so it seem churlish to sit down to a game of Combat Commander. Some light 3-player action it was going to be then. I was very keen on a game of Cosmic Encounter but Badger persuasively noted that it's not at its best with 3 players (sad but true). Dominion was mooted by Badger, but it lost out in the end to Liam's suggestion that we play Alhambra.

We played 2 games. I won the first comfortably, although Badger was pleased to come second because he'd never played Alhambra before. The second game was much closer. Badger won in the end thanks to some astute wall-building in the endgame (I played that aspect particularly badly in this game, in stark contrast to the first). Liam and I were tied a mere 1 point behind.

Bagder liked Alhambra. Well you would, wouldn't you, after doing so well in your first 2 games? To be fair though, his liking was evident throughout play, as witness his catchphrase for the night, "In-teresting".

And finally

Gaming website BoardGameGeek has been hosting blogs for some time now. I've taken to reading a few lately. I noticed that some were crossposts from externally-hosted blogs. Why ever not I thought. So I've begun crossposting RD/KA! to RD/KA!@BGG. The major technical issue- translating a post written with HTML tags into a post written with BBcode tags, proved to be simple to solve, thanks to Keynote. I wrote a template containing each HTML element and its BBcode replacement. With this I just have to run a 'Find and Replace' and the whole thing is done in minutes. Lovely, lovely Keynote NF!

I've crossposted 2 posts to RD/KA!@BGG so far and the results are already encouraging, and that's even without illustrations (BGG doesn't offer the same layout options as blogger, and I'd have to upload the images to BGG to use them to boot, so I just leave them out). I noticed a marked spike in readership here. Better even than that perhaps is the success of RD/KA!@BGG by the standards of BGG blogs.

"Appreciate
Connolly,
appreciate!"

As is prevalent across the web, there is a button on BGG you can use to show your liking of site content- the 'thumb'. My previous crosspost garnered itself 18 thumbs. This was only 4 thumbs shy of the top 10 most popular BGG blogs, as registered by the number of thumbs. These 'Hot' blogs stay on BGG's front page instead of disappearing down the roll of 'Recent' blogposts. So you can imagine then, dear readers, how satisfying this positive start is to yours truly; all the more so for reasons that need no rehearsal here.

BTW, PS

And yes, I'll never again yank USBs from their ports before I've 'safely removed' the hardware. Of that you can be sure. ;)

The long dark night of the dice rolls #2: light at the end of the tunnel

2011-07-04T02:22:00.003+01:00

Give me hexes, counters
& CRTs, goddammit!

I wrote last time about some of the highlights in recent multiplayer gaming. Today, I'm going to look back at some of the 2-player fun I've been having. When the Sunday sessions dried up I came to realise that the last couple of months of Sunday gaming had been slightly frustrating: we'd been playing too many light Euros. It's not that I don't like these games- I do; it's just that I wanted some meatier fare, with the lighter games filling their proper role, namely filler. I'm pleased to say that I've managed in the past couple of months to satisfy this desire to a significant extent.

Combat Commander

Regular readers won't be surprised that Badger and I have been keeping up our regular Combat Commander games. We've mostly being playing our way through the Combat Commander Battle Pack #3: Normandy. The scenarios start at the beginning, with Operation Deadstick- the Ox and Bucks' coup de main at the Bénouville (later Pegasus) Bridge in the early minutes of June 6th 1944; and finish at the end, with the 1st Polish Armoured Division's stand on Hill 262 ('The mace') during the battle of the Falaise pocket in late August. In between there are beaches to fight your way off of, beachhead fortifications to overcome, lots of bocage to fight your way through, villages to capture, and a couple of scenarios featuring French Resistance forces to boot.

BP#3 includes 4 new double-sided maps; new special rules for the beaches and for bocage country- including a nice new set of night rules; a sheet of new counters; and a campaign game. All in all an excellent expansion which has been pleasing other CC:E fans as much as it pleased Badger and I.

Fighting Formations: Grossdeutschland Infantry Division

I previewed Fighting Formations- Combat Commander designer Chad Jensen's next WW2 tactical project, back in August 2009. The game finally shipped some 3 months ago and I got hold of my copy in late May and, one pause for some counter-clipping later, Badger and I enjoyed our first play at the end of the month. A thorough review will have to wait till later. For the moment I'll just say that the game is a lot of fun to play (it's good to get some tanks rolling!). The game is also remarkably easy to learn and teach; Badger grasped the rules in minutes, meaning that I found FF:GD as easy to teach as I did Conflict of Heroes when I was demoing it at Conpulsion 2010. This was a big surprise.

It is also noteworthy that FF:GD sold out in just over two months. A significant proportion of those sales will have been to retailers, meaning that the games are still in the distribution chain, but it's quite a landmark for Chad and his crew nonetheless. More soon you can be sure.

Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear

As part of my new 'campaign' to play more of the games which have languished too long on the shelf, I persuaded Dave (last seen in March 2010 introducing the lads to Z-Man Games' most excellent co-op game Pandemic), to have a go at Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear. Regular readers will remember the enthusiasm with which I greeted Uwe Eickert's new WW2 tactical boardgame back in December 2008. Sad to say, Badger didn't really take to the game after our handful of initial plays, so CoH joined the ranks of those wargames at which I gaze wistfully on occasion, wondering when and if...

You can imagine then, dear readers, that I was well pleased when Dave took up my invitation. You can imagine how much more pleased I was when it turned out that Dave not only likes CoH, but turned out to have something of a flair for tactics: we've played 3 games so far, and the score stands at 2-1 Dave. I'm not at all surprised that Dave took to CoH the way he did. I pitched it to him as a 'wargame for Euro-gamers', and the fit was perfect, as I'd hoped. Again: more soon, you can be sure.

Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?

I visited an FLGS in the middle of May expecting to pick up my long-awaited copy of FF:GD. It turned out that it wasn't in because, on seeing the price, the store owner wasn't sure if I'd want the game after all. I reassured him that FF:GD was on my 'must buy' list and he promised he'd have it in the following week. The spending bug was in me though, so I started looking round for something to get it out of my system. In the end I plumped for Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?, a Card Driven Game (CDG), by Volko Ruhnke.

I chose Labyrinth because:

People had raved about it on the internet.
The theme intrigued me.
I'm interested in the idea of CDGs, which are one of the biggest innovations in wargaming of the past 2 decades.
The box ad-copy showed some nice-looking components.
I figured it was worth picking it up 'cheap', before the 2nd print-run copies arrived at prices boosted by recent inflation and currency fluctuations.

So, I took the game home and did my bagging, tagging and card-sleeving thing (no counter-clipping because the deluxe counters are nice and thick). I showed it to Liam one night before one of our Ivanhoe sessions (remember those?). He too was intrigued by the theme and liked the look of the components, especially the board, which is an excellent piece of functional graphic design with a nicely muted colour palette.

And so it was that just over a week after I'd bought Labyrinth, Liam and I sat down to our first game one Friday night. Labyrinth features an excellent tutorial, which takes you through a scripted first turn, by the end of which you have sufficient familiarity with the rules to play that game through to completion. That took us 5 hours, at the end of which Liam was keen to try again. That second game took about 3 hours, which left us sitting up past dawn. The dam was broken (remember that "something [which] came along to break Liam from his obsession with Ivanhoe before I broke down completely!"?), and Liam had a new game to obsess over.

I invited Gav (last seen enthusing about Dogs in the Vineyard) round a week later to try Labyrinth. He was a bit leery initially, but the end result was exactly the same as with Liam. In the next 4 weeks I played 22 games of Labyrinth, mostly with Liam; meanwhile Liam had started eyeing up all the other games on my shelves.

Twilight Struggle

With Liam obviously keen to try other games, I decided one day to take the plunge and lash out on a copy of the Deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle, which regular readers might remember I first played against Alan Poulter- webmaster at Web-Grognards, at a DiceCon West way back in 2008. I really liked Twilight Struggle but, apart from one ill-fated VASSAL game back in September 2009, my 2nd edition set was just another game which had sadly been gathering dust.

Incidentally, that game fell through partly because I just couldn't grokk the tactical/strategic complexities of TS across VASSAL. Mostly though it was because of the disjuncture between VASSAL and ACTS noted by an anonymous commenter to my second TS@VASSAL post: namely the fact that it's essentially impossible to register the effects, on TS@VASSAL, of cards played on TS@ACTS. I just didn't like this at all and found the resulting confusion to be a real disincentive.

Anyway, Liam took to Twilight Struggle with alacrity equal to or even greater than his enthusiastic response to Labyrinth. We've played 11 games already, in less than 2 weeks. And I'm pleased to say that Liam is not just willing, he's able. This is pretty good going considering his very limited experience of games beyond the familiar family boardgames and cardgames.

Last words
So you can see, dear readers, that life hasn't been all gloom and doom- in the past couple of months especially. I've got some serious 2-player games out onto the table and I'm sure this is going to run and run. I've even got a neighbour dropping in regularly for weeknight gaming sessions. What kind of gamer's heaven is that, eh? ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- The long dark night of the dice rolls #1: a little light relief

The long dark night of the dice rolls #1: a little light relief

2011-06-28T20:01:00.006+01:00

I mentioned last Tuesday that I've played hundreds of games during the months of my depression, nearly 600 in fact. Still getting back into the swing of things here at RD/KA! as I am, I thought I'd run through some of the highlights of that epic series of games, and cast a quick eye over some other games which I've bought recently.

Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe and yet more bloody Ivanhoe!

The impressive statistic of nearly 600 games played since last September is put in its proper context by the fact that more than half of those were games of Ivanhoe. My neighbour Liam (last seen swigging wine at Sioux's gallery launch in May last year) came round on xmas eve keen to play a game to which he'd taken an instant liking way back in October 2009. We played a 24-game session. And so began a marathon run of 325 games, all but 9 of which were played in the 6 months up to May. That's averaging 14 games/week, in a couple of sessions each week. Whew!

I've written before about how much I like Ivanhoe. I still like it, but I never would've imagined that there could come a point when I'd be scunnered at the suggestion of playing again. That point came sometime in May I seem to recall, when we played 12 sessions. Luckily something came along to break Liam from his obsession with Ivanhoe before I broke down completely!

A pleasant sufficiency of Alhambra

Alhambra is a game I first played a couple of times at a DiceCon in Glasgow way back in the days before RD/KA!. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and remember it as being something of a brain-burner in which my every move was foiled before I could make it. Seeing some slightly battered boxes going cheap in Static Games a couple of years ago, buying a copy was a bit of a no-brainer. As so often happens, the game then gathered dust on the shelf until I finally got it to the table one Sunday last November.

Bits, dear boy, bits

I won't give a detailed review. In short: Alhambra is a tile-laying game in which players have to collect money cards to buy their tiles (for more info, see the video on the game's page, via the link above). The rules are very straightforward, although they contain one or two of the little 'fiddles' which some gamers take as characteristic of Euros and which they dislike with varying degrees of intensity.

A major feature of Alhambra is that there is no direct player interaction, so that the game is something of a multiplayer solitaire puzzle. Even though I'm an avid wargamer I don't mind this a bit: random tile and money draws; the uncertainties of market conditions as you wait your turn; coupled with often fraught decision-making in poor markets; these all add up to a game I'll be happy to play a lot more.

Not nearly enough Cosmic Encounter
"We come in peace for the benefit of all humanity"

Cosmic Encounter is one of the classic multiplayer boardgames of our time. It was first published in 1977 by Eon Games and has since seen 16 editions. 'Uncle' Martin (last seen around xmas 2009 introducing me to the delights of Pandemic) owned the original- and all its expansions IIRC, back in the early 80s. We played the game endlessly, and viciously, for hours and hours at a time. It was in my first ever flat- which I happened to share with Martin, and I have one of those peculiarly vivid memories of us all sat playing around the kitchen table; peculiar because I can see the scene from outside, as if out of body.

"Eat plutonium death, you disgusting alien weirdoes!"

The original Eon edition

Looking for something new to bring to the table for birthday gaming, I treated myself to FFG's 2008 Cosmic Encounter revamp back in March. For the uninitiated, Cosmic Encounter works like this:

Each player is an alien species with a system of 5 home planets and 20 spaceships.
The game is played by playing cards in encounters to establish colonies on your opponents' home planets.
The winner is the first player to have 5 such colonies.
Encounters work like this:

The hyperspace gate

The target system is chosen at random.
You place up to 4 of your ships in the hyperspace gate and point it at the planet of your choice in the target system.
You invite any other players to ally with your attack.
The defender also asks for allies.
The other players decide in turn if they'll ally, committing their spaceships as they see fit.
You and the defender each secretly choose an encounter card from your hands; these can be Attack cards or Negotiate cards (there's one other kind of encounter card, but I'll leave that out for simplicity).
Cards are revealed, with the following effects:

Sample Encounter cards:
sneaky, mighty, median
& mediocre

Attack v. Attack: the highest total of card plus ships wins; all losing ships go to the warp (the deadpile).
Negotiate v. Negotiate: allies are sent home; the main players have 1 minute to make a deal involving swapping cards and/or bases; if no deal is struck, each player loses 3 ships to the warp.
Attack v. Negotiate: the Attack card wins automatically; the player who played the Negotiate receives 'compensation'.

To the victor the spoils

The warp: home of
the rash, the luckless
& the unwary

The spoils of victory are:

Attacker and allies: all gain a colony on the defeated planet.
Defender: survive to fight another day.
Defending allies: rewarded with 1 new Cosmic card and/or ship freed from the warp for each ship committed to the defence.

'Compensation' means that the player whose Negotiate card lost to an Attack card takes 1 random card from the winner's hand for each ship lost to the warp.

"Take us to your leader"

"My card? No, your card."
"I hit you with my planet."

Readers unfamiliar with Cosmic Encounter might by now be wondering why the game is such an enduring favourite if its core system is a simple as I've outlined above (and it is). There is a bit more to it, naturally enough- namely alien powers: each player has a random alien power which allows them to break the normal rules in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. Some are apparently quite weak and therefore subtle in their applications: who'd want to be the Philanthropist, with the "power of giving"?. Others are so mighty to behold that you wonder how you'll ever stop such behemoths in their galaxy-conquering rampages: who could hope to resist the Leviathan, with their "power of Worldships" which allows them to take entire planets through the hyperspace gate, for +20 attack.

More cards, more sneaky tricks

Some useful cards
filling out the deck

The aliens and the encounters define the core of Cosmic Encounter gameplay. The basic game is filled out with some more cards in the Cosmic deck:

Morph: a unique card which dupiclates your opponent's encounter card.
Reinforcement: any player(s) involved in an encounter can play reinforcement cards after the main cards are revealed, to change the outcome; any number of these cards may be played in an encounter.
Artifacts: these are 'event' cards which have various useful effects, some of which can tip the balance in an encounter.

Flares & tech:
more power;
more chaos

In the familiar tradition of FFG box-stuffing, there are 2 further decks of cards in the basic set: flares and tech cards. Flares are intended as part of the core game and are cards you can play for effects which will vary according to whether you have the power matching the flare- 'super', or not- 'wild'. The flares were an expansion for the original Eon edition. Tech cards are new to the FFG edition as far as I know, and are optional.

The rules for tech in Cosmic Encounter are simple enough: each player starts the game choosing 1 of 2 random cards. Tech cards have to be researched before you can use them. Researching a tech card involves placing ships on the face-down card- 1/turn, until the player chooses to reveal the card. If the number of spaceships on the card is greater than or equal to the card's research number (that number in the bottom right of the cards), the card is complete. Whether the tech card is complete or not, the ships on the card are returned to the player's colonies.

Surprise, surprise: an expansion!

I also picked up the Cosmic Incursion expansion set for the sake of a potential 6th player. Cosmic Incursion adds 20 new aliens to bring the total number up to 70, and a new rule: 'Cosmic Quakes'. A 'Cosmic Quake' happens when a player has to draw a new card and both the Cosmic deck and the discard pile are empty. All players must discard their cards, then new hands are dealt to each player. This will be rare, but no doubt entertaining and frustrating in equal measure when it does happen. There is also another deck of cards: the optional Reward deck. Players can choose to draw their cards from the Reward deck instead of the regular Cosmic deck when they receive rewards for participating in a successful defensive alliance.

Rewards: a gold
standard loyalty
scheme

There are lots of neat cards in the Reward deck, but this could prove to be a double-edged sword for 2 reasons: the back of the reward deck cards is different from that of the regular encounter cards- so your opponents could always choose to pick a reward card if they were allowed to draw a card from your hand; and there are a couple of real turkeys in the deck, including the 'Attack -7', the lowest valued attack card in the game. Still, there are only 2 bad cards in the 32-card Reward deck, and some of the good ones are very good indeed:

Kickers: these multiply your attack card value, compensation and/or opponent's ships lost due to failure to make a deal (just watch out for the 'Kicker x0').
Rifts: free ships returned from the warp- always good; with a sting in the tail if your opponent steals the card from you- better still.

Overview

Individual planet counters
& the new spaceships

The FFG edition of Cosmic Encounter is excellent. In fact it's one of the best new editions of any game I've ever seen, up there with GW's 2nd and 3rd editions of Space Hulk and 3rd edition Blood Bowl, which have long held my prize for best new boardgame editions. FFG's familiar high production values are nicely brought to bear: their thick cardboard makes all the counters and other pieces nice and chunky; and the little plastic spaceships are just lovely, with the added bonus that they stack perfectly and are easy to handle for those players who are all fingers and thumbs.

New destinies
to explore

There are also some neat additions to the destiny deck (from which you draw to decide the target system for an encounter). These are: 'Wild'- any system of your choice; and 'Special'- particular systems according to certain specifications, eg. the player with the most ships in the warp. I don't know for sure if these were in previous editions; they're certainly new to this player of the original Eon edition.

If there was nothing more to FFG's new Cosmic Encounter than some new aliens, cards and high production values, then it would be good but not excellent. What makes the new edition excellent for yours truly are several small additions in particular, much more important in play than their unassuming appearance might suggest. These additions are:

Text on the alien cards to remind players when they can use their powers and whether use of the powers is optional or mandatory.
The timing strip which appears on all relevant cards.

Those pleasing
little details

These additions- and the rules for resolving timing conflicts, mean that players will always know when and how to use their alien powers; and that there should be no problems dealing with the complex interactions of the wide variety of card effects in the game. Clarity of this ilk is important enough in its own terms in any game. It's doubly important in Cosmic Encounter. Why? Because timely cardplay — to zap powers and to trump or cancel opponents' decisions or other game effects — is at the heart of the fiendish tricks which constitute so much of the tactics in a game as chaotic as Cosmic Encounter.

All-in-all then, this new edition of Cosmic Encounter should be sought out by all fans of highly interactive multiplayer games with serious screwage; sought out, cherished, and played- a lot! ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- The long dark night of the dice rolls #2: light at the end of the tunnel

Changes, changes

2011-06-23T09:28:00.009+01:00

Old habits die hard: tabletop miniatures games

"Very pretty John, but
what does it mean?"
(Damned if I know BTW)

When you're depressed you often become withdrawn to the point of being reclusive. The resulting emotional disconnection from so much of your life means that a period of depression really isn't the best time to make decisions of any consequence about your life, not least because coming out of depression means that you face putting back together everything which has been disrupted when you were down. So you could easily dispose of things or give up on activites which are really important to you because you take your depressive emotional disconnection at face value, when you're really just expressing your dread of the effort it'll take to get everything sorted out when you're feeling better.

Memories, sigh

All of which is by way of preamble to an explanation of some changes in my gaming tastes and habits which have come upon me in recent months. First and foremost is that I'm giving up tabletop miniatures gaming. This is something of a painful break, and even as I type this I'm struck by a sense of unreality, not to mention wistful nostalgia. After all, my life as a hobby gamer started nearly 40 years ago when my brother and I made up our own rules for playing proper games with our Airfix 1/72^nd Napoleonic toy soldiers.

An all-too-familiar sight!

Tabletop miniatures gaming- or to be more precise, collecting miniatures with a view to tabletop gaming; this has been part of my hobby whenever I've been active as a gamer. And I've always enjoyed my tabletop games- eg. last year's games with Penumbra's Talons. The sad reality though is that games have been few and far between. More important than that: I just can't be arsed with the effort of army-building. It's too much like hard work for me, which turns the most important part of tabletop miniatures gaming- the visual appeal, into a dreaded chore.

Hexes, lovely lovely hexes!

More than all of that, I must confess a longstanding sneaking preference for boardgames. Why? Several reasons. First: it's in the nature of boardgames that the location of every piece in the game is well-defined. It's in the nature of tabletop games that it's not. This is the old measurement problem, and every tabletop gamer will have their stories about 'creative' measurement. I like the fact that boardgames circumvent this completely.

Elegant functionality:
a beauty all its own

In addition, boardgames are typically deeper and more challenging games than tabletop games. I must qualify that statement with the recognition that this isn't necessarily true of tactical games, all the more so because simplicity seems to be increasingly the trend in some corners of both genres. By and large though the statement holds true, especially when you consider the vast range of operational and strategic level board wargames which, by definition, are beyond the scope of tabletop gaming as such.

Just a small selection...

Talking about "vast" ranges of board wargames brings me to another salient point: variety (check out this list of board wargames @Wiki to get an idea of what "vast" means in this context). Ringing the changes with your boardgaming experience is a relatively simple matter: you get your new game; prepare the counters and study the rules; get your willing opponent in front of you, and you're good to go. Tabletop games bring with them the added complications of all that painting, as well as finding opponents who've collected their own armies should you be interested in a game which is out of the mainstream.

Under a large shadow: roleplaying games

"The Shadow knows!"

It's been 2 years since I last played an RPG: during Keith Baker's 2009 visit as part of his ongoing Have Dice Will Travel world tour (also to be found on The Escapist Magazine: Live Bookmarks feed here). I wrote way back in May 2009 of my hopes that I'd get over my burnout following on from my Ashes of Middenheim campaign and get some more roleplaying going. Sadly, that one game with Keith aside, this just hasn't happened.

I'm soft & cuddly,
really!

Reasons for this are various, general lack of player interest in the Sunday group being primary. Also important though for yours truly is this "large shadow". Less the various problems associated with the aforementioned burnout, this is really a matter of the burden of the past. Let me explain. Regular readers might remember how I wrote last year about my friends' and my own intense engagement with our games and our PCs in our free and easy student days back in 80s. The outstanding result of this was a degree of emotional involvement with our PCs which enabled the GMs cruelly to manipulate us by pushing the psychological buttons we had so conveniently laid out before them. Oh how we loved it!

Gotta get inside your head

For me then, these peak gaming experiences mean that roleplaying is strongly associated with the particular psychological payoff you get when your identification with your character is so great that you are literally choking with emotion as you make an empassioned speech, or do something just plain stupid because it really is what your character would do when they'd been pushed to the extremes the GM has put them in (not to be confused with doing something stupid in, say, D&D because you're a party-fucking dipshit).

I may be the
Master of the Universe,
but I'm only human

Of course I was typically PCing back then. I was the GM during the Ashes of Middenheim, but I rarely felt that my players were giving me anything significant to work with in the terms I've described above. Honesty compels me to note that this could've had as much to do with my limitations as GM as anything else (and there were plenty of those on show). Only my players could really adjudicate on that and we never really got to discussing issues like these, neither during nor after the campaign.

So I'm left with this hankering for that special something which only roleplaying can offer: not just the form of playing a single character; but the content unique to that form, content which even the most satisfying boardgame victory can't deliver. Writing this I find myself wondering if our youth might've been the decisive factor in our willingness as players to step up the way I've described. I can't say for sure, but I hope not because this is an itch I really want to scratch.

And so?

Aging grognard
on the prowl

Giving up miniatures games has had no effect on my time because I've actually done so little associated with that hobby in recent years. I just no longer spend time poring over various Space Marine codexes dreaming about army lists. It's possible that I will return to miniature painting as a relaxing aside to other activities. I don't really know, but I certainly haven't given up the notion. Meanwhile, I'll be continuing recent efforts to play more of my collection of wargames (if you look at my boardgame collection over at BGG you'll see that there are many wargames there which have few or no plays). In any event dear readers, don't expect any more Penumbra's Talons battle reports or articles drooling over the latest Space Marine goodies from that old money-sucker GW.

Dig those
threads man!

As for roleplaying? Hopes of a return to the Warhammer Old World are still alive. More significantly perhaps, I'm considering investigating the Indie games scene. Regular readers might remember that I first met British indie publishers at Conpulsion 2010, and I met them again at UK Games Expo 2010. I've not yet had a chance to play any of the 3 games I bought at those events. Interestingly enough, one night some months ago I sparked Gav's (last seen leaving a hapless princess to her fate in a game of Descent) interest in Dogs in the Vineyard (a game which had conspicuously failed to interest anyone else). The rules rapidly captured his imagination in no uncertain terms and he spent the rest of the night reading them with mounting enthusiasm. Unfortunately this didn't translate into a playing opportunity.

"Do you feel happy punk?
Well, do you?"

Chances to play some indie games and find out if they're to my liking currenlty hinge on Glasgow Indie Gamers, a group I discovered on Facebook last year. I went to one of its early pub meetings last year, before the downswing kicked in bigtime. There was a healthy turnout of an interesting variety of people. The group is also frequented by the indie designers who live in Scotland. I guess it's time for me to shift my ass and turn up to another monthly meeting. The next one is Monday coming. Fingers crossed I guess. ;)

"Another fine mess..."

2011-06-21T10:57:00.000+01:00

Woah, a tale of woe
Well, it was kind of a close run thing this time but here I am, back at the keyboard. There are several reasons why I almost succumbed to the urge just to disappear from the pages of RD/KA!. I'm just going to let them lie. I will however briefly explain why this particular bloglag was so long (at 9 months it's been the longest ever).

Sometimes people just won't own up...

It'll come as no surprise to my regular readers that a serious depression was to blame. Why so serious? Long story short: a home support worker who'd been visiting me for some 4 years took the huff with me one day and indulged in some unprofessional behaviour. The next time we met he manipulated me into withdrawing from the support service against my will. With hindsight I realised that saving his job was surely his primary motivation for being such a shit. We'd talked often of the difficult funding situation in his workplace and of how staff were worried about their jobs. So I think he feared a black mark if I was to ask for him to be replaced, which would've led to questions being asked about why I no longer wished to work with him (which I didn't, naturally enough).

At the time (just after RD/KA!'s 5th anniversary), I decided just to put the incident behind me. After all I reasoned, all the guy did was visit me for a couple of hours twice a week, when we'd mostly just talk, so what could happen? I was wrong. My mood was already wavering and within a couple of weeks it had taken a severe nosedive. Eventually I twigged that I'd been more psychologically dependent on the home support than I'd imagined, a supposition borne out by the subsequent length of the downswing.

And that's about that. I wish I hadn't let the guy off the hook, but it would've been an unpleasant experience to make a complaint which'd've been a matter of my word against his. And y'know, I believe that, deep down, he knows he was wrong. It won't get me back the last 9 months, but it's something I guess.

On a lighter note

It's not been all gloom and doom thank goodness. Sure, I missed this year's Conpulsion and UK Games Expo, so neither my Conflict of Heroes demo nor the Combat Commander tournament were repeated this year. Ah well, fingers crossed, they'll be back.

"A little bit of politics..."

These lowlights aside, the Sunday sessions- which stopped in February, were another significant casualty of my downswing. They too will be back sometime. There was a shedload of gaming nonetheless: I got through hundreds of games in those months; a playing record of which I'm strangely proud (I'm a gaming geek, go figure). I'll talk more about all that another day.

BoardGameGeek was another source of succour during those unhappy days. BGG community culture is not without its irritants (but then, I imagine that's true of any online community which otherwise serves your interests), but I like it for its game-specific forums, which allow me to focus my attention on subjects which particularly interest me; ie. my favourite games. I've also become a denizen of the Wargames forum. In fact, my increasing activity in these forums in recent weeks helped me recover my writing mojo to the point where only a couple of weeks ago I knew that my return to RD/KA! was just a matter of time.

Unfinished business
And so to the embarrassing matter of all those goodies about which I made such a hoo-hah before disappearing from view for so long. I will be sorting this out ASAP. More on that in due course. ;)

"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty #4. The final countdown

2010-09-25T10:33:00.001+01:00

Life's little ironies or, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to"
What's a man to do? I mean to say, after some ups and downs you finally hit your blog's 5th anniversary and manage to put together an impressive bunch of prizes for your readers. Just how can you follow that? Ah, I know. How about taking a mood downswing and disappearing from the site for a month? Yeah, that's a really good idea. Really.

Anyway, here I am. I'm not swanning about in sunny Acapulco with all that lovely swag offered up by my generous donors (chance'd be a fine thing). Nope. I'm living la vida loca in the slough of despond in rainy Glasgow. There've been games at least, a lot of games, Dominion especially. So it's not been all bad. But that's not really the point of this post, oh no. This post is about prizes (remember those?).

Everything must go!
I had been intending to change the format of the bumper prize draw before my dropping off the radar forced my hand. Now I'm just going to run one big draw until all the prizes have been claimed. So:

Go and check out the the spoil heap.
Comment here, there or in any other prize draw thread indicating the prize of your choice (comments already made will be taken as entries).

I'll announce winners in a fortnight. And that's it for today because I'm packing for a wee trip and I'd better get on with things. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty
- #1. Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!
- #2. Draw the first
- #3. First prize draw winners!

"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty #3. First prize draw winners!

2010-08-23T13:49:00.005+01:00

Who are this week's lucky readers?
The entries for last week's draw have been counted and the draw has been made, using my shiny Conpulsion 2010 random number generator. I am pleased to announce the winners in the first RD/KA! 5th anniversary bumper prize draw bonanza. My congratulations to all the lucky winners; my commiserations to everyone else. Don't give up yet though: there are still three more draws to go and you can all (previous winners included remember) enter those too.

A Bill King Gotrek and Felix omnibus
Trollslayer.net.
I am delighted to be able to announce that, fresh from the trials and tribulations of flitting, Bill has been able to unearth 2 English-language copies of Gotrek and Felix: the First Omnibus which he has generously donated to the spoil heap. One of these will go to Chazz Kellner. The remaining copy will be added to a subsequent draw.

'Shrek's Dragon' by Sioux Jackson
Sioux's Art.
Sioux's lovely pen and ink drawing goes to the gnome, of the most excellent indie/retro computer gaming blog Gnome's Lair.

Battlelore Dragons from Static Games
Static Games.
The Battlelore Dragons boxed set goes to Uncle_Cthulu.

Two Osprey books
Osprey Publishing.
Thanks to Bill's last minute addition of the Gotrek and Felix books, I've decided to give away all the Osprey books this week. They're going to two winners: Alan- who wins two books of his choice; and Patrick- who wins the remaining book.

One $60 voucher from CSN Promotions
The $60 voucher from the lighting department at CSN Promotions goes to nix26gonzo.

How to claim your prizes
Please email me via the 'Contact' link at the bottom of the sidebar on the right, and please use '1st draw prize claim' in the subject line. For nix26gonzo that's all you need to do- I'll forward you instructions on how to use your $60 voucher; everyone else please remind me which prizes you're claiming and don't forget to include your mailing address so that I can send out your prizes.

Your next chance to win
I'll be posting the second selection of prizes in the RD/KA! bumper prize-draw bonanza tomorrow. You have till then to check out the spoil heap and wonder if your favourite will be coming up for grabs this week. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty
- #1. Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!
- #2. Draw the first
- #4. The final countdown

"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty#2. Draw the first

2010-08-14T21:48:00.012+01:00

Four, weekly prize draws

-#The spoil heap#-

The RD/KA! 5th anniversary bumper prize-draw bonanza will consist of four, weekly draws. This week's draw runs until midnight (BST) on Sunday 22nd August. The draws are all open to all of my readers (yes, that includes friends and family).

Draw the first's prizes
There are 5 prizes up for grabs this week.

A Bill King novel.
Trollslayer.net.
Choose any one.

'Shrek's Dragon' by Sioux Jackson
Sioux's Art.

Battlelore Dragons from Static Games
Static Games.

Two Osprey books
Osprey Publishing.
Choose any two for one prize.

One $60 voucher from CSN Promotions
Canadian and US entrants only remember.

How to enter
To enter, just comment to this thread. Please include your prize preference(s) because I will be drawing a winner for each prize, so you will not be eligible for any prize you don't list as a preference. And yes, you may list all 5 prizes if you wish. I will announce the winners on Monday 23rd August. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty
- #1. Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!
- #3. First prize draw winners!

"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty#1. Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!

2010-08-13T15:44:00.026+01:00

"Lights... Cameras... Action!"
Alighting on this page as you have dear reader, be welcome to the 5th anniversary of "Roll dice and kick ass!". Yes, it's been 5 years to the day since I launched myself into the geek blogosphere with a report on Interaction, the 63rd Worldcon. I took to blogging a hobbyist wanting to write. What I didn't bargain on were the technicalities of creating an illustrated webzine: hunting down links and references, image work, layout; all suprisingly labourious and time-consuming. Enough already with my blood, sweat, toil and tears. Feast your eyes, dear readers, on the booty below...

Matt Forbeck
Hot off the presses, Ghosts of Ascalon — "the first original Guild Wars novel" — is Matt's and Jeff Grubb's spin on the popular fantasy MMO Tyria. I am told that Guild Wars- soon to see its first reboot, disposes of that WoW-grind by the simple expedients of a level cap and rapid character progression; which reads to me like a recipie for playing more characters having more adventures which play out more quickly. That sounds thrilling and action packed. Expect no less from messieurs Forbeck and Grubb.

Prize #1
Signed author's copy courtesy of Matt.

-#!#-

Bill King
Specially for my European readers:

Las aventuras de Gotrek y Félix.

Hardback Spanish editon of the first Gotrek and Felix omnibus.

Der Dämonengott, Volume I of Die Legende der Terrarch.

TPB and mass market German editions of the first volume of the Terrarch trilogy.

Prizes #2-4
Three signed author's copies courtesy of Bill.

-#!#-

Mike Cobley
It's a little known fact that Mike Cobley sent me my first editor's rejection letter. In his guise as major domo at Shark Tactics — "a snotnosed paperbased knot of erratic but always heartfelt brickbattery" Mike confesses — Mr. Cobley subjected me to that first short sharp shock horror of writers' nightmares. An'd'y'know? I suspect that's news to Mike after all these years.

Seeds of Earth, Volume 1 of the Humanity's Fire trilogy.
Shadowmasque, Volume 3 of the Shadowkings trilogy.

Prizes #5 & 6
Two signed author's copies courtesy of Mike.

-#!#-

Sioux Jackson
Hard at work since last May's launch of her career as an illustrator, Sioux's been regularly adding new pictures in aid of her good cause. 'Shrek's Dragon'- right, is an A3 print suitable for framing which Sioux thought an apt choice for RD/KA!'s 5th anniversary prize draw.

Prize #7
A3 pen and ink print courtesy of Sioux Jackson.

-#!#-

Paul D Selman
Paul was a freelance artist until May, when he got a "paying art gig for a movie production company" about which he can tell us nothing more. Readers new to Paul's work can't go wrong by checking out the iL-Logic webcomic, for which Paul put pictures to Adam Di Stefano's scripts.

Paul has found two suitably grisly pieces from his sketchbook for this ass-kicking prize draw:

'A Moment's Respite': full size.
'And The Blitzer Is Toast!': full size.

Again, both would frame nicely.

Prizes #8 & 9
Two original artist's sketches courtesy of Paul D Selman.

-#!#-

Academy Games
Publishers of award-winning WW2 strategy boardgames.

Academy Games' Conflict of Heroes series- Awakening the Bear! – Russia 1941-42 and Storm of Steel! – Kursk 1943, has won awards, and fans sufficient to see several new games in the series already under development. The latest addition to the series- Price of Honour – Poland 1939, will be hitting retailers next month. Note that Price of Honour is not a complete game: it is an expansion to Awakening the Bear! and you need AtB to play PoH.

Prize #10
One copy courtesy Uwe Eickert.

-#!#-

Q-Workshop
Producers of fine designer dice and related gamers' accessories.

Remember the elves?
Well it seems their strike is now official, if the new Q-Workshop banner is anything to go by. I'm pleased to say too that the elves must've appreciated my little message of solidarity, because I recently recieved a package secretly smuggled out of the Q-Workshop vaults: 3 sets of Q-Workshop dice.

There was a note asking me to give the dice away to my readers to popularise the elvish cause:

Prizes #11-13
Three sets of dice courtesy of Q-Workshop.

-#!#-

Static Games
From its origins as a pitch in an indoor market through several incarnations to today's two shops at Glasgow's geek street central, Static Games has been around a long time, offering:

A wide range of new and current games.
Extensive 2nd hand stock.
Regular bargain sell-offs.

A great place to browse for those curios games afficionadoes can't resist: old editions; forgotten small press ventures; games which for some reason will probably remain unplayed but which attract your interest anyway; all the kipple of the geek life in other words.

I heard at UK Games Expo back in June that FFG is running down Battlelore to replace it with their Battles of Westeros. It's certainly true that the future of classic Battlelore is uncertain. Expansions like Battlelore Dragons might prove increasingly hard to come by. Don't let this chance to get a copy pass you by.

The Great War of Magellan? You what? So: Richard Hatch- who played Tom Zarek in Battlestar Galactica, came up with a big idea — "years ago [which was] filmed between 2000-2001 as a professional presentation trailer reel" — which apparently still only exists as a 17-minute trailer dated 2003. Three years later DGS Games published a 410-page Great War of Magellan RPG co-written by Hatch and Johnathan Bjork.

A second dead site confirms that the long odyssey of Richard Hatch and his dream project is over for now. You, dear readers, could give it a glimmering of life with this game. Or maybe it's one of those curios? Read this review and decide for yourself.

Prizes #14-15
Boxed boardgame expansion and RPG courtesy of Kenny at Static Games.

-#!#-

Kingdom of Adventure
The latest Scottish FLGS venture, Kirkcaldy's Kingdom of Adventure enjoys great facilities and an owner dedicated to his hobby community, as witness an in-store events calendar second to none.

Published last year, featuring — "a new class, new race options, paragon paths and epic destinies, character backgrounds, feats, powers, rituals, magic items, and new rules for dragonmarks" — the Eberron Player's Guide is essential reading for players in 4th edition D&D games set in this fan-favourite world, originally created by Keith Baker in 2002.

AEG's Legend of the Five Rings' main lines have long been the CCG and the RPG. Death at Koten- sample here showing the sumptious art, is AEG's first L5R graphic novel.

Prizes #16-18
One Eberron Player's Guide and two Death at Koten TPBs courtesy of David Wright at Kingdom of Adventure.

-#!#-

EMOTIONALLY FOURTEEN
I stumbled across E14 sometime last year, found the scabrous geek humour of its reviews entertaining, and stuck around. Soon enough I'd hooked up with Brad and Robert- two of E14's writers, on fB; where I fell in with the rest of the crew. What a crew. E14 has grown rapidly and now maintains a consistent output of cranky gonzo goofing and reviews covering a surprisingly wide range of geekery. And they get lots of stuff to give away to their readers. Worth keeping an eye on.

Nemesis
James Swallow's latest addition to the Black Library's popular Horus Heresy series, Nemesis sees opposing teams of assassins racing to take down Horus and the Emperor. Who is pulling the strings behind the scenes? Can the assassins strike quickly enough to prevent the conflict at the heart of the Imperium from erupting into all out war? Fast-moving, action-packed twists and turns to be expected.

Fireborn and Throne of Lies
Fireborn- featuring "the Firedrakes, peerless champions of the Salamanders", and Throne of Lies- featuring "the Night Lords... among the most feared Chaos Space Marines in the universe", are two recent additions to BL's range of 40K audio CDs. Expect chaos, death and spikey bits with added sound effects.

Prizes #19-20
One book and two CDs (counting as one prize) courtesy of Brad Harmer and the crew at E14.

-#!#-

From the vaults of my absent mindedness
Osprey Publishing has been the grognard's choice for concise reference for some 40 years now, with a list of titles so long that it can be difficult to remember what you've actually got in your collection. And so my bargain-hunting has left me with a few doubles:

Prizes #21-22
These will be 2 prizes: 2 books and 1 book.

-#!#-

And finally for today...
Attentive readers might already be asking themselves the point of that rather contrived link right at the top of the article? Did you click through? Nope? Well if you're from Canada or the US you should because if you do you'll be able to navigate yourself away from the lighting department to the boardgames. There you'll find a range of products from major adventure gaming brands including:

One lucky north American winner will receive a $60 voucher. You can spend it on anything you like from any one of 200+ CSN|stores- including from the lighting department; but, well, y'know.

Prize #23
A $60 internet shopping voucher (Canada and US only) courtesy of Sean at CSN Promotions Team.

Tomorrow: how to enter
I'm going to leave all the finicky details until tomorrow. In the meantime I'd like to give my heartfelt thanks to everyone whose patience and generosity have helped me get the "Roll dice and kick ass!" 5th anniversary blogparty off to such a cracking start. Words fail me.

Thanks too to all my readers: you are the point of the exercise after all. Now on to year 10! Meanwhile, start thinking up your prize lists and get ready while I try to fill the next month with as many anniversary specials as I can. ;)

"Cut. That's a wrap."

Related@RD/KA!
"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty
- #2. Draw the first
- #3. First prize draw winners!
- #4. The final countdown

Meeting Richard Williams

2010-08-10T13:52:00.014+01:00

The best laid plans
Unfortunately last Saturday's planned trip to Claymore fell through. I'm in a bit of a downswing just now and my main symptom is sleep disturbance, typical phase 1 for me. And so Friday night dragged on into Saturday morning leaving me facing 2 hours sleep before I was supposed to get up to catch an early bus to Edinburgh. The result was inevitable. Ah well, c'est la vie.

But still...
I did manage to make it to GW Glasgow on Friday afternoon to meet Black Library author Richard Williams. Richard proved friendly and easy-going as you'd expect and I passed a pleasant hour or so sharing his company with the other fans who'd turned out to meet him.

The inevitable signage
I'd taken along my copy of Liber Chaotica as planned. I'd thought that'd be all but Steve- the local manager, had managed to rustle up some copies of the currently out of print Reiksguard, in search of which I'd visited the store only the previous day and which had then been strangely absent from the shelves; so I bought that. As William and I prepared to pose for a couple of photos I figured that it'd be churlish not also to pick up a copy of the latest- and current, BL book in which Richard's writing has seen print: the anthology Legends of the Space Marines.

I seek the secret of success in Richard's mind as he signs over his soul to the Ruinous Powers 'just one more time'

Richard had some Scythes of the Empereror stickers to hand out; they're the chapter which features in his story in Legends of the Space Marines. I promptly stuck one of these inside my copy. In addition Richard'd had a little widget specially made which he used to emboss a wreathed skull inside copies of Reiksguard. Speaking simultaneously as they did of his pride in his BL work and of his remembrance of the other side of the fan experience, these were nice touches on Richard's part.

Offerings to appease the Ruinous Powers

Chat and stuff
One of the first questions I asked Richard was what had brought him north to Glasgow. It turned out that he was up in Scotland because KDC Theatre are at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a production of Ups & Downs- a play he's scripted, and so he'd decided to combine the trip with visits to GW Edinburgh and Glasgow. Ups & Downs features 5 souls in the afterlife's waiting room who face the business of filling out their application forms for heaven or hell, forms which are part of the Holy Ghost's newly streamlined system for final judgement. The show runs every day at noon until the 15th (that's this Sunday) and it sounds intriguing. I'm going to try and make the trip to see it.

With the other fans present we talked too about which armies we collect. Richard confessed to being more a random collector than an actual army-builder, although he did talk of an Alaitoc craftworld Eldar army (a craftworld of whose Pathfinders I have particularly painful memories) which he fields without Aspect Warriors in keeping with his theme of a scouting force. As a by the way, Andy- whose approach to army-building is as clean-shaven and cheese-free as it is possible to get, has suggested that Aspect Warriors are actually quite in keeping with Richard's theme because they're the full-time warrior castes as opposed to the citizen reservists represented by the Guardians. It'd work for me!

While talking about his writing Richard revealed that he'd used one of the Total War series of computer games- Medieval or Medieval II I expect, to stage a major battle from Reiksguard so that he could get a feel for its scale and of how it might look as it developed. This was very much to the delight of one young fan who was a big fan of the computer games too. I've only played the first of the series- Shogun: Total War, and that just a few times on its release back in 2000. The game impressed me like few others and I can see that the Total War engine would be ideal to help writers visualise the sort of huge battles which are common in fantasy novels.

A quick review
Reiksguard is going to have to work its way up my read pile, but I had time to read 'Orphans of the Kraken', Richard's story in Legends of the Space Marines. I liked it. I thought I'd better double check before I wrote anything about the story, so I read it again. I still liked it.

'Orphans of the Kraken' features Brother Sergeant Tiresias of the Scythes of the Emperor chapter. The story is set in the aftermath of the Scythes' near destruction at the hands of Hive Fleet Kraken. With the chapter's strength reduced to a fraction of normal and its homeworld destroyed so that most of the Scythes' geneseed has been lost forever, the new chapter master has adopted a long-term strategy of survival and recruitment to rebuild the chapter. Tiresias' role in this is to lead the new recruits in recovery missions, a role which leaves him bitter and resentful because he believes his new chapter master's strategy is futile and he'd rather see the Scythes just go out in a suitably martial blaze of glory.

Taking this premise, Richard's short and atmospheric opening immediately sets the story on a tragic arc. Then it's straight into Tiresias' lastest mission with his squad of neophytes, all of whom he regards as strictly second rate compared to his many dead battle brothers. The mission is to search for possible surviving Scythes battle brothers who might somehow be alive aboard a Tyranid bioship. Scenes of exploration and epic discovery, and well-crafted action sequences are combined with flashbacks which develop Tiresias' relationship with his neophytes so that his self-indulgent deathwish ultimately becomes a surprisingly thoughtful tale of redemption.

To say much more about 'Orphans of the Kraken' would risk spoilers. I have to note though that its theme has a special appeal to this DIY chapter master. I've written before about how Penumbra's Talons was founded single-handedly and on the spot by Franken Lar. The Talons were eventually recognised as a Chapter in the 4th Founding. This means that the Talons went through a long period- both during the Belonian Heresy Wars and after, in which a small nucleus of battle brothers would have been operating essentially unofficially. Even after their authorised founding the new chapter would have been sorely under strength and so would've had to be careful in how they committed their precious resources while simultaneously upholding their standing as Astartes. No prizes for spotting any similarities with Richard's story of the rebuilding of the Scythes.

A well-written story with that special geek appeal? Job well done Richard I have to say.

One last teaser
Richard told us that there is talk at BL of commissioning him to write to a novel featuring the Scythes of the Emperor. That was all the information he could give us last Friday. I'd probably buy it on the strength of 'Orphans of the Kraken' alone. Will I still feel that way after a play and a novel? Time will tell I guess. ;)

Of GW, the lure of Chaos, gribblies, and stuff

2010-08-05T14:19:00.014+01:00

Space Hulk wins 2 Golden Geek Awards
My recent visits to the pages of Black Library novels: Graham McNeill's Heldenhammer- which I picked up at Conflict 2010, and Nathan Long's Bloodborn- which I reviewed last month; these visits to the world of the book have revived my interest in tie-in fiction set in two of my favourite gaming universes. And so it was that last Saturday saw me dropping in to my local GW in search of new reading matter. Also available was the new issue of White Dwarf. I confess I'm in the camp who finds GW's house magazine to be of limited utility in terms of adding value to my GW gaming interests- namely 40K, but I always like to read interviews with the creative types at the Design Studio. White Dwarf #368 features two, so I bought it.

One mighty game; two well-deserved awards

Skimming through the pages of news and new releases, as you do, I was pleasantly surprised to read Jervis Johnson's grateful acknowledgement of the two 2009 Golden Geek Awards the BGG community had awarded Space Hulk, whose 3rd edition was released amid great fanfare last year. The awards were:

Best 2-player game.
Best artwork/presentation.

Pleasant: because it was good to see that Space Hulk had received these accolades from the BGG community, and because it was nice to read Jervis' appreciation of this in the pages of White Dwarf. Surprising: because, regular BGG user that I am, I had no idea of these awards- the official awards ceremony was in November last year, until I read of Space Hulk's 2009 success in White Dwarf.

From the depths of darkness past
I'm sure I've mentioned before somewhere that I didn't immediately take to the chaos, death and spikey bits which have become the trademark style upon which GW have lovingly lavished so much care and attention these past 37 years. I didn't like the look of it when it first appeared in Citadel's Fantasy Adventurers range of roleplaying miniatures back in 1982. And I didn't like this vision any more when I first saw it in all its vivid detail, in the guise of 'Harry the Hammer' on the cover of Warhammer Fantasy Battle when the first edition appeared a year later.

Back then I was of course still under the shadow of Tolkien, the great grandaddy of 20th century high fantasy. My tastes therefore ran to a more naturalistic style: worlds whose trappings retained a certain real-world plausibility even if their denizens were utterly fantastic. The result was that my imagination couldn't find a place for these new gothic stylings; they didn't speak to me of worlds I wanted to visit because I still expected fantasy worlds ultimately to be rooted in the materiality of our own world.

It was after the appearance of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay- 1986, and Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader- 1987, that I finally got the point of GW's new vision. And that point was? In a word: Chaos. WFRP took the grotesqueries from which I had instinctively shrunk a just few years earlier and put them in a context which brought them to life. That context- one of a life and death struggle between a beleaguered humanity and legions of darkness, was hardly novel in and of itself. It was the sheer grandiosity of the Ruinous Powers- simultaneously genuinely unsettling in their implacable evil and in their overweening disregard for life, and actually quite intelligent to boot; it was this sheer scale which put them in a league of their own.

Strangely magnificent as they were, the Ruinous Powers of the Old World and the Dark Millenium wouldn't in and of themselves have been enough to lure me into GW's new worlds. What did that ultimately was the theme of the enemy within. This theme scaled the overpowering threat of Chaos down to a level which is:

Managable in game terms; ie. something characters can confront and against which they might prevail.
Part of everyday life instead of some distant and overwhelming faceless evil; giving rise to the paranoia for which GW's two great gaming worlds are so justly renowned.
Something of a 'rational' choice in an evidently hopeless situation; this creates the possibility of pathos and other sensibilities surprisingly subtle for gaming settings sketched in in such visceral broad strokes.

If WFRP played fast and loose with the traditional Faustian pact of surrendering to evil instead of struggling against it, the development of the background to 40K took the next step: it took such a pact and wrote it into the heart of the setting in the form of a tragic fall from grace, namely the Heresy. The immediate effect of this was to underscore a key theme of 40K: the futility of rebellion. In most SF, evil empires are there to be defeated by heroic rebels. In 40K, the evil empires' Evil Empire remains mankind's last best hope because all the alternatives are worse, and because rebellion itself is a curse thanks to Chaos.

Absolute evil, the struggle against it, and rebellion: these are potent themes. Chaos- in the Old World and in the Dark Millenium both, makes these themes simultaneously black and white and shades of grey, a paradox which contributes to these worlds' enduring appeal. It's certainly what made me interested enough to want to visit and revisit these worlds down the years.

Slithering, slurping, howling hordes of insane slaughter
All of which brings us back to White Dwarf #368 and another reason why I couldn't resist it: it's dedicated to the new additions to the Chaos Daemons range. As a 40K fan, my interest in Chaos has long lain with my plans to build an army of Red Corsairs, plans which were seeded as soon as I read of the Red Corsairs in the Huron Blackheart entry in 2nd edition Codex: Chaos. A piratical army of recent renegades from the Imperium? Readers should be able easily to imagine why the appeal of this was so immediate and strong to yours truly.

As is typically the case these days, a new wave of GW releases means new plastic sets to replace miniatures which used to be available only in metal, as well as new characters in metal. Speaking as a would-be Lord of Chaos with my own heretical agendas, I have to say that the new Khornate stuff appeals to me the most:

These are the sort of daemonic allies I would choose first to recruit to my own Red Corsairs.

I've also got to mention the new Pink Horrors of Tzeentch plastic boxed set. This is partly because of the thematic appeal of combining Khorne's unquenchable bloodfrenzy with Tzeentch's subtle reality-warping, but mostly because Giorgio Bassani gets a design co-credit with Mark Harrison. Regular readers might remember that Andy and I had a nice chat with Giorgio when we met him at Conflict 2010 last April. Now we know (some of?) the secrets Giorgio could't tell us that day. I'm sure Giorgio will be very proud when his work finally hits the shelves on Saturday.

One last thing...
Tomorrow- Friday the 6th, GW Glasgow have an author event featuring BL writer Richard Williams, whose most recent novel is Reiksguard, in the Empire Army series. The event starts at 3pm and will feature an Ork versus Empire megabattle based on the one in Reiksguard, as well as the usual opportunity to chat with the author and get some signage. I daresay I'll be taking along my copy of Liber Chaotica, for which Richard shared authors' credits with Marijan von Staufer. Should be fun. ;)

Q-workshop STRIKE!!!!

2010-08-01T19:00:00.001+01:00

Journey to the unknown land of dice manufacturing
Remember that mention I gave back in June to Q-Workshop, the novelty dice company? I thought I was just honouring my side of a bargain made at UK Games Expo 2010, when I wangled a small discount on some dicecups in return for a promised mention here at RD/KA!. Little did I know then the ancient emnities- as long as beards and as sharp as ears, with which I had become involved for the sake of those two quid. What am I talking about? Watch this video and you'll see.

It seems then that the introduction of new design and manufacturing technology means that big changes are afoot at Q-Workshop, including:

New cheap classic RPG dice sets.
New premium 3D dice.
New deluxe metal dice.
New box packaging.
New lower prices for older dice sets.

"New" and "lower prices": phrases which are bound to delight dice geeks everywhere, especially those who are already fans of Q-Workshops' wide range. But is this really good news all round?

A sting in the tail?
Spare a thought, dear readers, for the elves, those nimble-fingered craftmasters brought low by ancient animosities; reduced to penury and with no choice but to put their noses to the grindstone in the forges- now under new ownership, of their ancestral enemies, the dwarves. If you really must be seduced by the new 'shiny shiny' on offer from Q-Workshop- and why not: after all, if dice are nice then nicer dice are dicier; if you really can't resist the lure of Q-Workshop's wares, then don't forget the elves. Contact Q-Workshop and insist that their promise that "No elves were fired" lives on into the future.

And should the day come that Q-Workshop's elves must resort again to the strike? Why not make a donation to their fighting fund for every product you buy from Q-Worshop? New technology is great to be sure but new machines are just the 'shiny shiny' of tools. The skills and craft of the wielder are decisive in the end. The best of these should command the best prices, just like everything else. So support the Q-Workshop elves because you want their dice. ;)

Not 'just another' Claymore

2010-07-31T21:01:00.004+01:00

Convention off the starboard bow
August is waiting at the door and so Claymore is manoeuvring itself into position again on the local convention calendar.

My plans aren't in place yet but my intention is to attend as ever. The success of last year's new venue means that I await 2010's Claymore with anticipation tangible enough to feel quite novel.

Zombies and Daleks, oh my!
This year's programme of participation games looks interesting all round. I can honestly say that I'd be happy to play in any of the games in this year's programme. Needs as needs must though, so here is my shortlist of 3 games for the day:

City of Prosperity: 15mm Zombies.
Dumfries Wargames Club: British Civil War 1938, 28mm.
Edinburgh League of Wargamers: 28mm Daleks.

Daleks, zombies and an alt-history British civil war? Truly messieurs convention organisers, you are spoiling us.

What to choose, what to choose? I think I'll have to put the British Civil War game at the top of my list. I imagine this will be based on the 1938 A Very British Civil War series published by Solway Crafts and Miniatures. My old pal Jim told me some interesting tales about this game when I visited him in Edinburgh after my Conflict of Heroes demo sessions last month. Jim gave me the impression that this game is something of a hit. It deserves to be, given its intriguing premise: that Edward VIII didn't abdicate in 1936, with the result that civil war breaks out in Britain in 1938.

After that I'd probably want to have a go with the Daleks. Zombies are fun I know, but I've never played a wargame with Daleks, which makes the opportunity just a bit too much to resist. So here's hoping for a dose of "Bally spiffing old bean," topped up with a dash of "Exterminate! Exterminate!" a week today. ;)

Rain starts play

2010-07-16T13:15:00.004+01:00

Get down, deeper and down!
Tuesday's visit to G3 was just the icing on the cake of what had been a bumper few days gaming for yours truly. Such a big night took priority over the weekend's gaming here at RD/KA!, which- thanks to my trip to Edinburgh and the recent good weather, saw our first Sunday session in a month. Donald, Gav and I made three on the day. First choice was down to Donald, which put him in the Overlord's Seat of Power for a long-awaited return to Descent, my favourite dungeonbash boardgame.

A dynamic duo?
With only 2 heroes a solid tank was a priority. Gav chose that role and quickly settled on Mordrog. I decided to run a rogue , choosing Kirga for his ability to keep the spawning monsters at bay. And so we had a pair of scurvy greenskin 'heroes' we hoped would be fit to tackle the best that the Overlord could throw at us.

Already tickled by our characterful choice of heroes, we were well satisfied by our skills draws. Mordrog's Brawler, Relentless and Tough were going to make him a killing machine who'd excel at getting in the thick of things, and whom the Overlord would have a hard time stopping. Kirga's Born to the Bow, Eagle Eye and Marksman- giving him aimed Pierce 3 bow attacks at +4 range, meant that we had- for the first time ever in our games of Descent, a genuine master of the bow.

What went down
Minor inconveniences?
We were playing Quest #4: Spoiled Brat, which led to the first of a couple of what we hoped would be minor inconveniences: an unconsciousness princess. One of us would have to carry her and she'd count as 1 of that hero's 2 'other' items as well as reducing his Speed by 1. Gav and I easily discounted the notion of reducing Mordrog's Speed to 2 so yours truly was duly lumbered with this encumbrance.

Kinga and Mordrog made short work of the dungeon denizens in the first room, although Donald was able to delay us with some spawned monsters. Still, our treasure from the 2 copper chests netted me Backbiter, a cursed magic bow. Cursed items are powerful treasures which come with a sting in the tail: you can only get rid of them when you die, and your hero becomes worth an extra Conquest point if you equip the item to use it (losing all your Conquest points- when heroes are killed or when the Overlord exhausts his Overlorld deck, is how hero players lose the game). Backbiter's amazing abilities were enough to convince Gav and I that the risk of the Curse was well worth running.

Inconveniences become complications
Opening the door into the second area revealed quite a lot of monsters; entering the area revealed a spiked pit trap, into which Mordrog promptly fell. The monsters in this area weren't too worrying individually, en masse in such a tight corner was another matter. Gav and I were slow in fighting our way through, our caution in advancing encouraged by Donald's spawing more skeletons then a blood ape to join in the beastmen attack from the rear.

Both one-shot killers by this point, Kirga and Mordrog wreaked terrible carnage as they worked their way slowly forwards. Unfortunately the Overlord's monsters were wearing us down too, Kirga especially because Donald was cleverly concentrating his attacks on the weaker of our two heroes. Weak though they were those skeleton archers were able to pick away at Kirga with their piercing arrows. Eventually Kirga was so wounded that I realised that it'd be a waste of a good potion to heal him only for him to die in a couple more turns: it was time for him to die and to respawn.

This gave rise to another minor inconvenience: the princess was left lying where Kirga had died so that I had to go back to pick her up again. Fortunately this was easily done so I thought that this had been a good death.

The Overlord's spawnage continued, this time a couple of dark priests. Dangerous enough in their own right, the master dark priest had the added complication of Cursing the hero who killed him. And so it was that Mordrog joined Kirga- who'd kept Backbiter when he'd respawned, in being worth that extra Conquest point for the Overlord.

Complications have consequences
Gav and I were starting to feel the pressure as we headed for the door to the third area: all Donald had to do was exhaust his Overlord deck or kill just one of us and he'd win. So the monsters awaiting us in that room were a grim sight to behold. We had to act fast.

Mordrog charged in to open the Silver treasure chest. Then I made a fatal miscalculation, moving a square too far forward when I moved in to finish off the naga. This allowed an ogre to get in to attack and use its Pushback to shove Kirga back down the corridor, where he was promptly surrounded by a mob of fast-moving razorwings. This proved to be very bad indeed because the 2 master razorwings had the Stun ability; each hit places a Stun token; each Stun token loses a model 1 of its 2 actions for each turn. Soon enough Kirga was reeling around unable to do anything at all except wait to die for the second time, and worth an extra Conquest point for that second time.

Gav was able to save the game by activating a Glyph of Transport (you gain Conquest points for doing that), but there was nothing he could do to stop a master razorwing picking up the princess. This beastie has a move of 8- more than either Kirga or Mordrog could manage at full tilt, so the only way we could kill it and get the princess back was to attack from both sides. And we had to get the princess back because Donald was drawing 2 extra Overlord cards each turn while he held the princess, which amounted to going through his Overlord deck at twice the normal rate (exhausting the Overlord deck costs the heroes players Conquest points remember).

We almost pulled it off. Mordrog appeared behind the monsters and hacked his way through almost half of them. Then I appeared in front of them and opened fire with my bow. All I had to do was kill the master skeleton then the master razorwing would be next. The skeleton was duly despatched, only to pick itself up again because of its damned Undying ability. Gah! The pesky skeleton even survived a second time.

At this point Donald's Overlord deck was about to run out, so Kirga and Mordrog decided that discretion was the better part of valour and headed back into town leaving the princess to her fate.

Score
Newly qualified Evil Overlord 1
Ill-fated- but surviving, would-be heroes 0
:-/

Afterthoughts
A fantastic game! Donald played like a real pro, putting in his best ever performance as the Overlord (and it's not as if he hasn't won in the past). In particular he was ruthless in picking on the weaker of Gav's and my heroes- Kirga unfortunately, something which he'd failed to do in the past. Donald's clearly got to grips with the role and I'm looking forward to our next attempt to take him down a peg or two.

As for Gav and I? Well I have to say that perhaps Kirga wasn't the best choice of second hero. What he was good at was fine, but he was poor in two key areas:

Fatigue points: these are what enable heroes' fancy footwork; 3 might just not've been enough.
Speed: having a hero who can outrun monsters and generally get about a bit is important; Kirga's speed 4 was fine; reduced to 3 by that damned princess it was definitely too low (I couldn't've known about the princess before we started but maybe the lesson is that every party needs a hero with speed 5?).

Even with that we were hampered more in the end by poor tactics. We did two crucial things wrong:

We spent too long clearing rooms because we were concerned about the monsters who'd be following us; we should've pushed on faster leaving Donald to use his own turns to keep the monsters on our tails; all the more so in situations in which narrow corridors would've limited the number of monsters who could actually get in to attack.
We were too distracted by treasure and other baubles, which are there for the express purpose of enticing hero players into wasting time.

It's frustrating to have fallen into these bad old ways because I was already aware of the dangers they present to parties of heroes. Ah well, there's always another day.

Tactics aside, hindsight means I have to question the wisdom of accepting that Curse on Kirga. If Gav and I hadn't lost those extra 2 Conquest points because of Kirga's Curse, then we wouldn't've lost the game when we did. One point Gav and I never considered when we pondered what to do with Backbiter was how easy is it to kill the hero carrying the cursed item? If they're one of the lightly armoured heroes any half-decent Overlord will be picking on for easy kills, then perhaps it's better to ignore the lure of power and just keep the item in your pack until you can discard it when you die.

Bad choices and massive screwage
With time for another game after 5 hours of Descent we quickly decided on our old favourite, Settlers of Catan. Going first I had little difficulty in choosing a location giving me brick, lumber and sheep with what I hoped would be quick access to a brick port. Waiting for my second pick I was worried about my access to grain and/or ore. Sure enough, I was left a choice. In the end I plumped for a location which gave me a run to a lumber port with decent lumber regions- 6 and 10 for a total of 8 pips; good enough if I got it.

What went down
I got off to what looked like a good start, quickly building a city and grabbing the Longest Road quite by accident as I built what turned out to be a superfluous road in my efforts to prevent Gav from confounding my plans to get my grain along with some nice extra lumber. Then came the massive screwage by Gav:

He bought a Development card and his gloat was enough to worry me immediately; sure enough, on his next turn he revealed Year of Plenty and built 2 roads, so cutting off my access to the lumber port I'd had my eye on.
He built a settlement on the grain region I'd tried to shut him out of, so denying me grain for the rest of the game.

With my resource base thus crippled and Donald's being even worse than that because he'd started without any lumber, there was little that either of us could do to stop Gav's relentless advance to victory. That didn't stop me trying, naturally enough, but with no grain coming in I couldn't buy the Development cards which would normally have provided the Soldiers I'd've used to deny Gav his strategic resources.

Score
Evil Overlord 1
Just plain evil 1
D'oh! 0
:(

Afterthoughts
Gav's massive screwage was the decisive turn in my fortunes and I completely lost my focus after it, compounding a bad situation with dumb moves. Truth to tell though I had already showed poor focus in my setup. My second choice of starting settlement was invidious:

If I took the grain I'd almost certainly never've got any ore, so I'd've had no chance anyway.
Taking the ore put me into a potential conflict with Gav for my grain, which I might lose because I had no grain and therefore might not get my settlement down in time.

I made two crucial errors in this situation:

I should've gone for maximum ore once I'd decided to choose ore at that point: going for the lumber port was a third layer to the road/settlement strategy to which I was already committed by virtue of seeking my grain and that brick port; this was just a bad call.
Even before that, my first road should've been pointed at the grain I wanted instead of at the brick port: I knew that grain was going to be difficult simply because of the board layout; I should've redirected that road to minimise the resources I'd've needed to grab the resource vital to my game.

Ah well, c'est la vie. Here's hoping I've learned lessons for the future. ;)

A big night out

2010-07-14T14:02:00.029+01:00

Small beginnings?
In part 1 of my 2010 gaming wishlist last December, I wrote of how I needed to find new opponents to maintain my regular fix of WW2 tacsim gaming. I finally took steps towards this end last month when I posted an 'Opponents wanted' thread on BGG. The thread resulted in one reply which I confess wasn't encouraging, but it was enough.

And so it was that last night saw me lugging a big bag full of Memoir'44 down to a local municipal hall- conveniently located a few minutes away, there to attend the very same Glasgow Games Group (G3) which had been my old stomping ground in the years before I started blogging, and whose 10th anniversary celebrations I had attended back in June 2008.

As you can imagine dear readers, returning to an old haunt like this involved meeting with a few familiar faces. The first was Barry, whom I'd introduced to Memoir'44 when it was still new back in the days before I took my break from the club. What a pleasant surprise that was. This led to another entertaining little moment when, chatting to Barry about what had brought me back to G3, I mentioned the person I was to meet that night. He was lurking nearby earwigging, naturally enough, and so I was introduced to Gregor.

In at the deep end!
Gregor and I settled in for our game, before which I just had to show off the new Breakthrough boards and scenario pack which I had recently bought, naturally enough. Gregor was suitably impressed which was nice, because that meant I can be confident that this new expansion will be hitting the table sooner rather than later.

Distractions done, we chose our scenario. Gregor was keen to try the Eastern Front expansion because he'd never played it before. I'd been thinking about introducing Gregor to the new air rules via a familiar scenario but I needed no second bidding. Eastern Front is a great expansion and there's one scenario in particular I've never played that I've long been keen to try: Red Barricades, featuring a German assault on the legendary tractor factory.

What went down
Random selection gave Gregor the Russians, which suited him because he was interested in finding out how the Commissar rules worked. We set up and set to.

A strong German force ready to advance across the frozen wastes into the teeth of the Russian defences

With 4VP available to myself and the Russians for holding the Red Barricades factory complex and other objectives, and expecting to suffer serious losses as I closed, my basic plan just had to involve going for the Red Barricades on my right flank. This did and didn't start well:

Did: I got a couple of order cards for that flank which enabled me to advance, opening fire with my sniper for a kill; the first ever sniper shot in my Memoir experience and success was mine!
Didn't: Gregor launched a local counter attack, killing my sniper; my own advance on the right stalled for some time thereafter.

My next manoeuvre involved a bit of adjustment on my left followed by an Infantry Assault in the centre. The result was a bastion of 5 infantry units based on that town and ruins on my centre/left, complete with the clearance of the adjacent minefield and 2 wires: a strong anchor for my left to swing up the flank I hoped. Gregor had other ideas naturally enough, hitting my units turn after turn with everything he had before I could exploit my opening. Artillery, infantry, snipers (those pesky snipers- a permanent thorn in my side!) and tanks made short work of my exposed units so that shockingly quickly I was left with just 2 units holding in cover.

Gregor & I: battle is joined in Stalingrad

I was feeling the heat by now and knew I'd have to do something soon to turn the situation in my favour. I brought my artillery forward to improve their range and sent in the tanks. They didn't get off scot free but they achieved their crucial aim when they disposed of Gregor's own tanks, so opening up my own freedom of manoevure. Some of Gregor's infantry were stubbornly holding on in the buildings and ruins but others were caught by my tanks in the open deep in the Russian lines on my left: perfect conditions for armoured overruns, of which I was able to take full advantage. Meanwhile I had gained enough of a local advantage on my right finally to threaten the Red Barricades factory complex.

His forces crumbling and under pressure on two flanks, the jig was up for Gregor. The end came when a unit of Engineers cleared the factory objective on my left, advancing to occupy it for the final VP and a result of 10-5.

Score
Veterans of the 6th 1
Stubborn but outgunned 0
:)

Afterthoughts
A gripping and brutal game, the latter being down to the 10VP victory requirement which is uniquely high in standard Memoir AFAIK. Gregor's early success showed that this scenario is well winnable by the Russians. What went wrong? Well Gregor did comment before we played that he's more prone to rash attacks than he is to tactics, and I think our first game together proved his point.

With as many as 4VP available from objectives, the Russian strategy just has to involve holding on to those and punishing the Germans while they advance to sieze them. This suggests to me that the Russians have to create 2 defensive positions:

The Red Barricades factory complex.
The factory and ruins on their centre/right.

They also have to be prepared to fall back:

The 4 infantry units in the advance guard should tighten the defensive perimeter when the German advance is in a position to overwhelm them.
Everything should fall back on the Red Barricades for a last ditch defence because the Germans have to capture 3 of those 4 hexes to gain the 2VP.

These manoeuvres can be covered with harassing fire from the artillery, tanks and snipers. No plan ever survives contact with the enemy of course but I think that this strategy presents the Russians with their best chance.

By the way, although I won a fairly decisive victory the overall result was actually quite close to the historical outcome: the Russian line broke but I only ended up occupying a corner of the Red Barricades. Neat, I thought.

Hanging out
There was plenty going on at G3 last night: roleplaying- an ongoing D&D campaign in which Donald's been playing for ages; 40K- a 5-player megagame; Warmachine- 2 or 3 different games of this, which is apparently quite big in Glasgow; Infinity- an SF miniatures game which Andy was playing on some very nice urban terrain; and a game of Descent. Regular readers will know that this offers me plenty to get my teeth into in the future.

All of that will come after I've got the regular WW2 gaming rolling. All of which leads to my final pleasant surprise of the night, another club-goer called John. He was Gregor's other recent Memoir opponent; in fact he owns the campaign bag which is the only accessory I haven't bought for this favourite game. It turned out that John is a keen WW2 tactical gamer whose collection includes ASL and Combat Commander and he is a big fan of card-driven command and control systems.

We had a long and interesting chat after which I also found out that John is interested in RPGs like BoxNinja's SF bughunter 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars- which regular readers might remember I bought at Conpulsion back in March; and in Contested Ground Studios' game of Cold War paranoia, weird science and monster hunting, Cold City- which I picked up at UK Games Expo'10 just last month. I'd been wondering when I might get a chance to play these new RPGs and now it looks like that chance might come a lot sooner than I'd imagined.

Two new wargaming opponents and someone who shares my interest in alternative RPGs? Talk about coming up trumps. You can be sure, dear readers, that John and I will be meeting each other across the gaming table at the earliest opportunity. I suspect Gregor might want first dibs on his revenge though. ;)

"Trapped in the netherspace, the void between the worlds"

2010-07-08T23:21:00.055+01:00

WARNING!

- MAJOR Doctor Who season 5 spoilers ahead -
WARNING!

Oh. My. Goodness!
I may only have written about Doctor Who once before here at RD/KA!- at the end of David Tennant's first season back in 2007, but everyone who knows me knows only too well that I am a devoted fan of the show, albeit not a Whovian geek as such. As I set to writing this I've just come from watching for the 3rd time the 2-part finale to Matt Smith's first season as the inimitable Doctor, to refresh in my mind what made this season so striking as to prompt me to give vent to my enthusiasm for what has been 13 weeks of truly matchless television.

Brace yourselves dear readers!
In light of what I said last Sunday about the pointless sound and fury so often aroused in geek culture by clashes of tastes driven by blind partisanship, I want to begin with a warning and a clarification. If you don't like Doctor Who, or you do but don't share my high appreciation of the merits of this season: that's all well and good, but I don't care. Mule headed blind partisanship? No. I simply can't. This is just the blunt end of my critique of what I was hinting at last Sunday when I referred to how "personal tastes are justified against other people's by being raised to the level of intellectual generalisations".

What I'm getting at here is the all too widespread tendency for people to express their own tastes in absolute qualitative terms, so that different tastes are seen as inferior: if I like it it must be good; if I don't it must be bad; other people's tastes are then refracted through this egoistic prism. I believe that this is in part a legacy of the obsolescent division between high and low culture, art and entertainment- on the one hand; and the concomitant creation of the 'canon'- on the other.

I also think that this close-minded blind partisanship derives from the very conditions which have driven the obsolesence of the old high art aesthetic. These conditions are: the emergence of new media- based on technology (eg. digital media) or otherwise (eg. tabletop RPGs), which have transformed the cultural landscape so radically that they represent a veritable revolution; and the overwhelming profileration of expression in all these media. This historically unprecedented cultural richness has exploded the credibility of the notion of the canon because there are now literally too many products across too many media for even the most eclectic cultural afficionado to experience a representative sample of this new universe of creativity. And if even sampling everything is impossible then plainly liking everything is unimaginable.

Big little people and small big people
That's all very well you might say, but what's it got to do with geek rage? Compared to the old, this new culture is simultaneously more intensely personal- because of the necessary selection from the vast new menu; and more participatory- because of the new media among other things. We are therefore talking about something which more actively expresses and affirms individuality than could the old culture, so that it is the basis of the richest expression of personality that we common people have ever enjoyed. It makes us bigger people in other words.

Yet these wonders, or more precisely perhaps: our understanding of what they are, represent and so might become; these still labour under the burden of the dead hand of 'mainstream high culture', whose aesthetic is still only obsolescent after all. This survival is thanks largely to state and corporate patronage, the attendant awards circuit with its coterie of celebrity hangers-on, and the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy and well-to-do.

Now don't get me wrong here: I'm not saying that this stuff is all crap; that's not the point of this polemic, and it's a matter of taste after all. What I'm saying is that the overweening sense of self-importance enjoyed by these ivory tower denizens- a mere trickle in our cultural floodtide after all; this serves to deny to geekery fair recognition of its true novelty and profound human value. Hence, I suggest, the defensiveness of those who internalise and project outwards the old order's negation of their newfound sense of cultural identity by adopting the obsolescent aesthetic equating taste with absolute quality.

And the point of all this? Paradoxically perhaps, it's about quality in the end. Critical appreciation of objects and matters of interest is essential to the exchange of ideas without which no human activity can aspire to become better than it is. The blind partisanship of tastes defined through the denigration of others' is a barrier impeding the necessarily comparative nature of this vital discourse. The effects of this are all the more baleful in geek culture because of what it is: a mulitmedia participatory culture of confluence and sythesis; ie. an open, exploratory culture. The tragedy of geek rage then is that it insists on slamming doors shut and turning back from the unknown.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION
- Total Doctor Who season 5 spoilage follows -
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

"Geronimo!"

Class act: Amy Pond and the 11th Doctor

A möbius strip tied in a Gordian knot?

What do you get if you take Steven Moffat- writer of season 3's intricately plotted time-travel episode Blink, and give him an entire season of Doctor Who to play with? Let me tell you. You get the Doctor- existence unravelling because he's just rebooted the universe by staging Big Bang 2 at the heart of an exploding TARDIS, returning to from where he set forth, there to vanish; then being rescued by Amy Pond (new assistant) thanks to the seed he'd planted in her mind (in what was hitherto widely regarded to be a continuity error no less!) while that unravelling drew him back through an adventure in which the Doctor- the one going forward this time, had found out that these cracks in the universe were a growing threat on a cosmic scale; a threat which turned out to have been caused by his very own exploding TARDIS. Until, that is, the Doctor- in an alternate Earth, figured out how to intervene so that the explosion saved the day it had already created.

If your heads're already spinning dear readers, I'm afraid there's more. Twelve years elapsed between the 7-year old Amy's first meeting with the Doctor- at his point of departure and return (her house, where the Doctor also first encountered one of those cracks in the universe) and his reappearance for their first adventure together: saving the world, naturally enough. Two more years passed before the Doctor came back to take Amy on her first trip in the TARDIS, on the night before her wedding. The Doctor manages to turn up at Amy's wedding thanks to her remembrance: late- but in time for the dancing, and none the worse for having been erased from existence while Amy slept that night on which it turned out he hadn't invited her for that first trip in the TARDIS after all. So the whole series- spanning the length and breadth of time and space as ever, actually took place in a mere 24 hours.

And to cap it all: the universe might've been saved, but what caused the TARDIS to explode in the first place remains a mystery.

Ingredients essential to a new recipie
Three ingredients were essential to this heady brew: an absence, and two presences direct consequences thereof. The absence? That of Russell T. Davies, whose scripting had been the object of fans' complaints for some time. It was thanks to The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone 2-parter that I finally grokked what people were on about: there had been a subtle but significant change to the whole tenor of the storytelling. By the end of The Time of Angels I was aware of the significance of this absence and of the other two ingredients.

The masterly pre-credits sequence reintroducing River Song at the start of The Time of Angels- 5 minutes which for sheer wit, pace and concise storytelling outdid any James Bond movie opening I can remember; this showed us the second ingredient: superlative use of time travel, of its possibilities and its paradoxes. In Moffat's hands this is doubly dramatic because it's not just a 'black box' MacGuffin enabling plot twists, it's a tool the characters use to solve their problems. This has the added effect of deepening the characterisation because time travel becomes part of who they are- of how they relate to each other and so on, instead of just something they do.

This same dramatic intelligence was brought to bear on the third ingredient: characterisation. With Amy and River in particular we had two female characters who were strong protagonists in their own right in a way that was novel despite all the good work in this regard that had gone before. The Doctor was improved as a character by this peculiar loss of his familiar absolute authority. Why? Simply: he became stronger- as a dramatic character, because he was reacting to and relating with stronger characters. The result was again doubly improved drama: better dialogue on the one hand; on the other, supporting characters who became less than merely supporting because who they were and what they did played a bigger part in the plot, not to mention having a greater effect on the Doctor himself.

Rory's erasure from existence itself at the end of In Cold Blood is a case in point. By this time, the episode Amy's Choice had already seen Rory saved from his earlier role of comedy-relief pratt. This came when Amy realised that Rory was more important to her than a life with the Doctor which, however excting, could only ever be platonic and therefore ultimately unsatisfying. Rory's tragic fate a mere 2 episodes later was thus all the more moving, and especially poignant when its nature meant that Amy forgot him. So not only had Rory grown as a character because of how he was reflected in his relationship with Amy; but the feelings at the core of that relationship, and the Doctor's guilt about his role in Rory's erasure: both of these were to have decisive consequences- for good and ill, in the season finale.

Now get out of that!
This intricate web of action and reaction, event and consequence, in the realms of thought, feeling and derring-do brought us to River Song at the start of The Pandorica Opens, once again using her own skills as a time-hopping super agent and her knowledge of the Doctor to bring the Doctor to her to deliver to him a clue which itself had travelled centuries up the timestream before she took it centuries back downsteam. And what did we find? That it was all a fiendish trap into which the Doctor was lured by being hoist on the petard of his own insatiable curiosity before finally being snared by the sin of hubris.

Plot twists piling on emotional reversals spilled forth helter skelter until we were left with the ultimate irony: the Doctor pleading for freedom with all of his most dangerous enemies- who'd united in an impossible alliance, because only he could save the universe from his own exploding TARDIS. They didn't listen, of course (he was the villain of the piece in their eyes), and so the Doctor was sealed in the Pandorica, simultaneoulsy sealing the fate of the universe.

Oh, alright then
A little girl- from an alternate Earth, who believes in stars which never existed follows a string of mysterious messages to open the Pandorica from which the Doctor has already been rescued because those messages are sent by himself on that alternate Earth; from where he returns to the original Earth at the centre of the dying universe to organise his own release; from where he travels to the alternate Earth, there to encounter the little girl (who has by now met her alternate older self, Amy, naturally enough); from whom he learns which messages to deliver and where.

The Doctor, Amy and Amy reunited, the piece's sole villain appears- a clapped-out Dalek; as do: Rory (again!); a dying Doctor- who gives himself some fateful advice with his dying breath; and River Song- rescued from the still-exploding TARDIS. Then the Dalek does for the Doctor, who promptly does the disappearing act which is the other end of his earlier mysterious appearance, and which leads to a second disappearance as it turns out the Doctor hadn't been dead after all. He'd been hard at work preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice, launching the Pandorica into the heart of his exploding TARDIS to spark Big Bang 2; only then to discover- as his time stream unravels towards his own erasure from existence, that he himself has one last chance: Amy's dreams of days that never were.

SPOILERS OVER
- Safe reading ahead -
SPOILERS OVER

This geek and his delights
So, dear readers, if you've followed me this far I'm hoping that there's one thing that we'll all have to agree upon: whether or not you like the 11th Doctor and/or Amy, Rory and River- and I know that some or all of the new characters have sharply polarised the show's fanbase; like them or not, they were part of a season which saw an already excellent TV show rise to new heights of sophistication. I'd argue that this is there in the structure of the stories and of the entire season, as I have tried to show above.

My point here is not to tell you that you have to decide to like what you didn't like (although that'd be nice, naturally enough). Rather I'm trying to demonstrate what I was getting at in the preceding polemic with my references to "critical appreciation" and "comparative... discourse". The structural features of cultural artefacts- texts, tunes, rules of the game, and so on; these have a qualitative objectivity of their own: their novelty; their authenticity or truthfulness; whether or not they actually work to deliver their creators' intentions, and so on. These aren't necessarily absolutes to be sure but you don't have to like something to be able to recognise and assess these qualities.

My private trip in the TARDIS
My love of Doctor Who is a case in point here. Forty-odd years ago I was a little kid who used to watch the show from behind my splayed fingers when I wasn't hiding behind the sofa. Doctor Who was therefore my personal introduction to stark staring terror, to the extent that I've sometimes wondered if my parents would've let me watch the show if they'd known the effect it had on me. I grew up with the Doctor for some twelve years before leaving the family home at around the time Tom Baker regenerated into Peter Davison.

Losing touch with the Doctor thereafter, I'd become so jaded by today's culture of movie blockbusters, franchises and remakes that I had no faith whatsoever in Doctor Who's planned revival in 2005; so much so that I wouldn't've watched Eccleston's first episode unless Gav had called to remind me that it was on. I loved it, naturally enough, but the crucial moment came right at the end. Rose was walking away from the TARDIS when the Doctor popped out to quip, "Did I also tell you it travels in time?"

"Yes, yes! It does!" I was shouting at the TV at this moment, because that was what the show had done for me: it had taken back me in time to that little kid. My immediate realisation thereafter was that the production team had succeeded with Doctor Who where George Lucas had failed with the Star Wars prequels: they had managed to exploit the generation gap in their audience to create a unique artistic experience, one in which young and old members of the audience are united in their enjoyment of a show which each generation watches as if through different ends of a telescope, if you will.

It wasn't until the season just passed that I realised how profound this achievement is. Why? Firstly because Moffat had put time travel front and centre, as well as at the heart of his jaw-dropping megaplot. Also, the way that Amy had been introduced took the personal dimension to which I referred above- the play on childnood memories and adult perspective in this viewer, and made it too both part of a great character and a crucial feature of the stunning finale. Along the way there were reflections on love, dreams and mortality which struck deep chords in me. In other words: a show about time travel already giving me a metaphoric sense of time travel in the way that it awakens my inner child started to orchestrate emotional symphonies of a whole new complexity because of the multi-layered mind games the stories were playing.

All of which brings us back to "personal taste" and "intellectual generalisations". Doctor Who is a singular pleasure for me because of the show's role in my life; not just when I was that kid who just couldn't resist the source of his terror, but also for what it represented when it was revived. This is the "intensely personal" dimension of the new culture to which I referred above and it is why challenging my taste here is pointless: this passion just runs too deep. It is obvious that it is simply impossible for many of Doctor Who's other fans to have the same relationship with the show, making it similarly futile to challenge the tastes of those who don't share my high opinion of the show.

My depth versus your superficiality? No! No! No!
It's the untrammelled delight Doctor Who brings me which drives me to analyse it in such detail, to understand how and why it thrills me so. This kind of passion is a natural consequence of how people choose from among the range of products of the new media, as I've tried to explain. Its lack of reciprocation likewise, because people are making personal choices every bit as deeply felt as my own response to Doctor Who. This is essential fuel for the geek rage which can make arguments about differing tastes so explosive. Because, as I've also tried to explain: the 'my tastes good, your tastes bad' line of argument adds a direct attack from your 'flanks and rear'- ie. from your fellow geeks whose tastes differ, to the indirect one from on high.

And that's where I came in: making no apologies for not giving a jot if you don't believe that this season of Doctor Who was the best yet of what was already the best TV show of its kind on the face of the planet. All I could say to that is: why not? Meanwhile, how ever will I survive until its return next year? ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- It's art Jim, but not as we know it!
- A parcel of rogues...

Death becomes them all

2010-07-06T09:00:00.002+01:00

Again with the old pals routine
My old pal Rob- whose job regularly takes him to Sweden for weeks at a time, was back in town last week so we decided a trip to the cinema was in order. We chose to go see Black Death, a film which has been on my 'would like to see' list ever since I noticed its release. Regular readers should have no difficulty in guessing why a film set in plague-ridden medieval England should appeal to me, but I'll come back to that later.

The critic's eye
There is a lengthy review on the IMDb Black Death page in which I think the reviewer is quite quite wrong. The IMDb page correctly tags Black Death with the horror and mystery genres. These features of the movie are nowhere addressed in that review; poor form and a shame, because these were the movie's strengths.

The mystery central to the story is straightforward: there is a village which is reputed to be free from the ravages of the plague. Why? Witchcraft and daemonology is the answer which springs to the mind of some of the church's more 'devoted' servants, who are sent out to investigate and to bring the fallen to preordained and bloody 'justice'. Interwoven with this mystery for the characters is one for the audience: will the satanic forces supposed to be protecting this village be real, or will they just be projections of medieval Christianity's own inner darkness?

Supernatural or psychological horror? This simple question- posed both by the plot and by the audience's own situation, is deftly handled and is the engine of Black Death's drama, generating tension which rises nicely through satisfying twists and turns towards ultimate resolution. Part of this is down to the characterisation, deemed "cardboard" by our IMDb 'reviewer'. The point here is that- by the time the witch hunters arrive at the village, we understand them well enough so that we are looking at the world through their eyes, with the result that what they finally encounter deepens the mystery, ratchets up the tension, and sets the stage very nicely for the final act.

It is clear that the IMDb reviewer is missing the point completely when he complains that the "conversations [in the village] were between cardboard characters; mentions of God weren't enough to create meaningful discussions." A "missed opportunity" he calls it. You what?

Consider the situation: on the one hand we have a village; on the other, a party of fanatical Christian witch hunters who already know the former are fallen and who are just looking for the evidence they need to bring down the wrath of a righteous Lord on those deserving heads. What prospect could there be for meaningful religious discourse in this atmosphere of mutual suspicion between people already ideologically closed to each other's viewpoints?

The truth is that the characters in Black Death aren't cardboard. They are drawn in exactly as much depth as their role in the story requires. If this wasn't so then the witch hunters' arrival at the village simply couldn't've been the fine moment it was. More than that, the scenes in the village as the movie rises to its climax deftly manipulate the audience's sympathies so that by the end of the film you're sitting there warily keeping your eye on both sides, so to speak. It would be too much to say that this is profound, but it's certainly a long way from stupid, and definitely much much more subtle than staple blockbuster fare.

"Unnecessarily graphic violence" is the phrase demonstrating our IMDb reviewer is more than merely obtuse, that he is bitching blindly because he went to see the wrong movie. That violence will feature in the story is plain as day as soon as we meet the collection of misbegotten veterans of the Battle of Crecy who are the witch hunters. The bleached and grainy cinematography which unflinchingly depicts the pestilent horrors of the Black Death foreshadow a similarly grim treatment of the inevitable violence. And make no mistake about it: when it comes, that violence is gut-wrenchingly visceral; a life or death struggle in which every blow counts because each miss is one more chance for your opponent to kill you. Authentic precisely because it is so appalling in other words.

I liked Black Death a lot. It's a very competent unpretentious little movie which was never less than engrossing even when it was almost too gruesome. One or two plot twists were a little obvious, but that's not a serious complaint for this satisfied customer. Definitely worth watching. DVD would be fine because it's not really a big screen spectacular.

The geek's eye
It wasn't long after the screening began that I realised Black Death was giving us a portrait of medieval life more coarsely and grubbily authentic than that I'd enjoyed so much last month in the otherwise unspectacular Robin Hood. The difference between Black Death and Robin Hood parallelled that between Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey: everything in Black Death looked much more of its time and place, more lived in, than had similar trappings in Robin Hood.

And it wasn't long after that that I realised this difference was akin to that between the cod medievalism of classic high fantasy in RPGs, on the one hand; and the "grim world of perilous adventure" that is WFRP, on the other. You can imagine, dear readers, that this contributed mightily to my enjoyment of a movie which already needed no assistance in that department. Exactly as with Robin Hood, roleplayers- GM or PC both, could loot Black Death for material to bring to their games: characters, incidents (just look at those flagellants above!), locations, the plot entire; all would fit nicely into a roleplaying campaign but especially, I reckon, into WFRP's Old World.

The fight scenes were a particular case in point when it came to how much the depiction of medieval England in Black Death echoed WFRP both as a setting and as a system. I could almost see those critical hit dice being rolled (my 1st and 2nd edition WFRP heritage speaking there) as people were ruthlessly struck down and brutally finished off in fights which had nothing to do with the extended exchanges of blows typical of many action movies' fight scenes. It wasn't pleasant but that was the point of course, exactly as it is in WFRP.

A welcome return?

2010-07-04T09:00:00.013+01:00

Sometimes we just can't help ourselves
Geek culture can sometimes be less a cultural panorama than a minefield for the unwary. I'm talking of course of the irrational passions and prejudices which can be oh so easily aroused by our own version of 'brand loyalty'. Sure, so-called 'mainstream' culture is no more free of blind partisanship than any other social sphere in which personal tastes are justified against other people's by being raised to the level of intellectual generalisations, or just by plain mule headedness. Mainsream culture though lacks the wide spectrum offered by edition wars- RPGs and miniatures games; new writers and/or artists- comics and books; the full range of cross-media adaptions (which rarely stray beyond prose into movies in the mainstream)- most any geek medium into most any other; Euros versus Ameritrash- boardgames; 'old-school' versus 'indie'- RPGs again. And this is just a selection. I'm sure readers could easily add to this list.

The recent Black Library Warhammer novel Bloodborn is a case in point for yours truly. Its author is Nathan Long, of whom I first heard- as I imagine would have most of my readers who recognise his name, when he took over writing the Gotrek and Felix series from Bill King, with the novel Orcslayer. You can imagine then, dear readers, that the geek spasms so induced meant that this was hardly the best introduction a reader could have to a new writer. This misbegotten mentality was only encouraged when I heard that Nathan Long was going to be writing a Gotrek and Felix spin-off series featuring Ulrika the Vampire.

A step too far?
I confess in all honesty that my heart sank when I read this news. In a world full of heartless remakes and soulless spinoffs, how could BL do this to Ulrika, of all people? Had she not suffered enough already? I mean to say: not only was she the last great love of Felix's life, but the dolt had gone and lost her because he was too emotionally inarticulate to express his feelings to her in a way that'd've won her to him forever. Then she'd been captured by the single most chilling villain Gotrek and Felix ever encountered, the vampire Alophus Krieger (Vampireslayer, collected in Gotrek and Felix: the Second Omnibus). Ulrika was rescued, naturally enough, but hardly in the nick of time: she'd been turned into a vampire by the evil Krieger. Oh woe was me.

So you can see, dear readers, that Ulrika was a character who'd had a strong impact on me, who'd tickled my taste for a good romance- tragic or otherwise; she was- in short, the perfect minefield. The irony wasn't lost on me that Ulrika might even end up twice undead: once as the actual character, and again as the sorry spinoff who'd shatter my fond memories of the great role she'd played in the life of a favourite fictional character.

It has to be said that BL were very crafty: the announcement of the imminent new series was accompanied by the cover art for Bloodforged, which will be part 2 of the Ulrika the Vampire trilogy. The cover for Bloodborn- which I first saw at Conflict 2010 back in April, is good; but the cover for Bloodforged is frankly stunning, and was almost enough to sell me on the new book by itself. Yeah, I know what they say about books and their covers- especially when it's for a different book, but at least I knew who was going to be inside, and there was something about that cover which just spoke to me about the character I remembered.

But sometimes we just can't help ourselves
In the end it was a glowing online review and Andy's recommendation which overcame my purblind resistance. It became only a matter of time before I succumbed to my curiosity. That time ran out last week.

The fact that I am already writing this is itself an answer to the crucial question: how well did Bloodborn negotiate the many hurdles it faced thanks to this particular geek's predispositions? The short answer: very nimbly. This novel is a right ripping read and I consumed it avidly in two or three sittings, a bookworm's pleasure I hadn't enjoyed in some time.

The next important question is how does the character of Ulrika fare at Nathan Long's hands? My answer here is in two parts. First, I can't usefully compare Ulrika in Bloodborn with Ulrika in the Gotrek and Felix novels without going back to the latter for the sake of a detailed comparitive study. Geek I might be but I've not done that. In any case any inevitable disconnect between two authors' treatment of the same character could here reasonably be explained as a consequence of Ulrika's transformation into a vampire.

Beyond that I have to say that Ulrika in Bloodborn is a good character in her own right. There are at least two significant moral conflicts at her core as she struggles to come to terms with her new life as a vampire. "Yes, but is she really Ulrika?" was a refrain which echoed in my mind as I read the novel, and it was the facets of her character which came to the fore through these personal struggles which reassured me of one thing: whatever else you might want to say, Long's Ulrika is no travesty of the original.

The story too is good, with a decent plot, interesting characters and a colourful evocation of a city- Nuln, on the verge of major civil disorder. There were a couple of features which struck this reader as slight weaknesses:

The foreshadowing of the villain's identity isn't good enough, so that when this identity is revealed I was left asking myself, "Yes, but why?" This could be unfinished business for a future installment I guess, but it just felt like a loose end to me.
I found Long's fight scenes confusing; writing this I find myself wondering if this could be because he writes with a screenwriter's eye after his long years in that line of work.

These really are minor complaints because I still enjoyed Bloodborn, a lot. More than that, I am glad that the Black Library took the decision to bring Ulrika back in this series. Colour me pleasantly surprised dear readers. ;)

Conflict of Heroes on tour

2010-07-03T02:23:00.015+01:00

Kingdom of Adventure
Friday afternoon a week ago saw a traveller- somewhat weary thanks to insufficient sleep the previous night, hauling his heavy luggage through the door of Kingdom of Adventure in sunny Kirkcaldy, there to be greeted by David, the cheerful and friendly store proprietor. My luggage was stowed in the back office and David proceeded to show me round his shop.

Kingdom of Adventure is a really nice wee shop. The ground floor is bright, airy and spacious. There is a smaller upstairs gaming room whose 6 tables make it more cramped, naturally enough, and which lacks the full length floor-to-ceiling window which gives the ground floor such a pleasant aspect. For all that this is no poky wee hole either.

David hard at work keeping his customers happy over a cardgame

David explained that this impressive space was one of the benefits of being located in such an out of the way corner as Kirkcaldy: the rent for a similar space would've been prohibitive most anywhere else. He told me too that the location was beginning to pay off: KoA has regular customers who travel in from across the region to buy their games and to play them in the shop.

I got a real sense of this during my visit. The shop was never empty during the 6 hours I was there. Staff included, there were some half a dozen people there when I arrived; miniatures painting was going on downstairs, and a card game started upstairs. Numbers increased significantly as the evening wore on. I reckon that there'd've been about a dozen and a half people there throughout the night, and 2 RPGs were run. The place was buzzing and there was a real sense of everyone being part of a cheerful crew.

Some of the cheerful crew at Kingdom of Adventure

David has clearly put a lot of effort into establishing his shop as a centre for the local gaming community, and it has equally clearly paid off. I'm pleased for David's success- the gaming community needs places like this; and I left with an oldtimer's wistful feeling of, "Oh, if only we'd had this back when I was young!"

Somewhere near Kursk, July 1943
Chilled out, loaded up with new geek treasures, and fed and watered, it was time for me to get rolling. One of David's regulars- Andrew by name, was there specially to join in with the Conflict of Heroes demo. He told me that there had been wider interest but that events had intervened- as they do, to prevent the other interested players from showing up. Young Daniel was hanging around with nothing to do. He accepted our invitation to join in against Andrew.

Andrew intent on the Soviet defence as Daniel ponders his next move

I think I made heavier weather of teaching the game compared to my first demo at Conpulsion back in March. Andrew and Daniel picked it up quickly even so, and I was able to leave them to their own devices when my old pal Hugh turned up. With Andrew and Daniel playing the Western flank all-infantry scenario I'd selected from the Cherkasskoye scenario pack, I ended up taking the Soviets against the Germans on the all-armour Eastern flank.

Holy heck but those Tiger I's are fearsome! I'd decided on a 3-pronged attack to split the German forces. Unfortunately I made the mistake of bringing on my flanking tanks individually so they were picked off one-by-one by the dreaded 88s. We went into the endgame with Hugh well in front. I did manage to retrieve the situation so that I had a real play for the win but all my crucial attacks failed me leaving the depleted Germans in possession of the field.

Hugh and I getting stuck in with the tanks

Over on the Western flank Daniel had gotten off to a slow start, but he too turned the situation in his favour so that he had a real chance of victory. At this point his troops got bogged down in the woods so that they were pummelled into destruction by the Soviet artillery.

Everyone enjoyed the game and were keen to see it make a return to Kingdom of Adventure, even Daniel who'd suffered so much under that artillery. His victory aside, Hugh also enjoyed drawing an instant kill with his first ever attack in CoH. Andrew's enthusiasm was plain to see, and infectious as he told other regulars of CoH's qualities. That was very satisfying, and I'll certainly be making another visit to Kirkcaldy's gaming mecca just as soon as I can.

Black Lion Games
Hugh put me up for the night in the cosmopolitain metropolis that is Cowdenbeath and we sat up late into the night chewing the fat and generally catching up. Then I had to drag myself out of bed for an early start to get into Edinburgh for my visit to Black Lion Games. The Black Lion is right in the middle of my old stomping grounds from the 80s so I've visited the shop several times before (in fact I bought my copy of 5th edition Fantasy HERO there as long ago as August 2004), and I'd met Liam at Conpulsion, but this was my first visit there to play a game.

Back in the USSR
Space is much tighter at the Black Lion than it is at Kingdom of Adventure, but I was soon esconced in a comfortable wee corner of the sales floor with Alan, whom I'd met at Conpulsion, and who'd turned out specially for the game. Our scenario was the Western flank all-infantry engagement from the Cherkasskoye pack.

Me and Alan in Black Lion Games

Alan was playing the Germans. He started off well enough, getting his units into position in the woods from which his attack should've jumped off. Thereafter he unfortunately got bogged down as had Daniel the night before. The result was the same: the Soviet artillery wreaked fearful carnage as, turn after turn, it ranged in on the static German forces. Still, Alan too enjoyed his game despite everything he'd had to endure, and was keen to play again at the earliest opportunity.

Afterthoughts
When you get 4 new players to try a game; when they all enjoy it and want to play again; and when the more experienced among them admire the game's elegant simplicity and can see the inherent authenticity so delivered; then you can call that a result.

As you'd expect, there were things which I could've done better. Looking at the outcomes of the 2 infantry scenarios- in which the Soviet artillery played such a decisive role, I reckon that the more experienced player should take charge of the Germans because they face the much harder task in getting forward out of those woods.

Also, I've still got everything to learn about teaching tactics to new players. Alan and I discussed this at some length over a couple of coffees after our games. As I noted back in March, I have to learn to explain my own game as I go along. This is because giving advice to new players would:

Overload them with information which would be not only confusing but worse than spurious.
Take their game away from them- essentially making it mine, which wouldn't actually help them learn anything (hence spurious).
Be less than completely objective; I believe objectivity about your opponent's strategy and/or tactics to be simply impossible when you're playing competitive games (again, spurious).

I guess I'm just going to have to practice hard at the new kind of table talk demo games require.

Afterwards: Brevity
I was put up on Saturday by another old friend- Jim, which led to a quiet night in the pub talking geek talk and strenuously avoiding spoilers for the season finale of Doctor Who. which I'd missed and wasn't to see until I got home.

Jim was GMing a wargame on Sunday, part of the Western Desert Operation Brevity/Battleaxe campaign he's running using veteran games designer Frank Chadwick's venerable Command Decision WW2 tactical miniatures rules, whose 4th edition is now published by Test of Battle. There were no objections to my joining in so I found myself posted as OC, 2nd Battalion, the Scots Guards.

Jim surveys the barren desert wastes

Jim's got his own campaign website which- among other things, features:

A map of the campaign area with point-and-click links to the tactical maps for the campaign battlegrounds.
The map of the area over which we were to fight on Sunday (Post 23 on the campaign map).

This is relatively straightforward stuff these days, but Jim's obviously put a lot of work into it and it's a neat example of what the net has to offer the creative gamer.

The engagement was a night action in which the British and Commonwealth attackers- commanded by Derek with yours truly as 2IC, had the objective of clearing the road to Bardia by dawn. The Italian defenders- played by Andrew, were setup hidden on the table. The British and Commonwealth forces started off-table in a column stretching down the Bardia road. My Scots Guards were at the back of the column. Also present was Alistair, an observer from the British high command.

Our attack was straightforward: Derek led, his infantry advancing to secure the gap in the anti-tank ditch. Some well dug-in Italians put up surprisingly stiff resistance. One machine-gun platoon in particular just wouldn't give in, eventually surviving to retreat all the way back to its own lines. This, and some confusion about road traffic conditions delayed the arrival on-table of my column by a few turns.

Keen to get into the action as quickly as possible once my battalion did arrive, I thought out loud about just throwing the column straight up the road in their trucks, with the result that Derek's nerves were sorely stretched. I instinctively knew that this was not a wise plan and was finally persuaded against it by Derek's constant pleas not to waste his precious trucks.

The development of my attack

In the end Derek and I just failed in our appointed task, to clear the Bardia road by dawn. The Italians in the settlment were broken and I'd've mopped it up in another turn, two at most. Derek's forces would've regrouped in the early light and cleared the hills to secure the road for any of our troops who would follow up. In other words, the result was authentically indecisive.

Afterthoughts
I've not played WW2 microarmour in over 20 years and I really enjoyed my return to the gaming of my teenage tankie years. The Command Decision rules were OK. There are some odd features of the 4th edition; eg. disordered units can't regroup at night, leaving them effectively out of action until dawn breaks. This was the subject of much discussion last Sunday. For my part, they just follow a design philosophy I abandoned back in the 80s. Still, the rules are nearly 25 years old, so they're definitely good at what they do. I'd certainly happily play under them again.

Acknowledgements
As ever when you stage an event- however small, there are votes of thanks to be offered. This time they go to:

David and Liam and all their friendly staff at Kingdom of Adventure and Black Lion Games: hope to see you all again sometime soon.
Alan, Andrew, Daniel and Hugh for joining in and giving me another small success under my belt.
And to Hugh and Jim for their hospitality over the weekend, which just couldn't've happened if I hadn't been able to call on the 'old pals' act: my thanks to you both.

And that's that. More sometime soon I hope. ;)

Free RPG Day 2010

2010-06-23T19:42:00.017+01:00

A bumper swag-bag!
Started in 2007, Free RPG Day has already become something of an institution in the international rolepaying community. I was alerted to this year's event- which took place last Saturday, by FFG's recent announcement that they'd be contributing an introductory scenario- Final Sanction; for Deathwatch, their soon-to-be-released and long-awaited volume completing the 40KRP trilogy.

My other plans for last Saturday having proved impractical or just plain fallen through, what else could I do but hie myself to Static Games, there to avail myself of the opportunity presented by this annual celebration of roleplaying. And what a lucrative opportunity it turned out to be!

I grabbed myself 7 different products:

Quickstart rules with scenarios:

Final Sanction (PDF link; 2 more PCs to download here).
The Trail to Esavar; for Claymore Entertainment's upcoming old-school FRPG Hero's Bane.
Heirs to Olympia; human-centred medieval fantasy by Countess Games.

Introductory scenarios:

Legacy of Disaster; for AEG's recently released Legend of the Five Rings RPG4e.
The Murderer of Thomas Fell; for Pelgrane Press' 2008 Ennies-winning horror RPG Trail of Cthulhu (pregenerated character handouts here). Trail of Cthulhu is just one of many games based on the Gumshoe investigative RPG system by Robin D. Laws. This system has intrigued me for a wee while now. I expect I'll be investing in one of its versions sooner or later.
Dungeonbattle Brooklyn; for Goodman Games' unique take on fantasy sport, Xcrawl. This game looks like it could provide an interesting change of pace for fans of classic dungeon-bashing.

Setting and background:

Punjar: the Tarnished Jewel; part of Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics range, this is a complete city gazetteer. A GM can never have too many mapped and detailed cities to hand so this is a very nice package all told.

Oddly enough, only Final Sanction and Legacy of Disaster were part of Free RPG Day's 2010 giveaways. The rest were from previous years; Dungeonbattle Brooklyn actually dating back to 2007. Roleplayers passing up on free stuff? Who'd've thunk it?

By and large, the quality of these products shows how seriously the RPG industry takes Free RPG Day. The Murderer of Thomas Fell is the only one of the bunch which isn't in a full-colour cover; three of them are in full colour throughout- Final Sanction, Heirs to Olympia and Legacy of Disaster; and no shortcuts appear to have been taken with the layouts, which all look to be up to professional standards. Some aren't quite as nicely illustrated as others but that's often the case with smaller companies operating with limited budgets. So these are all decent or better in other words.

I'll look in a bit more detail at this year's products.

Final Sanction
As soon as I saw the first previews for Rogue Trader in the pages of White Dwarf back in dim and distant 1987, I wanted to be a space marine; so much so that it took me a few years to get over my initial disappointment that 40K was a miniatures game and not an RPG. So the Deathwatch RPG is quite literally the single longest awaited new product of my roleplaying life. There was a lot running then on FFG's contribution to Free RPG Day 2010 and I am pleased to be able to say that the 37 pages of content in Final Sanction contain an admirably complete introduction to Deathwatch.

The booklet begins with 4 fully-detailed PCs complete with all the rules needed to use them in the introductory scenario. The PCs look like pared down versions of those which will be available in the full game, but they are an interesting enough bunch nonetheless. Most important IMO is that they all enjoy special abilities- due to wargear or otherwise, which should allow each character to make its unique contribution to the various problems the Killteam will have to face- in or out of combat, during the scenario.

The rules covered are:

Characteristics.
Skills.
Tests.
Combat.
Hordes.
Demeanours.
Weapons and wargear.

Of the material new to Deathwatch I particularly liked the rules for Demeanours and for Hordes. Demeanours are two aspects defining each Marine's identity: one from their Chapter; the other personal. They provide a means to unite roleplaying with mechanics when a marine steps up to do something heroic or otherwise significant during a game. The Hordes rules provide simple rules for the waves of foes which Deathwatch Killteams will inevitably face sooner or later; a system essential to the game's atmosphere in other words.

Some sections are more extensive than others- as you'd expect, but the overall effect is concise and thorough. I could only find 2 points lacking:

Penetration; ie. how weapons reduce armour protection.
Ammunition; the marines' bolt weapons' clip sizes are included but there is no mention of their initial allocations; this is unfortunate because restocking dwindling ammunition is noted as an important feature of the scenario.

These are minor points it must be said- an experienced GM (or one who already knows the 40KRP system) should easily be able to sort them. Even so, they are unfortunate lapses in a book aimed as much at the complete beginner as at anyone else.

As for the scenario? I'm not giving away any spoilers by telling you that it features the Killteam responding to Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Kalistrandi's warning of a genestealer infestation on the backwater agriworld Avalos. It's simple- as you'd expect for a quick-start package; and there's lot of combat- as you'd expect from a game featuring the elite of the 40K Imperium's supreme killers; but it's more than a mindless slugfest. There are plenty of opportunities for the PCs to use quick thinking, smart tactics and good roleplaying to solve problems non-violently. GMs should indeed encourage this, or an already dangerous situation might veer completely out of the characters' control.

The setting and its locations are presented in adequate detail, with plenty of useful tips to help GMs bring the place to life and to create a sense of the atmosphere of doom caused by the crisis into which the Killteam is plunged. The structure of the adventure also provides a neat introduction to the Missions system (more here) in Deathwatch. Essential to creating the military feel appropriate to the game, Missions in Deathwatch break adventures down into various objectives which the players can tackle as they wish. Each objective brings it own rewards- both XP and material or information to assist with other objectives; and provides guidelines for determining the Killteam's success or failure, and the consequences thereof.

One final note about this quality package: it is beautifully illustrated. There is already a vast library of pictures which has established the unique imagery of the Dark Millenium. FFG has already added to this with its previous products in the 40KRP line: Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. The new pictures of space marines are a wonderful addition to the pictures already available of this most iconic of 40K archetypes. Lovely stuff!

Legacy of Disaster
After the excellence of Final Sanction I have to say that Legacy of Disaster is a bit of letdown. Why? Ultimately because it's not as well focussed as the former on delivering what it's supposed to be: in this case an introductory adventure for existing owners of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG4e. This starts immediately: after having been told that you'll need to know how the game works you are then introduced to some rules, the basic dice engine and the combat rules to be more specific. All well and good you might say. The problem is that you're not told enough about any of these actually to run the adventure without the main rules; you couldn't even run combat with the limited rules selection provided.

The sense of padding this creates is deepened by 11 pages of 16 pregenerated characters followed by 5 pages of 31 spells. Again, none of these can be used without owning the main rules and no doubt some of them are reprinted straight across from those rules.

You might think that it's a bit churlish to complain about something we're getting for free (and maybe it is). The problem here is that this largely redundant material consumes 22 pages from Legacy of Disaster's 30 pages of content. So we're left with 8 pages of scenario. Compare this to Final Sanction's 17 pages of scenario in 37 pages of content, all of which can be used with just the booklet in your hands. This might be OK if all that material useless to those who can actually use the contents of Legacy of Disaster accompanied an otherwise good scenario. Unfortunately I can't say that.

The scenario here is a one-track railroad to a pre-ordained denouement written so as to prevent the players from discovering the plot until after the event. On top of that, the PCs' progress to this sorry end is so reliant on social skills tests that I found myself seriously questioning the value of this time-honoured mechanic while reading Legacy of Disaster. There's got to be a better way to do this, I kept thinking.

After all those complaints I must admit that I quite like the look of Legend of the Five Rings. The setting interests me and the system looks like it has potential to bring it nicely to life. And the illustrations are beautiful and evocative. It's just a bit of a shame that my introduction to this popular game (you don't get a 4th edition of a game no one likes) was this rather ill-considered freebie. ;)

UK Games Expo'10 #4. Winding up and wending home

2010-06-20T08:21:00.003+01:00

Birmingham geek-out!
My travel plans on the Monday after the Expo gave me a day to spend in Birmingham. I deposited my luggage at the station then pondered my options: was I going for the cultural day out, or the geek day out? I chose the latter, naturally enough (no slur intended on the cultural attractions of the fair city of Birmingham I assure you dear readers, this option just proved easier to pursue on the day).

Who goes where?
Decision made, I set off to visit the local GW as is my wont when I'm on my travels. Luke- the staffer on duty, gave me the familiar friendly GW greeting when I arrived. I gave him my card and told him the story of my trip to Birmingham, then we fell to chatting. Answering the usual questions, I told him that I'm a DIY Space Marine Chapter Master and filled him in on some of Penumbra's Talons' background. I talked about how Belon (the Talons' home world remember) is located in the Eastern Fringes, which is where it's all going down in the Dark Millenium these days:

There are rumours that the protracted death of the Emperor on his Golden Throne has reached a point where the Astronomicon- upon which depends all human interplanetary travel, no longer reaches the Eastern Fringes; or that it is at least weaker and less reliable than ever.
The imminent Deathwatch RPG is to be set in the Jericho Reaches: located in the Eastern Fringes, and the target of a major Imperial Crusade aiming to reconquer lost Imperial worlds.

Little did I know what I was letting myself in for all those years ago when- on a simple whim, I plumped for the Eastern Fringes as the location for the home of my lads.

When our talk moved onto WHFB I confessed that I'm not a player and that most of my knowledge of the Old World comes from WFRP. It turned out that Luke was a big fan and experienced GM of WFRP2. He'd run the entire Paths of the Damned campaign; most or all of the other WFRP2 adventures; and many of the older 1st edition and Flame Publications adventures to boot. This is an impressive record and no mistake, as this bibliography of WFRP adventures demonstrates.

Luke and I passed a pleasant while sharing stories about our campaigns and swapping tidbits of the highs, lows, trials and tribulations of the GM's life. I also passed on to Luke a tip about Keynote, which readers might remember was invaluable to me when I was running my own Ashes of Middenheim.

While I'm on the subject of Keynote, I'm pleased to be able to report that someone has reactivated the Keynote project, which now goes by the name of Keynote NF (New Features). I've not been keeping a close eye on developments but there's certainly a lot of activity on the project page. It's nice to know that my favourite app is alive and well out there in cyberspace.

Luke was on the job so he had to attend to other customers, leaving me to ponder my inevitable latest donation to my favourite moneysuckers. My funds were limited so- possessed by the completist daemon and in the spirit of 'know thine enemy', I bought a copy of Codex: Tau Empire. Here's hoping that the knowledge contained therein will yield benefits when next the Talons encounter the battlegroup of the maverick Shas El Quixo.

Robin Hood
After GW it was time to go to the movies. The cinema schedule and my timetable left me with no choice but the new Robin Hood, a movie I was quite keen to see so that was OK.

The critic's eye
The Squareman- usually reliable but never dull, had reviewed Robin Hood last month. His key point was that the movie laboured under the burden of the trappings of the Robin Hood story because it had a very interesting story of its own to which those trappings are superfluous. I soon found myself in agreement.

This turned out to be a real problem for me. It seemed to me that the character names were just convenient tags used as shorthand to tell us that this was Robin Hood, while the story and characters had nothing at all to do with Robin Hood. The result was a permanent disconnect between expectations and actuality which completely undermined my identification with the characters:

They didn't share nearly enough with the Robin Hood archetypes for the shorthand to pay off in its own terms.
The use of the shorthand meant that the story wasn't doing enough work of its own to bring the characters to life.

This was a real shame because the movie did have an interesting story in its own right; there were some decent performances- Mark Strong as the villainous Godfrey was always fun to watch; and- Ridley Scott being Ridlely Scott, there were some great action sequences. It was just that, well, by the time I'd almost started to give a damn, my goodwill was blown out of the water by two particularly egregious episodes of Hollywood stupidity:

The restaging of Operation Overlord in miniature- this time with the French invading England, complete with medieval landing craft: yes, they had little cabins aft, drop-down ramps forward, and they were powered by oars; this was just too much for yours truly.
The arrival of Cate Blanchett's Marion- in a suit of perfectly-crafted figure-hugging plate armour, just in time to join the final big fight against those dastardly French; as the SquareMan suggests, this'd've been OK if it had somehow been foreshadowed but just dropping it in out of nowhere like that was shite pure and simple.

And then, as if all this wasn't bad enough, the movie turned out to be the reimagined origin of Robin Hood- no longer the noble cast down because of his empathy for the common man, but a yoeman who could've made good were it not for the machinations of a self-serving monarch; and all for the sake of another new movie franchise. Gah.

The geek's eye
As many of my readers will know only too well, gaming geeks- roleplayers especially, often have their own special reasons for appreciating TV and movies. I can still remember watching Lethal Weapon and Total Recall and mentally parsing their action scenes using HERO rules as a 'reality check' (they passed BTW). The new Robin Hood definitely has a lot to offer in this respect.

The story itself is chock-full of incidents which could easily be lifted by GMs and dropped into their campaigns. In fact you couldn't go far wrong just using the whole story as the basis of a campaign: simply add your PCs with their own agendas and you'd be good to go. And the movie is a visual feast for the gaming geek's imagination.

This is where the film really scored IMO- hardly surprising with Ridley Scott really: it is visually sumptuous without ever presenting that faux High Medieval look so familiar from older movies. Everything looks just right: small castles; manor houses with rude wooden furnishings; small dingy chapels; squalid little hovels; and mud, lots of mud. It's period authenticity the way that roleplayers love: everything looking just so, even if it wasn't actually quite so.

Of course I was soon aware of a problem with all this: I spent so much of the movie admiring the scenery because I was quite disengaged from the story because I didn't give a monkey's for the characters. Still, I'd see the movie again just for the visuals. Can't say more than that really, can I? ;)

Related@RD/KA!
UK Games Expo'10
- #1. Friends old and new
- #2. Once more unto those hex-and-counter battlefields
- #3. Games to the left of them, games to the right of them

UK Games Expo'10 #3. Games to the left of them, games to the right of them

2010-06-19T01:07:00.032+01:00

A weekend of lovely stuff
With trade stands and demo tables spread through 6 halls in the Clarendon Suites there was plenty to keep me busy on Saturday before the Combat Commander tournament, and on Sunday. I had to exercise a measure of restraint at the trade stands this year because I was hauling my own luggage home by train, which gave me an added incentive to pass the time playing as many games as possible.

Cubicle 7
My first definite port of call on Saturday was the Cubicle 7 stand, located in the Gold Zone (where I'd later play my first game of Dominion). I was a man on a mission: I wanted a copy of the new superhero RPG Wild Talents, which I'd seen in the Expo programme because it'd been nominated for 'Best New RPG' in the Expo Awards. The stall was very busy so I only had time for a brief exchange of pleasantries with Angus Abramson before moving on.

Wild Talents
Wild Talents- "Superhero Roleplaying in a World Gone Mad", developed by Arc Dream Publishing, is a superhero RPG which uses the One-Roll Engine (ORE) designed by Greg Stolze. The ORE is a d10 dicepool system in which your success is determined by matching dice from your dice roll. The elements of the ORE in action are:

Height: the highest value of dice matched- eg. 2 7s; this determines the quality of your success.
Width: the number of dice matched- eg 3 7s is wider than 2 7s; this determines the speed and/or impact (ie. damage) of your success; you need a width of 2 to succeed at all.
Hard dice: these special dice always score 10.
Wiggle dice: these special dice can be assigned any desired value after all other dice have been rolled.

There is a bit more to the ORE than that, naturally enough, but that is the core system. I must admit that the idea that you can read off all the results of an action from a single dice roll is one which appeals to me, so I'm interested to see how this will work in practice.

The ORE aside, Wild Talents features the list of attributes familiar to all superhero RPGs:

Stats.
Skills.
Powers.
Extras (power boosters).
Flaws (power weaknesses).

There are also chapters on 'Building Superheroic Histories', and 'A World Gone Mad'- the alternate history of the world in Godlike, the first RPG to feature the ORE. The book is rounded off with appendices which include 'How To Play a Roleplaying Game' and 'How To Run a Roleplaying Game', both of which look useful. In short, this weighty tome pleases me greatly.

Retsami
Elsewhere, wandering about the Blue Zone I happened across Retsami, an abstract game being demoed by John Wildsmith- its inventor; and billed as 'The Greatest Game Since Backgammon'. A grand claim in the opinion of this fan of backgammon, I was sufficienlty intrigued to want to investigate. So I had a game against John.

John Wildsmith & I play Retsami

Retsami ('I master' reversed!) is played on a 9x9 chess-style gridded board, with the addition of a spiral working into the centre. The 2 players each have 4 pieces which start the game dispersed along the same board edge. You can make any 1 of 3 moves on your turn:

Move any 1 piece in an L-shaped move; ie. you can move as far as you like but you only turn 1 corner.
Take any 1 opposing piece which is ahead of your attacking piece; this can be done in a straight or diagonal line.
Return a lost piece to any empty square on the starting row.

These simple rules make Retsami easy to learn. They don't make it simplistic to play. It is surprising how few opposing pieces are needed to make a row a potential deathtrap for your own advancing pieces. The resulting gameplay was tense and exciting. In short: I liked it, enough to buy it even if I'm unconvinced about the grand claim relative to Backgammon. Oh, and I won. I'd still've bought it otherwise.

Game design workshop
This year's Expo programme included a series of talks by guest speakers. Top of the list was the 'Game Design Workshop', featuring Alessio Cavatore- lately of GW where he worked on WHFB, 40K and LotR; and Jeff Quantrill- developer and playtester of Great Fire: London 1666 (designed by Expo's very own Richard Denning). You can be sure, dear readers, that this event was at the top of yours truly's list as well.

The talk took the form of introductions by Alessio and Jeff followed by a conversation between them in response to questions from the audience. All-in-all the event- billed as a 'Workshop', was OK. This might sound like damning by faint praise. It's not. Let me explain. Both Alessio and Jeff had interesting stories to tell and I enjoyed hearing them. On the ins, outs, trials and tribulations of games design, little of what they said was new to me: I'd already come across it one way or another down the years

What was new to me came in the discussion of playtesting. This went beyond the obvious points about doing lots of playtesting and of the importance of blind testing, to talk about the different kinds of playtesters. The key difference was summed up as this:

The playtesters who work to help you fix your game.
Those whose suggestions are more about redesigning your game into one they'd prefer.

The consensus from Jeff and Alessio was that the best way to avoid pitfalls of this ilk was to develop your game in definite iterations. That is to say: don't continuously incorporate every small bit of feedback; wait until you've got feedback from a specific test period, then incorporate that. This struck me as sound practice.

I asked a question of my own, naturally enough: if using today's ICT to give games away would prejudice future efforts to sell those games, and to what extent. I didn't receive the insights I was hoping for- into added value in the full production game, and so on. But we did hear an interesting story about how some fans of Days of Wonder's successful Small World had put together their own mod and uploaded it for free distribution via BGG. This turned out to be so popular that DoW bought it.

This session was well worthwhile. Even where the content wasn't new to me it was good to hear it in distilled form while surrounded by people of like mind. I enjoyed this a lot.

Accessorised!
There were some particular gaming accoutrements I was keen to buy this year: dice cups. I wanted these for playing the random hidden AP variant in Conflict of Heroes: roll 3d6- taking the highest and the lowest; keep the dice hidden under the dice cup and count your AP expenditure up from 0 instead of down from 7, as in the standard game. This variant is recommended by designer Uwe Eickert, and Badger and I have been keen to try it for some time.

The kindly folks at Q-Workshop, purveyors of excellent gaming accessories

I did the rounds of all the dice and gaming accessories stands- picking up some nice dicebags (for the damage counters in CoH) and a nifty dice-rolling tray (it was a bargain I couldn't resist!), before returning to Q-Workshop, where I'd started: they had the cheapest dicecups on offer. Feeling a bit cheeky, I asked for a small discount on the 4 leather dicecups I was buying. The woman on the stand swithered, then agreed. Result! This quick plug is my side of the bargain.

The cups themselves are really high quality, made of thick durable leather with similarly durable stitching (it looks like waxed thread to me). I'm sure they'll last for years and will prove to be well worth the £7 each they cost me (discount aside, mine were cheaper than those on the Q-Workshop website because they don't have lids). Like I said, result!

War for Edadh
I sought out the stand of WarriorElite Ltd- publishers of the fantasy battle cardgame War for Edadh, because they were on the list for the 'Expo passport' prize draw. It turned out that WarriorElite were insisting that you play a demo before they'd stamp your passport. I felt that this wasn't quite in the spirit of the thing, but what the heck I decided. I'm glad I did: behind trappings which give the appearance of just another fantasy battle game set in its own world is a game which strikes me as quite unique.

Dave Kitcat on the WarriorElite stand

The core game of War for Edadh uses two kinds of cards:

Troop cards: these are double-sided; the back of the card is more detailed than the front and contains the unit attributes which are used to resolve conflict in the full game (the sample images here are taken from the Demo cards PDF; these are one-sided unlike those in the full game). The attributes' meanings are:

Attack and defence value are obvious.
Attack damage value is used when the attacker's attack value is greater than the defender's defence value.
Defence damage value is used when the defender's defence value is greater than the attacker's attack value.
Discard value is the amount of damage which must be delivered in a single round of combat (AKA. Conflict Resolution) to destroy a unit.
Melee, charge and ballistic are the 3 ranges at which combat can take place in the game; not all units can fight at all ranges, as can be seen from the sample troops cards above.

Mastery cards: these are single-sided with 2 Mastery values on each card, and are used to determine who is the attacker and who is the defender in each conflict; the way this works is really neat:

Each player secretly selects a Mastery card, standing it up with the chosen Mastery value to the top.
Cards are revealed.
Players pay the Mastery Point cost for the cards they played; this may be adjusted as per #6 below.
If both players play the same card- regardless of its orientation, then the result is a draw.
Each player then selects the troop(s) which will engage in this conflict.
One player's card's Mastery value may be increased if their opponent played a card in the appropriate range; eg. MV1 becomes MV13 against MV9.
The player whose MV is higher is the attacker for this conflict.
Damage is resolved as above: only the attacker does damage if there is one; each side does damage to the other in a draw.
If a defender- or either side in a draw, takes damage greater than their participating unit's Discard Value, then that unit is lost.

My valiant opponent & I at our demo of War for Edadh

If the interaction of attack and defence- with their related damage values, is intriguing, it is the use of the Mastery cards- especially the altered Mastery values, which makes War for Edadh unique; and all of this was shown to advantage in my demo game. I was playing Angueth against Huaos-Dzaa. We were playing the core rules from the full game so that we both had a wider range of troop types than in the sample battle layout shown above.

I was keen to experiment with the psychological dimension of playing low in the hope of ending up high thanks to my opponent's choice. This availed me naught; all the more so because the Huaos-Dzaa seemed to be so damnably heavily armoured even when I did get a hit. I was soon reduced to a lone unit against my opponent's five. It was all over bar the shouting we all thought. And then began the most amazing last stand as I played 5 correctly judged low cards in a row to win. What a thrill! A truly epic victory, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with pure chance.

I didn't buy War for Edadh on the day- I wisely judged that I could afford neither the cash nor the luggage space. Even so, if I have one regret about my own UK Expo'10 it is that I didn't come away with a copy of this fascinating game. I expect I'll rectify that just as soon as I can.

Shuuro
Having heard Alessio Cavatore speak on Saturday I decided to give his new game a go on Sunday. So I made my way to his stand, introduced myself in my now traditional manner, and got wired in. Shuuro- published by River Horse Games, is the first of Alessio's post-GW games. Shuuro is a chess variant whose variations are:

You buy your own 'army' using points values: you get your king for free; everything else is up to you.
There is some terrain: simple blocks in Shuuro- only Knights can cross or enter these; but Alessio told me of plans for different kinds in the future.

I played a quick game with young Joey on the 6x6 starter board. When this was finished Alessio suggested that Gina- Joey's mum, join in for a 4-player game using the unpublished expansion- Turanga, which adds 2 more players. Gina was game and she and I were teamed up against Alessio and Joey. One rule of Turanga is that teams are not allowed to communicate during play so Joey and Alessio went off for a few minutes to give each team time for a quick strategy session. Gina confessed she was no chess expert. No matter, I said, suggesting a simple strategy: pick on Alessio. Gina approved.

Me & Joey playing Shuuro while Alessio looks on

Our strategy proved very successful, not least because you only have to beat one player in a team to win the 4-player game. The game revealed some interesting quirks of play; eg. when you're in check you don't get mated until your own turn, so you get 2 chances to escape: your team mate can come to your aid; then you get your own chance.

I played another quick minigame with someone else so I ended up spending a wee while in Alessio's company before finally moving on. Alessio was very friendly and didn't mind answering my inevitable few questions about his GW days. He also told me that there will be more games from River Horse, but he couldn't tell me anything about them.

I have to say I really enjoyed Shuuro, the 4-player variant especially. I'm not a big fan of chess- I've never been great at the kind of lockstep logic it demands so I've long preferred dealing with chance in my gaming. But the customised armies and the addition of 'terrain' made this classic interesting to me in a way I really didn't expect. I'm already considering investing in the fully expanded set, although I might want to try it again before I took the plunge.

The UK Games Expo Awards
Any convention worth its salt has awards and UK Games Expo is no exception. There were 19 nominations in 5 categories this year:

Best new RPG.
Best new boardgame.
Best abstract game.
Best family/general game.
Best card game.

One nice feature of the Expo Awards is that con-goers can vote. I voted in 2 categories:

Cubicle 7's Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space for best new RPG.
John Wildsmith's Retsami for best abstract game.

Angus and Dominic of Cubicle 7 with their UK Games Expo 2010 Best New RPG award

I was pleased to see that Cubicle 7 won for their Doctor Who RPG. My commiserations to John Wildsmith, and also to Ben and Chris of Tied to a Kite, whose Backswords & Bucklers was also nominated. I hope you won't hold my vote against me guys!

The full list of UK Games Expo 2010 award winners can be found here.

Collective Endeavour
Late Sunday afternoon I decided to have one last run round the trade stands in search of swag. I headed for the Chessex stand in the Green Zone, thinking to buy some nice dice. It just so happened that my route took me past the Collective Endeavour independent RPG stand. I'd met some of the Collective Endeavour crew at Conpulsion back in March so I stopped to say hello. I exchanged greetings with some faces familiar from March and was surprised and delighted to hear praise from several quarters for my Conpulsion report. Thus waylaid it was inevitable I guess that I'd decide to invest in one of their games.

Malcolm Craig does his psycho impression at the Collective Endeavour stand

I explained my interest in buying an RPG with which I could run thrillers of the ilk of classic Hollywood movies like Hitchcock's North by Northwest. There was a game like that it turned out but it wasn't available on the Collective Endeavour stand, so I took a look at what was available and fielded a few suggestions before plumping for Cold City, by Malcolm Craig. Malcolm was pleased to add to my collection of RPGs signed by their authors.

Cold City
Published in 2008 by Contested Ground Studios in a nicely produced digest-sized volume, Cold City is a game of monster hunting and twisted technology set against the background of emerging Cold War tensions in the Berlin of 1950. The PCs are members of the Reserve Police Agency: a top secret multinational organisation whose purpose is to track down the various horrors left behind after a Second World War in which the Nazi weird science and supernatural tinkering, so beloved of alternate history geeks, is all true.

My interest in the Cold City's setting and theme aside, what first struck me about this game is that it is very well written. Malcolm's prose is concise and to the point, and the sections on 'Game Creation'- 'Closed and Open Games' and 'Collaborative Game Creation', offer advice which could benefit any GM setting up a game using any RPG. The system itself is uncomplicated although its mechanics might at first seem strange to those unfamiliar with independent RPGs. Some examples:

The Draw: a flashback scene run for each PC as a prologue to the first scenario involving those PCs; the Draw serves to define the characters' involvement in the RPA, and might even add to the characters.
Traits: open-ended attributes- positive and negative, which players can define as they wish; eg. 'Hotshot pilot', or 'Can twist language and use it to her advantage' (an example from the book); capable of being both dramatic and functional, these encourage players to define their characters in interesting ways.
Conflict resolution: the single mechanic which perhaps most distinguishes RPGs of this ilk from those with which most roleplayers are familiar, conflict resolution is different from task resolution in that it typically distills the essential dramatic conflict of a scene into one contested dice roll, the results of which are then interpreted to narrate the scene's outcome.
Trust: the atmosphere of paranoia and hidden agendas (all PCs in a game of Cold City are usually from different countries so they have competing national and personal agendas) is engineered systemically in the game by the use of Trust, a mechanic which measures the trust PCs have in each other; Trust is a resource which can contribute- postively or negatively, to the dicepools used to resolve conflicts.

I have some vague familiarity with the notions of the Draw- from 'origin scenes' in superhero roleplaying and of Traits- from Disadvantages in HERO, but I've never seen either used as they are in Cold City. I'm certainly interested in seeing how they work out in practice. I hope I get a chance sooner rather than later.

Dogs in the Vineyard
Leaving the lads at Collective Endeavour I headed off to the Leisure Games stand to look for the RPG which had been recommended to me. Seeing there a copy of D. Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard RPG- my interest in which had been piqued by Malcolm at Conpulsion, I did the natural thing and bought a copy (which I got at a healthy discount because it was shop-worn). I must confess that I had mixed feelings buying this game because I've read statements about roleplaying from Vincent Baker which were so beyond being wrong they positively reeked (apparently I didn't play any of the great romantic melodrama which so thrilled us back in the 80s; we were playing the wrong games y'see). Still, I wasn't going to let that get in the way of my curiosity.

Dogs in the Vineyard (DitV) is a game of Mormon lawgivers in fancy coats dispensing harsh justice to the sinful faithful in the Old West; think Dirty Harry meets Pale Rider with a dash of High Plains Drifter and you've got it about right. The first thing I noticed about DitV is that it's not as well written as Cold City, the main problem being that the author is just too fond of himself in places ('show don't tell' would've been worth his bearing in mind it seems to me). Still, the book is quite readable and it did catch my interest: the rules are well explained, and the background is made quite vivid in exposition that is definitely useful to would-be players.

Character creation is easy enough:

Chose a background.
Divvy up your dice into your attributes (all attributes are dice pools of d4s, d6s, d8s or d10s):

Stats.
Traits.
Relationships.
Belongings.

Resolve your 'Accomplishment': just like 'The Draw' in Cold City.

The key feature of DitV is its conflict resolution system. This involves each side rolling a dice pool then bidding dice- poker style, to determine the outcome of the conflict step-by-step. This is frankly peculiar- if not contrived, to a roleplayer schooled in classic task resolution mechanics, but I must admit that I can see how it could encourage an interesting narrative dynamic to conflicts. Colour me intrigued a second time.

And that, dear readers, is all she wrote. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
UK Games Expo'10
- #1. Friends old and new
- #2. Once more unto those hex-and-counter battlefields
- #4. Winding up and wending home