UK Games Expo'09 #4: Old friends and new stuff

I commented yesterday on the "paramount contribution the tournaments had made to my enjoyment of the Expo". More than a matter of mere highlights, they were the absolute backbone of everything I did on that long weekend. Having something to do each day meant that I wasn't just drifting aimlessly, as I have done at conventions so often in the past. And even the familiar drifting through the various halls seemed more enjoyable. Perhaps because they were a part of a greater whole? Or perhaps just because I enjoyed telling people I met about my own part in the Expo?

All of which is by way of introduction to a highlight of my wanderings through the halls crammed with trade stands, demo games, and people- lots and lots of people.

Gordon Lamont and Snow Tails
The oldest of old hands or most dedicated readers of blog archives might remember that Gordon Lamont (one half of the dynamic duo that is Fragor Games) featured in the 2nd post here at RD/KA!. Regular readers will probably remember Gordon from my reports about DiceCons, which he helps organise alongside his associates in the SBGA.

I'd heard about Fragor Games' new game Snow Tails on the net, naturally enough; had seen some preview pictures; and had seen Gordon sheltering under an umbrella from our lovely summer rain while I was heading to the Clarendon on Saturday, so I knew he was at the Expo. For some reason though, I was still surprised to find Gordon demoing Snow Tails.

The irrepressible Gordon Lamont demonstrates Snow Tails

I enjoyed my first game of Snow Tails, a game about racing dog sleds in the snow. I spotted 1 or 2 similarities with the only Euro-racer I own: Mississippi Queen. Most of the game though, was completely new. The most significant new feature is the cardplay players use to control their movement.

Each player has their own deck of dog cards, each numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 IIRC, and from which they will maintain a 5-card hand. As many as 3 cards can be played each turn, 1 each into 1 of 3 places:

• Left dogline.
• Right dogline.
• Brakes.

These cards set the sled's speed according to the simple formula: (left + right) - brakes. The difference between left and right also determines whether the sled drifts; and how far and to which side if it does.

There are various tweaks to this core mechanic. Among the more important are:

• Each time you collide with something bigger than your sled (ie. not another sled), or exceed cornering speed limits, your sled is 'dented', and you have to add a dent card to your hand; useless cards that count against your 5-card hand limit and which cannot be disposed of in any way, dent cards limit the range of choices you have each turn.
• You can only play more than 1 dog card in a turn if they are all the same value.

The upshot of these simple rules is a game which is quick to pick up; which plays fast enough so that you could easily fit 2 or 3 games into just part of a comfortable evening's gaming; and whose hand management rules are sufficient to induce brain-burn in the most hardened card gamer. I liked it, enough to think seriously about buying it.

Gordon shows off Fragor Games' UK Games Expo'09 award for 'Best New Boardgame'; and the winner: Snow Tails

I wasn't alone in that. I met several groups of gamers that Saturday afternoon who were just settling down to play their newly acquired copies of Snow Tails, and who were all excited at the prospect of meeting one of the designers. It was just a shame that I couldn't offer them better directions as to how they might track Gordon down.

In any event, the praise for Fragor Games' latest offering was sufficient to give our favourite dynamic duo of designers the UK Games Expo 2009 award for Best New Game. Congratulations to Fraser and Gordon both. Lang may yer lums reek!

And stuff
Entry fees and beerage aside you can be sure, dear readers, that money changed hands between me and traders last weekend in Birmingham. I bought a couple of games that had been on the horizon of my interest for some time. I also picked up an absolute bargain boardgame 2nd hand from a fellow C&C:A campaigner (thanks again matey!). More on these as they hit the table, I expect.

Books too figured large in my quietly conspicuous consumption. I picked up a good half dozen or so new WW2 books. That particular splurge began on the Saturday when I chanced to notice Rommel's Infantry Attacks. My swither was just some kind of game I played with myself before succumbing. Other books quickly followed, opening the floodgates so that I had several games and doubly several books in the luggage I took home as compared to the luggage I'd brought south.

One last big thank you...
... goes out to Andy.

Andy does what a man's gotta do

Andy booked our hotel, our tickets, and did all the driving; so that from day one of my plans I could relax in the knowledge that all I had to deal with was my own event. I couldn't've done it without your support pal. Thank you very much. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
UK Games Expo'09
- #1: Time to kill
- #2: And so to war
- #3: I eat dirt and die

UK Games Expo'09 #3: I eat dirt and die

I'd had a long lie on the Saturday morning, but I had to get up bright and early(ish) to get to the Clarendon Suites for Barry Ingram's Commands and Colours: Ancients tournament, my entry into which readers might remember. I was looking forward to this a lot. Regular readers might remember that C&C:A is my favourite version of Richard Borg's Commands and Colours system; yet, because Badger and I just can't get Combat Commander off the table, I've played C&C:A just once in over a year.

The C&C:A tournament took place upstairs in the Clarendon. I'd wandered round that area on the Saturday afternoon, noting without really seeing the militaristic tone of the cases of medals, flags, paintings and so on which decorated the walls. It wasn't until Sunday that I cottoned on that this was all Masonic memorabilia and regalia; rooms and rooms of it. I couldn't resist snapping a few pictures.

UK Games Expo'09 #2: And so to war

My plan for our Inaugural Combat Commander tournament was simple: to get as many people as possible to play as many games as possible in the shortest possible time. I'd've been satisfied to scrape the bare minimum 4 people needed for a credible tournament; in the end, 10 players joined in across the 2 evening sessions, playing a total of 19 games.

I did bring printed sheets so that players could record the details of their games, but foolishly too few; and my hopes of easy net access were dashed, so that my backup plan fell through. With neither spares for other players, nor my own copies for duplicates, my record keeping was less than meticulous, amounting in the end to nothing more than the bare list of wins and losses I needed to track players' tournament VP. So 20-20 hindsight proved the sense of my decision to run the simplest possible format.

UK Games Expo'09 #1: Time to kill

UK Games Expo'09 has been and gone, and our inaugural Combat Commander tournament is done and dusted. I am pleased to be able to report that the Expo was hugely enjoyable, and that the CC tournament was a great success. But all of that is to get ahead of myself a bit.


To begin at the beginning

A giant cyborg sadly
couldn't kill the turkey
hiding behind this movie

Arriving in Birmingham in that teatime twixt afternoon and evening, Andy and I had no difficulty finding our destination thanks to the wonders of modern technology, AKA the Tom Tom satnav. Duly installed in our hotel and with an evening to kill, we sought out a cinema there to watch the newly released installment of a movie franchise which has never quite lived up to its point of origin, by which I mean Terminator: Salvation.

At first sight the trailer had given me real hopes for this movie, but subsequent reflection and one really bad review had brought me back to more realistic low expectations. Which was just as well: the best thing that Andy and I could find to say about the film was that it wasn't as bad as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (and I speak as one who lists Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a Top 5 SF/Fantasy movie sequel).

And they're off!

I'm just waiting for Andy to come and collect me for the drive down to Birmingham. In a couple of days, my Combat Commander tournament at UK Games Expo'09 will be over. I am already confident that there'll've been enough players to make it a good couple of days' gaming.

UK Games Expo runs over 2½ days. My CC tournament slots will amount to one of those days. I already know where I'll be on Sunday: playing in Barry Ingram's Commands and Colours: Ancients tournament. I'm looking forward to this; C&C:A is my favourite iteration of Richard Borg's Commands and Colours system.

The rest of the time? I won't know till I get there. If I had to pick out just one possibility, I guess I'd have to hope that Uwe Eickert might be able to make it across the Channel for the Expo. I'd just love to have the chance to play him at Conflict of Heroes, a game I'm keen to see get past CC onto my WW2 tactical gaming table one of these days.

That's it for now. See you on the other side. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
UK Games Expo'09
- #1: Time to kill
- #2: And so to war
- #3: I eat dirt and die
- #4: Old friends and new stuff

A rusty veteran and new arts of war?

Not so much 'rusty' as 'seized up'!

As I noted last month, my old buddy Mark's mayday visit was marked by his introduction to my current game of games: Combat Commander. This was going to mean more visits to Scenario 1. Fat Lipki, which I guess I've played more than any other because I've already introduced 3 players to the game (but scenarios 4. Closed For Renovation and 9. Rush to Contact are 2 alternative candidates for my single most played Combat Commander scenario). Just as well I still like the scenario then.

Following up the scenario's sitrep notes in my efforts more precisely to locate the action I was unable to locate the specific Lipki via google or wiki. I had to turn to my books for the map to the right. I also learned that the 18th Panzer Division was in Panzer Group Two's 47th Motorised Corps under Army Group Centre.

Combat Commander quickies

Fun in Stalingrad!

Badger was round on Friday. We played Combat Commander, naturally enough, choosing to embark on the campaign scenario from BP#2: Stalingrad. Representing a single September day's fighting atop the Mamayev Kurgan (Badger was pleased to discover that, Stalingrad campaign scenario notwithstanding, there are no city maps), the multigame campaign scenario uses the RSG with a few variants:

• A limited mapset across which to fight; this represents the ebbs and flows of the tactical situation as the battlelines move back and forth across the mountain.
• Predesignated force pools, with named leaders and their platoons replacing the OB's from the RSG.
• Extra rules for fortification resources; for units which survive one scenario becoming reinforcements in the next; and for spreading devestation - a personal favourite this, it adds an increasing amount of rubble to the map each scenario.

Badger got the Germans (curses!).

Another bloody Sunday?

From the skies and the forests they came!
It was just Donald and me for games on Sunday, so we decided to begin our first campaign from DoW's Memoir '44 Campaign Book, Volume 1, which this M44 completist had treated himself to with the hoary old "it's my birthday" excuse.

The quick play and simple unit representations make M44 an ideal game for a system linking a series of scenarios into a campaign, and M44:CB1 was eagerly awaited by the game's many fans. After just 2 games it is impossible to have a sense of the full scope of what the DoW team have added to M44 with CB1, but I can report that I like the look of what I have seen so far (surprised, dear readers?):

• A nice hardback book, with full colour art throughout: it's expensive to go hardback, but the book's more durable, and I think kids'd be extra proud of one.
• A punchboard of counters stuck in the back of the book (keeping these in good nick is another good reason for a hardback book).
• 51 new scenarios, many drawing on underused expansion sets.
• 3 grand campaigns; each comprising several mini-campaigns, themselves played out across 3 or more scenarios (as many as 8 in the really big ones):

1. Unternehmen Fall Gelb: France 1940.
2. Operation Barbarossa: Soviet Union 1941.
3. Normandy: France 1944.

The core campaign rules themselves are simple but effective:

• Reserves: each player has a reserve pool; reserve rolls at the start of each scenario govern access to your reserve units.
• Objective VP: many scenarios contain various objectives other than just destruction of the enemy; these provide bonus Campaign VP as well as victory medals in the given scenarios.
• Victory events: dice rolls made before each new scenario begins, these provide another layer of variation by enforcing small changes to each side's deployments.

All told, these rules will add a few minutes to each scenario's setup time, which I would expect to see become increasingly insignificant as players gain experience of the campaign game.

Unternehmen Fall Gelb: Airborne Operation
#16. Fort Eben Amaël
Starting at the beginning, as you do, and with some random selection, I found myself the Belgian defenders of fortress Eben Amaël on the Meuse near Maastricht, under attack from German glider-borne combat engineers. The original action there was one of WW2's first and most famous coup de main operations.

Historical revisionism took root right at the start of our new campaign: the Belgians held the fort against the German attack so that the panzers were unable to cross the Meuse as quickly as had been planned. There was a minor rules hitch which might've contributed to my 5-4 victory, but I reckon more significant was the excellent shooting of my units, which was some 1 pip above the mean on the day as a whole.

#17. Unternehmen Niwi
Another interesting scenario showcasing the new depths brought to this old favourite with the expansions, Unternehmen Niwi features the operation in which the Germans used Fieseler Fi 156 Storch light utility aircraft to seize crossroads vital to the planned panzer 'infiltration' through the Ardennes. Among the new rules in play were:

• Depleted units: units starting at less than full strength.
• Armour Breakthrough: armour reinforcements which can enter on your opponent's side of the map.

History was again rewritten, despite Donald's canny use of an Armoured Assault card to mobilise his Armour Breakthrough. I had kept my own armour units safe, ready, and waiting, and so was able to mount a decisive armoured counterstrike which won me the game.

So, with 2 scenarios to go, the Unternehmen Fall Gelb: Airborne Operation minicampaign stands at 10-7 to the Allies. All to play for then!

Score
Grizzled veteran 0
Stubborn defenders 2
:-)

Attack Sub
I've recorded a game or two of Courtney F. Allen's Attack Sub with Andy in the past, but none with Donald. We'd played it several times before, although sufficiently long ago that we decided to stick to the introductory scenario.

I drew the Russians. The game started well for me, as I was able to build up contact sufficient to take the first shot (IIRC), which missed. All told I think Donald and I each fired 3 times; mine all missed; 2 of Donald's were the 1-shot kills that won him the game. I will have my revenge.

Score
Old seadog 1
Not quite got his sealegs 0
:-\

PS. I don't know why the scans for the M44 maps turned out so scabby. I'll look into it. ;)

A Sunday sessions roundup

So, I've got 3 sessions' worth of games unreported. The Combat Commander games played with Mark and Badger are going to have to wait a bit. Meanwhile, I'll do a quick run through our last 2 Sunday sessions.

#1. Triumphs: complete, petty, or otherwise
Ivanhoe

Elsewhere on Saturday after showing what he's made of across the Combat Commander table, Mark was able to join us Sunday. I was keen to play Judge Dredd, so that I could return to my rightful place in the Chief Judge's chair, there mercilessly to lord it over Mark as befits ancient rivalries we share with our old Edinburgh mob.

Gav's impending late arrival meant that we had to turn to filler, so that Knizia's old favourite Ivanhoe appeared on the table as if by a law of nature. We fitted in 3 games while waiting for Gav. Andy particularly enjoyed the first: he won, which is rare. The next 2 games went to me.

Score
Andy 1
Donald 0
Mark 0
Me 2 (that's the "complete"...)
:-)

Oooh! Shiny! (AKA floating like a butterfly)

It seems like an age since last I posted, but it was actually only last Tuesday. Stage 1 is ongoing. I take comfort from the fact that I seem to be levelling out, but am only too well aware of how easily this might change. I've done some proper shopping and cooking this week, which is about all that's gone to plan. I'm just a bit frazzled.

CC@UK Games Expo'09
I've made some decent progress in my preparations for this tournament, but less than I'd've wished. Still, with a tad less than 3 weeks to the due departure date, I remain confident that I'll manage to do all I'm planning for the event.

Meanwhile, look at the lovely piece of kit I was able to pick up the other day at the local Ryman stationers (formerly known as Stationery Box): my very own LOS checker! (AKA: Retractable chrome badge reel.) Dirt cheap at £1.99. So you where to go fellow CC fans.

#Grins#

Adjusting the throttle

Bloody hell! No sooner had I survived the mayday gaming bash with Mark, Badger and the lads, than I found myself snapping awake and bouncing out of bed in the instant; a sure sign of my Stage 1 Hypomania. Oh dear, I thought, and I'd just got used to the unanticipated mood downswing.

Faced with this wakeup call, and after a frazzled week at the end of which I was pretty weary, I've decided that RD/KA! will be taking 2nd place in my gaming priorities until June. Or, to be more precise: Mark's, Badger's and my mayday weekend's games of Combat Commander and Up Front will be the last full-length game report I post before I return from CC@UK Games Expo'09.

CC@UK Games Expo'09
The event now has 4 players booked (myself excluded), plus 6 CC sets available. This means that we can already accomodate up to 12 players. Such a turnout would push the event up to the limits of this year's space, which would just prove my point about the demand for a WW2 tacsim tournament circuit in Britain. Fingers crossed I guess.

Meanwhile, I've made a start on the task of clipping, bagging, tagging and inventorying all the games I'm taking with me (CC aside, I'm taking my Memoir'44 and my Commands & Colours: Ancients to lend to Barry Ingram for his main-event tournaments (Saturday and Sunday, respectively). Hardly a thrill a minute (task and entry both), I'm going to get the latter done so's I can make headway on getting the former dusted. I've got two Sundays' games results to post, which I should get done before the week is out. ;)

Promises, promises!

The perfect Space Marine army?

Facebook-friends and twitter-fellows will already know about the Liquid Gloat prompted by yesterday's geek grab:

"the 'old' one (and better than ever too!)."

No-prizes (with apologies to Stan 'the man' Lee and the old Marvel Bullpen) to readers who thought... 40K?

Yes I'm hankering after more than just some roleplaying, so yesterday I hit town; there to visit my local GW; where I availed myself of the filthy lucre and finally grabbed myself a copy of the new(ish) 5th edition Codex: Space Marines. I've only skimmed the book so far but I can report that, alongside the astonishing and ever-growing range of plastic Space Marine kits, this codex - fat as an old 2nd edition volume, means that there truly never has been a better time to be a Space Marine fan (and at GW's prices, it's just as well, don't you think?).

A definite hankering...

It's been a long time since I did any roleplaying, and longer still since I've GM'ed. There are various reasons for this, but they all boil down to two in the end: dissatisfaction and weariness.

My WFRP campaign ran for about 30 sessions over a period of some 16 months, ie. roughly every other week on average. I wasn't a seasoned GM, and I'm not really the seat of the pants type either, which meant that I put a lot of work into those games, not including the write ups here at RD/KA! (Keynote was a godsend!). In the end it was all too much for me. I was worn out.

What was more, I wasn't getting the satisfaction I wanted from the game. As I explained to the lads one night while we were eating dinner before a game with Bill: playing boardgames with Badger is a simple matter of opening the box and off we go; a 100% successful recipie for enjoyment, which couldn't be said of the roleplaying, even when it was going well; which wasn't all the time, naturally enough. This was my motivation to turn the Sunday sessions into a regular boardgaming bash.

Even when Bill became the GM, the group dynamic changed because the midweek date ultimately reduced us to just 2 PCs: Tony and me. I think this just wasn't enough to give the games real momentum. Quite why the 3 of us failed to reach critical mass escapes me, although I do know of some contributory factors. I now believe that primary among them was Katana.

Readers who've known me since bygone days might be shocked by that admission, since they'll be all too aware that Katana is one of my all-time favourite PC's, so close to my heart that I coined the phrase 'primary projection' to express what he meant to me. That is to say: he was a creative expression of some of the deepest wellsprings of my subconscious strivings. Well known primary projections include Conan and Philip Marlowe.

At first sight you'd think that I'd've been delighted to return to a PC like that; in the hands of the GM who presided over his creation and the first phase of his adventures; and with the player - Tony, natch - who, as GM, gave Katana the second phase of his adventures, when we first roleplayed together back in the late 1990's. And I was. It's a nice experience to pick up an old PC and 'put him on' like you would a well worn coat. And that blog I wrote upon his return weighed heavily in the balance which eventually tipped in favour of my acceptance that rpg's are art.

Even so, with the benefit of hindsight after the roleplaying had unravelled, Bill mused that going back to Katana might've been a futile attempt to relive old glories. He was right, of course. Precisely because Katana is that primary projection, he is too deeply embedded in pasts that can't be revisited. Sure Bill and I could do Katana easily and well, but it was, as Bill said about Frank Miller's Sin City, a five-finger exercise.

Worse still, with the benefit of lengthy reflection on Bill's offhand remark, I have come to the conclusion that not only was Katana too easy to play for the pair of us; he was also an unfair obstacle we unwittingly threw in Tony's path. I mean to say, teaming up Tony's Witchblade with Katana effectively reduced her to a guest star in Katana's continuity, instead of being a co-star in her own. This is OK for one-offs or short mini-campaigns based on player transience, but not if you want a proper ongoing series. Each and every player should enjoy equal billing after all.

All of this is by way of looking back at some of the mistakes made in past roleplaying in the hopes of avoiding them in the future because, yes, we're talking about doing some roleplaying. In the end Donald's wish to roleplay again was just too keen to ignore.

I'd already suggested to Donald that he try the HERO system, and was pleased he was agreeable. On that basis, Donald is talking about a couple of ideas. It's likely that we'll begin with his first: an outlaw mini-campaign using Iron Crown Enterprise's highly esteemed 1987 Robin Hood: The Role Playing Campaign. I am already looking forward to this. I'm thinking of a character who is a master of the quarterstaff. Whatever complaints people might have about HERO, it cannot be gainsaid that its skills list and combat system renders weapon mastery in rich detail, and with mechanics that reward real tactics and actual practice as opposed to just dishing out stat upgrades.

For my part, I have two ideas for mini-campaigns of my own. One is HERO too: a return to my take on TSR's 1993 Bughunters. One of two books I've got from the late, unlamented Amazing Engine system, I liked Bughunters' concept: clone troopers in space fighting the bugs? What's not to like? I immediately realised though that I would run this game with HERO instead of the dumbass TSR AE.

I ran this with Tony and other friends back in the late 1990's. I've still got all the material I worked up for the game and the setting (a piece of background work was posted to the Trollslayer forums a few years ago). It just needs to be updated, and I'd be ready to run it again. This is something I'd like to do, because I liked the kinds of stories I was aiming at in the setting; and I had a few surprises in store for my shell-shocked players. Unfortunately we moved on to other games, and never went back to my Bughunter.

My other idea is to go back to WFRP, naturally enough. I'd like to run a more hi-octane game in a classic D&D style, albeit with a bit more than just dungeon bashing; a game in which I'd unleash without let or hindrance the full power of the game's hideous antagonists and its deadly combat system. Of course, I plan on making the potential rewards commensurate with the risk.

We still don't know quite how, when and with whom our return to roleplaying is going to pan out, but we'll be getting something going for sure. Expect to hear more. ;)

Blogging through the slog

"Incoming!"
The slog? Yep. Not just the mood swing - which had already slowed down the lickety-spit with which RD/KA! began 2009; but also a flash of déjà vu when three out of four of the easter extravaganza reports (count them: #1, #3, #4) were marathon sessions at the GIMP, working on yet more "ever thinner Combat Commander battle reports... become uninspiring drudgery to this blogger", to remind readers what I wrote last September. This time, the drudgery was at least productive (all hail the GIMP!); not just nineteen new maps, but a new avenue in fleshing out battle reports with real history and geography.

Even so, that game of Rogue Trooper came along in the nick of time. All the more so since there's shedloads more Combat Commander on the way.

A parcel of rogues...

Rogue Trooper
Donald, Gav, Tony and I made 4 for boardgames on Sunday. Casting around for the main event as you do I spied, tucked away almost out of reach on a high shelf, my as yet unplayed second hand copy of GW's Rogue Trooper boardgame from 1987.

I confess I was never a big fan of the Rogue Trooper story, which made its debut in the galaxy's greatest comic - 2000 AD, in 1981. To paraphrase a friend at the time, there are only so many ways to ring the changes with "Eat chemcloud Norter scum!" The story was very popular though, so it was hardly surprising that a Rogue Trooper game was added to the series of licenced 2000 AD products which came out of the young design studio's halycon days.

For the record

Ivanhoe
No sooner had I returned from sunny Anstruther in Fife than I got a call from Antony (a.k.a. the mighty Grundi), who was at a loose end. His visit concluded with an outing to the tournament field in Ivanhoe, which I suspect is Antony's favourite game.

Long story short: Antony had skillfully fought his way to 3-2 up. It was late and time was getting on, but I psyched him into another game, which I won, thus forcing the inevitable tiebreaker (Antony no more wanted to surrender the night's knightly honours than did I). I won that too.

Score
Headstrong youth 3
Wily old dog 4
:)

History of the World
Tony's absence gave us 5 the following Sunday. There was a great appetite for giving History of the World another try after Easter Sunday's first play. Andy was content to go along with this.

Notes were taken of the scores at the end of each epoch, but again the intervening week has cleared the interesting little details from my mind. What I can report is that the Romans did make their appearance this time- in Dave's hands, and they were truly mighty, especially with the addition of weaponry; that I held the lead until epoch 5, when it was stolen from me by Dave; and that my best efforts with the British empire in epoch 7 (and they were a lot better than last time too) weren't enough to prevent Dave sneaking past me in the last turn of the game to win by a mere 6VP (216 to my 210).

Score
A man who needs no introduction
(Because he's not getting invited back) 1
The civilised world 0
:-\
;)

Easter extravaganza #4: Rumble in the jungle

Our trip to the chateau of doom done, we proceeded to what, for Martin, was the main event: a trip to the PTO and Martin's first taste of Combat Commander: Pacific. A noted player of the Japanese in Up Front, Martin was looking forward to seeing how they shaped up in Combat Commander, a game to which he rapidly took, pronouncing it the most exciting WW2 tacsim he'd seen since Up Front.




Send out the scouts!
We started at the beginning, as you do, with Scenario A. Grassy Knoll, which Badger and I had played in our first CC session of the year back in January. Since then, the scenario has acquired a reputation as being too tough on the Americans, as witness this thread on CC:P@BGG.

Slaving away again at the GIMP (where do you think I've been all week?!), I went first to Wikipedia in search of the Battle of Mindanao to see if I could find any information that'd clue me in about the map's orientation. That search proving fruitless, google followed, which led me to HyperWar: a hypertext history of the Second World War.

Easter extravaganza #3: Country-house carnage

Preliminary reconnaisance

After a short night's sleep and a journey across the country to the east coast Martin and I sat down to the main event: Combat Commander. We decided to start with Scenario 4. Closed for Renovation. Could one of us gain the American victory which has eluded everyone so far?

Working at the GIMP to get files ready for RD/KA!, I searched for Humaine, Belgium on googlemaps, as I'd done with Scenario A. Ichiki Attacks from CC:P. I was able to find the town, but neither googlemaps nor google earth are detailed enough for me to pick out the chateau itself, so north is purely conventional on the maps for this scenario. Still, I found some pictures which show the piece of real estate to which those Germans clung so stubbornly back in December 1944.

Easter extravaganza #2: Limbering up

The Easter holidays brought a visit from 'Uncle' Martin for a WW2 tactical megasession.

Up Front
Beginning in the wee small hours, we opted for a couple of quick games of Up Front. We managed 2 games. Turning to Scenario A. Patrol as ever, random generation pitted my British against Martin's Germans, then I took the Americans in against Martin's Germans.

The details of the games escape me at week and a half's remove, and I wasn't taking notes. What I can remember is that, continuing my setup experiments, I decided to give my Germans a chance to gain a manoeuvre victory with a strong 4-man assault group on my open flank. I managed to pull this off.

I tried something similarly unusual with my Americans, setting up:

• The 2 ML1 wimps with Cpl. Moores at group A.
• A 6-man firebase at group B.
• Sgt. Burnett with Myers and a ML3/Panic 5 rifleman at C.

Sgt. Burnett and his lads got into close combat, and amongst the game's high jinks were:

• I took a prisoner.
• Burnett junked a tommy gun (what?!), then picked up the dead Bernhoff's rifle from the German group he was infiltrating.

In the end, Martin's assault group died in a hail on fire and on the points of my bayonets, and I won again.

Score
Aging reservist 0
Combat-ready veteran 2
:)

Afterthoughts
These games were part of my ongoing consideration of Up Front tactics, naturally enough. Isolated data insufficient for the drawing of conclusions, the results are grist to my mill nonetheless.

Key for the Germans was the decision to keep open the option of the manoeuvre victory with 4 men at range chit 4. Historically authentic for the Germans, this aggressive strategy is also eminently playable with their hand in Up Front. Going with a strong 4-man assault group raises the question of how to build your firebase. I opted to put the ML1 Beck and the ML2/Panic 2 Wollack at group A, and to transfer Wollack into the firebase at the first opportunity:

• The firebase has to have at least 5 men.
• ML1 wimps shouldn't be in your firebase.

In addition, I would consider pulling Beck back to range chit -1 to keep him out of range of the enemy. That way, he'd be able to run around for the sake of card cycle without coming under too much fire.

Unlike the Germans, neither the American hand nor their firebase favours the manoeuvre strategy. So I prefer to go with a 3-man assault group whose role is to hold out against their German opposite numbers. The novelty in this game was to put Cpl. Moores with the wimps in group A instead of with the firebase in B:

• Moore's tommy gun makes him largely superfluous in the firebase.
• His smoke capacity is likewise mostly redundant.

So, putting Moores in group A with the wimps means that:

• The wimp group can lay smoke to enhance their own survivability and to increase card cycle.
• Group A will be more durable because of Moores' higher morale.

These strategies worked against Martin on Easter Monday. Even so, the vivid memory of the utter tankings back in 2007 which refuted my alternative Japanese strategy means that I'm not leaping to any conclusions about these setups, all the more so given my concerns about the scaling of Up Front's firepower engine. Still, I know I'm going to try them both out again the next chance I get. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
Easter extravaganza
- #1: The long weekend
- #3: Country-house carnage
- #4: Rumble in the jungle

Easter extravaganza #1: The long weekend

Diversions, dinner, then duel in the depths

The long weekend brought Badger round on Thursday night. Events elsewhere diverted us unexpectedly for a few hours, so that our anticipated WW2 tactical megasession turned into a single visit to Stalingrad in Combat Commander, but not before dinner, naturally enough. Dinner was another new recipie from Nick Nairn's Top 100 Chicken Recipes: chicken with butternut squash and bacon.

I like cooking chicken. It ticks a lot of healthy eating boxes; is available prejointed in portions ideal for freezing, and easy to apportion to appetites; it cooks quickly and easily; and is adaptable to any and all culinary styles. Truly, the pack of chicken portions is a boon to the busy modern cook. Butternut squash was new to me, even though they've been around for ages.

The recipie was a success, just like all the others I've taken from this book by Nick Nairn. It'll be revisited, and I'll be looking for other ways to use butternut squash just as soon as I can.

Doom, despair, devestation, dastardliness and dinner

Andy, Donald and Gav turned up for last week's Sunday session. Dinner was going to be a French classic: chicken cassoulet. The recipie was a quick and easy modern version from Nick Nairn's Top 100 Chicken Recipes, suitable as ever for advanced preparation and last-minute finishing.

The dish was a great success, which was nice. I took special pleasure in the lip-smacking appreciation of my favourite spicy Italian bangers, which I believe were new to everyone else.

Doom

I was keen to have another go at the final Doom mission Donald and I had lost so pitifully last month. We were humped, again, even with 3 marines and a reduced difficulty level. Our humpage was of a degree less severe than the last time - we did get out of the first room, though only as far as the second area; but it was humpage in the extreme nonetheless.

A night on the Russian front

Up Front

Badger and I began last Friday's session with a game of Up Front, another Patrol because Badger's still green despite his excellent record. Random selection gave him the Germans against my Russians. He chose to go with a variant of his winning setup from 4 weeks ago. I went with my now standard 3-group Russian setup.

Routine trash talking aside, I was quietly confident as this game started. The Russians are probably the best force with which to take on the Germans. Sheer weight of numbers, a capacity for insane charges, and the best discard in the game are strengths which I reckon give them the edge over the British or the Americans. Plus, Badger's run of luck surely couldn't continue?

"We go!"

The unstoppable charge of Chad Jensen's Combat Commander continues with the addition of Battle Pack #3: Normandy to GMT's P500. Scheduled to include 17 new scenarios (1 a campaign), 8 new maps, extra counters, and a host of new rules to cover the terrain, units and operations in the Normandy bridgehead in the summer of 1944, BP#3 looks set to provide hours of fun for CC fans everywhere.

There is no release date as yet, as you would expect from the nature of the P500 system, but there is every reason to expect the pack to appear this year: at the time of writing there are 320 preorders, and that's within 24 hours of the announcement of BP#3's addition to the P500 list. I imagine a fair proportion of them are automatic preorders. Even so, I'll be surprised if the crucial 500 preorders hurdle hasn't been crossed before the month is out.

In other news

Badger's coming round soon for another session of WW2 gaming, so I've just got time for a couple of quickies.

Space Hulk rumour mongering
A recent visit to the Bell of Lost Souls GW fansite and a quick search for 'Space Hulk' has updated the rumours about the rerelease of this classic boardgame. The talk at Bell of Lost Souls is of "a full bore rework with all the bells and whistles you could ever want." You can find the full story here.

With as many as 6 months before the much-touted Q3 2009 release date, there is plenty of time for GW to do some serious viral marketing by drip-feeding rumours into the online GW community. As the comments at Bell of Lost Souls and elsewhere demonstrate, this could bring the Space Hulk fanbase to a pitch of excitement perhaps exceeding even that of playing the game itself! Myself, I want pictures.

Now that was a bughunt!
Google have finally got round to fixing a bug with the user stats for blogger, one I seem to recall arriving when they upgraded the system back in 2005.

The 'Profile Views' stat is the only counter of any sort I use here at RD/KA!. That upgrade all those years ago had the unexpected consequence of making the counter increment whenever I looked at my own profile, so I'd half the number and round down conservatively to get any idea of how many visitors had clicked through to check my profile. I actually sent google a bug report on this back when the issue arose. Is the delay in fixing this an indication of how backlogged their inbox is, I wonder? ;)

This and that

Something fishy going on
Alert readers might've noticed a recent weekend passed without a Sunday session. This was because that weekend saw a night out in celebration of my 46th birthday. I had decided weeks ago that I wanted to make the occasion the excuse for my eagerly awaited second visit to the delightful Two Fat Ladies West End.

Snappy dressers set their own style!

Andy, Badger, Donald and Gav had all heard me sing the restaurant's praises more than once, so it had quite a reputation to live up to. For my part I was wondering how my second visit would go after the first had been such a landmark in my fine dining experience. Opinions were a bit mixed in the end.

Andy, Badger and me in the Three Judges

Several people had the Cullen Skink, which was unanimously highly praised. Andy and I started with a squid salad. I found this quite delicious, the tenderest and most flavourful squid I've ever eaten. My main - scallops with Stornoway black pudding - slightly let down my high expectations. Stornoway black pudding is a modern food legend, and justly so. Perhaps Two Fat Ladies sources its supply from a butcher other than that whose pudding I've enjoyed so much in the past. I don't know for sure, but I have to say that it lacked the pepperiness which to me characterises Stornoway black pudding.

The lads were mostly happy elsewhere around the table, although Donald was a bit disappointed with his first taste of fresh tuna, which was too mild in flavour for his liking. A wee taste and subsequent pondering has left me thinking that this was mostly bad luck: Donald's a confirmed lover of red meat, and the idea of fresh tuna steaks probably conjures up certain expectations of strong, meaty flavours. Maybe he should try the meat dish on a future occasion.

Badger, me and Gav in Two Fat Ladies

Andy, Gav and I were on our third bottle of a sluggable fresh and fruity white wine by the time the desserts came round, so my memories of that course are vague. I'm pretty sure Donald was pleased with his pudding though (and so the day was saved for him: puddings are second only to red meat as essential components of Donald's ideal meal); I certainly enjoyed my chocolate pot.

The matter of the black pudding notwithstanding, my second visit to Two Fat Ladies lived up to the promise of the first. And, although perhaps not sharing the degree of my enthusiasm (Badger took to accusing me of turning into John Torode of BBC TV's Masterchef), I think everyone agreed that we'd been served top-quality food at fair prices.

Cheers!

I don't know about the others then, but I know I'll be making another visit just as soon as I can find the flimsiest of excuses.

My life in the mob
In the months since I became an active facebooker, I've been invited to join and otherwise taken a look at many of the little games people play there. Of all of those, only one has managed to hold my interest: Zynga Inc's game of gangland empire-building Mafia Wars.

I'm really not sure what it is about this game that appeals to me so much. I mean, I'm a fan of The Sopranos, a big enough fan that I still expect to hear the Alabama 3 signature tune kick in every time I hear the chords and static hiss that are HBO's station credit. And I like resource management in games in general. But that doesn't really explain why Mafia Wars is the facebook game which first successfully lured me into this genre.

No, really: this doesn't explain my fondness for Mafia Wars; and I really don't know why I like it so much. What I can say for sure is that I'll be playing this one out as far as I can take it. Oh, and I won't be paying for it either. ;)

PS. I just want to add a note of thanks to Donald and Gav who took the photos of my birthday night out. Cheers lads.

Related@RD/KA!
- Sweat the small things?