On 'The Russian Front': a hit of that digital rush!

Opening the offensive

I said back in June that I was "going to master the first Operation on CCIII:TRF if it kills me". I procrastinated, as is my wont but eventually got down a couple of weeks ago to 'Blitzkreig: the War Begins', which links together the first 3 maps with which I am well familiar from previous battles with Close Combat: The Russian Front. I felt a bit intrepid: five days across 3 maps with a campaign system metagame of whose workings I have the barest clue- a whole new level of digital gaming ambition for yours truly. Sure, I can win the first map on autopilot, probably the second one too, but what unknown equipment might the Russians bring to the table, and what about factors like attrition, and resting and refitting? I could soon find my small platoon sorely depleted.

The first battle briefing

Hacking through the endless jungle

In full retreat

So, Badger was round last Friday for our regular Combat Commander session, which we had carefully planned to make sure we’d have time for 2 games. Committed as we are to playing all the official GMT scenarios at least once, we turned again to Battle Pack #4: New Guinea for Scenario M4. Templeton’s Crossing. This is a time and place we've visited before: Scenario G. Bitter Creek from Combat Commander: Pacific is similarly set around Eora Creek in October 1942, when the Japanese were fighting to withdraw their overstretched expeditionary forces back up the Kokoda Trail.

The Japanese advance down the Kokoda Trail

Soldiers on the
Kokoda Trail

The battles of October and November 1942 in Papua New Guinea were the last phase of a campaign which had begun in July of that year when the Japanese landed on the north coast of the southern end of the island of Papua. Their objective was Port Moresby on the coast some 150km to the southwest, from where they planned to launch an invasion of Australia. To reach Port Moresby the Japanese had to cross the Owen Stanley Range, which rises to over 3000m. The Kokoda Trail was essentially the only route suitable for military forces and the Japanese troops spent 2 months struggling through jungle and across ravines as the Australians fought a series of delaying actions to save Port Moresby. Eventually the Japanese fell foul of the perennial problem of over-extended supply lines and were then forced on the defensive as their strategic position in the Pacific was undermined by the Americans’ early gains on Guadalcanal.

In the eye of the storm: June gaming roundup

More games than you can shake a stick at

June saw a glut of games after the recent months’ paltry pickings I noted a few weeks ago- a total of 21 games played in 15 sessions. The Saturday crew turned up again for the first time in several months, and Przemek made a return appearance too. But it was 13 games of Combat Commander which turned regular hearty fare into a veritable whirlwind of boardgaming, thanks largely to the enthusiasm with which Gav and Liam took to the game after I’d managed to persuade them to give it a go: fully 10 of those games were games of CC against Gav and Liam.

Alien wars and other inhumanities
Eclipse: new gaming horizons in the penumbra

I picked up a copy of this hot new 4X multiplayer game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) early in 2012. It was an instant hit with my players and has seen play matched in recent years only by Battlestar Galactica and Cosmic Encounter,  a fact that is all the more noteworthy when you consider that Eclipse is a pretty intense game which can take as long as 4 hours or more when you’re not familiar with it. This familiarity has to be hard-won by repeated play and the Saturday crew have proved willing to play often enough to achieve that. So when we got together for our first Saturday games group in some 6 months, everyone was keen for another adventure in space, and I was primed to introduce the new material from the game’s first boxed expansion- Eclipse: Rise of the Ancients.

September games round-up: not writing, gaming!

Getting back on track

Write-ups of gaming sessions have been a staple here at RD/KA! since the earliest days (the first use of the ‘got game’ label dates to my 5th post back in August 2005, and the label itself is second only to ‘boardgames’ as the most used label). As well as being satisfying to write, these posts have also driven the development of my use of graphics on the blog, which in turn means that they have been the engine of my learning how to use the GIMP. These posts don’t come without their problems:

• They’ve taken ever longer to prepare the more graphic-intensive they’ve become.
• Writing them is very much ‘of the moment’; ie. they have to be written very soon after the gaming session, when my memory is fresh.
• Taking notes during a game- for the sake of adding detail to a session write-up, can be more than just distracting: it can also disrupt my enjoyment of a game and my attention to the flow of the game- at the expense of my decision-making.

Celebrations and felicitations!

Edinburgh Games Hub: so hot it’s cool- it’s Official!

My enthusiastic response to my first visit to the Edinburgh Games Hub means that readers should be unsurprised to hear that I kept my promise and turned out for the EGH’s official Grand Opening on August 31st. Gav joined me on the bus ride to Edinburgh for the day and we arrived around lunchtime to find the cafe already thronged and buzzing. Needing to relax a bit after our journey, we promptly plonked ourself down at the nearest convenient table- which just happened to be the one upon which Zia (Shaz, the proprietor’s mum, remember?) had laid out all the special munchies she’d prepared for the day. Soon enough we got to talking with the guy already sitting there, who was there with his young son.

Derek & Gav in the Edinburgh Games Hub cafe

'Death Ray Manta': indie, still psychedelic after all these years

“Like, cosmic, man!”

The origin of Death Ray Manta

The many-splendoured universe that is digitial gaming is terra incognita to me I must confess. I mean, I’ve played video games hundreds and hundreds of times: across different platforms- arcade games, Spectrum games, PC games, console games, social network games; in genres too numerous to mention, but which barely amount to a representative sample of what digital gaming is and has been. All those games, and all I know about the single most important new gaming medium of our age is the depth of my woeful ignorance.

My geeking summer #2: True North

A hot time in the old town: Games Hub Edinburgh

This post could also be subtitled ‘fB strikes again’ because, exactly as with last month’s encounter with Mark Millar at Plan B Books, this story all began on Facebook. If I recall correctly, what happened this time was that a couple of months ago I followed through on a link that a friend had liked and lo, there it was: the Games Hub Edinburgh, a fB group for an upcoming games cafe in Edinburgh. Frankly, I was gob-smacked. What an awesome idea! What a risk to take. Just WTF! More seriously though: the Games Hub Edinburgh strikes me as an idea whose time has come, and as the most important thing to happen in the Scottish gaming community since I don’t know when. OK, starting G3 back in 1998 was totally exciting, and no small achievement for all concerned, but what we have here strikes me as being different by a whole order of magnitude. GHE, after all, won’t be a club meeting weekly for some 4/5 hours. It’ll be open 12 hours/day, 7 days/week. See what I meant about awesome, and the risk?

Just when you thought it was safe to venture back onto the internet…

It lives!

Innovation in
mental health care?

Site-visitors who’ve tracked the ‘Recently played games’ widget over on the sidebar (or on my BGG profile page) during the months of this longest of bloglags will have been aware of continuing activity there throughout all that time. Regular readers will be quite unsurprised to hear that the recent reappearance of Up Front is particularly gratifying to yours truly. But it is the unexpected return of the Cylon menace which I must bring to your attention today.

Another random assembly of nuts, cranks and scrounged body-parts

A genuine masterwork?

I hosted a boardgaming stag-night for Badger last August. Seven of us played Cosmic Encounter and Dominion, both of which went down very well in a company of mixed gaming interests and enthusiasms; a success sufficient to generate demand for repeats, which themselves have happened often enough to establish a definite new games group. And so last Saturday 6 gamers assembled for a much-anticipated session of games and grub, with the prospect of playing Battlestar Galactica: the boardgame adding unknown and challenging expectations to the already familiar atmosphere of pleasant anticipation.

My first (and last?) game of España 1936

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.

A bit of this and a bit of that

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.

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

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.

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

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!

Rain starts play

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.

A big night out

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.

Conflict of Heroes on tour

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

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

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.

UK Games Expo'10 #2. Once more unto those hex-and-counter battlefields

The best laid plans
My experience of- and the feedback from, CC@UK Expo'09 had led me to reconsider the tournament's format, which had been very open last year: players just paired up at their own convenience and chose whichever scenario they wished. This had worked well; even so I was wondering if it might be worth experimenting with a more structured format.

My final decision so to do was forced to a degree by space constraints. Last year we had essentially just squatted as many tables as we could get away with in the Strathallen's main opening gaming room. This meant that we occupied space which could easily've accomodated twice our number or more so I wasn't at all surprised when Richard Denning- with whom I was liasing for CC@UK Expo'10, asked me about space requirements so that he could allocate us a specific room of our own.

The result of all this was that CC@UK Expo'10 was set up with 6 preselected scenarios to be played in seeded rounds. The scenarios were:

• 8: Breakout Dance.
• 13. Tussle at Maleme.
• 19. Metaxas Season.
• 21. Saint Agatha (@RD/KA! here).
• E. West Tank Barrier.
• K. Burning Buna.

In the event this format was abandoned on Saturday in favour of last year's because players were having to sit around for too long waiting for others to finish so that the next round could begin. This was pointless, the main aim of the tournament being to play as much Combat Commander as possible.

"Alas, I am undone!"

Sieze the day?
I said last Thursday that I wanted to get Dominion to the table up here in Glasgow "at the earliest opportunity". That opportunity arose when Badger appeared for Friday night gaming. I'd been touting for a game of Conflict of Heroes- what with the upcoming demo tour, but the lure of Dominion proved too much to resist. A Euro-style cardgame that can keep this grognard's favourite treadhead's game off the table? Regular readers will realise that this must make Dominion something really special.

What went down
The rules of Dominion include a few recommended sets of Kingdom cards to give beginners balanced games which demonstrate different dynamics of play (you only use 10 of the 22 different kinds remember?) so- knowing what I was looking at and for this time, I was quickly able to get the game set up using the starter game cards (all shown in the illustrations left and below). Five minutes later we were playing. Five minutes after that Badger was playing his cards like he'd been playing Dominion for ages: grinning all over his face as he surveyed good hands; grimacing at his hands of shite.

UK Games Expo'10 #1. Friends old and new

Rattle and hum: the convention circuit with added cyberware
As many of my readers will know, one of the special charms of any convention is meeting new people with an ease all too uncommon in everyday life. The simple foreknowledge of passions shared with those you encounter, coupled perhaps with something of a 'hothouse' environment as people try to squeeze as much as possible out of the convention experience, creates a drive to turn chance encounters into memorable moments. This pleasure grows when continued convention-going turns these passing moments into casual acquaintances and more enduring friendships.

This already familiar experience has changed in recent years thanks to the intervention of the internet, and of social networking in particular. People you know online become candidates for organised rendezvous at the earliest opportunity; those you meet at conventions are added to your online network so that it's easier to meet up in the future. And so the hobby community is enriched as a whole- by the growing networks of its members; and for each of those members- by their increasing ability to participate in and contribute to the life of the community of their shared interests. (Image via Online Teaching Resources.)

Not your regular Sunday session #2. Of gangers, competitors and winners

Getting wired inWednesday's first installment of this Conflict Scotland 2010 report was all about meeting people, seeing the sights, and loading up with swag. Today I'll be telling of how Andy and I fared when we joined in the fun, and of the results of the competitions: the event's purpose after all.

Underhive shootout
The game
Knowing that there was to be open gaming laid on, Andy and I took along some of our models for a game. Andy took his 1500pt, 20 model Space Wolf Wolf Guard army (Andy's tried this army out already- against David's infamous Tau: you can read Andy's battle report here). I'd considered taking a Penumbra's Talons army but decided against it in the end, preferring instead just to take along my gang for a game of Necromunda with Andy.

Now part of GW's Specialist Games range, Necromunda was originally released in 1995 in a big box stuffed to the gunnels in best GW tradition (a box whose contents included- IIRC, the first appearance of the now highly prized plastic bulkheads). The game was an instant hit and has since won itself a following whose fanaticism is matched only by that of Blood Bowl, another game hailing from the same period (Blood Bowl's definitive 3rd edtion was released just the previous year).