A sandbox for my brain

A shocking turn of events!

2008-12-05T21:28:00.000-08:00

It's the creative urge. The need to go it alone. Build your own future.

This blog, it's contents and all associated entertainment magic have moved to a new neighborhood. To continue following the adventures of a balding dad and wargamer, please visit my new blog at the following address:

http://www.opportunityfire.com

Thanks.

Just another American story

2008-11-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

November 11, 1918 found Rutherford B. Edwards laid up in a military hospital in Kansas. About six weeks earlier, the corporal in the US 1st Infantry Division had gotten a whiff of either phosgene or mustard gas when his crappy issue gas mask had failed during a German gas attack. He never made much of an effort to find out exactly what had happened – he was just damned happy to be alive.

After his discharge from the hospital (and from the Army) some months later, “Red” (so nicknamed because of his thick, red hair) didn’t immediately head back east to his hometown of Ashland, Kentucky. He was a brother or two down the totem pole from taking over the family farm, jobs were scarce back home in the post-war wind-down and, besides, there was an influenza epidemic raging that he figured somebody with gas-damaged lungs should probably try to avoid.

Kansas and neighboring states still offered plenty of opportunity to work in the wide-open spaces, so Red knocked around a bit working farm jobs, punching cows and mending fences. A lot of Great War veterans did essentially the same thing – just with different details in different parts of the country – because it was difficult for them to settle in to work-a-day America after what they had just been through.

War has never been a pleasant experience for those on the pointy end, but World War I was warfare as men had never before seen. The tools and systems of industrialization enabled slaughter on an unimaginable scale. Mass conscription kept the technological abattoir freshly stocked, and simultaneously insured that tens of thousands of survivors were exposed to war’s most soul-shattering horrors.

In 1919 they didn’t call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but many veterans wrestled with the horror just the same. Fortunately Red had a good religious grounding and a common-sense understanding of human nature that helped him cope. He knew other men who weren’t so fortunate, however, so until his dying day he thanked God that he always had the ability to face his wartime experience and not allow it to dominate his life.

Red had a gal back home, but he wasn’t able to lure her westwards. When the American Rolling Mill Company announced construction of a new plant in Ashland in 1920, Red headed back home to take both a steady job and a wife.

By the time I came along, my granddad Edwards was already 70 or thereabouts and long-retired from Armco Steel. “Papaw” always carried a bit of the war around with him – although no one else in his family would really ever know it.

Except for me, anyway. He had plenty of grand-children (6, I think), but I guess of them all I was the best listener. I wonder to this day if he thought I understood what he was talking about all those afternoons we spent sitting on that old concrete culvert down on the back of his property. My guess is that he knew, at least a little bit, his experiences would help shape my view of the world.

So today, as on every Veteran’s Day, it’s with a mixture of awe and sadness that I think about my Papaw Edwards and all of the veterans who stood for their country during the Great War and in every American war since.

I am awed by their courage and their sacrifice. And I am saddened that the War to End All Wars… wasn’t – and that none of the wars since then have been, either.

Distraction 5: Block games

2008-11-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

Block games – wargames that use wooden blocks for their primary playing pieces – aren’t exactly a new product on the market. Columbia Games has been producing them for over 20 years. In the last five or six years, GMT Games has also taken up the concept.

Columbia has produced some very good games over the years. Their game “East Front” remains one of my favorite titles on World War II in th East. But GMT’s entry into the niche has brought in some welcome new ideas. I think Europe Engulfed was their first block game, followed more recently by Asia Engulfed. They’ve also produced Fast Action Battles: Bulge and the very successful Command & Colors: Ancients series.

Thanks to GMT’s recent half-price sale (for P500 buyers), I now have all four of those games. FAB: Bulge and CC:A arrived last week – and I’m quite impressed by both of them.

It’s weird. Both games cover topics of interest and I enjoy block games quite a bit but I never got around to buying either one of them. They couldn’t quite manage to make it to the top of my game list. Maybe because they made a big splash when they were first released and I am by nature a contrarian? After seeing them both up close, now I feel kind of dopey.

Typically, the use of blocks makes for a game format that’s very friendly to limited intelligence rules (your opponent can’t see ‘your’ side of the block) and to easy step reduction (each edge of the block representing a different strength). CC:A is the exception – it uses blocks for units where other Richard Borg-designed games (Memoir 44 and Battlelore, for example) use plastic miniatures.

There’s a tactile ‘something’ about playing block games that scratches some indescribable gaming itch for me. Maybe it’s because I started playing block games 15 or so years before the industry started producing all of those fancy-pants plastic miniatures, but I think I prefer blocks over miniatures. Or maybe in my addled little pea-brain I equate blocks with ‘serious’ wargaming and plastic minis with ‘lite’ wargaming.

Also of note, as with the other Borg-designed games Command & Colors: Ancients is also a ‘franchise’ system with a number of expansion packs available that add new forces to the original game. The various expansions available (three to date) probably triple the number of blocks available in the system. Catchy idea.

Distraction 4: Memories

2008-10-31T10:57:00.001-07:00

Three years ago today – Halloween 2005 – my wife and I, along with our newly-adopted son, found ourselves sitting in the lobby of the US Embassy in Guatemala City. The issue at hand was the approval of our son’s visa, which would finally allow him to travel home with us.

Earlier in the day we had completed the last bits of paperwork and tendered final payment for the processing of our son’s immigration packet – a receipt hastily scribbled on note paper said as much. We were all a bit aggravated and apprehensive because the embassy employees seemed to being devoting much more time to decorating for a Halloween party than they were to anything else. In fact during our adoption process we had encountered enough seemingly random embassy re-scheduling that I firmly believed they were going to chase us all out and close for the party before issuing our visa – which would have really been a problem because it was a Friday and our flight home was scheduled the following day.

It’s difficult to join in the merriment or laugh at people in silly costumes when your main thought is that they’re screwing off instead of helping you get your child back home to America.

Can I have a moment to be grumpy? Thanks.

Over the last couple of years I know that immigration has been a hot topic for political discussion. Here’s the deal: If you have never been through the process of dealing with US Immigraton – please shut right the hell up, because you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Just in case you think a US Embassy is a shining beacon of freedom and democracy to both citizens and those wishing to legally become citizens, I’ve got a little reality check for you. A US Embassy is a fortress of bureaucracy, surrounded by razor wire, full of bureaucrats, working on their own schedule to do whatever suits them whenever they choose to do it. Period.

The only embassies that get US Marine guards are the ‘prestige’ embassies and those in the movies. The rest of them get locally-hired, unfriendly, unhelpful, shotgun-toting Whackenhut security guards who think nothing of keeping a mother and her 7-month old infant standing in the rain for an hour at 8 in the morning.

On the whole, our process was easy compared to what the average immigration applicant from Guatemala endured. It only took us about 5 months of dealing with the Guatemalan and US governments to bring our son home. You want to know why so many people resort to illegal immigration? How about this: An embassy waiting room full of families dressed up in their finest clothes, ready for the 5-minute immigration interview that they have been waiting TEN YEARS to get.

Is that a no-shit, life-changing moment? You’re a skilled worker and this is your one shot to immigrate with your family to a country where you can find a decent job and make a living for them. Good luck, screwhead. Hope you don’t blow the interview or catch your immigration agent on one of those ‘headache’ days.

Whatever happened to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”? See, the crap you get taught in school isn’t always the way the real world works. I probably wouldn’t be such a lefty on the topic, except that I understand that Guatemala is one of those central American countries that we’ve screwed with (just for fun) for over 50 years, sucking away their resources and wrecking their economy.

Anyway, it seemed a minor miracle at the time – but the embassy issued our son’s visa that afternoon. I’d like to think it was just an efficient moment, but I also know that a coordinated phone-call campaign from family back home had generated ‘concerned faxes’ from the offices of our US Representative AND one of Florida’s US Senators. Never hurts to twang the strings of power every once in a while.

Democracy in action, right?

So. Forgive me if I have a slightly different attitude toward Halloween than a lot of other people. It’s a day of special memories for our family – and a day that serves to remind me how much better America can become.

Distraction 3: Kiev-to-Rostov

2008-10-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

Barbarossa: Kiev to Rostov landed in the swamp toward the end of last week. I ordered it on P500 from GMT some time ago, so I was happy to see it finally arrive.

Eastern Front games typically rate high on my list of favorites. War for the Motherland/Red Star Rising tops them all, I think, but various PanzerGrenadier and ATS modules set amidst the titanic struggle aren’t far behind. Other favorites from the period include GMT’s Ukraine ’43 and most of the East Front games in the Operational Combat Series (MMP/The Gamers).

I have all of the games in the EFS, with the exception of Typhoon (which was more of a fore-runner to the ‘series’). It’s been a couple of years since I’ve messed with any of them (Army Group North most recently) so picking up on all of the changes to the rules isn’t that difficult because I basically don’t remember any of the ‘old’ rules. One of the advantages of being an old, bald guy I suppose.

While the series is built around a map scale similar to OCS (5 miles per hex), there are few similarities beyond that. I find it rather interesting to play both systems and compare the different treatments given to operational combat in the same theater at the same ground scale.

EFS has a number of mechanisms that are slightly more abstract, which means it plays a bit more quickly on the tabletop (or in Cyberboard, whatever). What it sacrifices is flexibility. The system is highly tailored to the situation found at the opening of the war on the eastern front. The sequence of play is assymetrical and favors coordination on the part of the Germans, while it also imposes headquarters-bound restraints on the Soviets that their counterparts do not face.

OCS, on the other hand, is a system flexible enough to be used across theaters and time-frames – although it can get a bit complicated in spots. I also happen to believe that OCS works best for the games set on the eastern front and begins to break down a little bit when applied to theaters with either low density or high positional attrition.

But my point today isn’t to compare the two systems. I really just want to observe and report that Kiev-to-Rostov appears to be a worthy addition to the series. Half a bazillion counters and four well-done maps continue eastward with the action from Army Group South. The box also includes a couple of ‘mini’ maps printed on cardstock that reproduce small slices of the main maps for use with the game’s introductory scenarios.

I want to dwell for a moment on the mini-maps. It’s a concept that I can’t praise highly enough. It’s a single 8.5 x 11 inch bit of cardstock, each side printed with a different mini-map AND the setup charts needed to play the scenario. The scenarios cover fairly small areas, use small forces and are 3-4 turns long. The mini-maps couldn’t make setup or gameplay any simpler. They seem the perfect setting for a manageable introduction to a fairly complex, sprawling game system.

Maybe in future ‘monster’ games we’ll see some more of the same. Hope springs eternal, etc.

Distraction 2: Arctic Front Deluxe

2008-10-29T07:32:00.001-07:00

PanzerGrenadier: Arctic Front Deluxe is an upgrade of APL’s earlier Arctic Front supplement for the system. It’s pretty much a given that anything game-related with ‘Deluxe’ in the title is a re-make of something.

I have the original Arctic Front supplement, but the ‘Deluxe’ version certainly appears to be well-worth the $15 I paid for it. It includes more scenarios than the first version (and all of them are tooled for the new mappage), bigger scenarios and two identical half-sheets of counters for the Finns.

This supplement appears much more accessible than East of Suez, primarily because it doesn’t require ownership of a $200 monster game. Most of the scenarios can be played with ownership of only East Front Deluxe, the system’s core game. Scenarios range from small 1-mappers to several 4-mappers with lots of counters.

All three main episodes of Finnish involvement in the war are represented. Scenarios cover the Winter War, what the Finns call the Continuation War and the final fighting in Finland in 1944 (both against the Soviets initially, then against the Germans in a few instances).

The scenarios set in the different ‘episodes’ provide an interesting view of the progression of the Soviet army through the war years. The Finns are fairly consistent throughout the course of the war – skilled, motivated, well-led but always short on heavy hardware. The Soviets, however, change considerably over the course of the module’s scenarios.

In the Winter War, they are stumbling goobs with low-average morale and a dearth of leadership – certainly not well-suited to offensive operations in strange territory. The Continuation War sees their troops become a bit more motivated (and on the defensive), but leadership is still weak and it’s still obviously a bastard theater of operations with low priority for the good hardware. Then fast-forward to the Soviet offensives in 1944 that convinced Finland to seek an armistace. The Soviet formations involved in the attacks weren’t the tip of the Red Army’s spear (it was still sort of a bastard theater), but the troops are better, leadership is more plentiful and considerably improved and they bring a good deal of nasty hardware to the battle. It’s easy to see how the Finns were initially overwhelmed during the opening days of the offensive.

Historical commentary in the supplement is less plentiful than it is in East of Suez. More space is devoted to the scenarios. Still, you can read the historical notes and come to a good understanding of the underpinnings of the Finnish army and find a good basic primer on Finland’s military involvements during the war years.

Distraction 1: East of Suez

2008-10-28T07:40:00.001-07:00

To kick off this little ‘interruption’ thread – in which I will chronicle my holiday-season game-buying madness – I’ll note that my little order from Bunker Hill Games arrived yesterday.

In response to the owner’s “help me stay in business” posting, I ordered a couple of APL game supplements. Stuff I’ve been putting off because while interesting, they weren’t eating in a hole in my brain. But since John at Bunker Hill has always done an excellent job by me over the years, I thought I should kick in a little something, even if I didn’t want to spring for a ‘boxed’ title.

So I got both PG: Arctic Front Deluxe and SWWAS: East of Suez. I cracked into the naval book last night as I sat grumping about the rain-soaked World Series baseball game (which should never have started in that crummy weather, BTW).

East of Suez is a very nice supplement with two half-sheets of counters – mostly British, but some Dutch, Japanese and various others mixed in. The first thing about it that hit me, though, was that it seems a lot of effort for something that’s actually kind of dopey. By that I mean none of the scenarios in the book are playable unless you own SWWAS: Leyte Gulf.

I don’t know what sales of Leyte have been, but I can’t help but wonder if they didn’t print more supplements than they did monster games. I imagine a number of guys don’t care – they just want to fondle the counters and see the stats – but at the very least it had to be something of a trap for retailers. I couldn’t help but notice that Bunker Hill (he posts stock levels in his item details) had 43 of the damned supplements in stock. I’ll bet he hasn’t sold that many copies of Leyte, and I notice he has just 1 copy of the monster in stock (at $175).

Count me as one of the zany bunch who bought Leyte Gulf (at some or another terrific discount during one of APL’s big sales). So for me, nearly everything in the supplement is playable (except anything requiring Strike South, which I don’t have).

Anyway, it reads like a supplement that the boss wanted to print (as opposed to one that marketing wanted to sell). Some very nice historical articles, including probably the most extensive discussion of the Dutch navy that I think I’ve ever seen in a wargame. A number of large-ish operational scenarios that span a range from ‘really happened’ to ‘almost happened’ to ‘Churchill’s wet dreams’.

Addiction: The Marines have landed

2008-10-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

Monday night I continued to thrash around in the throes of the tabletop addiction by reading through my just-arrived copy of the new WH40k 5th Edition Space Marine codex. Naturally, I’ve got some observations.

First, I have to say that the three initial publications under 5th Edition (which I’ll call 5E from now on) are taking the game’s resources in an interesting direction. The new rulebook, the Black Reach ‘Getting Started’ book and the 5E Marine codex all contain quite a bit of ‘fluff’, or background for the 40k universe. That’s not a bad thing, but notable nevertheless.

The new codex, in fact, is very fluff-heavy. It’s 144 pages, but the unit descriptions, stats and the army list – the ‘hard’ info in the codex – takes up less space than it did in the 4E Marine codex.

The change is primarily due to the elimination of 4E’s ‘chapter variations’ – which gave SM players the ability to create ‘custom’ armies based on a set of give-and-take options. You could, for example, select options that allowed your squads to take a second assault weapon (instead of a heavy weapon), balanced by a negative option (for example) that eliminated an Elite slot from their force organization. [Note: That’s an outta-my-butt example because I don’t have the 4E codex handy and I never used the deviations anyway. So don’t go digging through the book to check my work, geek.]

I don’t hang around any of the 40k forums on Teh Intrarwebs, but I imagine the deviations have been eliminated for the sake of clarity and sanity. I think they increased the pre-game, rules-related fiddle factor and likely drove more than one tournament organizer to the edge of insanity. Eliminating the rules-based deviations puts home-grown chapter creation back where it belongs – in the player’s imagination – and returns more focus to tabletop play.

Eliminating the deviations doesn’t mean all Marine forces will now look alike, however. The codex is far from being a straightjacket for “Codex Chapters”. A quick look through the unit descriptions and various tables shows that there are now more unit types available to Marine players, and that each of those unit types now has more ‘gear’ options than were previously available.

I’ll shortly be busting into my bitz box, for example, to arm both of my Assault Squads with the newly-available flamer option. Stompy squads with a 12-inch move AND a template weapon? Got to git me summa dat.

From what I’ve read in it so far, I like the new 5E codex a lot. Its content bodes well for the notion of increasing focus on the tabletop. Future codices (for other factions) will likely follow the same pattern. I’d bet that the concept of ‘Doctrines’ introduced in the 4E Imperial Guard codex will get the chop.

Holla to the addiction

2008-10-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

Out of the Wrapper: “Assault on Black Reach”, the new ‘starter’ box set for Warhammer 40k. GW obviously still understand the art of peddling their tabletop addiction because they’ve created a very clever lure for the unwary gamer. It’s a box chock-full of Plastic Crack.

MSRP is $60. That’s pricier (by $10, IIRC) than the previous starter box (“Battle for Macragge) – but for the money it provides a much broader look into how the game plays. In fact, it’s interesting to compare the different approaches taken by the two sets.

The 4th Edition starter box, Battle for Macragge, contained only enough figures to build a couple of small ‘demo’ forces. 10 Space Marines and a pilot (who is more of an objective than anything else) compose one force. They contest the field against a minor swarm of Tyranids: 10 gaunts, 6 genestealers and 8 spore mines. The plastic in the box was rounded out by a nice ‘crashed shuttle’ piece of terrain and a few flimsy doodads the Marines use as an electronic fence of sorts. The set also includes a small-format rulebook (with just rules, no fluff), a Getting Started booklet, dice and templates.

The new 5th Edition starter includes enough figures to build a couple of forces that are more along the lines of real ‘starter’ armies. There’s the ubiquitous 10-man Space Marine tactical squad, but it includes a Veteran Sergeant figure. The Marines also get a Captain (independent character), a 5-man squad of Terminators and a Dreadnought (walker-vehicle). Their opponents are a force of Orks: a Warboss (independent character), 20 boyz, 5 nobz and a squadron of three Deffkopters (vehicles). Plus the same furniture as the Macragge set – including a stripped-down rule book (5th Edition, of course).

Black Reach packs a lot more plastic into the box, and the Getting Started booklet takes a completely different approach. The Macragge booklet presented several scenarios that form a narrative and bring in various rules complexities as they progress, almost a ‘programmed’ approach. It’s simple infantry-on-infantry fare – but it is an instructional approach. That said, once you got past those intro scenarios you didn’t have much of an army in hand to play anything else.

The Black Reach intro book is descriptive but it lacks the scenario-based ‘game’ content. It contains information about the figures and how they relate to their game statistics, how to paint them, how a typical game sets up and lots of fluff on the 40k setting in general. But the only thing that approaches a ‘scenario’ is basically a diagram (albeit a very nice diagram) of how to set up some Marines and Orks 12 inches apart with the encouragement to have a go at it. Oh, and buy the army codices to discover the special rules and buy the full rulebook to read about the different scenario setups.

I would like to have seen a couple of scenarios in the Black Reach booklet because the rest of the ‘Getting Started’ content is quite appealing. If you’re brand-new to figure gaming, however, it does leave you casting about a bit for what to do ‘next’.

Generally, though, the Black Reach box set is far superior to its predecessor as a starter kit. Not only are the forces included more robust, but the figures themselves are well done. The sculpts on the Marines and Orks are more lively (the sculpts on the Macragge Marines reminded me a lot of the clone-like figures that came in the 2nd Edition box). Even more of a surprise, the vehicles almost – almost – fit together. You don’t have to be an expert with modeling putty in order to build a credible Dreaddie.

I also give credit to GW for using ‘basic’ factions for BOTH starter box armies. Space Marines vs. Orks are one of 40k’s classic matchups. A Space Marine tac squad (with flamer and missile launcher) has appeared in each starter box from 2nd edition on out. 2nd edition’s starter also featured Orks (and Grots) – but the ‘OPFOR’ selections for 3rd and 4th editions were both marketing misfires, IMHO. 3rd edition’s boxed starter included the newly-introduced Dark Eldar. Unfortunately, the Dark Eldar were (and remain) a ‘finesse’ faction that’s difficult for beginners to handle. The Tyranids in 4th edition’s Macragge box are also a specialty faction which, in addition to everything else, require some skill to paint up properly.

Elsenborn Ridge: Getting started

2008-10-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

After getting the last of counters for Elsenborn Ridge trimmed out last night, I bulldozed around the scenario book for a smallish scenario to start in with. I settled on scenario 9, called “St. Vith: First Probe.” The Germans have an infantry battalion supported by an assault gun company – 6 x GREN, 3 x ENG, 3 x StuIIIG. Their job is to push the initial American defense completely off the east-west road that crosses the map through the town. The Americans start with the divisional cavalry squadron of the 7th Armored Division - 3 x INF, 3 x M3 (halftracks), 3 x M8 (armored cars). Random American reinforcements arrive at some point, consisting of a company of Shermans from 7th Armored – 3 x M4.

It’s interesting in that at the beginning of the scenario, the Americans have no answer to the German Stugs. The M8 armored cars have an A-T attack of 2, the Stugs’ armor is 4. Absent a cross-fire modifier, that’s pretty hopeless. And, of course, being armored cars the M8s have puny armor.

The scenario is set on Map 24, inverted. There’s a big blop of woods to the north, a fairly good size town (maybe 8 or 9 town hexes) just above the fold and a 1-hex town sitting on a ridge to the south. The large town (St. Vith, I guess) has both east-west and north-south roads running through it.

The US deploys anywhere in towns or on hills, or anywhere else on or west of the north-south road. The Germans enter from the east edge of the map, which means they’ve got maybe 6 hexes of open terrain to cross to get at the town.

I think the armored cav will be best served by hiding in the town and whacking the German grunts with artillery as they approach the town. The US has a decent amount of artillery considerring the size of the forces involved – 1 x 24, 3 x 18 – while the Germans counter with 2 x 16. Leadership is 1 x CAPT, 1 x LT for the US and 1 x CAP, 2 x LT for the Germans.

The Americans generally get a LOT of artillery in this game. In some of the scenarios set later in the battle, they also benefit from the introduction of V-T proximity fuzing – which gives all US artillery an automatic 3-column bonus shift against infantry in the open. That’s a shift in addition to anything else. My St. Vith scenario doesn’t use the rule, but it’s something that looks like it could be pretty devastating against a careless German player.

Logic in short supply around here

2008-10-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

Nothing follows a logical sequence in my world. And that includes this blog. So here’s the perfect sequel to September’s out-of-the-zippy post concerning ATS Dien Bien Phu.

I’m not playing it right now. Bwahahahaha. It’s my table and I can do what I want.

Since last we met there have been, in no particular order: Sinus infection, vacation cruise, a couple of games of Day of Heroes and the extreme baseball distraction of the Rays winning their division and advancing in the playoffs.

In the middle of all of that, I lost the urge for more squad-level gaming – finding it replaced by the urge for some platoon-level gaming. Therefore, I am now in the middle of punching and trimming the counters for PanzerGrenadier: Bulge II Elsenborn Ridge.

Last week was consumed by a 5-night cruise that hit highlights in Key West, Cozumel and Belize City. I took along a few bits of wargaming rulebookishness to peruse during the trip, but of course I didn’t touch any of it. That I even bother to lug the stuff along is proof indeed that ‘hope springs eternal’ . That was our fifth cruise. Every time we cruise I lug along game reading. Never have I struck a lick at any of it. Duh. Still, it’s better to travel prepared. You just never know when you’ll need to look up something in the rule book for ASL SK-3.

Right?

Doom and gallantry: Dien Bien Phu

2008-09-18T10:32:00.001-07:00

As my new copy of ATS Dien Bien Phu comes out of the ziplock, the question arises: Why on Earth would anybody be interested in a wargame covering some of the fighting at Dien Bien Phu? As battles go, it ended in a rather lop-sided win. So what’s the point?

I’ve been fascinated by this battle for a long time – no doubt in part because it was precisely so lop-sided. Truthfully, I think I’ve been less interested in the ‘daily log’ of the battle and more keen on what led the French to commit such an incredible strategic and operational blunder. And, of course, there are always the consequences of the French defeat to reckon with as nothing impacted the US in the second half of the last century nearly as much as the conflict in Vietnam.

Years ago – my junior or senior year in high school – I bought one of those Ballantine books on the battle of Dien Bien Phu. From there I moved quickly into finding and reading Bernard Fall’s two masterworks on the conflict in Indochina, “Hell in a Small Place” and “Street Without Joy”.

I’ve often wondered if America’s leadership at the time (both books were published before Fall was killed by a Vietcong landmine in 1964) read either of his works. Subsequent political decisions would argue that they had not – with the possible exception of the FBI director, who apparently had Fall under surveillance as a possible subversive.

But I digress. I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of the ‘average’ soldier to perform heroically in the midst of the most colossal leadership failures. And Dien Bien Phu is certainly an instance of just such an event.

Predictably, over the years there haven’t been very many games published that cover the battle. The most notable probably has been “Citadel”, published by GDW more than 30 years ago. Against The Odds magazine published an area-movement game on the battle a couple years back that I really wanted to like, but it carried enough errata and other baggage with it that in the end it was too much like work to engage with it.

As a grand-tactical exercise, Dien Bien Phu isn’t very interesting without the inclusion of some rather improbable hypothetical events (like a massive US bombing intervention). The affair was decided the moment the first shots were fired and the French realized that the PAVN had managed to bring a large concentration of artillery to bear on the under-fortified defenses.

However, isolated parts of the battlefield were contested fiercely and with great heroism. At the tactical level, the fighting for some of the individual fortifications were truly tales of near-insane gallantry on both sides. To bring the discussion full circle, this is what ATS Dien Bien Phu concentrates on: The fighting for the “Elaine” complex of fortifications.

In game terms, nothing that happens stands a chance of reversing the overall outcome of the battle. The French may win a scenario and hold this trench or that for another day – but Dien Bien Phu will fall no matter what. But that’s generally the point of a wargame anyway, isn’t it? You ‘win’ if you can do better than your historical counterpart – even when winning only means surviving long enough to lose tomorrow.

Sailing into the East China Sea

2008-09-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

Just to confuse things, I’ve got a few minutes today so I’m going to step back in time a week or so and write up a little bit about the new game I played between sessions of Day of Heroes – “Fleets 2025” from Victory Point Games.

In your spare time do you ever sit around and wonder what would happen if a shooting war broke out between the US Navy and the Chinese a couple of decades from now? If you do, then this is the game for you. And even if you’re not obsessed with naval affairs of the near future – you just might find an enjoyable game inside this package.

Fleets is ‘semi’ desktop published. The components are (good) desktop quality, with the addition of the counters being mounted, pressed and die-cut. At $22.95, component-wise at least, as game prices go these days there’s a fair amount of ‘stuff’ in the ziplock. 80 counters, 11 x 17 map, 60 (smallish) cards, play aids and rules.

As far as play value goes, Fleets 2025 is excellent. Period.

I couldn’t be more impressed with a simple (5 pages of rules) game system. The cards throw in enough variability that no two games ever play alike – but they don’t overwhelm the rest of the game.

There’s no ‘history’ to measure by, as they game’s topic is a very hypothetical limited naval war between China and the US in the East China Sea and Pacific near Taiwan and southern Japan. Events on Taiwan are the ostensible rationale, but the ‘why’ of the situation hardly matters . In a couple of the scenarios some victory points are awarded one way or another depending on who does what to the three Taiwanese ‘city’ hexes, but that’s about it.

Above all, it’s a clever little game about maneuver, detection and planning. It plays very quickly, yet the decision-making involved is far from trivial. I suppose it wouldn’t play so quickly with an opponent in the throes of analysis paralysis, but I usually managed to squeeze an entire game into a 1.5 – 2 hour gaming session – even less than that a couple of times when early action went wildly against one side or the other.

I’ll confess that in the 6 or 7 scenarios I played, I never truly grasped an effective approach for the Chinese to take. It seems they really need to rely on ‘quantity as quality’ and hope for early success in putting some US ships out of action.

Since the game is entirely hypothetical, there’s really not much point in debating or haggling about the various unit ratings in the game. The US clearly has a qualitative advantage (longer ranges, higher combat factors). That’s the basic balance of the game – quantity (China) vs quality (USN).

Still, I’ve got a quibble. Yeah, the US already seems to have enough going in its favor in the game – but the combat ratings of the US aircraft are consistently lower than the Chinese aircraft. What’s up with that? The US “F35” strikefighters get a bonus in air-to-air that give them a leg-up on the Chinese. But their naval strike capability flat stinks. By 2025 the US Navy will have been operating carrier aviation for nearly a century – and they get strike units rated a stinking ‘1’, while the Chinese (who don’t even have a carrier yet) aircraft are rated ‘2’.

Overall game balance probably tips a little in the US favor, so it’s not an issue that impacts game play (I don’t think, anyway) – but the game’s designer shouldn’t be surprised if a disgruntled naval aviator poops on his doorstep some night.

That trivial issue aside, though, I don’t have very many games in my closet that I’ve enjoyed playing more than Fleets 2025. Lots of them offer greater ‘simulation value’ – but few are more fun to just sit and play.

Mixing games and the Black Plague

2008-09-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

Hey gang! Been a while since I’ve given much attention to blogland here. Sorry about that, but sometimes these little projects get side-tracked by real life.

Since our last episode, we’ve gotten Junior Destructo Man enrolled in a pre-K3 program. Half-day, twice a week. The whole whirlwind of the kid’s first time in school was a major focus of energy toward the end of last month and the beginning of this month.

Of course, when your kid goes off to a school environment for the first time it’s a given that he’s going to bring back all of those fun first-week-of-school germs. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was for the germs to raise merry hell with mom and dad while the three-year-old gets off with a case of the sniffles.

Ugh. Kids these days and their germs. He gets a runny nose and whatever he brings home whacks me like the Black Plague. Two weeks later and I still have a mild case of the cruds that I can’t quite seem to shake.

Mixed in amongst all of that fun stuff was a little bit of gaming. I temporarily put aside Day of Heroes when a new game arrived. I devoted a couple of weeks to playing the new “Fleets 2025” from Victory Point Games. Small footprint, low number of counters and an interesting little system made it a pleasure to fiddle with. Unfortunately, while I had it deployed to the table I couldn’t muster the additional mental energy needed to give it a blog write-up. In a couple of cases, truthfully, scenarios played so quickly and easily that I finished them in one sitting and didn’t give a second thought to yakking about them here. At some point in the future I may devote some additional blogenergy to it, but in the meantime I’ll just say that it’s a game that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in a quick-playing and fun ‘modern’ naval game.

After I finished with Fleets 2025, Day of Heroes went back onto the table for another go. It’s one of the more interesting games in the LNL series, primarily because it plays differently than its brethern. Throughout most of the series, western troops (US and British mostly, but the ANZACs in Vietnam too) favor stand-off firepower over melee combat. Melee is usually one of the great equalizers in the system.

But that’s not the case in Day of Heroes. In the mean streets of The Mog, melee combat is the favored mode of combat for Rangers.

Oh yeah, no doubt they’ve got a ton of stand-off firepower. The main problem is that they don’t have much time to use it. They have to move quickly to reach objectives and maneuver deftly in order to avoid large numbers of militia units. Better to use their morale advantage to get into melee, where their superior up-close firepower can lead to some very lopsided results.

I’ll probably play one more scenario of Day of Heroes before moving along to something else. PanzerGrenadier: Bulge 2 – Elsenborn Ridge and ATS Dien Bien Phu are both in the house and awaiting some attention. Almost time to move along.

Moving along: Lock N Load Day of Heroes

2008-08-08T10:16:00.001-07:00

OK, East Front fans – Bombarossa is off the Big Table. Sorry for the abrupt ending, but in summer the game industry often tries to mimic the movie industry by releasing lots of interesting stuff. So Bombarossa is out in favor of a new game, which will in turn soon be out in favor of another new game.

My final assessment of Bombarossa is “not bad”. There’s nothing really extraordinary about the game, especially if you’re familiar with other Bomba games like Proud Monster. Bombarossa has a neat one-map footprint, good physical quality and rules that work just fine (even if they are a tad fiddly). The game plays fairly fast and features numerous cycles through the dead pile for lots of units. It wouldn’t be one of my ‘desert island’ games, but it’s OK for a short-ish playing panzer-pusher.

Great. Now what about the new game?

It’s been a while since I’ve played anything at the squad level, so it’s time to return to one of my favorite game scales. The new game on the Big Table is “Day of Heroes”, which uses the Lock N Load game system to address the October, 1993 fighting in Mogadishu.

Physical production values are fine, although I don’t think the graphic design decisions in Day of Heroes are on a par with those in other system modules. The map is quite nice, but the counters suffer from a color palette that has the unfortunate effect of causing them to blend in to the map, rather than stand out from it. And the white-on-gray print scheme for the Somali units makes much of the numbering on them quite difficult to read at times.

The module rules adapt the core system to the peculiarities of urban fighting, and they don’t do a half-bad job. The most notable change is the switch to a square grid on the map (as opposed to the usual hexagonal grid). There are also a number of special rules to account for the civilian-filled, urban environment – items like flaming roadblocks and angry mobs are key components.

The US order of battle is long on firepower, but it’s man-carried firepower for the most part because of the setting. Ranger squads and Delta teams both have relatively high inherent firepower, and the Rangers tote quite a bit of additional punch in the form of support weapons like the M249, M60, LAW rocket launcher and 40mm grenade launchers.

Somali militia appear as squads and half-squads with low firepower, but there are a lot of them. And they can dodge in and out of the civilian mobs – and fire through them without giving up victory points. The US, on the other hand, gives a VP to the Somali player each time a US unit fires into a mob. I will note that Somali militia units never suffer a ‘shaken’ result; any adverse combat result against them causes a casualty reduction (squad to half-squad, half-squad eliminated).

Today’s snappies feature the setup for the recommended intro scenario, “Chalk 2’s Run”. The US player has a couple of Ranger half-squads, two heroes, a medic, and a leader (the guys of Chalk 2). On the other side of a wall of hostile Somalis is the crash site of Super 61, with the chopper’s immobile crew and a Delta sniper team. The scenario is six turns, and the US has to hold the crash site with minimum casualties at the end of the game.

Pardon my addiction

2008-07-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

My investigation of Bombarossa has been interrupted a bit this past week or so, and it’s entirely my fault. Bear with me as I explain, because today’s content is a lot like confessing that you’re a crack addict.

The new edition rulebook for Warhammer 40k was recently released, and I’ve lately been giving myself a daily miniatures fix by pawing through the 300-plus page hard-cover book. That’s right. I play Warhammer 40k. Whatcha gonna do about it, you heretical spawn of the Warp?

I started on 40k about 7 or 8 years ago, not long after the publication of the 40k Third Edition rules set. That was back in my single days when I had an entire house to myself, complete with two gaming tables – a four-by-four foot table and a four-by-eight foot table. That’s right. I said “eight”.

Yeah, well, times have changed (for the better in all respects, except for the lack of table space). But back in those days I had ample room to pursue some heavy-duty miniatures gaming. The eight-foot table was almost constantly occupied by games of 40k, Battlefleet Gothic or Epic 40k (in the pre-Epic Armageddon era).

I collected a vast array of miniatures from a number of different ‘armies’ in the 40k universe. As my painting was not so profligate as my purchasing, many of them have since been sold into better care and many others remain in storage tubs to this day, awaiting their fate.

Basically, I have enough miniatures that I could probably paint two hours a day for the next five years and not run out. So it’s fairly cost-effective these days to maintain contact with 40k gaming because I only have to keep abreast of the new rules and any changes to the various army codices.

It doesn’t seem that long ago, but the Fourth Edition rules were indeed published in 2004. I didn’t buy any new minis then, and I don’t foresee buying any new minis now. I think in the last four years I’ve spent maybe $60 on new 40k plastic – one of the new Imperial building kits and the Space Marine Commander box.

My ‘house’ armies are a home-grown chapter of Space Marines (the Iron Templars) and Orks. Since they came with the Third Edition boxed set I briefly farted around with Dark Eldar, but sold them all years ago. The Tyranids that launched Fourth Edition’s “Battle for Macragge” intro set never saw the first drop of paint – after just very brief consideration they went up on Ebay. Some years ago (2003?) I sprang for a Chaos Space Marines boxed army, but it remains untouched and will likely go the Ebay route. I also have far too much unpainted Imperial Guard plastic sitting around, but I do some day intend to build a force of guards, so I’ll be hanging onto it a bit longer.

So far, what I’ve read of the new rules I like. There are quite a few changes from the Fourth Edition rules. Some changes are subtle, others more radical. Overall I think it will produce games that play quicker and are less fiddly. I intend to take it for a spin in the near future, but right now the challenge is to read CAREFULLY through the rulebook. Since I’m pretty familiar with 4th Edition rules, I’ve caught myself a couple of time skipping paragraphs of rules – a bad idea, considering the number of changes.

More mention of this at a later date. We now return to our regularly-scheduled invasion of Mother Russia.

Bombarossa: Shut Up and Play

2008-07-22T06:34:00.001-07:00

Instead of charging pell-mell into the rest of Bombarossa, I’ve replayed the opening a couple of times to make sure I’m not being an idiot. There’s some chatter on the Bombarossa thread on CSW about the Germans having a tough time but – as with RSR – I’m chalking most of it up to guys being too lazy to figure out how to run the Germans correctly. I’m satisfied that the only deep, dark secret to running the Germans is managing movement so that it minimizes opportunities for the Soviet mandatory attacks to do damage.

This brings up an interesting point, though. What, exactly, do gamers expect from the opening turns of an East Front campaign game? Surely not a total German cakewalk for the opening momths. A super-powered race against time and Russian speedbumps before a sudden wall of reinforcements and foul weather put the brakes on everything? I hope not.

The German Wehrmacht’s initial accomplishments during Barbarossa were impressive, no doubt. But I’m of the opinion that the results were actually somewhat extraordinary and gamers should have to work – hard – to match the historical accomplishment. They should have to work even harder (or encounter perhaps an even more inept opponent) to exceed the historical result.

I am not of the school of thought that the German accomplishments were a “given.” But it appears that many other gamers are. Why do so many gamers expect a low-casualty, magic carpet ride to the gates of Moscow?

To an extent, I blame wargaming classics like Jedko/Avalon Hill’s “The Russian Campaign” and (to a lesser degree) SPI’s original “Barbarossa”. Early in those game the German player spends a lot of time not worrying about Soviet attacks. The Reds are outnumbered and offensively incompetent versus rather high German defense strengths – and the combat results tables are constructed so that what meager odds the Soviets can muster won’t do anything more than force an unlucky German unit or two to retreat a hex.

So what you get is an 800-pound gorilla trying to lumber into Moscow before he either loses his good footing or runs out of bananas. Pathetic Russian attackers bounce off of him like so many tennis balls.

Of course I understand that the 800-pound gorilla was the prevailing view of Barbarossa held by Western historians (or pop history, at least) for many years. Given the lack of Russian-language source material that persisted until the fall of Communism, I suppose it’s forgiveable that so many people held the memoirs of the German Generals in such high esteem for so long – even though a careful examination of German-language unit histories and returns told a slightly different story.

Some of the more recent East Front games to see print are more representative of the situation, IMHO. To an extent, some of this is due to advances in the art of game design. But the major influence is the improvement in the historical record that has occurred over the last 15 or so years.

Columbia’s “East Front”, while not exactly a recent design, captured the essence of the Wehrmacht’s supply problems. It didn’t really address the Soviet attacks launched early in the war, but I think it is still quite clever and a top-shelf wargame.

Masahiro Yamazaki’s “War for the Motherland” is far and away my favorite large-scale design on the East Front. Not the mugged-up version published by Rampart, mind you, but the excellent treatment that appeared in Six Angles magazines. MMP’s redux of the game, “Red Star Rising”, is a worthy, English-language update of the game.

As the new kid on the East Front, Bombarossa appears clever and interesting. I like that it doesn’t hand the German player an 800-pound gorilla – rather, if he wants an 800-pound gorilla, he has to make it himself.

Whether or not it’s a concept that works for the long game I’ll know better after I’ve had more of a chance to, er, monkey around with it.

Bombarossa: The Cardboard Invasion Begins

2008-07-09T07:28:00.000-07:00

After another read-through of the rules I got my first game of Bombarossa going last night. Owing to various distractions I managed just the first turn of the game, but it was a pretty enjoyable session.

As with most games that cover the opening of the war in the east, I’m sure there’s a bit of a learning curve that I’ll have to conquer. Running the opening German operation involves a bit of art – and probably more daring than I’m willing to exhibit on a first playing.

Looking at the starting German forces and then looking at the starting Soviet forces induced a brief “WTF?” moment – which it almost always does. There are lots of Russians on that map. The Germans have ample(ish) infantry, but those panzer corps look pretty thin compared to all of that space. But that’s the essence of the whole campaign, isn’t it? WTF? What friggin nutcase decided an invasion the Soviet Union was a good idea?

I think my German opening went OK. Not great, but not horrible. The game passes one crucial milestone – the “Minsk Test”. Can the Germans take Minsk on the first turn of the game? Yes. It’s definitely possible. My particular German army didn’t, but that’s just me being (probably) too cautious. Instead of charging ahead and trying to run a Mobile Assault against Minsk with some of my AGC panzers, I opted instead to use them to MA and mop up a moderately strong Soviet stack they had just surrounded to put out of supply.

No doubt I’m being a little too paranoid about those mandatory Soviet attacks, but after playing lots of games of War for the Motherland and Red Star Rising I’m probably too sensitive to the possibility of German step losses early in the game.

Army Group Center performed pretty much as expected and blew big holes in things. Army Group North captured Riga. Army Group South didn’t make a lot of progress, but I expect things there will pick up a bit in Turn 2 as the Axis guys that setup in Romania get into the action – the Russian southern flank is a bit loose.

Opening turn casualties? The Russians have lost 9 or 10 steps, three or four of which were the replaceable ‘new model’ Rifle Armies (the remainder were some of Stalin’s Expendables). The Germans lost three steps (two Inf, one Arm), two of which will return via replacements on Turn 2.

My plan is to get in a few more turns tonight. And maybe some digisnaps too, as the camera (and my family) will be returning from the beach today.

Bombarossa: War in the East

2008-07-08T08:03:00.001-07:00

A new month means it’s time to turn my Sesame Street attention span to a new game. Accordingly, the Big Table has been cleared of the enjoyable Island of Death and replaced with one of the newer offerings from Decision Games, Ty Bomba’s “Barbarossa” – which appears in Decision’s equally new “World at War” magazine as the first edition game.

The game began life as a redesign of Jim Dunnigan’s original “Barbarossa” from way back in the early 70s. Truth be told, SPI’s old Barbarossa was the second wargame I ever purchased (SPI’s “Tank!” was the first).

However, one quick look at this game tells me that the two designs have very little in common. Not much beyond the subject matter. In fact, this new game strikes me mainly as every arrow in Bomba’s East Front design quiver all shot into the same target at the same time. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But it definitely is not the old Barbarossa somehow remade.

So just to keep things clear, I’m going to refer to this game as “Bombarossa”, mainly because it is entirely and obviously a ‘classic’ Bomba design. It uses nearly every mechanism, feature and sub-system that has appeared in any of his East Front games over the last umpteen years.

No zones of control. Variable game-turn sequence (fight-move or move-fight). Trace supply with no transport lines on the map. Single step units. Bloody combat with lots of reinforcements and replacements. Sudden death victory conditions to drive the action. If you can think of a favorite design element from any of Bomba’s games in the last decade or so, chances are that it’s in this game.

Again, not that any of this is necessarily bad. In fact, reading the rules to Bombarossa was like reading a long letter from an old friend who lives some place where things never change. There’s a lot of chrome in the game and a touch of fiddliness about the victory conditions, but the core mechanics are so simple that none of it is difficult to keep up with.

I have the game set up now on the Big Table – everything on the map or sorted as reinforcements onto the Turn Record Track – so I should get going with it over the next couple of evenings. I may even get some digisnaps of it in progress once my camera returns from the beach (along with the rest of my family) later this week.

Plenty of 'starting experience'

2008-06-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my wife’s cat Sam (I will no longer claim him), I’ve made some interesting discoveries about “Island of Death.” The game has certainly re-kindled my interest in APL’s “Red Steel” system – but that’s not the point.

Because of all the variability built into the game’s opening mechanisms, it has an incredible amount of replayability. Owing to a couple of table-top escapades by Sam the Cat, I’ve now gone through the opening day of the hypothetical invasion of Malta three times. And the starting positions delivered by the amphibious landing and air drop mechanisms have been quite different on each re-start.

[A quick note about the cat. He’s still alive, despite his depredations of the sacred hexgrid. He only assaults the Big Table when he gets locked in my office for the day and, unfortunately, I managed to lock him in twice before figuring out where he had established his new hiding place. The second time he came very close to expending another cat-life, but then I discovered the four missing counters on the seat of my office chair. Not quite sure how they got there in unchewed condition, but there you have it.]

In solitaire play, the beach landing zones and air drop zones are chosen pretty much at random. Selection is weighted toward a couple of favored spots, but otherwise it’s tough for the defenders to outguess the dice in their opening deployment.

Unless the Luftwaffe and the Regia Marina are wildly successful in knocking out coastal guns on the first turn, the two Italian infantry divisions that hit the beaches are going to take fairly heavy casualties. The assaulting companies have to survive the coastal guns, and then each company that lands has to make a Landing Loss roll and then survive any Waterline Combat initiated by adjacent Allied units. It’s potentially bloody business.

Each division has six infantry battalions, and they’re generally going to attempt to get three or four of those ashore in the initial landings. The Italians also have six companies of marines that can be assigned to either division. Plus they need to get their divisional HQ ashore fairly rapidly. Potentially, the Italians can put 30 steps ashore in the initial landings. If 20 of those land safely, I think they’re doing pretty well.

The airdrops are even more wildly variable. The solitaire drop table has five target hexes, basically spread at intervals east-west across the island. Each airborne formation targets one of those hexes, then more-or-less randomizes the location of their Drop Zone Marker by using the air drop scatter table.

Quite frankly, when you start rolling on the scatter table – crap goes everywhere. Some of the battalion-sized serials land intact and pretty close to the DZ. Others scatter into individual companies that get dumped all over the map. Including into the drink, which is very bad for the Axis.

The results of the air drops, in particular, are critical for the Axis. Their parachute troops are the primary bad-asses they need to take the island. Italian paratroops typically have a +2 morale advantage over the Allies, and the German guys have a +3 advantage. In a game where each point of morale advantage translates into a column shift on the CRT, those are pretty important guys not to dump into the Med.

My three starts of the game have each yielded different Axis loss results. In one of them, they took just 15 steps of losses. In another, they lost 17 steps. In my latest they had some particular problems with air transport navigation (apparently) and lost 21 steps before the beginning of the Allied response.

A visit to the sunny Island of Death

2008-06-10T09:25:00.000-07:00

Time to wake up the old blog again, I guess, and see if I can’t bang out a few lines for entertainment and illumination.

The Big Table is currently occupied by one of the newest releases from Avalanche Press, “Island of Death”. It’s a battalion / company level game covering a hypothetical invasion of Malta by the Axis. As a sometimes-fan of “hypothetical” games – and aren’t most wargames somewhat hypothetical anyway? – I find it an interesting and overlooked topic. I’m also a big fan of the game system (more on that in another post), so at basically $20 this game was a lock for me to buy. So far, I have not been disappointed.

Since actually playing the thing is on my mind right now, I’m going to dispense with the introductions and jump right into getting it set up.

In this version of 1942, Malta is defended by a mish-mash of British and Maltese units. Except for coastal defense artillery, the island is weak on artillery support – a single arty battalion. Coastal batteries are plentiful, but they can only fire on Italian warships and on units that are landing amphibiously.

The attackers are primarily Italian troops. Two infantry divisions constitute the amphibious component of the attack, supported by the Folgore parachute division and the Ramcke brigade of German fallschirmjaeger. A third Italian division stands by to land by glider at captured airfields. Add to that a few odds-n-ends (like Italian Marine companies). A number of Italian warships are also on the scene to provide support and suppress the coastal batteries.

The Allied combat battalions, security companies and AA units deploy in ‘historical’ locations. I noticed a couple of oddities about the deployment locations. In a couple of spots Allied units are deployed in open terrain within a hex or two of a fortress, but nothing is deployed IN the fortress. I’m a little curious about that, especially in a couple of cases where British companies are near, but not in, a fortress. It may be something to quiz the developer about, should a motivated mood strike me.

After the fixed setup, the Allies then free-deploy their eight Strongpoint units and their buttload of coastal guns. As I’m playing this one out solitaire, I’ll be using the various solitaire landing tables provided in the game. Some landing locations are more likely than others, so that figures a bit into the setup.

The amphibious landing table makes it most likely that the Italians will land on the North and West beach zones. The areas most easily covered by the Regia Marina, I guess. You roll a d6 to set the landing zone for each Italian division. 1-2 is West, 3-4 is North, 5 is East and 6 is South. The East and South zones are closer to a lot of airfields and such, but they’re also straight in the teeth of the Allied deployment. Two Italian divisions land amphibiously (4th and 20th Infantry). After a couple of die rolls, the 4th is coming ashore in the West, the 20th in the North.

The airdrop location table scatters five drop zone points pretty much evenly spaced across the East-West axis of the island. After you roll up an initial hex, you then go through the scatter routine to place the final drop zone marker. The individual drop serials will scatter from that point. There are two drop zones: One for the Folgore division and one for the Ramcke brigade.

After some more dice rolling the ‘plan’ actually worked out to be interesting. The amphib divisions are coming ashore in the West and North. The Folgore division is dropping in the southwest corner of the island, where they can link up with the 4th Division and drive eastward. The Ramcke Brigade gets the tough job of dropping in the middle of all of the airfields and defenses in the eastern part of the island, ostensibly to tie-up the Allied response while the three Italian divisions get established. The danger is that a badly scattered drop (less likely with the Germans) will give the Allies a chance to chop the Germans to bits in the first couple of turns.

The setup lets the Allies place their coastal guns anywhere on the island, with a restriction that they must place at least 8 of the batteries within 2 hexes of the port of Valletta. So I’ve setup quite a few of the coastal guns farther inland, where they can still hammer the beaches but will be out of range of most of the Italian warships. Of course, that means they generally won’t be able to fire on the warships – but my plan is for them to ignore the warships and blast away at the landing waves as they come ashore.

I tried to site most of the guns inland to cover multiple beaches. Considering the landing areas chosen, most of the guns on the eastern half of the island are kind of useless now. The guns around Valletta can cover a couple hexes of the northern landing zone.

After I rolled for the landing beaches it occurred to me that I probably hadn’t covered the western zone as well as I thought – but then it’s also the beach zone farthest from any important locations. The northern beaches are set to get hammered, though.

The Axis want to take a couple of airfields as early as possible so they can start landing more of their guys. The third Italian division (some glider guys) can only arrive at airfields.

With any luck, I’ll get the amphib landings going and resolve the air drops in the next day or two. It will be interesting to see what happens when the dice start rolling.

The King is dead; Long live the King

2008-04-09T12:51:00.001-07:00

In between work, vacation, chasing the kid, taxes, family visits and – did I mention? – work, I have indeed been fiddling around with a game every now and then.

As part of my ‘old games’ wandering, a few weeks back I began poking around at the old SPI classic Mech War 2: Red Star/White Star. Aside from bringing back a bunch of late 70s-early 80s gaming memories, the episode caused me to engage in some re-evaluation.

Mech War 2 is a fairly complicated game, and the exclusive rules to RS/WS add to that considerably with items like chemical warfare and tactical nuclear weapons. The core rules demand quite a bit of chart-flipping. It’s also one of those games from SPI’s later era that featured extensive amounts of ‘these rules are really complex, so evaluate their usefulness yourself’ and ‘this scenario is fun is you’re not worried about balance’ sort of stuff.

The smaller scenarios are by no means unplayable, but the ‘campaign size’ scenario is a monster of epic proportions. And the chemical and nuclear rules that take up so much book space pretty much break the game in the sense that make playing out any action moderately pointless.

It’s a game that has stuck in my head for so long largely because the topic material has been ignored during the intervening years. Now-defunct GDW approached it with it’s “Assault” series of games and, later, with some of its First Battle games (like Team Yankee). There was also West End Games’ brilliant “Fire Team”, but that was set at the even-more-ignored (for ‘moderns’) squad level.

I’ve still got my old Assault games, but it was never all that satisfying – mostly because I always felt it was difficult to keep up with who had (or had not) done what in the course of a game turn. I also still have Fire Team (but that’s another story). Since those games, however, I can’t think of any publisher who has seriously touched the subject matter.

That is, until recently. World at War: Eisenbach Gap is a recent release from Lock n Load Publishing, along with its close-following sequel, Death of the First Panzer. The subject matter of those games post-dates MW2 by a few years – the M1 tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicle had not yet entered service in MW2 – but the setting is still the Cold War turned hot.

World at War’s graphics are considerably improved (as attested in the accompanying photos), but the salient difference is the new game’s complete and absolute accessibility. It is, as they say, A Player. MW2, while the Alpha Dog of its day, was more of an exercise in keeping up with charts and minutiae.

WaW manages to deliver a large dose of the ‘tread head’ experience without all of the math and rules engineering. It has no combat results tables, for example – as all of the combat data needed is printed right on the counter. What it lacks in sheer geekery, it makes up for in playability.

Scenarios can be completed in a manageable amount of time, which usually means you’ve finished a battle when you put things back in the box. Never underestimate the satisfaction gained when you have a sense of closure about a gaming session. With MW2, sessions frequently ended at 1 a.m. in the middle of a game-turn – an event common to many complex games, but it plays merry hell with trying to fashion an entertaining game narrative in your head.

As I may have mentioned when I first started pushing around WaW, because of the combat mechanism in the design the game ‘feels’ a lot like quite a few of the miniatures games I’ve played. Anybody familiar with the roll-to-hit, roll-to-save combat in Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Flames of War, Epic Armageddon and Blitzkrieg/Cold War Commander will be instantly at home with World at War. It makes for generally fast-paced play, which in turn helps generate an enjoyable game narrative.

One of the key differences between wargaming and other forms of complex games (some of the Euros, for example) is that the gamers – especially the history-buff gamers – actively seek a satisfying narrative as part of their gaming experience. They’re not ‘just’ engaged in a mental wrestling match with an opponent; they are, in addition, ‘simulating’ (to an extent) a military event or operation.

On top of that, WaW is a ‘live’ system – actively supported by the publisher and growing in depth with the production of follow-on modules and other publications.

So, move over Mech War 2. There’s a new sheriff in town (well, on the table, anyway).

Grumpy Tuesday

2008-03-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

In a wargaming context, when does “hypothetical” go too far?

That’s a question likely to reveal quite a bit about the person answering it. Me? I’ll have to say I can’t define ‘too far’ through a set of solid guidelines – but I know what it looks like when I see it.

Some gamers draw the line at sci-fi theme games. Others can’t stomach “alternate history” – which might seem strange at first, as a wargame that allows you to create an outcome other than the historical is “alternate history” almost by definition.

But I understand that the line separating the passable from the indefensible is usually pretty fuzzy and very personal.

My personal tastes are a perfect example of the confusion. I’m a big fan of ‘moderns’ – games featuring Cold War-era tactical combat, mostly in Europe. I think I’ve discussed that previously, in fact. I also enjoy a number of sci-fi titles, and was a big fan of almost all of the SPI sci-fi games when they were first released back in the wayback.

Alt-history Hot War games like NATO, The Next War, Central Front Series and World War Three have all graced The Big Table at some point over the last 25 years or so.

Yet there are a number of alt-history games that I have no appreciation for whatsoever. Why? Usually for one of two reasons: either their premise is grounded in a near-history that seems impossible to me or the topic seems gratuitously goofy to me to the point that I feel the publisher is trying to make a quick buck instead of a quality gaming experience.

Truthfully, most publishers are smart enough to avoid impossible near-history. But many of them have published games that display gratuitous goofiness. The key, for me at least, is the orientation of the goofiness (is it humorous?) and, ultimately, the quality of the game play.

The current target for my ‘hypothetical’ grumpiness is “Cone of Fire” from Avalanche Press. As has been noted elsewhere in this blog, I’m a fan of both GWAS and SWWAS – but in general their ‘Plan’ games and, now, Cone of Fire, simply rub me the wrong way. Cone of Fire, I’ll grant, includes some historical scenarios but – frankly – for the price tag it sports it needs to offer more than a couple of ‘real’ battles in combination with a number of South American maritime wet dreams which feature ships that the great naval powers like Chile and Argentina COULD have bought, but didn’t.

Of the ‘Plan’ games, only US Navy Plan Orange seems even remotely plausible as alt-history. A 30s-era Pacific War was improbable, granted. Plan Orange also has the virtue of being very playable, rather interesting and a good introduction to the system’s rules for air warfare.

Plan Red (and its replacement, Sea of Troubles), Plan Black and Plan Gold strike me as games built on weakened keels (as it were). Truthfully, to me it seems that those games, along with Cone of Fire, were intended to cash in on the ‘completist’ gamers out there more than anything else. To an extent, that irritates me.

Grump, grump, grump.

Old games on the brain - still

2008-03-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

Last night I sat around and poked at the old SPI game World War I. I also spent some time in the Wayback Machine, flipping through the pages of the magazine it accompanied, S&T 51.

It’s an oddball little ‘time machine’ sensation to page around an S&T published in 1975. Capsule reviews of games I don’t remember from publishers I only vaguely remember (if at all). Advertisements for ‘new’ SPI boxed games (‘Fast Carriers’ was the flavor of the month). Feedback proposals for more games – some that were published, others that weren’t, and others still that were published later in a different form.

The ‘Outgoing Mail’ written by Dunnigan is interesting only in hindsight. Most of his commentary for the issue centers on SPI’s pricing, and how that had been impacted by both the ‘oil shortage’ and the recession. He vows to hold the line on subscription pricing and to keep price increases on their flatpacks to one dollar. One dollar. So that put single-map flatpacks in the $7 to $9 range, depending on the number of counters. They hadn’t started doing ‘monsters’ (or had they? I know Terrible Swift Sword was just around the corner), but I think I saw a bigger game – don’t remember the title – priced at $12.

Normally a discussion of pricing would be pretty dull, and this is too, sort of. But part of the historical context is that there was apparently quite a bit of disagreement about pricing at SPI. A number of the gaming ‘names’ that scattered when SPI exploded place considerable blame for the collapse on the company’s ‘underpricing’. It would have been a tough call, I admit, given the state of the economy at the time.

It occurs to me that maybe – just maybe – SPI might have been able to survive (to a degree) if the Internet had been available to them as a marketing tool. They made a great effort to promote what these days are called ‘direct sales’, but the only tools they had for that were their magazines and other mailed materials.

Plenty of grognards remember (and many probably still have one or two) the old SPI brochure-style ‘catalogs’ that they used to promote mail and phone orders. It generated a good chunk of business for them, but there just wasn’t the communication system in place that they needed to enable direct sales to completely replace sales through the retail distribution channel.

Of course, I’m under no illusion that they would still be producing games today. The industry went through so much of a shake-out in the late 80s and early 90s that none of the ‘starter companies’ survived in anything approaching their original form. Think about that for a minute, too, in the context of SPI exploding. Where have their contemporaries gone? GDW, Avalon Hill, Victory Games, West End Games, TSR. GDW just kind of flamed out. Avalon Hill and TSR got swallowed by the Hasborg/Wizards of the Coast collective. Victory and West End proved not much more than fast-burning debris thrown off from the SPI explosion – a pity because both produced some very good games.

In a strange bit of irony, I think computers – once identified as the destroyers of board wargaming – are really the main force in keeping the hobby alive. Computer gaming certainly chopped the market for cardboard-and-paper games, but in a strange twist it’s the development of the Internet that has allowed the industry to survive and prosper.

One of the primary reasons companies like Victory Games and West End Games couldn’t make headway is simply this: Not enough wargamers knew about their games. I was as geeky a gamer as they get, but I was distant from major urban areas and large game stores. I didn’t discover many of their published titles until I started tooling around on Ebay some 15 or 20 years after their demise. Truthfully, ditto for some of the games from ‘mainstream’ publishers like GDW and TSR. None of those publishers had a communications method as fast, complete and inexpensive as the Internet.

Many modern game publishers, for instance, absolutely depend upon pre-orders (pioneered by GMT’s P-500) to cover production costs. I think GMT is financially beyond P-500 as an absolute requirement, but many publishers are not. Most publishers depend on Internet direct sales to the point that they keep a very low profile in the distribution channels. Remember when The Gamers pulled completely out of retail distribution in the mid-90s? A lot of gamers thought Dean Essig was crazy. (Well, he is, but not for that reason.) Cutting the costs of the retail channel and selling direct to gamers kept his business alive. While few companies have completely abandoned retail, many of them indeed have minimal retail presence. DTP and low-volume publishers typically sell only through their own web site or via limited presence on discounter web sites.

Hmm. All of that from flipping through one old copy of S&T. Somebody stop me.

Bye-bye, Bill

2008-02-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

Even now that he’s dead, I would not presume to debate William F. Buckley Jr. His intellectual training was much superior to my own. My daddy wasn’t a depression-era multi-millionaire who sent me to some of the finest schools – although, notably, not to American public schools.

Neither would I presume to attempt authoritative commentary on the man’s life. But his passing does bring occasion for me to share some personal opinions about some of Bill Buckley’s political thinking, and the modern conservative movement that he helped shape.

First, let me set the record straight: I am a conservative in remission. After 30 years fancying my own politics as those of an ‘Eisenhower Republican’, I have given up on the Grand Old Party. In a way, Buckley’s movement to eliminate Eisenhower’s brand of moderate politics from the Republican establishment is responsible for this. If the Bush years – with their rampant corruption, moral relativism, arrogant elitism, boundless administrative incompetence and complete disregard for the American Constitution – are the highest expression of Modern Republicanism, then I want nothing to do with it.

So, with that out of the way I’d like to examine an issue or two.

In the finest traditions of intellectualism, Buckley and his publication National Review had the luxury of not having to be ‘right’. Lawmakers and government institutions have a burden to get things ‘right’ – else the people will suffer unnecessarily – but intellectuals do not. Which is probably why intellectuals (of every political stripe) so often get things wrong.

Buckley was erudite, clever and charming. And, often, wrong. Some of his opinions were, in fact, not just wrong (as proven by history), but wrong-headed and mean-spirited. That he in later years subsequently reversed many of his ‘wrong’ opinions is of little consequence. It’s easy to switch opinions once history has written its judgements. It is much, much more difficult to be ‘right’ on the first pass.

I believe getting it ‘right’ is indicative of the central moral premise and the intellectual honesty of any given political philosophy. By this I do not mean the morality they purport to espouse; I mean the real morality of which their actions speak most loudly. Just off the top of my head:

Bill Buckley supported Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunts.

He opposed desegregation in the South.

He opposed civil rights legislation.

He supported Barry Goldwater for president. Twice.

He supported the Strategic Defense Initiative

He supported Pat Buchanan for president.

He supported the invasion of Iraq.

While it’s laudable that he had the wherewithal to come around (at a later date) to the ‘right’ opinion on most of those issues (save the SDI and Goldwater), in the moment when the opinion counted most – at history’s tipping point in each case – Buckley’s conservatism was wrong.

(Now, I realize that many conservatives will argue that support for the invasion of Iraq was not wrong. That is a topic for another day, but at this time I will simply counter that history has not yet offered its judgement on this point – but my opinion is that given the general track record as listed, the odds in favor of the conservative view do not look strong.)

Granted, as the years passed Buckley and his National Review were wrong less often – but this is largely due to a reduction in hard-core stands on matters of national policy. He supported individuals (notably Ronald Reagan), anything that opposed the Soviet Union (regardless of expense) and the rise of the so-called ‘neo-conservative’ faction in the GOP.

Truthfully, I haven’t kept up with Buckley’s writings to the degree that I can assess his influence on the current state of affairs. In many instances, I fail to see how he could reconcile his brand of almost libertarian conservatism with the Big Brother brand of quasi-fascism engineered by the Bush administration.

And that, I believe, points to the central fallacy of the conservative movement that Buckley helped shape. He purported to act upon the direction of a strong, personal moral compass. Modern conservatism purports the same moral values. In both cases, however, it appears to me that the true motivation was more in the nature of self-serving expediency. The results appear to me, largely, the product of de facto moral bankruptcy.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Another February flashback

2008-02-22T07:12:00.001-08:00

Gaming flashbacks. What causes them? The advance of old age? Weird February weather? A side-effect of pushing too much cardboard around over the years?

I don’t know, but whatever the reason it looks like February is a good month for flashbacks. First there was the trip to the old FLGS in Orlando. Now I’m having more gaming flashbacks, triggered by the arrival of a Moldie Oldie that I bought on Ebay.

SPI’s old “Mechwar 77” is a game that, somehow, I managed to miss on the first orbit around Game Planet. In the SPI production cycle, it sits between “Red Star, White Star” (1973) and the imaginatively named “Red Star, White Star 2” (1979).

Mechwar 77 was published in 1975 and used the same game system as their “Panzer 44” game. The system was extended and improved in the Strategy & Tactics issue game “October War” (1977). I consider October War pretty much the pinnacle of tactical moderns development under SPI because, unfortunately, “Red Star, White Star 2” bodgered the whole thing with some very over-the-top and needless design complexity.

But back to my recent acquisition, Mechwar 77. I owned and played all of the above-listed games – except MW 77. It (and Panzer 44) are exactly the kinds of games I was devouring in the 70s, so I have no idea how I overlooked them. Probably because I never saw them in a store anywhere. Remember, this was the 70s and there was no Internet. Maybe I missed the ads for them in Strategy & Tactics. Maybe I was just too busy playing the games I did own to scout around very much for new ones.

The copy of the game I bought (for cheap) was bare bones – the flatpack and box-cover were long gone. The counters were punched, although some were still ‘strip punched’ in threes and fours. The map is in good shape, the rules are a bit ‘used’ but not bad.

While they were punched, the counters were not ‘trimmed’. For the novice, I’ll explain. Cardboard game counters are printed in sheets and die-cut in ‘trees’. When you get one of these things, you have to punch the counters out of the trees. Typically, this leaves little fuzzy nubs of cardboard on the corners of the counters where they were attached to the trees (the die doesn’t cut out the entire counter). If you don’t trim the nubs, your counters look sloppy and they become harder to stack and move around the map.

So my ‘new’ Mechwar 77 counters had to be trimmed. That’s when the real flashbacks started. SPI had an identifiable graphic ‘style’ in the production of their maps and counters, so it brought back quite a few memories to sit there and fiddle around with counters that were printed in the wayback before I graduated from high school. I still have a few SPI flatpack games (and old issues of S&T) sitting around the game closet – including the first two wargames I ever bought – but the close encounter of trimming was a process entirely different from, say, playing a game of my old “Barbarossa” (see an earlier post on this).

Flashbacks included some of the games of October War and the“Modern Battles” quads that I played in college. Game-mastering double-blind games of SPI’s “Fulda Gap” that were played by officers attending the old Naval Logistics School. The three-player game of “Outreach” that I screwed up by forgetting a key production rule. The six-player game of “Terrible Swift Sword” where the Confederate player attacking my Union cavalry on day one did even worse than his historical counterpart. Countless games of “Squad Leader”. A game of “Wellington’s Victory” that my Allies won before noon because the French player got stoned and played stupid.

Funny. Those silly cardboard counters can sometimes be very cheap substitutes for a time machine.

Flashbacks from the old FLGS

2008-02-12T13:52:00.000-08:00

The other day I had the opportunity to make one of my rare (apparently bi-annual) visits to my old Friendly Local Game Store – Sci-Fi City on the east side of Orlando. Back when I was a young goober, they were my source for wargames. They also carried almost all of the ‘wargaming’ miniature lines. But not so much any more.

As I’ve probably written before, they’ve really cut back on the old-school gaming stuff. Most wargaming minis are gone. They carry the relatively new-fangled World War II Flames of War miniatures, but I noticed this trip that they’re not stocking as much as they used to. FoW is pricey, so maybe sales are tanking. Pride of place still goes to their Games Workshop minis, but they also stock tons of fantasy minis and lots of the ‘hot’ lines of almost-a-wargame type miniatures (Warmachine, Hordes, AT-43).

As with most game stores these days, I’m sure they do a lot of business in the various Collectible Card Games and Collectible Miniatures Games. But I’m a wargamer, so that that’s what I look for.

The Big Box ‘lite’ wargames – Memoir 44, Tide of Iron, Axis & Allies, Battlelore – get a lot of space, along with all of the popular new lots-of-plastic-minis-in-the-box crossover games like Dust, World of Warcraft (the boardgame), Twilight Imperium and whatnot. Those all have retail prices in the $60-plus range, by the way.

Last time I was there, ‘regular’ wargames still occupied about 80 percent of one aisle. This trip it was all compressed into about 15 percent, max. Oddly, they still carry nearly a full line of Osprey-style reference books (mostly used by miniaturists). But all that’s left is a few of the top titles from GMT, a few games from Avalanche and some titles from Decision. It looks to me like they may not be re-stocking the APL stuff.

Sad, in a way, I guess. But those games can’t really compete with all of the ‘lite’ wargames that are being produced with zillions of shiny plastic bits in every box. Tide of Iron, for example, is a really impressive package. And, truthfully, it probably is a better playing wargame than SPI’s old “Tank!”, which was my introduction to the hobby over 30 years ago. Not the feeling of ‘hard’ simulation data in the box, but definitely a lot more bling and good play value.

So what am I bitching about? I dunno, dammit. When I was a boy, we didn’t have those fancy double-sided geomorphic mounted boards and those minis and color rules and cards and crap. We had a hexgrid on paper and some cardboard chits all printed in three colors, with a rules folder and a Si-Move pad. And we were thankful.

Of course, we didn’t pay $80 for a game, either. But when you consider a largely disposable video game cartridge sells for around $60 these days, not so bad I suppose.

$7 in 1974 money would be how much today? OK, I found an inflation calculator and answered that myself. $32.33. I think $7 is what I paid for “Tank!” at a bookstore in the Altamonte Mall in 1974.

Hey, now there’s a flashback for you.

Red Banner Black Sea Fleet arrives

2008-02-08T06:15:00.000-08:00

The SWWAS supplement Black Sea Fleets arrived yesterday. Personally, I think Avalanche Press using FedEx for all of their shipping is a bit of overkill – especially for shipping single supplements – but there you have it.

Nice book if you’re interested in Commies, Turks and Greeks. It uses the Bomb Alley maps and counters, although a couple of 1946 ‘what if’ scenarios use British units from East of Suez and US units from Leyte. A few of the scenarios are historical, most are at least ‘possible’. Interesting mix, I think.

Two half-sheets of counters in the package, which make it a pretty good deal for the price tag. One sheet of long ship counters, one sheet of mostly aircraft with a few destroyer escorts thrown in.

The Soviet Black Sea Fleet is an interesting assortment of old battlecruisers, a few heavy cruisers, some not-quite-state-of-the-art light cruisers and a whole bunch of destroyers, most of which are very, very fast. Only a few Soviet ‘hypothetical’ units are included – one of each of the three classes of aircraft carriers they tinkered with (but never got close to finishing) and a rather powerful battleship that was laid down but never got off the slipways.

There’s a mob of Soviet land-based air, along with a few units of carrier air for their hypotheticals. Some more Italian stuff, some more Greek stuff and what passed for the Turkish navy and their naval air support. The Turkish units feature the refitted German battlecruiser SMS Goeben (Yavuz in Turkish service) – which remained in commission until 1950 and wasn’t scrapped until 1973.

Of course, I have loads of time to play this.

Remembering the Bronze Age of wargaming

2008-02-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

In one of the blog threads that I follow over on Consimworld, we were having a little discussion about personal gaming history. The idea was to name the game that ‘got’ you back into gaming again – provided, of course, you had strayed from the True Path to begin with.

I noticed a number of the guys who responded fell out of wargaming either during or right after college. Many others put gaming on hold during that mid-20s-plus stretch when they were building careers and families. That got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing).

I never really stopped gaming at any point in my life, although I did go through a period of significant slow-down during the late 80s and early 90s. That corresponds roughly with what was for other folks their ‘family building’ phase. But not in my case. My main issues were career-building – and the general malaise in wargaming that struck after the fall of SPI.

As an official member of the Living Life Backwards Club (i.e. starting a family in my late 40s), the wife-and-kid issues weren’t in play. Rather, during the mid-80s (before the arrival of the Internet now, mind you) the place where I was living and working was a good 2-hour drive from ‘my’ FLGS and any kind of gaming scene.

And – adding to the problem – that distant FLGS was carrying an ever-shrinking line of what appeared at the time to be ever-growing games (like GDW’s Europa stuff) or TSR recycled flubs of classic SPI titles. I still had storage shelves stacked with old flatbox (and soapbox) titles from SPI – this was also before Ebay – but the new stuff just wasn’t very exciting for me. S&T Magazine was heading into its sub-par encounter with 3W ownership. It flat sucked being a wargamer holed-up in a backwater swamp who worked nights and weekends.

The industry itself caught some new energy in the early 90s, IMHO. I was very interested when Command Magazine started publishing in 1989. Ty Bomba’s mag produced a number of very interesting and playable games, and I think to an extent his XTR publishing venture played a role in reinvigorating the wargaming business.

The Internet, such as it was at the time, certainly helped re-engage some of us backwater gamers. Gaming bulletin boards and, shortly thereafter, Genie groups and the like started putting some of us grognards back into communications with our brethern. Jim Dunnigan served his short second tenure in charge of (then struggling) Strategy & Tactics, and those early incarnations of digital communications actually gave me an opportunity to do some editing work for him.

In 1992 I paid a visit to my buddy Keith up in Georgia. He showed me a game he’d recently purchased (while visiting the big city of Atlanta) called “Guderian’s Blitzkrieg”. It was the first game in what would become the Operational Combat Series from Dean Essig’s The Gamers. And it was sufficient to hook me back into gaming full-time.

Complete ‘re-engagement’ (and the shedding of much cash) I blame on the modern Internet. Without e-commerce, Yahoo Groups, Consimworld and company web sites, where would wargaming be? The same FLGS is still over two hours away. Most gamers I know are even more distant. Maybe with those Internet discounters hanging around a truly local FLGS might be feasible, but it’s hard to say. But it’s interesting how things work out, isn’t it?

20 years ago, who would’a thunk it?

Flailing Into February

2008-02-01T13:30:00.000-08:00

“for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty” (Pirates of Penzance).

Let’s maintain a positive attitude here. At this stage of the proceedings I have know idea whether February will be beastly. All things considered, however, it has potential.

January has ended with much spasmodic flailing at nothing in particular. Business has been, well, busy, resulting in some recent evenings spent on actual ‘homework’ for a couple of projects – with a consequent reduction in temporal resources devoted to All Things Gaming.

I’m entering the month with no particular focus on any single game or topic. A scenario of Eisenbach Gap is still in progress, and the new World at War supplement “Death of the First Panzer” has arrived with a new 11 x 17 map and about 40 new counters for the Bundeswehr.

Lunch break reading has been the rulebook for GMT’s Asia Engulfed. At some stage the compulsion will strike and will start ‘stickering’ the blocks for that game. It’s predecessor, Europe Engulfed, I enjoyed quite a bit – but I’ve been delaying any encounters with AE because my brain has been too lazy to tackle the complexity. Soon, though.

And while the Incoming Queue has been greatly reduced over the last few years, it hasn’t been eliminated entirely (doh!). Within the next week or so I anticipate arrival of the newest PC game in the Squad Battles series from HPS – The Soviet Afghan War.

If you’re not familiar with it, stuff from HPS is pretty much board wargaming translated to a PC screen. Hexgrid, square ‘units’, turn-based play. No fancy graphics at all – not even by the standards of 10 years ago. That said, the programs are all low-impact as a result, and given to easy scenario and mod creation. The Squad Battles engine is pretty good – not great – but the subject matter in this case is pretty compelling. And I expect a lot of end-user mods to take advantage of the programming changes made to accommodate ‘modern’ warfare in the 80s.

A few other Incoming Queue items may or may not hit in February – more on them if they show up.

The land of the deluded

2008-01-18T06:46:00.000-08:00

The Missus and I were sitting around this morning with our coffee and wondering when, exactly, the shitstorm of stupid started. We didn’t manage to quite track it back to Ronald Reagan before the kid started torturing the cat, but we did manage to come up with a number of extremely aggravating thoughts.

Our first topic was what the hell has happened to the standard of medical care in this country that we’re now reading reports and statistics that look like they come out of a third world country? Ol’ Dr. Sanjay was on the TV talking about “What you should do if you’re in the emergency room and nobody is paying attention and you think you’re going to die.” That’s All American, ain’t it?

In the last 14 months both of our fathers have passed away, and I’ll tell you right now that out here in middle America their ain’t no “House” coming in with a miracle cure. Not even much in the way of “Marcus Welby” around to keep up with things.

So my wife asks me this morning:

“Why am I staying awake nights trying to figure out how to protect my Mom’s financial assets from the government?” Hmmm. Mostly because the government her parents (and mine, for that matter) paid taxes and social security to, supported and believed in would have her expend all of her assets (except domicile) before paying substantially for her medical care?

I notice that former senators and congressmen don’t seem to have the same concerns with their government-issue, taxpayer-funded insurance coverage.

Later on, driving in to work I’m listening to NPR and a little interview with John McCain about the economy. I’ll pause for a moment to point out that McCain is the only GOP candidate I have even a shred of respect for, and that’s because he’s the only one with enough of a moral compass to take a stand against torture as government policy. The rest are little more than slavering boot-licks that toady to a pack of self-deluded bigots who have forgotten so much of what America once stood for that they believe they are Americans.

But I digress.

So McCain’s solution to our economic woes is to reduce the corporate income tax rate.

That’s fucking brilliant. That will finally resolve the problem of that long line of corporate CEOs down at the bank who are all begging for loans to make the next payment on their Benz. Or have I missed something? My take on things is that a lot of what could be corporate profit (‘shareholder value’) is ending up in executive compensation packages.

Personally, I would like to be able to screw up my job so badly that my company loses billions of dollars in one quarter and then get fired with a multi-million dollar severance package. And I won’t even ask to use the company jet. Anybody else want in on that deal with me?

I don’t pretend to be a wizard at macro-economics, but please don’t shit on my head and then tell me everything will be allright if I’d only help you eat some more steak-n-eggs.

Feeding the monster

2008-01-09T09:23:00.001-08:00

It’s probably some kind of mental illness. Try as I might, I can only go so long without springing for some new-ish type of wargaming stuff. The longer I resist the urge to purchase something, the bigger the explosion when I snap.

Up until the holiday season, I’d been doing OK for the last few months. But then those placed-months-ago pre-orders (Eisenbach Gap and Asia Engulfed) landed on my doorstep and it was all over but the shouting. I HAD to feed the monster again.

Fortunately, feeding the monster has become somewhat cheaper over the past few years as I’ve matured enough in my decision making to only focus on items that I might actually play someday. Gone are the days of large acquisitions based on vain hopes and distant fantasies. I will likely never play a four-map anything again. Heck, getting the oversized map of Red Star Rising onto the table is challenge enough.

Anyway, this is all a round-about introduction to the newest additions to my game closet. Chances are good that these games will get more mention in the weeks ahead because, as I said, they are all ‘players’.

The list of incoming titles is short: Corps Command: Totensonntag (from LNL Publishing), A Victory Lost (from MMP) and two minatures rules sets, AK-47 Republic and The Men of Company B, both from Peter Pig over in the UK.

Totensonntag will probably hit the table after I’ve had my fill of Eisenbach Gap. It’s got a small footprint, low unit count, short rules and it’s been getting very good reviews. The miniatures rules will have some lead time because I’ve got to twiddle up a way to play them. It’s very, very, very unlikely that I’m going to pony up for any kind of new figures, so I’ll need to put together a cardstock set for them. A Victory Lost is one of those mystifying ‘why didn’t I get this a year ago?’ games. East Front, interesting system, good reviews, comparatively cheap. Just never got around to it. Now I can.

Welcome to 2008

2008-01-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

I can’t let the New Year get along too far without a blog post, I suppose, even if the post is to declare that there hasn’t been much going on that’s blog-worthy.

Real-life family matters (along with the usual Work Stuff) have been consuming most of my time. And I’m just old-fashioned-y enough that I won’t be discussing any of that online. I know there are plenty of bloggers out there who spill their guts to the world daily, but I’m not one of them.

I may have a bit of fun writing about my kid as he discovers the world around him, but that’s about my limit. Everything else stays on my side of the keyboard.

Sorry. Can’t help it. I’m Lutheran.

Eisenbach Gap: A closer look

2007-12-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

Time to revisit the topic of World at War: Eisenbach Gap. I’ve managed to get in a few games of this over the holidays, so I’m able to comment about it intelligently.

The nutshell version is that I like this game quite a bit. It’s not very fiddly, plays quickly, has some interesting hooks and delivers plausible results. The physical production is a pleasant enough package, the rules are fairly well written and the game’s tabletop footprint is manageable without feeling restricted.

In a way it’s what I would call a “brave” design because of the combat mechanism. There is no combat results table. This game uses what I’ll call a little buckets o’dice system for combat. “Little” because players are never rolling more than four or five dice at a time.

It’s a design element that took some guts to include because games that use any form of buckets o’dice (BOD) resolution always seem to get a mixed reaction from the wargaming community. Maybe it’s a bias against the mechanism because it’s used in a number of miniatures games? I don’t know. If a designer does his math well, combat probabilities can be modelled just fine using BOD.

More likely, some gamers dislike BOD because the mechanism does introduce a higher element of randomness into combat resolution – or at least a greater perception of randomness. Odds- or differential- based combat results tables are frequently designed to contain randomness. It’s very rare to find a CRT that offers wild swings of fortune within a single odds or differential ‘column’. (Advanced Tobruk is a system that comes to mind, and that CRT has taken it’s share of flak.)

Sometimes that sort of ‘chaos control’ is used to compress the range of possible results and make game outcomes more “predictable.” Lack of a farily narrow predictability puts many gamers out of their comfort range – thus the knee-jerk negatives concerning BOD.

But I digress. In Eisenbach Gap, to be certain, there can be some swings of fortune. But I like that combat in the game avoids the Proving Ground Syndrome of 80 percent kills at 2000 meters. Sometimes a platoon of Abrams will fire on a platoon of T-72s and completely flub. Other times they’ll turn the whole lot of them into smoking junk. The odds favor the latter result (or something in between), but the lack of narrow predictability is a key component to the game.

In some other ‘modern’ tactical games, maneuver is generally undertaken only at great sacrifice. While it’s true that modern weapons systems are very lethal, I think under most circumstances it’s highly unlikely that they will ALWAYS achieve complete mission kills against enemy units.

I think Eisenbach Gap models this notion pretty well. Stupid tricks will get you hammered pretty quickly and exposing your units to enemy fire is a very risky proposition – but I think the game achieves the right chaotic balance (is there such a thing?) and provides a highly enjoyable gaming experience.

The great electrical conspiracy

2007-12-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

One question I have (that will obviously never be answered) is this: Since AA and AAA batteries are all packaged in even numbers (2, 4, 8, 24 to a package) why do so many toys now require THREE batteries instead of two or four? WTF up with that?

Personally, I think it’s a kickback scheme cooked up by the battery manufacturers in order to reduce the usefulness of rechargeable batteries. Why? Think about it. Battery chargers typically hold four AA or AAA batteries. If you use batteries in threes, you’ve then got an odd battery flopping around that you’ll either lose or can’t keep charged properly. Oh, sure, you can buy (and charge) 12 batteries (that will give you four sets of three) – but then you’ve bought 12 friggin rechargeable batteries when what you really need is just six.

One of the toys the kid got uses (the Geotrax train set from his godparents) three AAA batteries in the train engine and three AA batteries in the remote control. Why not all AA batteries or all AAA batteries?

It’s a friggin conspiracy, I tell you.

Changing the day after Christmas

2007-12-26T12:36:00.000-08:00

Five or six years ago, Christmas around my house was quite a bit different.

For starters, I lived in a different house. Smaller, with just me living in it. In the morning I’d visit my parents in nearby Leesburg, exchange gifts and eat lunch. Depending on the year and scheduling sometimes I watched football with them and stayed for dinner. Other times I packed up my gear after lunch and drove into the office to make the next day’s newspaper. Somewhere in there I’d work in a stopover visit with the lady who eventually became The Missus.

I mention this as a way of noting that in the not-too-distant past, the day after Christmas was a time for me to dig in to a stack of several new games.

My goodness, how things have changed. No more post-Christmas ‘out of the wrapper’ tidbits from this old gamer.

Nowadays Christmas is all about Junior Destructo Man 2.5 and, more generally, bringing the family together to celebrate. Having a toddler zooming around the house on Christmas day certainly gives me cause to live the holidays as a brand-new experience.

Yesterday was spent primarily on three activities: 1) Watching the kid play with his stuff, 2) playing with the kid and his stuff, and 3) eating. It could scarcely have been a better time for all involved.

Hey, it only took 40-some years for me to finally get stuff figured out. Pretty good, all things considered.

Nothing like a good shoot-em-up

2007-12-05T14:01:00.001-08:00

Whoa. Sorry. Had to take some time off after expending all of that energy on philosophizing and digesting holiday goodies. But now it’s December and – what the Hell – it’s time to stutter along some more about wargaming.

One of my last remaining game pre-orders arrived last week. Many months ago I gave up on the practice of pre-ordering, but some of these things take that long (at least) to work their way through production. I think I may have one or two pre-orders out there from over a year ago. Heck, over the summer I cancelled a bunch of pre-order ‘Pledges’ from Decision Games – all of which had been in place for over three years. That’s a crisp production schedule indeed.

Anyway, a World at War: Eisenbach Gap showed up last week. Between the usual holiday goings-on and the long-awaited completion of the Bethlehem Battlefield project (more on that in a day or two) it’s taken me this long to getting around to some kind of assessment.

In a nutshell: Pretty cool.

The game is designed by Mark Walker, so I figured going in it would be a game with a hearty emphasis on playability – which is a hallmark of his squad-level Lock ‘n’ Load system. This game is a platoon-level treatment of a subject that’s entirely hypothetical: The NATO-Soviet World War Three that never happened.

The components are well done, although the counters indeed have a bunch of numbers on them (11 for the biggest and baddest). So they’re a little squinty, but not too difficult to read.

Why are the counters so packed with info? Mainly because the game uses a combat results mechanism that’s drawn primarily from territory more familiar to miniatures gamers. There is no combat results table in this game – all of the info you need to resolve combat is printed right on the counters.

Eisenbach Gap uses a chit-pull activation system, which lends itself to high replay value. There are other little bits of chrome here and there, but for the most part it’s a straight-forward design that’s light on the rules weight.

Many non-wargamers (and more than a few grognards) wonder a bit at the appeal of the subject matter. Certainly it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, as many players generally prefer to stick to history. The weapons, formations and doctrines the game is based upon were never tested (as it were) in a head-to-head environment so there’s a lot of speculation involved.

But for some there’s that gnawing fascination with the great conflagration that never occurred. There’s the ‘what if?’ surrounding the great and desperate battle quite a few of my generation trained for but never had to fight.

I’ve pushed it around a little bit and it seems pretty darned solid. More on it in a few days once I get the hang of things.

Just a little holiday perspective

2007-11-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

Something to think about while you’re sitting around today, still sort of druggy-acting from yesterday’s overdose of tryptophan-laden turkey and other goodies.

Last Saturday, after our big yard sale, the Missus and I loaded up all of the leftover stuff – books and warm clothing mostly – and trucked them over to the Salvation Army (this was before the tire went flat episode).

Not the Salvation Army thrift store, mind you. We took our stuff to the Salvation Army compound with their ‘soup kitchen’, emergency housing and other services. If you take the stuff to the thrift store, it gets recycled to the store where they sell it. That’s not a bad thing – Salvation Army gets the cash, duh. But we wanted the folks at the shelter to get first crack at the warm clothing, so that’s where we took it.

You want some perspective about your place in the scheme of things and a glimpse into how things are going here in the world’s richest country? Visit a Salvation Army shelter and kitchen at mealtime on the day after the season’s first serious cold snap. That’s how things are going.

Some years back, when the Missus and I used to help run Community with a Heart, we frequently delivered donations to the shelter – so the general scene wasn’t anything new. The benches and green spaces out front collect people (men mostly) sitting and smoking cigarettes - or just sitting. (The first time I visited the place, I wondered about the high rate of cigarette smoking, but then it occurred to me that people with good decision-making skills don’t typically end up at the Salvation Army shelter. )

Thanks to Compassionate Conservatism shifting our tax dollars from social services to Halliburton and Bechtel, more and more people who show up at shelters are folks who at one time would have been under some kind of taxpayer-subsidized psychiatric care. Some would be in-patients, but most would simply have access to out-patient benefits like counselling or prescription drugs in order to help them lead productive lives.

Right after a cold snap, the shelter’s population spikes. This time, there were more women and children eating at the kitchen than I’ve seen in the past. How much action do you think it can generate when word spreads that a couple of boxes of kids’ clothing have just arrived in the lobby?

One of the men who helped us cart all of the stuff into the building – a shelter client – was looking at the books we were leaving.

“That’s a lot of books,” he said. And then he looked up at me: “You know, most people think we can’t read.”

One of the images I took away was the sight of a middle-aged man combing through the books as we shuttled items into the lobby, putting a couple of books into a plastic bag and then walking off with a big smile. His haul: well-worn copies of “On Zen Practice” and “The Three Pillars of Zen”. I wish him well.

I’m not writing this to brag about our charitable donations. In fact, it’s a bit embarrasing that I originally considered we were dumping junk on the Salvation Army. It’s humbling that I required a reminder about all of the people in need right here in my own neighborhood. And it’s shameful that so many people can’t even surrender their ‘junk’ in order to help out others in need.

So. The next time you get the opportunity, donate or volunteer. Don’t just stuff your hands in your pockets and pass by the rackety bell-ringers. Do a little bit of good this holiday season every chance you get, because there are plenty of people in need.

“May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.” (2 Thessalonians)

Are my He-Man days over?

2007-11-19T14:15:00.000-08:00

“Daddy truck broke.”

I really couldn’t argue with Junior Destructo Man 2.5. Technically, I suppose a flat tire doesn’t ‘break’ the truck – but it does make it pretty darned useless for a while.

It was pitch dark (already, at 6:30 p.m., please see “Burn In Hell, Eastern Standard Time below for more philosophy on this) and my truck was sitting seriously wounded on a city street with its hazard lights blinking. The right front tire was F-L-A-T to the rim. [Crap].

We had just pulled out of the driveway at a friend’s house, hereafter referred to as the Truck Bermuda Triangle (TBT). This is the same driveway where, a couple of months ago, one of the posts on the truck’s battery had completely corroded out. Next time we visit them, I’m parking across the street.

But back to my flat tire. I’ve only been driving it since February, and standing there I suddenly realized I barely knew where the changing tools were. After sending the family back into our friend’s house, I dug out the tools and flashlight in hand starting searching under the truck for a jack point.

My friend the owner of the Bermuda Triangle showed up a minute later while I was still rolling around under the truck.

“Do you have a road service?” he asked. “To heck with this. Why don’t you have them change it?”

Well, God Bless DriveAmerica. That’s just exactly what I did. I, He-Man, called the road service and had them send out a kid with a tow-truck to change my damned tire.

“Hey, you got your jack out,” the Kid observed. “Why did you stop?”

Because, junior, it’s dark, I’m old enough to be your daddy, twice as cranky, bald and lazy. Now get to friggin’ work. I figured being truthful was the best way to keep my manhood from falling off. It worked. My spare tire got installed and my dick is still attached.

But it did make me wonder. Are my He-Man days over? 20 years ago I would have changed that tire myself, even if it took me all night and the truck fell off the jack and took out one of my lungs. Of course, 20 years ago I wouldn’t have had a wife and a 2.5 year old waiting in a nearby house. But I would have had an assault rifle in a gun rack and just shot the thing if it really pissed me off. And I would have smoked a pipe through the whole event.

Hm. The pipe is long gone. And I’m now down to just one semi-automatic rifle. No, make that two … er, three. OK, three. But only one of them has a high-capacity magazine. And it should really be two anyway, because a Ruger 10/22 barely counts as a gun, right?

Also gone are a bunch of He-Man books, mostly either sold off at a recent garage sale or simply thrown out because they were too stupid for anybody to buy. Dumbass stuff like “Getting Even” or books on trailcraft or about survival skills. Most of them were old and yellowed, some even falling apart. Nowadays you can find better info on the Internet anyway.

Does any of that mean my He-Man days are over?

Nah. I’ve still got the Uzi.

Busy.... Very Busy!!

2007-11-16T13:20:00.000-08:00

This week’s slow-down in the rate of blog posts can be attributed entirely to my lack of time to indulge in anything interesting or blog-worthy.

In theory, most of my ‘hobby’ time this week was planned for a large terrain-building project. Not game-related hobby terrain, though. Instead it’s a large, fixed display for our church’s Nativity scene.

That was theory. In actual practice, I have spent the week helping the Missus get stuff sorted out and organized for a yard sale. The yard sale she suddenly decided last Sunday that we needed to have. Major time-eater.

At some point in time around the weekend, I should receive one of a few gaming items that I’ve either ordered online or shopped victoriously for on Ebay. I confess to being unable to resist the temptation to buy a couple of items from the new range of widgets Games Workshop is selling as part of their new “Apocalypse” genre of 40k gaming. When I spotted it for a good price, I caved and Ebayed an Imperial Baneblade – a mega-tank model, essentially. GW has also released their new “Linebreaker Squadron”, a kit with three Space Marine Vindicator tank models in one box. Mercantile types are breaking those kits up into three sets of sprues and selling them. Thus I also Ebayed a new Vindicator model.

I have absolutely no idea when I’m going to have a chance to build these things, but I’m determined to build out my 40k forces at some point. In my hobby universe, figure gaming is a sinful indulgence akin to eating dulce de leche (only, and lots of it) for dinner. It’s something that I spend more time preparing for than doing – but isn’t that the case with most hobbies?

I also ordered a new board wargame this week, which makes it a week of splurges indeed. As part of an order with a gift game or two, I bought myself a copy of Avalanche Press’ Jutland, one of their newest offering in the Great War at Seas series. It’s been out for a number of months (late spring?). I suffered a lengthy decision cycle on it primarily because I own the original GWAS: North and Baltic Seas. Jutland is basically an upgrade of North and Baltic Seas, which was just the second game in the GWAS series.

New art work, new mappage, new shippage, new scenarios – a lot changes in Jutland. I’m surprised I’ve held off so long in purchasing it.

I’ll be giving all of the above a few words in the space after they’ve arrived. And maybe someday I’ll even build those tanks.

Some thoughts on Veterans Day

2007-11-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

On November 11, 1918, The War to End All Wars came to a conclusion when a general armistice between the Central Powers and the Entente went into effect.

Hmm. The War to End All Wars. That didn’t exactly work out, did it?

Americans have fought in many wars since then. And the other day, while I was stuck in traffic behind a Hummer with a “Support Our Troops” bumper sticker, it occurred to me that as a nation we have odd ways of supporting our veterans.

Generally speaking, we crap on them. We’ve been crapping on them for a long time, in fact. I’m not very well read on anything earlier, but I know plenty of Civil War veterans were crapped on. I know lots of World War I veterans were crapped on – in fact, wasn’t it our old buddy Doug MacArthur who chased them around Washington, DC with some bayonet-toting troopers? That’s a hell of a thank-you.

On Saturday I bundled Junior Destructo Man off to a model train show at the National Guard Armory here in town. He wasn’t so much interested in the large vendor section, but he was fascinated by the two working layouts they had setup in one of the side rooms. He stood and watched the larger scale train (S-Gauge?) for maybe 20 minutes before he even blinked. It didn’t help that the thing went “chug-chug” and “toot-toot” when the operator pushed a button on his transformer console. Bloody hell, I suppose I see what the future replacement for Thomas the Tank Engine will be.

What’s all of this got to do with Veterans Day?

Well, as we were leaving the building there were a couple of railroaders standing around, talking loudly (half deaf from the train whistles, I suppose). One of them was expounding on the proper treatment of military veterans.

“I was in the Marines in Vietnam, and when I came home they [crapped] on me,” one of them announced. “All these whiners today need to just shut up. We’re going to [crap] on them, too.”

Juan Carlos, of course, is a sponge for new sounds so I hope at some point in the near future I don’t have to talk him out of shouting [crap] at the top of his lungs. Be that as it may, it was just kind of sad (and a bit aggravating) to hear a veteran express such resignation. Or was it something more base? I had it crappy, so you’re going to have it crappy too. That would be even more sad.

Obviously, the politicians out there didn’t keep their heads down during the Sunday and Monday events that mark Veterans Day. They should have gone into hiding instead of parading around spouting off a bunch of [crap]. The way we treat our veterans is a national embarrassment.

It is our shame as a nation that a millionaire (as most of them are) can squat on his ass in the well-guarded US Senate for six years and then collect more retirement bennies (which he likely doesn’t really need) than a service veteran who, let’s say for example, has had his leg blown off in the defense of our country.

But back to the train show.

I had parked my pickup truck off to the side of the Armory building. About 30 feet away on the grass sat what remained of a decommissioned Sherman tank – you know the kind of junkchunk they usually park around Guard armories.

“Daddy, whazzat?” Juan Carlos asked. About 20 times in the span of ten seconds.

So I walked over to the rusting green junk pile, and talked to my two-year-old for a few minutes about what it once had been, and the brave men who had served in it and the evil they had defeated. And I thought about my Dad, who served in the Navy; my Papaw Edwards, the gentleman-farmer who fought in the Great War and about all of the other veterans I’ve known over the years who are now gone from this Earth.

God Bless them all. I’ll try to do better for them.

For treadheads: ATS Stonne Heights

2007-11-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

Another item that arrived near the Big Table during blog off-season was the ATS title Ghosts at the Meuse: The Battle for the Stonne Heights. This one is another complete boxed game and features the fighting for the town of Stonne, France in 1940.

Of all of the battles big and small during the German’s 1940 invasion of France, Stonne is one that seems to attract a lot of attention. It has a number of historical points in its favor, I suppose. It was a tooth-and-nail struggle in which the French fought the Germans to a standstill. The terrain is interesting. It was a mixed-arms affair that featured a considerable amount of armor on both sides. The German attack was spear-headed by the troops of the Grossdeutschland regiment, a formation that generated a lot of ‘ink’ in Nazi propaganda at the time.

Also, over the last 15 years or so the historical view (in American eyes) of the 1940 campaign in France has been revised away from the ‘pop history’ view of unstoppable Nazi war machine versus totally incompetent surrender monkeys. These revisions toward a more accurate overview have generated new interest in the campaign from American wargamers – which is pretty much the market force that drives which topics appear in print.

Some years ago, Stonne was the topic of The Gamers’ Tactical Combat Series game GD (Grossdeutschland) ’40. It was an interesting, well-researched game that suffered to a degree from the game system’s inability to successfully mesh armored operations with infantry. A less interesting treatment of Stonne appeared a couple of years back as the issue game in Vae Victis magazine, a French-language gaming publication.

Critical Hit – the publishers of ATS – produced a Stonne 1940 module for Advanced Squad Leader some years back, and this new ATS title is an outgrowth of that project (fairly obvious, since Pedro Ramis gets the design credit in both games).

The cartography is updated from the earlier ASL module and uses a larger sized hexgrid in order to accommodate the larger ATS counter size. It does a nice job of capturing the ruggedness of the terrain in the immediate vicinity of Stonne. In this game the focus is entirely on the fighting in the environs of the town, which means the players won’t necessarily get a feel for the ‘big picture’ of Stonne’s dominating heights with regards to the Meuse valley.

Ghosts at the Meuse also introduces the 1940 French order of battle into ATS. It’s a generous countermix that certainly includes more stuff than you’ll ever use in a single scenario. For treadheads, I’m sure the centerpiece of the OOB is the French B-1 tank.

The appearance of the B-1 certainly provide ample opportunity for the ‘what if’ crowd to get their jollies by matching the French heavy against the general more lightweight German tanks of 1940. Unfortunately, while the B-1 may have carried more armor than the German AFVs and fielded a good gun (for the time), French operational doctrine just wasn’t up to snuff.

A couple of Stonne scenarios actually made it onto the Big Table before the summer caught up with me. I didn’t set up any of the ‘big’ scenarios, but it seems to be a well-done kit with forces that match up well and provide an interesting look at a pivotal fight in the 1940 campaign.

Burn in Hell, Eastern Standard Time

2007-11-06T10:26:00.001-08:00

Today we need to stop all of this silliness about baseball, tabletop games and other leisure pursuits and turn our thoughts to a more somber topic.

I would like everyone to join me in a moment or two of quiet contemplation regarding Eastern Standard Time and HOW MUCH IT SUCKS.

I hate the time change. I hate it with a burning passion. There are few things I despise more than working to my usual quitting time and then getting home after dark. Is that right? Is that the birthright we inherited from the founding fathers? Is that what God intended when He commanded “let there be light”?

I think not.

Many years ago (Many. Years. Ago.) my mother worked as a secretary in the offices of Kinsolving & Kinsolving in Shelbyville, Kentucky. It being a rural area and all at the time (it seems more of a Louisville suburb these days), many of their clients were either large local farms or agricultural concerns. When the time change arrived, staff had to remember who among their clients would arrive at the wrong time for all of their appointments until the time changed back.

“My cows don’t set their clocks back,” as one farmer explained it, “so neither do I.”

Sound reasoning, if you ask me.

When the time changes, I know that I am doomed to at least two weeks of waking up exactly one hour before my alarm clock goes off. That really pisses me off. I like sleep. I NEED sleep. I DO NOT need to wake up an hour before my alarm goes off.

I understand that there are weenie-headed, whining arguments in favor of the time change. Usually some crap about kids waiting for school busses in the dark. Those arguments are all worthless. Is it still dark at 8 a.m.? That’s when kids are waiting for their school busses in my neighborhood. Eight o’clock. Not six o’clock. EIGHT o’clock.

Some bunch of yahoos in Minnesota wants to start school at 7 a.m., so the rest of us have to set our clocks back? Screw ‘em. They can change when their school starts. In fact, they SHOULD change when school starts. Several scientific studies indicate that kids do better in school when they don’t have to be there at the crack of dawn. Why? Because they get more sleep when they’re not waiting for school busses at 6 a.m.

Well, duh.

The first presidential candidate to promote abolition of the time change gets my vote. I HATE Standard Time.

ATS Toktong Pass on the waiting list

2007-11-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been over a year since I last posted anything about one of my favorite tactical game systems – ATS. Well, as it’s been seven months since I’ve pretty much posted anything, I guess it’s not that hard to believe. Man, time sure does fly when you have a Junior Destructo Man running around the house.

So today a quick look at one of the three ATS items that landed near my Big Table during the course of baseball season: The new, complete boxed game Toktong Pass: Escape from Chosin.

This is the first game in the Advanced Tobruk Series to be set outside of the Second World War. It concentrates on the actions of Fox Company, 2/7 Marines at Toktong Pass during the Chosin Reservoir battles. You can read a bit of the history at this address

http://www.homeofheroes.com/brotherhood/chosin.html

or just Google around a bit for more information.

The game map, based on the historical terrain, covers a sizeable area around the heights that eventually became known as “Fox Hill”.

The color palette for the map is a bit on the dark side, but it’s easy enough to read. My only minor beef with the whole kit is the headache-inducing color scheme that’s been assigned to the North Korean countermix in the game. Here’s a sample:

Ugh. While you’re certainly not going to overlook them on the map, it seems to me that the colors might grate on players after a few hours of play. Actually, I think after a few hours the colors might induce epileptic seizures.

Other than that, it is a pretty interesting setup. Some post-WW2 hardware in the mix (most of which isn’t used in the Toktong scenarios), the North Korean troops are a lively bunch and the scenarios look pretty interesting.

Have I had time to set it up and play it yet? Nope. But I’ll get there.

Reports of this blog's demise are mildly exaggerated

2007-11-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

Since the last post was made after the opening day of baseball season, I guess I’d better bookend the long, blog-less season by posting something of an update.

If you pay attention to baseball at all, you will know that Scott Boras did NOT take me up on my offer. Bob Wickman DID suck. The Braves pitching DID kill them. And, unfortunately, the Red Sox ended up getting a lot more media attention.

I think that’s that highlight reel in total, right there.

Baseball season is over. Now begins the season of our discontent.

As evidenced by seven months of assorted blankness and clever nothings, during hurricane season I lapsed into pathetic non-blogging. Too many other fun things to spend time on, I suppose. Work. Chasing the kid around. Baseball. Chasing the kid around. And more chasing the kid around.

With the sad absence of baseball a reality, perhaps now I’ll be able to bludgeon myself into keeping up with this widget to one degree or another. There are some interesting new games to discuss, and a couple of holiday ‘projects’ to document – so maybe I’ll get back into it.

Then again, maybe not. I am nothing if not lazy and unpredictable.

The long, dark winter has passed

2007-04-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

Hey, it must be the start of baseball season because I’m bitching already! The Braves bullpen was butt-puckering! The D-Rays bullpen sucked! Woooooo!

Dangerously enough, I was thinking last night. If the morons in the federal gumment can’t see fit to make Opening Day a national holiday – they should at the very least make it illegal to play baseball games on Opening Day when everybody is at friggin work. I missed every decent game that was played yesterday. What was on TV when I got home? The Royals beating the crap out of the dipstick Red Sox. The dipstick Red Sox! Who gives a flying oily turd about the dipstick Red Sox?

So I had to read all of the game stories I could find today. Truthfully, I was surprised to read that Bob Wickman pitched in yesterday’s game. I figured his lard ass would have expired by now. I can say that because I think ol’ Bob has about the same buff athletic build that I count among my own unique features. I think I may even be a few pounds lighter nowadays. And yet he’s pitching for the Braves and I’m NOT pitching for the Giants, as per my earlier plan.

Yeah, I know. He can hit the strike zone in the 90s, but so what? Ever seen anybody hit my knuckleball? Ha! NOBODY has ever hit my knuckleball. It’s a minor issue that I’ve never actually thrown a knuckleball at a batter – the point is still that NOBODY has ever hit it. It’s all about spin, baby.

Cash in on a hot commodity now, Scott Boras. Just use the comments section below and I’ll have my people get back with you soonest!

As the season approaches

2007-03-09T13:21:00.000-08:00

If baseball season is approaching, it must be time for me to rant about what a gigantic pudwhack Mike Hampton has turned into. An oblique muscle? What a wuss! What’s he been doing for the last two years – watching Oprah and eating friggin cheeseburgers?

I don’t know who’s the bigger pudwhack – Hampton or Mark “I’ve pitched ten innings in the last three seasons” Prior. Holy sheeee-ittt!!!

I’ve thought about contacting several Major League teams – you know, the ones that are paying bundles to chronic pudwhacks. Why don’t they ditch those guys and, instead, pay me the Major League minimum to miss just as many games?

My main offer is to the Giants. Why not take the heat off of Bonds for a change? Sign Foster for the league minimum – the sports writers will go nuts and forget all about Bonds for a while. I’ll miss as many starts as, say, David Wells would. And they could write columns about Foster and Wells ‘seperated at birth’ stuff. I’d miss just as many starts as Wells will for whoever has him, but I’d only be one-quarter the grumpy asshole and ten times more engaging, personable and entertaining. Instead of pestering Bonds, the writers could pester the 48-year-old never pitched an inning fat man while I regale them with Neo-Stengalisms, tales of cosmopolitan adventure AND public challenges to Curt Schilling for an ASL cage match. I’d bust their chops about their typos and blown deadlines and incite them with clever newspaper patois.

And all for a fraction of what Hampton, Prior or Wells will pull down for sitting on their hairy butts. What a deal. Where’s Bill Veeck when baseball needs him?

Out with the old...

2007-02-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

The busy month of February is teetering on the brink of Slackerism here in blog land, so I guess a few notes are in order.

My urge to indulge in an entire campaign of ‘Barbarossa’ waned somewhat as I progressed through the early stages of the game. It still produces an entertaining game experience, but there are enough ‘holes’ in the game that I felt time would be better spent if I moved on to something else after wrapping up the 8 turns of the opening Barbarossa scenario.

One thing apparent was the odd structure of the victory conditions. At the conclusion of 1941, basically, a look at the map seemed to tell a tale of woe for the Germans. They had managed to capture Leningrad, but were basically stoned everywhere else and faced a growing Soviet army. They were short of Moscow by several hexes and had just barely managed to squeeze into Kharkov by game’s end – losing an entire Panzer Army in the process. Still, totalling up the Victory Points, the Germans managed to squeeze out a 1-point win. Very strange.

But that one is back up on the shelf. Some new items have arrived in the last few weeks, and one of them has landed on the Big Table. The new $20 small-format game from Avalanche Press, “They Shall Not Pass”, is set up and ready to go. The game covers the first nine days of the German offensive against Verdun in February, 1916. The first snappy here is an overview of the initial setup on the game’s full-size map:

And here’s a detail of the setup along the French center, which gives a pretty good look at the map artwork.

The geographical area covered is the whole sector held by French XXX Corps. Within the constraints of the historical deployments, the German player is pretty much free to set his own agenda for racking up enough VPs to win the game.

Victory in the game is based on what I would call the objectives as the opposing Army / Corps commanders understood them at the time. German local command wasn’t clued in on Falkenhayn’s ‘meat grinder’ strategy. So they really are trying to plaster the French and drive on Verdun.

Only the Germans score VP. They get them for taking towns (1 VP per two towns captured), destroying forts (1 VP per fort) and inflicting higher casualties on the French than they take themselves (0-3 VP – I think – based on the dead-unit ratio at the end of the game). They can also take one division of optional reinforcements for a 1VP penalty. Working from memory here, I think the Germans have to score more than 8 VP to win the game. 5-8 VP is a draw, IIRC. Although it might be 5-7 VP.

Starting soon, with a little luck.

Old and flawed, but still some fun

2007-02-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it can be interesting to drag out the wargaming equivalent of a Golden Oldie and take it for a spin on The Big Table just for the heck of it.

This past weekend, in the couple of hours of unstructured time I managed to eke out, I dusted off my old, old copy of SPI’s Barbarossa (2^nd edition, 1971) and set up the opening of World War II in the east. The game, which saw it’s first printing in 1969, essentially is the granddaddy of most ‘contemporary’ East Front games. A lot of the design mechanisms gamers take for granted first got their chops in Barbarossa.

The particular copy of the game I’ve got on the table is the second wargame I ever bought – purchased way back in 1974. My first wargame was SPI’s venerable Tank!, which I also purchased in 1974. That was back in the days when you could find SPI games stocking bookstore shelves, and indeed both of those games were bought a few months apart at a Waldenbooks in Altamonte Springs.

I haven’t stopped buying games since, but that’s beside the point.

Today’s photo shows a section of the front before the game kicks off. The deployments are likely far from historical, but this is the area where German Army Groups North and Center operated.

As a game produced entirely before the fall of Soviet Communism opened up a wealth of new material for history researchers, it suffers from a number of flaws in the orders of battle and in the geography of the game map. As one might suspect, later games have ‘done’ many things better – but for some reason this game can still produce a compelling game session every now and then.

Compared to today’s uber-complex designs, it’s quite simple and straightforward. The complexity of the rules, in fact, is probably on a par with Avalanche Press games like Defiant Russia and Red Vengeance. Barbarossa’s assymetrical application of the zone of control rules can take a bit to get used to, and can be a special, nasty surprise for the unwary Russian player.

The attacker-favoring combat results table is also somewhat assymetrical. The game heartily rewards the German player who can catch Russian units in a web of ZOCs and then eliminate them by forcing retreats with relatively low-odds attacks (at 1:1 odds, for example, there is only one ‘negative’ result for an attacker).

Lite, fun and moving right along

2007-02-05T10:40:00.000-08:00

After a couple of weeks of pretty intensive play (at least for me) I think I'm about to get enough of Combat Commander for the moment. It's like the kettle corn of wargaming. Entertaining and a tad addictive, but ultimately not quite filling. The variability of the card system gives it a certain just-one-more-turn quality akin to a pulp sci-fi page-turner. Quite often the system works well. Sometimes it doesn't.

Every once in a while some plain goofy crap happens. The cards fall in just the right order to make me feel like I'm fighting a battle on Bizarro World. In one of my weekend games, when the scenario ended about half the map was on fire (nearly ran out of 'Blaze' markers) for no apparent reason.

And then sometimes the cards fall in just the right order to make a very enjoyable game. In a second game, some US units had to cross a machine-gun covered road to attack an objective. As one unit crossed the road, the Germans played a Hidden Minefield card (the Americans survived, but it was a fun moment) and then played a Hidden Wire card as the US troops approached the objective (the Americans took the OBJ but it was another fun moment).

It's all rather random, which is pretty much what you run into with card-driven systems. Very often it's quite a bit of fun, but I think in only one or two of the six games I've played have I finished and thought it had come close to 'simulating' infantry combat. The others were just 'games' – like maybe playing Memoir 44 on steroids.

There's something to be said for a 'lite' wargame, of course – and CC is certainly the least 'lite' of the bunch. But it's not a game that's going to replace ATS or PG in my inventory.

If I was a headshrinker...

2007-01-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

If I ever lost my mind and decided to get a doctorate in psychology (there’s a pun in there somewhere), I have a ready-made topic for my doctoral thesis: How wargames can be used to demonstrate the different ways people comprehend, experience and assess the same game.

Well, from reading Boardgame Geek I suppose that could be applied to all games. But since I ‘know’ more wargamers, that would be my selected subset.

Following the online chatter about Combat Commander, it’s illuminating to read the different takes people have on the game. Most opinions are influenced to a degree by expectations. Many are additionally shaped by prior gaming experience (which I suppose shapes expectations…). It’s also interesting to speculate on people’s reasons for offering strong opinions when it’s pretty clear that they haven’t actually played the game.

CC is one of those games you have to ‘get’ before it makes sense. In that respect, it’s like PanzerGrenadier. If you don’t solve the twin Riddles of Scale and Assault (which I didn’t at first), PG doesn’t quite seem to ‘work’. With CC, to me it seems you have to solve the Riddle of Chaos.

Of course, there are some players who are simply never going to enjoy a game that doesn’t give them near-absolute control of their units. Even if those guys ‘get’ how the game works, they’re not going to enjoy it.

The guys that are really interesting to follow, though, are the ones who perceive that because of the card system, gameplay is almost totally random. That’s the part you have to ‘get’. It’s not ‘random’, although it is ‘chaotic’. Mathematically speaking, orders and actions fall within a structured range of probabilities that generally only influences WHEN things happen.

In game-speak, what this means is this: If you want your guys to get from Point A to Point B, you will be able to move them there – but you may not be able to move them at an ideal moment. If you don’t immediately have Move orders available, you either discard or do other stuff until you get them. Maybe the other side will shoot them to hell before they get going. But that’s kind of like ‘real’ combat – 2nd platoon was ordered to move out at 0600 but didn’t get the word in time and then got caught by an artillery barrage at 0605, blah blah blah.

Another critical point I see players missing is leadership. A well-placed leader can work wonders for coordinating units and getting things done. That might seem like a ‘doh!’ statement, but it really does seem to elude a lot of players. They’re probably influenced by how leaders are used in ASL or other tactical games. In CC, a ‘2’ rated leader can activate with one order a 5-hex long skirmish line – on a map that’s just 10 x 15 hexes. Seen it, done it. Good leaders are a real ‘force multiplier’.

Still taking this game through its paces, but so far, so good.

Another week, another game

2007-01-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

As I work my way through a few games of Combat Commander, NOW I remember why I ditched all of my Advanced Squad Leader stuff years ago. Not to take anything away from ASL’s large following of dedicated gamers – it’s just that it never really ‘worked’ for me as an enjoyable wargame. Tried it for several years running, collected a bunch of modules – all to no avail. It just was never quite worth the effort for me.

Combat Commander never claims to be the ultimate in simulation, but I think the end result is a much closer approximation of infantry combat outcomes than ASL. At least for me. Mostly this is because of the game’s chaos factor. You come up with an initial plan, try to implement it and then adjust as the game moves along. Damn near anything can happen. The game Events can throw all kinds of monkey-wrenches into things – from your own squads breaking at the wrong time to the timely arrival of reinforcements. The Order and Action mechanisms insure that you can seldom do EXACTLY what you want to do.

I think it was Rommel (?) who said something like “The reason the American Army does so well in wartime is because war is chaos and they practice it on a daily basis.” This game captures a nice chunk of chaos, and at a fairly manageable level.

One of the things I like is the pacing of the game. Even ATS pesters me a little in this regard – everything happens too quickly and unfolds too cinematically (although that can be fun as well). In the few games of CC I’ve played so far, the pace feels more realistic. Movement comes in fits and starts. You’re rewarded for using your leadership well. Or, more to the point, penalized for using it poorly. If you don’t keep your leaders in a position to activate multiple units when a Move order is played, then your guys just aren’t going to go anywhere.

Nobody gets as many Move orders as they’d like. All of the Fate decks (one for each nationality) have many more Fire orders. The end result is a game narrative that ‘looks’ right. Grunts in combat don’t typically sprint around the battlefield in sneakers, because they know that moving targets attract more attention. So you try to use Move orders to get your guys quickly from one good position to the next, while simultaneously trying to keep them set up to use fire groups for maximum impact. Closing with a defended position takes a mixture of boldness, planning and patience. In that respect it reminds me of PanzerGrenadier.

Combat Commander is doubly interesting for me because I never thought I’d enjoy a ‘Card Driven Game’ quite this much. Truthfully, it was almost a moment of insanity when I pre-ordered it. I’ve tried several CDGs and the only one of the bunch I’ve really enjoyed is Twilight Struggle. I was quite disappointed with both For The People and Barbarossa to Berlin. Paths of Glory seems more carefully crafted, and is enjoyable enough that I’ve still got it.

In the ‘standard’ CDG methodology, it’s that disconnect between Operations and Events – the ‘fallacy of the false decision’ – that chaps my butt. That effect is completely absent from Combat Commander. In Twilight Struggle, the card mechanism doesn’t necessarily produce the effect because the “Operations” and “Events” are both so abstract to begin with. In CC, that type of decision cycle doesn’t exist at all.

More on this game as we go along.

Apprenticed to a pi-rate...

2007-01-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

So how old was Horatio Nelson when he first went to sea? I'm willing to bet he was at least a shade older than 21 months.

Not that I anticipate it will lead to any kind of sea-faring career, but this past week we bundled up the Toddler of Mass Destruction and dragged him off across the bounding main for a Royal Caribbean cruise to the Bahamas.

Sunshine, salt air and the usual over-abundance of cruise ship victuals. In the photo above, my young sailor and I lounge about on the deck of the SS Sovereign of the Seas while she lay at anchor off of the cruise line's party island of Cococay. He was extremely interested in the dinosaur flashlight he'd acquired eariler in the day during some kids' activties.

He had a blast. We had a blast. Probably another cruise of some sort in our future.

Here's a health to the company, etc.

I am legion

2007-01-12T11:45:00.001-08:00

There are this many of me as “Matthew”

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
899
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

And this many of me as plain ol’ “Matt”

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
52
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Not counting all of my cousins near Pikeville, of which there are no electronic records (of course).

I may be a fat guy, but this is ridiculous

2007-01-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

We got back Monday from a 3-night cruise to the Bahamas. Now I know I’m not the lean, green fighting machine of my distant and misspent youth – but keeeee-riiiiist there were some monumental porkers waddling around that boat. They made me look like an Italian runway model.

Not just waddling around. Waddling around clad only in thin strips of Speedo. Over the years I have become inured to many unpleasant sights, but I dared not venture onto the pool deck for fear of an uncontrollable urge to pluck out my own eyes and roll around screaming on the deck.

Imagine, if you will, a large group of these scantily clad, blubbery lumps completely tanked on bad American beer and trying to line dance to the shrill exhortations of the ship’s Official Director of Drunken Activities.

The horror. The horror.

Note to aspiring maritime architects: There is a reason why the swimming pools on cruise ships are always placed abaft the bridge. Cruise lines place a high priority on maintaining the sanity of their bridge crews.

A deck attendant mentioned to me that he was employed on a five-month contract. I suspect this is because science has ascertained five months is the maximum exposure to such sights that an otherwise sane man may tolerate without sustaining permanent mental disability.

The Return of the Blog

2007-01-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

Don’t you just hate it when a blog goes ‘dark’ for an extended period of time? Yeah, me too. Does the blogger get lazy? Does his brain wink out? Does he forget his username and password? What’s the deal?

Not that I’m under the (mistaken) impression that throngs of readers hang on my every word. But some times real life has a way of intervening and getting in the way of our best intentions. Work gets hectic. Life gets hectic (and, unfortunately, painfully unpleasant at times).

But the show must go on. To that end, I am determined to post to this blog more diligently this year. I don’t ‘do’ New Year’s resolutions – but at the beginning of each new year, I do engage in a bit of goal setting. One of my goals for this year is to be a better-behaved – or more regular, at any rate – blogger. I hope to at least improve upon my recent record of a very quiet three months without comment.

ATS Berlin: Moabit Mayhem really long AAR

2006-09-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

Contrary to appearances, I ain’t been shot, Mum! Extra-blogular events have transpired to add some rather lengthy delays into my publishing ‘schedule’ – you know, stuff like family, job and allergies.

So. What we have here is one mega-butt-kicking after-action report for a game of ATS Berlin: Red Victory. The game took a while to finish – the first three turn were played the first week of August, the last three turns were played the first week of September. But there you have it.

The scenario here is Moabit Mayhem, from Berlin: Red Victory. It uses a medium-sized slice of the game’s massive Berlin map to portray the initial Soviet assault into the Moabit district.

In order to win the game, the Soviets have to capture three of the four objective building complexes on the map – the Prison, the Train Station, the Customs Yard and a location just west of the Train Station that I’ll refer to as the Office Building.

The German setup was intended to lightly defend two of the locations – the Prison and the Office Building – and focus the main effort on defense of the Customs Yard and the Train Station. In addition to their on-map troops the Germans will receive 5 squads of heavily-armed parachute infantry on Turn 3. They also benefit from an SSR that subjects Soviet units moving near the river to possible sniper fire.

Turn 1

On Turn 1, my Soviets swarm onto the map, mostly with balls-to-the-walls movement (as evidenced by all of the ‘Winded’ markers in the turn 1 photo). As is the case in many scenarios, the attackers don’t have much time to sneak around in this one – so some early rapid movement to get stuck-in quickly is the prime directive.

My Russians attacking the Customs Yard spent the first turn just getting into position for more serious work. I rolled a couple of assault guns up to try and blast the defenders, and one of the heavy howitzers unlimbered where it can engage the German medium machinegun. If the Reds don’t get the initiative on turn 2, the gun crew may well get shot to hell by the MG – but at least they’ll provide a distraction so the rest of the attackers can get to work.

The Soviet troops tasked with taking the Office Building got stuck in to their assault rapidly. In the turn 1 photo, one of the ‘Winded’ stacks has already engaged in melee and eliminated the occupants of the Office Building.

My Russians’ turn 1 was aided by truly, honestly miserable shooting from the Germans (maybe because they’re Volkssturm?). Even with all of the running movement, the Russians took a grand total of 2 steps of casualties. In maybe 10 or so attack dice rolls (with a d10), my opponent rolled less than a ‘7’ exactly twice. Russian rolls were less numerous and no more successful, but since my main job on turn 1 was movement that was no big deal.

Turn 2.

The Germans won the initiative for turn 2, and the machinegun in the Customs Yard mowed down the crew of the howitzer before it had a chance to fire. But the SU-152 blasted the crap out of the machine-gunners and turned the upper floor into smoldering rubble.

Russian infantry, meanwhile, cleaned up the lurking Volkssturm tank-killer squad and also took out the crew of the infantry gun. My Soviet grunts took some casualties assaulting the tank-killers, but they did their job.

There’s another German machinegun upstairs in the Train Station that can fire to cover the flank of the Customs Yard. One of my goals for turn 3 is to neutralize that gun. The two 203mm howitzers can both draw a bead on it, as can the SU-152. If the Germans win turn 3 initiative, I think maybe the machinegun guys should run and hide somewhere.

In the center, I consolidated my hold on the Office Building and began firefighting with the Germans in the Train Station. I didn't want to put too much of my infantry in harm's way because the Germans will get their reinforcement platoons on turn 3 and I wanted to see where those guys go first.

In the north, the Germans simply tried to draw things out. The Volkssturm guys up there managed to infiltrate away from the my assault squads and avoid melee – but they had to retreat into an exposed cellblock location of the prison in order to do it. They will likely get shot to bits in turn 3. They’re going to lose the prison, of course, but it’s more a question of how long they can hold out and how many of my squads they draw into the fight and away from other locations.

Turn 3

Sometimes it’s a bad day to be in Berlin, as the 3_End photo probably demonstrates. What my honorable German opponent thought would be a steely defense of the Customs Yard pretty much crumbled in the space of a single turn.

His German paras holding the Yard had largely been hunkered down, holding off to cover the approaches to the complex with opportunity fire. I suspected that the Germans doing anything down there but holding their fire in anticipation of a Soviet assault would be a mistake. And I was right.

It was one of those ‘slippery slope’ chain-reaction things. All of my Russian tank fire on the Yard defenders was pretty ineffective, although I did manage to get BOT on a couple of positions that would improve my chances on turn 4. I was thinking about being patient for a couple of turns to let the big guns do their thing, but then I realized I had a Red assault platoon (three squads and a leader) in the orchard south of the Office Building that could actually move under the bridge and into the building below the rubble of the former machinegun nest without taking any opportunity fire until they were under cover of the masonry building.

So that’s what I did. Of course, the German para squad they moved adjacent to fired at them – but a single squad (even of paras) doesn’t really have enough firepower to score much of a result against steely Slavic grunts under masonry cover (even with the shift reduced by assault movement). My guys took only a single step loss and were then in a position for a melee assault.

Plus, that expended about a third of the available opportunity fire that was covering the front of the Yard. A para squad has a good chance of shooting up attackers approaching across open ground – but coming at them through the buildings on their flank was bad news for them.

I pushed up a medium machinegun on the far left of the map, and that’s when the Germans experienced a ‘command failure’. One of the other German para squads shot at it. They inflicted a C1 result and the crew then flunked their morale check and broke – but that expended another potential defensive fire. That left one German squad able to cover the front, but I had two assault groups in position. So I sent them in. The first group of two rifle squads and a leader got shot up pretty good on the way in when the Germans rolled up a jolly C4 result. That flipped both squads. The leader and one squad broke, but the Germans were then out of opportunity fire. Three Russian submachinegun squads (those lovely 8-2-8 guys) then charged in with a leader. They didn’t even have to get into a melee; their assault fire wiped out the German squad they were going to attack. In the 3_End photo you see the results of the German debacle: A second squad wiped out in melee and the surviving para squad withdrawing to a spot where the Russian tank guns can’t shoot at it. Bad day to be a German paratrooper indeed.

Endgame – turns 4, 5 and 6

After about a two week layoff, we finally got in a session to wrap up the scenario.

The accompanying digisnaps show the main positions after turns 4, 5 and 6. The Germans didn’t have enough of a toe-hold anywhere to give any help to their five counter-attacking squads of parachute troops. So the paras had to make their way into the Train Station and then figure out what to do. In order to prevent a Russian win, they have to contest occupation of at least two of the four major building complexes in the play area – the Customs Yard, the Prison, the Office Building and the Train Station.

The snappies tell the story in a nutshell. On turn 4, the paras moved into the Train Station as the remnants of a defending Volkssturm platoon fled from the approaching Russians. The lone squad of Reds in the Train Station had just used infiltration to engage and eliminate two broken VS squads.

On turn 5, the German paras managed to eliminate the over-enthusiastic Russian squad and then moved into a jumping off position for their final, bold attempt to contest a second building. Chances for a successful counter-attack were pretty slim – because with most of the rest of the German force eliminated the paras would have to leave enough behind to hold the Train Station.

As you can see in the End_5 snappie, my Russians pretty much had the Train Station ringed with infantry, assault guns and heavy weapons. Pretty desperate looking, although my flank near the prison appeared weak enough that we thought it might be fun to give it a try.

The End_6 snappie shows where we called it. The para platoon remaining in the Train Station delivered some punishment to the Reds in the Office Building, but got whacked by a blast from one of my SU-152s (thus the BOT marker on them). The second para platoon used smoke to cover the first part of their movement out of the Station, and moved to attempt a point-blank PanzerFaust shot on the SU-76. Their shot just missed, and they got blasted for their trouble.

So. With the most of the paras remaining in the Train Station sitting under a BOT from a 152 mm assault gun and the second para platoon fairly shredded and still outside of the prison, we decided to put the wraps on this one.

Nothing quite like a trip to the desert

2006-07-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the slight interruption in this blog’s progress in detailing the fall of Berlin at the squad level. But everybody needs a vacation every once in a while – so we’re back and typing after a week-long visit to Arizona.

Of course, no trip to Arizona is complete without a visit to the Grand Canyon. So we trooped from Sedona up to the South Rim for a day and let Juanco chase after all of the wildlife he could spot. Here is a typical vacation moment as Junior Destructo Man tries to capture a squirrel.

Everything with four legs was fair game. He called them all “kit-kat”, since that’s what he calls the four-legged critter at home. The only one he actually managed to get his hands on, fortunately, was a rather well-behaved furry mop of a little dog. Both boy and dog survived the close encounter without a bruise or scratch.

The adventure included a Friday night trip to Chase Field, where we watched the Diamondbacks beat the Rockies. Nice ballpark, although I can do without the 118 degree summer heat in Phoenix. Needless to say, they didn’t turn off the air conditioning and roll back the stadium roof that night. It was still 100 outside when we walked back to the hotel (three blocks away) around 9:30. Any way you slice it, that’s just too damned hot.

ATS Berlin: Time out for a holiday

2006-07-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

The battle for Berlin is underway on The Big Table – but there’s going to be a slight delay in the proceedings. The driving force behind the game – that being me – will be off on vacation for the next ten days.

Being a typical game geek, I’m planning to lug along at least one set of game rules for some light reading while I’m gone. I might even put into action my plan to take along a rules set for one of the Command at Sea games with the notion of actually playing a small game by plotting ship positions on a piece of graph paper. That’s pretty ambitious, though, so no promises there.

Last time I took a ‘real’ vacation and carried along a serious set of game rules, the whole project turned out pretty messy. I spent one morning at our condo in Princeville sitting out on the porch reading through the “Dirtside II” minis rules. I left them sitting on the table out there in the afternoon when we took off to play some golf and – as luck would have it – a windblown rainstorm swept down from Mt. Waialeale that afternoon and drenched everything. The drenching included our roofed-in back porch, so the rules got a solid soaking. I was able to eventually salvage everything into readable condition, but it wasn’t a happy sight.

I no longer leave valuable printed material sitting out. Yeah, yeah, we’re off to Sedona and it seldom comes a drenching there – but I know leaving something out where it could get wet would be the ultimate wargaming raindance.

This will be our first trip (since the trip back from Guatemala last November) with Junior Destructo Man. At nearly 16 months now, he’s quite a bit more mobile. So it will be, um, interesting to see how he takes to nearly 5 hours of air travel.

ATS Berlin: A look at Scenario 1

2006-07-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Strange Defeat has gone up on the shelf for now. Next on the table: Scenario 1 “Moabit Mayhem” from ATS Berlin: Red Vengeance. I’ve poked around at a couple of the Berlin scenarios in the past, but this time I’m keeping score.

A digisnap from the pre-game appears below. It’s the German setup for the scenario before flipping the weapons to the their FOW sides and applying any Full Cover markers. The Germans also get some reinforcements in the form of a parachute infantry platoon on turn three. The big white tile spacers on the map mark the scenario boundaries.

The Soviets mob onto the map from the west. In eight turns, they have to control three of the four buildings where the Germans are setup in order to win the game. They’ve got a horde of infantry, some assault guns and a couple of pieces of direct-firing artillery to work with.

Even for experienced ATS hands, the Berlin scenarios present some very special challenges. The urban landforms are more peculiar than those found in the various Stalingrad scenarios, for example, which means a thorough reading of the battlefield walkaround in the scenario book is extremely important. In scenario 1, there’s also an SSR that subjects any Russian unit within four hexes of the Spree to possible sniper fire (depending on LOS conditions).

The Germans here have chosen to contest a couple of the buildings with only Volksturm squads, which are generally pretty iffy in their performance. Defense of the warehouse along the river has been given to a parachute platoon, supported by a MMG. Defense of the railway station has also been leavened with some paras.

The basic idea is for the Volksturm defenders of the prison and what I’ll call the “office building” (J12) to delay the Soviets and inflict as many casualties as possible. The Germans need to hold or contest two of the four buildings by game’s end, and the two buildings where they’ll make their stand are the rail station and the customs yard.

If the Volksturm guys do their jobs, they should absorb enough of the initial assault to give the German reinforcements time to get into position. The para platoon that arrives on turn 3 can enter anywhere on the east edge, so they have some flexibility on where they’ll commit. They can reinforce the rail station easiest, so that’s a likely course of action. If the Reds quickly clear the prison but then get sloppy, the paras can counter-attack to take or contest that location. They might even be able to reinforce the customs yard, but that might prove tricky depending on how the Soviets can cover the approaches with opportunity fire.

Although the Germans have no tanks in this scenario, the Russian tanks just can’t go charging around the map. Two Volksturm tank-killer teams lurk on the map, and the German OOB also includes two panzerschrecks and six panzerfaust single-shot weapons.

The Red Army of Workers and Peasants have their work cut out for them.

Strange Defeat: One more try

2006-07-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

A final look, for now, at Avalanche’s Strange Defeat, this time sans le chat. Managed to get in two games over the weekend.

The Germans won both games. I suspect in both cases that the Allies were over-aggressive, but finding a successful strategy for them is difficult.

In the first game, the Allies adopted a more spread-out approach. Their defenses deployed fairly dispersed, mostly one unit per hex with a few of the “AA” deployment group added for stiffening where allowed.

The dispersed deployment keeps the German armor from trying to ‘ooze’ the French defense, but it I think it opens up the Allies to defeat in detail. My thoughts on it are that the best chance the Allies have of inflicting step losses is when they’re defending. A good German player will always have an armor unit of some type stacked with his spearheads to gain the ‘Allies attack at half strength against armor stacks’ advantage – which means French counter-attacks frequently just bounce off.

Also, the bucket o’dice combat system punishes small stacks by making them easy to overwhelm. A German attack that scores three ‘hits’ will eliminate a single unit (two step) stack, but the same attack can be absorbed with a single step loss and a two-hex retreat by a larger stack.

At any rate, the dispersed defense seemed only to delay things. The Germans sort of stupidly pressed a frontal attack against the Belgians along the Dyle, which cost them some unnecessary infantry casualties. The Germans ended up bagging them eventually, but suffered from a few French/British counter-attacks in the process. Most of the BEF evacuated via Operation Dynamo, although once again the courageous French Gen. Piroux and his boys got whacked in the process.

Axis forces coming out of the Ardennes chopped up the dispersed defense facing them with a series of armor-led blasts that drove to Chalons by turn four. The Germans opted to not attack any of the Maginot forts, reckoning that picking up three or four additional Political Points wasn’t really worth running the risk of facing the defender advantage (hit on 5 or 6) of the forts.

On turn 5 the BEF evacuated via Dynamo and the French were down to a hand full of units defending in front of Paris. The PP index stood at -23 with little prospect of improvement for the French, which pretty much ended things.

In the second game, the French opted for a slightly different defense approach. Where possible they stacked defending units in groups of four or five steps. This left a few hexes uncovered except by ZOC, but it also forced the Germans to attack into stacks that would be rolling 9-12 dice against their panzer spearheads.

It worked for a little bit, I think. The Germans decided to take out the northern-most of the Maginot fortifications, which the Allies had stacked with 6 steps of defenders (two French fortress units and the BEF 51st Division). Both sides rolled a bunch of hits. One German infantry corps was wiped out and two more reduced – but the Germans rolled seven hits with some like 24 dice and wiped out all three units in one go. That was something like an 8 PP swing right there. Argh.

The Germans were loathe to commit panzer/motorized units to attacks against the bigger stacks without infantry support, and the jockeying around left them open to a couple of counter-attacks. The Allies managed to set up one good counter-attack in Belgium, which fizzled when they rolled 14 dice and got only 1 hit.

The turning point, I think, was a large French counterattack just west of Sedan. The Germans had driven Guderian and two panzer corps forward without infantry support, and the French managed to put them out of supply. But that attack failed even more miserably. They rolled no hits on 18 friggin’ dice, while the defending Germans rolled two hits with 6 dice. Had that attack succeeded, I think the Allies would have had a chance at winning the game. But, c’est la guerre. The counter-attacking British in Belgium then got chopped to bits and Ie called the game after turn 5 with the PP index standing at -26 and set to plunge even lower.

I think that will wrap up my investigation of Strange Defeat for now. More games beg for table space. Details shortly.

Strange Defeat: Catastrophe strikes!

2006-06-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Yes, indeed. Monday – sometime Monday – a literal cat-tastrophe struck the invasion of France.

Normally, Sam the Cat doesn't venture into my office where the big game table is set up. During the day, when I'm not home, the office door is closed - both to keep Sam out and, lately, to keep my 15-month-old Juan Carlos from diving under my desk and switching off all of the little glowing buttons.

At some point today, though, Juanco opened the door and ran cackling for my desk. Grandma intercepted him - but apparently left the door open long enough for Sam to find his way in and curl up in a corner to sleep for a while unmolested by Juanco the Giggling Cat-Chaser. When Grandma later closed the door, Sam found himself trapped.

When I got home and opened the office to put away my brief case, Sam was sitting - quite defiant and rather pissed off - in the middle of France with half of the Allied Army knocked into the English channel and half of the German army swept onto an adjacent map for ATS: Berlin. So ended the campaign for France.

A do-over will shortly be underway – although I suppose it won’t get quite the same detail of blow-by-blow narrative. I will, however, update with more observations and general impressions.

Strange Defeat: The invasion presses forward

2006-06-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

Turn two opened with the fall of Defiant Holland as the Germans overwhelmed the defenders of Amsterdam – with German motorized forces roaming the rest of the country at will the Netherlands would surrender at the start of Allied turn 2.

Farther south, German forces expanded their crossing of the Dyle and fought their way through additional Belgian fortifications. Strong counter-attacks by the BEF inflicted some casualties, but by the end of the turn only a lone step of Belgian forces remained on the map.

Panzer forces rolling out of the Ardennes continued driving toward Paris, overrunning Chalons in the process. Additionally, the fall of the northern-most Maginot fortifications would allow the Germans to push forward more of their infantry to support the spearheads.

Turn three went pretty badly for the Allies. The Germans used their greater mobility to re-direct their strongest panzer forces against the weak Allied ‘center’ – wiping out three French corps in the process. A clever little operation along the coast near Antwerp nailed a fourth French corps and the BEF reserve corps, and threatened to turn the northern anchor of the Allied line. They also launched a couple of attacks against the thinned Maginot defenses, causing the Allies to think perhaps they had combed out too many of the line’s better formations.

A French counter-attack mounted with three corps near Chalons met with some limited success, trading an infantry step loss for the reduction of the Germans’ strongest unit, the 19th Panzer Corps. Most of the German panzer units on the map are now operating at reduced strength – but the Allies have been so pummelled at this point that it may not matter.

In addition to the counter-attack, the French began trying to form up a defense of the capital in an attempt to stave off the Germans for a turn or two and gain some political points. In the north, the BEF operated in retrograde somewhat pell-mell to form a new line anchored on Ostend along with several French units. Their objective at this point is to divert Germans from the main thrust and to try to maintain a position that will allow for a rapid evacuation via Operation Dyanamo when the time comes.

Strange Defeat: The invasion begins

2006-06-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

The German attack opened on turn 1 with a strong armored thrust out of the Ardennes, a large German drive into Belgium and a smaller operation launched into the Netherlands.

The Dutch gave the invaders a bit of a bloody nose. German paratroops dropped on the lone Dutch fortress unit in Amsterdam, but their attack in conjunction with three additional units was a complete shambles that resulted in the elimination of the paras and no losses inflicted on the Dutch.

But that was pretty much it for the Allied highlight reel. The second parachute regiment dropped as part of the assault against the fortress of Liege and was considerably more successful. The Belgians took very heavy losses getting driven back from the Dyle, although by the end of the German turn they still held both Eban Emael and Namur. Only 5 SP of Belgian troops remained on the map, however. The German advance into Belgium cost them losses amounting to two steps of infantry and one step of motorized infantry.

The German panzer spearheads exploded from the Ardennes and hammered the French defenders. The assault on the northern-most of the Maginot forts met painful repulse, but the panzer forces skirted that battle and quickly drove back or elimnated the French defenders of Sedan and Mezieres. By the end of the turn four French units had been destroyed and a large gap blown in their defenses. German losses were very light, totalling just one step from the 5th Panzer Division. The first photo here shows the situation at the end of the German turn.

The Allies, faced with some severe movement restrictions on Turn 1, did what they could to slow the Germans and inflict some casualties. British and French forces moved forward to counter-attack in Belgium, and they also made use of some strategic movement opportunities to mount an operation against Guderian's spearhead at Mezieres. They also managed to score a minor success with the evacuation die roll for Queen Wilhelminia, gaining them one very happy Political Point.

The Dutch were forced to attack the superior German forces outside of Amsterdam (combat is mandatory unless the phasing units are in a fortress hex), but the Germans muffed their 9 defensive dice and neither side inflicted a casualty.

The first attempt at a joint British/French attack, against the German forward-most troops just north of Eban Emael, fizzled amid bickering and British fumbling. Alexander, the Royal Armored Corps and British 1 Corps evidently had bad maps, which left General Piroux and his DLM alone in a valiant assault that managed to inflict a step loss on 16 Panzer Corps. It was, however, a death ride for the French armor, as the DLM was destroyed and Piroux killed in the process.

French and British commanders farther to the south proved more cooperative. One of the French corps in the "MR" deployment group passed its movement check and moved against the Germans at Mezieres, providing some operational cover as British 3 Corps used strategic movement to join the assault. The coordination roll succeeded, and 3 French and the British corps slammed into Guderian's troops. Both sides suffered two hits, and both elected to take their second step loss as a retreat. The Allies lost one French infantry step in the attack, while the Germans lost a step from 10th Panzer Division.

The turn ended with the Allies able to form some sort of a line in front of the Germans, although the situation in the south is tenuous at best. The political point index stands at -7. The second photo shows the situation at the end of the first turn.

A new game on the table

2006-06-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Today I turn the gaming eye of this blog onto the subject of one of the latest games published by Avalanche Press, Strange Defeat: The Fall of France 1940.

Times being what they are (lacking time, that is), it’s only take me a week or so since it landed on my doorstep to get this one all ready to go. Which probably leads the casual observer (people without 15-month-olds running around the house switching all of the electronics off and on) to believe I’m some kind of a moron.

Physically, it’s not a large game. It’s packaged in one of APL’s small format boxes and retails for $20. 140 counters, small format rule book. The map, however, is more or less full-sized – and I’m going to address the subject of the map first because it’s my only real gripe with the game.

I say “more or less” full-sized because maybe a quarter of the map sheet is essentially waste area on the left-hand side. There’s a big honking title for the game – just in case you forget what you’re playing – and all of the game tracks are very small indeed. The terrain effects chart is not printed on the map. Perhaps it was supposed to be. In fact, the TEC is only available as a download from the APL web site.

The appreciation of map art, of course, is very subjective. Some folks like the Strange Defeat map, others don’t mind it. It’s not what I’d call a ‘bad’ map by any stretch. But it somewhat “underwhelming”, for lack of a better term.

It uses some of the same iconography found in the early games of the series – Defiant Russia and Red Vengeance. Small ‘sky scraper’ icons for major cities and a trio of ‘teepees’ for minor cities. Functional, but not much to crow about. Typography on the map looks rather small to me. There are no river names. The overall Michael Graves-ish blue and sepia pastel color scheme matches well with the box art, but gives the whole thing a bit too much distance and lacks impact.

From a function standpoint, my biggest gripe is with the very light cross-hatching used on the map to represent rough terrain, including the Ardennes. It is very light indeed and quite difficult for older eyes to discern – blue cross-hatching on a slightly lighter blue background. I also question how much of the huge expanse of map that lies west of Paris will come into play, although in fairness I have not yet played a complete and don’t have a feel for the campaign possibilities.

Counter artwork is up to the usual APL good standard, although they are nothing spectacular. This is due, in part, to the map color scheme. Blue-gray German units and French blue.. well, French … units lose their impact to a degree because of the blue map theme. Otherwise, they are quite readable and well done.

The hex-grid numbering, according to APL, was ‘flipped in production’. As a result, they have provided a new setup card as a download on their website. The setup listed in the rulebook, as a result of the ‘flip’, is completely useless. Oh, and one quick mention of the overall map orientation: The map’s ‘top’ is south in this game. North is at the bottom.

Setup takes a bit longer than you would think for such a small game. It probably gets quicker with experience. Units are each tagged with a setup code, and each setup code has an allowable range of hexes for deployment as listed on the setup card.

Here’s a digisnap of the deployments around the Ardennes used for my first game.

The Germans have basically three setup groups: One covering the Westwall defenses, one comprising the forces attacking out of the Ardennes and a third comprising the attackers from the Ardennes north.

Allied setup groups are more complicated. There are four smaller groups covering the Maginot Line. Another group screens France from the Maginot to the Belgian border. Netherlands and Belgian forces have their own deployment zones. The British, save for one unit, all deploy in or adjacent to Liege. And the French have a further general reserve that deploys within 4 hexes of Paris. A couple of other small deployment groups finish things out.

Next time: The first turn.

My kid will get me for this some day

2006-05-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

Unless you’re the parent of a little boy, one of the things you probably don't know about small children is that little boys spend a lot of time playing with their dicks. Juanco 'discovered' his dingdong about three weeks ago and has been doing his baseball player impersonation ever since. Pull his diaper off for a change and he grabs his dick. Put him in the tub for a bath and he grabs his dick. Grandma put him down for a nap last week in a tee-shirt and diaper, and he pulled his diaper loose, threw it out of the crib and grabbed his dick. He also shit in the crib, which upset him mightily – so he sat in one corner of the crib screaming and holding his dick. (It also upset grandma, who has now learned that little Juan Carlos must always wear either a onesie or pants when he's left alone.) Sometimes, even in a onesie, he grabs his crotch just to make sure his dick is still attached.

Mom, of course, being a girl and all, was concerned about all of the dick-grabbing. Sometimes it's a bit of hassle, especially when he grabs for the groin when he's getting changed out of a poopy diaper. Hands in poop, not good. Anyway, the pediatrician informed her that dick-grabbing is perfectly normal at that age. I told her she better get used to it, especially is she wants him to be a shortstop.

Sunday night, Juanco took a bath in the big tub with Daddy. After all of the scrub-scrub-scrub was done, he uncharacteristically relaxed, sat back and, of course, grabbed his dick. With both hands. Since I'm a firm believer in "if you can't stop it, tax it", I sat back and grabbed my dick too. After about a minute of uncharacteristic bath-time complete silence Mom, in the next room, walked to the door to see what was amiss.

"What are you two doing?" she asked. "Just chillin' out?"

"Yep," I replied. "We're just sittin' here holdin' our dicks."

A real father-son moment.

A serious escalation

2006-04-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

And sometimes, a photo is worth more than a thousand words.

Our remaining cat, Sam, is over 20 years old. Eartha passed a couple of years ago at around 13 years of age, and Friend went to kitty heaven last year at age 18. So we're down to Sam.

I fear for Sam's longevity. The one year old Baby of Mass Destruction has pestered ol' Sam plenty since his arrival, although the cat has seemed to tolerate things with good humor enough. But now things are escalating.

A couple of days ago, after spending months crawling around the house at extremely high speed, the BMD just stood up and started walking around. It wasn't a big surprise because he'd been 'cruising' with a lot of coordination for several months and had also been standing with a lot of stability for nearly the same amount of time. But since he was such an outstanding crawler, I suppose he just never felt the need to go it on two feet.

Until now. Now he's the Walkling Around Baby of Mass Destruction. And, as you can see in the photo below, he already has a primary target in mnd for his walking attentions.

Poor Sammy.

I, Slacker

2006-04-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Holy crap. I looked back at yesterday’s post and just realized I hadn’t written squat during the entire month of March. What a slacker.

Time flies when you’ve got a Baby of Mass Destruction in the middle of everything. March was First Birthday time for the BMD. Preparations absorbed a lot of time. Recovery from the whole thing absorbed a lot more. By the time he’s seven or eight, I’m seriously hoping that I’ll be able to sleep past 7 a.m. on weekends again. I miss my sleep-in mornings.

Oh yes. The obligatory baby’s first birthday photo:

After I finish the family income tax ordeal, I should have some time to get caught up on the gaming front. Last month’s small amount of gaming time was devoted to a couple of Avalanche Press games: Red Vengeance and Defiant Russia. I spent some time converting both of them to Cyberboard gameboxes (for personal use only…) and then played both of them several times.

Of the two, I found Red Vengeance to be more enjoyable. Defiant Russia struck me as more a ‘historically based’ game because there’s really very little about it that’s going to simulate the historical flow of events. No Germans are getting to Minsk by the end of June. A bad turn of luck in the early game can also pretty much short-circuit even the best German plans. Absent really wild swings of luck, I think the game is moderately competitve (with a slight balance tilt toward the Soviets) – it just doesn’t do much in the way of educating you about the actual campaign.

Red Vengeance does a better job all-around, I think. There’s more open maneuver, more opportunities for both sides to do things. Game balance hinges in areas away from the main ‘front’ on the road to Berlin, but I think that just makes the players’ decision-making more interesting. It’s still not entirely instructional as a simulation, but it is more reflective of history than DR. I think it’s quite a little gem of a game and a real ‘player.’

Who says we don't teach math?

2006-04-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

Wowser, what a bunch of fun! Just finished up the process of getting a Social Security Number for the Baby of Mass Destruction.

For those of you who haven’t yet tried it, I highly recommend you take two or three hours out of your otherwise boring work day and sit around in the lobby/waiting room of your local Social Security Administration office. It’s completely free of charge, and twice as entertaining as most of the movies currently in release.

At our local branch of the long arm of the Gumment, you do the ‘take a number’ routine when you enter and sit around until your number is called. Today’s favorite event transpired when they called ‘29’ (I had ‘51’) and some old codger started for the windows. A very, very large lady lurched dangerously to her feet and shouted at the top of her lungs: “What the f*ck happened to Number Thirty? What the F*CK happened to THIRTY??”

PanzerGrenadier: Wrapping up Fontana Alba

2006-02-16T07:47:00.000-08:00

To put a wrap of sorts on my running game of PanzerGrenadier: East Front Deluxe, I’ll sum things up by pointing out that it’s VERY hard to completely wipe out one side in a scenario.

EFD scenario three, Fontana Alba, is difficult for either side to win. The Romanians have to control the town. The Soviets have to kick all Romanians back across the river. I think balance in this scenario tends toward a draw, with a modest chance of a Soviet win that depends to an extent upon how hard the Romanians press their initial attack.

The Reds begin rolling for their counter-attack beginning with turn 13 – they have to roll a ‘6’ on a single die to receive their reinforcements. Each hour (four turns), the score needed to trigger the reinforcments increases by one. In this game, they roll a ‘5’ on turn 19 and the counterattack sweeps onto the board.

As seen in the photo below, by the time the counter-attack goes in, the Romanians have managed to contest three of the four hexes of Fontana Alba with assaulting units. The Soviet task at this point largely consists of trying to winkle the Romanians out of those assault hexes.

Sweeping away the few Romanian units that remain outside of the town isn’t a terribly difficult task. The stack of two Romanian machinegun platoons close to the river bridge gets pounded to dust by the Soviet off-board artillery (3 x 10-point concentrations) and the three Soviet on-map mortar platoons, before falling victim to a company-sized assault in fairly short order.

The remainder of the game then boils down to the Soviets managing their assaults against the three town hexes while the Romanians can do little more than hunker down and try to hang on by their fingernails.

The northern-most town hex is cleared in a couple of turns, as the two reduced cavalry platoons there lack any stamina at all in the face of a company-sized assault. Romanians in the other two town hexes cling grimly to their positions, but without reinforcements and with no place else to hide, they can only do so much.

It’s a close-run thing, but the Soviets finally manage to clear out the last of the Romanians with one turn remaining in the game. Had the Romanians suffered slightly lighter casualties in their initial attacks on the town – say, two fewer step losses – they likely would have had sufficient strength to hang on in at least one of the assault hexes and force a draw. As it played out, however, the large Soviet counter-attack – aided considerably by good Soviet leadership draws – was simply too much for the Romanians to contend with.

When a balloon is the center of the universe

2006-02-15T07:53:00.000-08:00

Our child, of course, has no toys. None. He has to play with empty boxes, plastic clothes hangers and spare tubes of Dr. Boudreaux’s Butt Balm to find any happiness at all. (Well, that’s HIS version of events, apparently).

It should comes as no surprise, then, that the helium-filled mylar balloon his Grammy and Pappy gave him for Valentine’s Day was the single greatest event of his young life. He grabbed it, poked it, whacked it, chewed it, drooled on it and generally had a big, whooping time with it. He even slept with it.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here you go:

PanzerGrenadier: Density reduction

2006-02-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

After my “stack ‘em high” post earlier, I wrestled a while with the topic of big stacks in assault hexes. In something less than a fit of brilliance, it suddenly occurred to me that I needed to be using markers for assault hexes and off-map boxes (or cards) to hold the units involved.

Good heavens. I’ve only been playing PanzerGrenadier since the first edition was published years ago. Only now, after years, does the idea pop into my little pea brain. Funny how that works. Perhaps it’s because as I get older I get more fumbly-fingered, so methods of clutter reduction (especially with those hefty 5/8-inch counters) become more important.

Anyway, here are some photos of the results. Numbered markers for the assault hexes. The units that are in those hexes go onto cards with matching assault stickers.

Doh!

PanzerGrenadier: Those deadly assaults

2006-02-06T07:36:00.000-08:00

As I’ve noted before, assault is where a lot of the casualties happen in PanzerGrenadier. Our game of Fontana Alba is no exception. In two playings, the Romanian assault on the town turned out to be the focus of the action (kind of ‘duh’, but there it is).

In the first play-through, the Romanians were somewhat impatient and rushed in for assault without much softening up of the Soviet defense. The result was an outright catastrophe for the attackers. Cavalry gives up a +1 shift to direct fire for starters, which helped get them chopped to ribbons. Charging into a solid defense, they lost four steps to opportunity fire before they were able to engage the first assault.

Since that was such a mess (and kind of stupid, too), that game was written off as an example of how not to execute an assault.

In the second playing, they approached with considerably more patience and beat on the defense with artillery and support weapons (mostly the two machinegun platoons) before closing to assault. As noted in my previous post, this time they were able to get ‘stuck in’ without suffering too much from opportunity fire. For a couple of turns they made a brave run at clearing out the Soviet defenders. But…

Results can snowball pretty quickly in assault. One or two bad morale rolls, or one or two good enemy morale rolls, can cause the situation in an assault hex to get out of control in short order.

The Romanians and Soviets traded assault results for several turns. Superior Romanian morale and more numerous leadership helped them overcome the defensive bonus of the town and they forced a number of morale checks. One unfortunate Soviet rifle platoon consistently flunked its morale checks and ended up eliminated after multiple failures resulted in two step losses. But the Red machinegun platoons in particular proved impossible to shake (both passed a couple of ‘M2’ checks).

In the 0830 and 0845 turns, the Soviets suffered a total of 3 step losses in assault and inflicted two on the Romanians (giving each side 3 step losses total). The Soviets fed some reinforcements into the assault hexes, though, and kept fighting while the Romanians maneuvered to bring support fires to bear on the two hexes of the town that weren’t under assault.

The wheels started to come off the Romanian effort, though, in the 0900 turn. The Romanians in 1004 totally whiffed on their assault result, while the Soviet defenders scored a ‘1’ against them in return. Both sides scored ‘M2’ results in assault in 1003 – and the Romanians consistently flubbed their morale checks while the Soviets passed more than their share of the critical morale rolls.

The additional step loss dropped Romanian initiative to ‘1’ in the 0915 turn and they lost the initiative roll. The Soviet captain defending the town then personally led a counter-attack into 1003, which contained (at the start of the turn) a disrupted Romanian leader, a disrupted Romanian cavalry platoon, and two demoralized full-strength cavalry platoons.

The Soviets scored a ‘1’ result and the Romanians elected to reduce one of the demoralized platoons. The Romanian leader passed his MC, but all three combat units failed. This resulted in two additional step losses from the two demoralized units (who both failed their MC by three or more) and the demoralization of the third platoon as well.

Figuring in the results from the assault in 1004, by the end of the 0915 turn the Romanians had lost 7 steps against the Russians’ 4. They had no good-order units remaining in 1003 – which was held only by a disrupted leader and one disrupted platoon after all of the recovery rolls. The area around the town was littered with reduced and demoralized Romanian cavalry units. The attack on the town, for the most part, appears to have broken.

That’s where we’ll leave the narrative for the day. The next turn, 0930, will mark the half-way point of the game (turn 15 of 30). It looks like from here on out, the Romanians will be playing for a draw – as clearing the town now seems incredibly unlikely.

However, their support weapons are all intact, as is their chain of command. And they’ve still got that off-board artillery to spread around. So there’s a chance that the Romanians may be able to pull back, dig in and hold on to a chunk of the eastern map and salvage a draw from the game.

PanzerGrenadier: Stack 'em high

2006-02-02T07:55:00.000-08:00

PG scenarios that don’t include lots of AFVs and transport – and even some of them that do – have some signature characteristics that players need to understand in order to be successful.

In an earlier post, I discussed the game’s pace and its morale-centric combat system. The next thing players need to consider is the game’s use of space.

Frequently, a scenario will give you a deceptively large amount of space to play around in. It’s deceptive in that once you give the victory conditions a good going-over, you’ll often figure out that most of the action is going to be concentrated in a fairly small portion of the map. All of that space may give you a number of initial options for deployment and maneuver, but once the shooting starts the area of the game map that’s really important can narrow down very quickly.

My example scenario – EFD Three: Fontana Alba – is a case in point. Two maps is a huge amount of territory for the number of units involved. But the victory conditions make it pretty clear that the four town hexes are going to be the focus of the game.

(Granted, if the Romanian player wants to play for a draw from the outset he might decide instead to occupy the woods to the south of town, but our Romanians here are playing to win and thus have to capture and hold the town. What kind of weenie starts the game looking for a draw?)

The Romanians have a few maneuver options – they have to decide on a direction to approach the town – but their goal is pretty straightforward. They have to move on the town, soften up the Soviet defense, and then assault to clear out the defenders. They have some time to accomplish this, but not tons of time. The scenario is 30 turns in length, but from the 13th turn (0900) out there is an increasing chance that a Soviet counter-attack will arrive.

In the example game, the Romanians approach the town quickly from the west and cross the river. Their cavalry draws up 3 hexes from the town. This is inside of the range of the Soviet machinegun platoons, but outside of the 2-hex range of the rifle platoons. The 3-hex range allows the Romanians to spot enemy units in the town and begin the process of trying to soften up the defense.

The ‘softening up’ involves bombardment fire from the Romanian off-board artillery – two concentrations of 12-strength fire – direct fire from their two 8-strength machinegun platoons (stacked to allow combined fire), and hail-Mary bombardment from their 5-strength 60mm mortar platoon.

The Russians respond with bombardment fire from their own mortar platoon, which is located in the woods south of town. There is an occasional head-game as the two sides trade activations and ‘passes’, but the Soviet machinegun platoons in the town generally don’t respond with direct fire. They elect instead to hold their fire and await a chance to use opportunity fire at a closer range.

Ill-timed direct fire from the Russian defenders could essentially give the Romanians a ‘free pass’ to an assault. As long as the defense remains in pretty good order (not a lot of disruption or demoralization results), the prospect of taking opportunity fire with a +3 column shift will generally persuade the Romanians that an assault is a bad idea.

Softening up a defense can take time, though. In this game, the morale boost of the Soviet captain keeps the defense steadfast until the 0800 turn, when the Romanian artillery finally has an effect on the units in hex 1004. The machinegun platoon in the hex takes a disruption result and the rifle platoon is demoralized, which at last gives the Romanians an opening to assault without having to absorb a huge amount of opportunity fire.

After their artillery strikes home, the Romanians use follow-on activations to execute a 2-hex ‘charge’ assault with some of their cavalry. Opportunity fire from 1003 inflicts a step loss on one cavalry platoon (which then disrupts) and causes the Romanian 9-morale locotenant to demoralize, but they have enough troops to commit that they can get a couple of platoons into assault.

As I mentioned in a previous post, in the PG system assault is usually a multi-turn process – and the attack on Fontana Alba isn’t going to be an exception. The demoralized Soviet rifle platoon fails to recover and flees to 1003 – but the Red captain feeds one of his reserve platoons into 1004 to bolster the machinegun platoon.

In the 0815 and 0830 turns, the Romanians work more troops into the assault, and also manage to send in an assault on 1003. The following photo shows the situation at the conclusion of the 0830 turn (which is where the situation will be left for today).

One of the things that’s almost impossible to escape in a tactical game is the use of various markers to keep track of what’s happening to the units on the map. PG is no different. MOVED and FIRED markers record which units have activated. DISRUPTED and DEMORALIZED markers show morale status. DUG IN markers indicate an additional status for the defenders. As you can see in the photo, stacks of units with markers can get pretty hefty by the end of a turn. One of the hazards of the hobby, I guess. A good pair of tweezers (or forceps) comes in pretty handy for us fumbly-fingered middle-agers who are trying to manipulate all of it on the gameboard.

Astute gamers will note one thing about my photos of the example game. I am using a mix of ‘old’ counters from the original PanzerGrenadier and ‘new’ counters from East Front Deluxe.

The Soviet infantry counters are ‘old’ counters, distinguishable by the individual numbering of units in the small type right under their unit type symbol. Except for that unit number, they are graphically the same as the ‘new’ counters. But the ‘new’ Soviet infantry in EFD is printed on the thinner counter stock that appeared first in Beyond Normandy (and has since been done away with), so I use the old counters because they’re more hefty.

The game markers are also the ‘old’ style with the plain white backgrounds and rather plain labelling. The new morale and activation markers are much more colorful – distractingly colorful, for my taste. I prefer the plain markers because they’re easier to pick out in one of those big stacks and they lend less graphic ‘clutter’ to the appearance of a game in progress.

A rather sad commentary

2006-01-27T11:51:00.000-08:00

The past week has been very, very busy (when I haven't been flailing around with a stomach bug), but not so busy that I didn't notice this rather sad commentary on what our country has been up to lately.

An indictment of America

International Herald Tribune, JANUARY 27, 2006

When Human Rights Watch, a respected organization that has been monitoring the world's behavior since 1978, focuses its annual review on America's use of torture and inhumane treatment, every American should feel a sense of shame. And everyone who has believed in the United States as the staunchest protector of human rights in history should be worried.

Many nations - Belarus, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Cuba, Sudan and China to name only some of the worst - routinely trample on human rights in a way that neither the United States nor any of its allies would ever countenance. But the United States wrote the book on human rights; it defined the alternative to tyranny and injustice. So when the vice president of the United States actually lobbies against a bill that bans "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment," Human Rights Watch is justified in delivering harsh criticism.

The report does not let anyone else off the hook. The massacre of hundreds of demonstrators in Uzbekistan, the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the restrictions on civil society in Saudi Arabia, the atrocities in Chechnya and all the other familiar episodes of human-rights abuse are reported and condemned.

But in the introduction by the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, the United States is singled out not only because it has raised the heinous practice of torture to a "serious policy option," but also because in so doing it is sacrificing its ability to champion human rights in other countries. America is not the worst violator, Roth writes, but it is the most influential. Now, when Americans accuse Iraqi Shiites of torturing Sunni prisoners, the messenger's reputation taints the message.

The report says that 2005 made clear that abuse of detainees has become a "deliberate, central part of the Bush administration's strategy for interrogating terrorist suspects," and it accuses Britain of complicity in the practice. We have no illusion that the administration will pay any more heed to Human Rights Watch than they have to anyone else on this issue. But the report is also an indictment of the rest of the United States for failing to stop the destruction of its most cherished values.

PanzerGrenadier: Under the hood

2006-01-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

By way of continuing my intermittent look at PanzerGrenadier (pardon all the interruptions, but there you have it), today I’d like to wax all eloquent on a discussion of the game system in general.

One of the keys to grasping the PG game system – and thus to enjoying the game – is understanding what it is and what it isn’t. As simple as that might sound, it can actually be a subject of great confusion to many veteran wargamers. They approach what is perceived as a ‘tactical level’ game with a mix of preconceptions that can screw things up if given half a chance.

Speed, or more accurately pace, is the first preconception ‘wall’ many veteran players can hit. Most of the familiar tactical level games – Squad Leader, Advanced Squad Leader, Advanced Tobruk, Lock n Load – engage in some serious time compression. All of those systems have ‘scale’ turns that represent anywhere from 1 to 2 minutes. Scenarios generally range from 6 to 15 turns in length, with the average probably in the 8-12 turn range. Now, anyone with even a passing familiarity with ‘real’ military operations should probably recognize that events in those game proceed at an unrealistically fast pace. I’ll grant it often makes for a tense, enjoyable game. But asking an infantry company to clear 400 or 500 meters of urban terrain of enemy forces in 10 minutes is hardly a ‘realistic’ mission. World War II artillery fire missions that are called and resolved in 90 seconds exceed any forward observer’s wildest fantasies. You only need to look at a few slices of those games (many of which I enjoy) to understand that they tremendously compress the scale of time represented.

Similar time compression is absent from the PanzerGrenadier system. One of the first things you should note when flipping through one of the PG scenario books is the length of the scenarios. They frequently appear quite long – and some of them are very long indeed. The Fontana Alba scenario I’ll be discussing is 30 turns, for example. That’s 7.5 hours of ‘scale’ time, which is a fairly typical game length in the PG system.

I’ve known a few gamers who’ve had a rough go at wrapping their heads around the ‘tactical’ concept that patience is a virtue. You don’t necessarily have all day to fiddle around in PG, but you generally have the time you need to execute a fairly realistically-paced battle plan. Time enough to do some maneuver. Time enough to let your supporting arms (if you have them) do some softening-up work.

PG is not a game system that generally rewards a rushed style of play. Players who charge toward the enemy, pause to fire off maybe one or two turns of direct fire and then try to close for assault combat will, more often than not, get handed their heads.

Take a look at the Direct Fire CRT and you’ll notice that casualty rates are going to be pretty low as long as your taking shots on the ‘11’ column and anything lower. If you’re accustomed to playing tactical games where troops tend to evaporate rapidly under fire, direct fire in PG can come as a bit of a shock. Sometimes, you can stand off and blast away all day and generate hardly any casualties.

The game’s direct fire model is morale-based, not casualty-based. To my mind, for the most part it’s intended to reflect the disorganizing effects of fire on a unit’s capabilities. Direct Fire (and Bombardment, for that matter) is best used to disorder an enemy position (inflict Disrupted and Demoralized results) before you send your guys in for assault combat.

Assault combat is what takes the ground and generates the higher casualty rates. In most PG scenarios, you have to figure out how to make assault work for you if you’re going to capture contested victory locations and win the game. The Assault CRT is shorter and bloodier.

But there’s another catch that can trip up the unwary gamer with expectations carried over from different game systems. In PG, assault is not a one-turn, win or run away knife fight. Be prepared to conduct and support your assaults over a span of several turns. Frequently, assault combats don’t resolve to a conclusion in a single activation. So keep key leaders handy to support critical assaults, and keep reserve platoons handy (if you have them) to reinforce assaults and keep the pressure on when you have to pull out reduced, disrupted and demoralized platoons.

Getting your attacking units into assault combat with an enemy force is one of the grognard skills you have to develop to win at PG. As I mentioned above, running into direct fire range of the enemy, popping off a few shots and then trying to get stuck into an assault hex seldom succeeds.

If you haven’t softened up the enemy position by inflicting some disruptions and demoralizations before you go charging in, your guys can get cut to ribbons by defending fire. Assault is a ‘Fire’ action that (except in the case of cavalry) can only be initiated from an adjacent hex. Which means 1) your assault force can get hit by opportunity fire on the turn they move adjacent and 2) on the following turn, if you lose the initiative you’ll get hit by the defenders’ direct fire before you activate for the assault.

In both cases, you’re taking fire with some very nasty column shifts on the CRT. Opportunity fire is +1 column, and you’ll suffer a +2 additional shift for being adjacent to the firing unit. Even a single, lowly rifle platoon can inflict formidable punishment with a +3 column shift in its favor. It gets even worse if the position you want to assault contains multiple enemy units, or heavier assets like machinegun platoons. If it’s a multi-hex defending position with a good leader at hand, you may also be facing the coordinated opportunity fire of multiple stacks of units.

For a quick example of this, try the opening turns of Fontana Alba with the Romanians in ‘impatient mode’. They’re cavalry, right? Just charge right on in there. Pause a few hexes short of the city to spend a couple of turns dropping those ‘12’ strength artillery attacks on them. Then just sweep on into the town for some assault combat. If you can.

Chances are, the Romanian assault won’t do so well. Below is a photo of my Soviet defense of the town. The two western-most hexes each contain a rifle platoon (4-2) and a machinegun platoon (7-4). The northern hex is two rifle platoons. The remaining hex is the leader (in this case, a rather good Captain) and a reserve of 3 rifle platoons.

Aside from having a bit of patience, the proper placement and use of leaders is another big key to enjoying your games of PanzerGrenadier. In this case, the Captain is situated to provide useful support to every hex in the defense. His +1 morale bonus can be used by every unit in town. He could activate all of the units in town at once if he desired. And any Romanians daffy enough to attack from the south face the likelihood of the Captain acting to combine the fire of four rifle platoons and a machinegun platoon.

In this particular setup, the Soviets absolutely benefit from the luck of the draw. The randomly-selected Captain commanding the defense is one of the best leaders in the EFD countermix. The Soviets’ inferior morale (7 vs. 8 for the Romanians) will stand against them in assault combat – but with the ‘10’ morale Captain coordinating activations and providing morale support with his bonus, they stand a much better chance of inflicting some pain on the Romanians as they attempt to close for assault.

The Romanian task in this scenario is very difficult. They have to capture the town and hold it against a late-game counter-attack to win the game. In order to do that, they have to exploit a couple of razor-thin advantages.

First, they receive two ‘12’ strength off-board artillery attacks each turn. They must show a little bit of patience and use their OBA – along with their smattering of on-board heavy weapons (two machinegun platoons and a 60mm mortar platoon) – to hit the defenders with some disruptions (and maybe even demoralizations) before they assault the town.

The excellent Soviet leader hunkered down in the town makes disorganizing the defense a tough chore. All Soviet morale checks get a +1 boost, as do all recovery attempts. In fact, I’m wondering if having such a good leader in charge of things might just make the Romanians’ mission close to impossible.

It takes more than one to FUBAR

2006-01-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

It takes more than one person to screw up an entire war. So I think we can safely spread some of the blame to Ol’ Scratch’s Left Hand Man, known affectionately to so many people as “Rummy.”

One of these days, maybe I’ll run a poll. Which Secretary of Defense was a bigger screw up – Rummy or Robert McNamara?

Here’s a vote for Rummy, I think, from The Sunday Times of London:

Blame Rummy for a war plan that went wrong
Andrew Sullivan

The great conundrum in understanding the conduct of the war in Iraq is a relatively simple one. How on earth did a noble and necessary decision to remove the Saddam Hussein regime result in such a chaotic occupation? The initial campaign to seize the country was brilliant, but almost immediately it was clear that something was awry.

The looting and mayhem in the wake of the collapse of a totalitarian state were eminently predictable. So why did the US and coalition armies simply let it happen? Why did they allow whole swathes of Iraq to descend into near-anarchy or control by Ba’athists and jihadist insurgents, make no attempt to seal the borders and dither for more than a year about the constitutional way forward?

Or to put it another way: if this project was as important as the Bush administration said it was, why did it seem unprepared and at times even indifferent to the consequences of invasion?
Well, we are beginning to get some answers — drip by drip, as former officials begin to leak or write memoirs. Two new books help a little. The first, My Year in Iraq, is by Paul Bremer, the former de facto pro-consul in Iraq in the critical early period. The second is a new biography of George W Bush, Rebel-In-Chief by Fred Barnes, published this week. Barnes, a former colleague and friend, has great White House access. If you piece together both books, you get a glimpse into how the most secretive presidency in years operated.

The picture is not pretty. Back in the spring of 2003 it had seemed obvious to most rational observers that we had too few troops to maintain order in Iraq. A mere 170,000 to control a country of 25m in a power vacuum was a joke. Towns and cities could be cleared of insurgents but never retained, because we had too few troops to stay put.

The borders were porous. We didn’t have enough troops to secure the weapons sites that the war had been designed to eradicate. General (Eric K) Shinseki famously argued before the war that we needed 500,000 troops to do the job. He was fired. Many pro-Bush military analysts, besotted with Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of a lean, mean fighting machine, told us we knew nothing about military strategy. They planned on about 40,000 troops remaining a few months after the fall of Saddam.

Well, it turns out that Bush’s right-hand man in Iraq agreed completely with the critics — or so he claims now. And Bremer is no Michael Moore. He believed in this war. And reading his book, you are struck by one thing. His appointment was rushed; he had mere days to assemble a team to govern Iraq (he largely had to find his own staff); and yet the administration had had years to prepare for this scenario.

As his plane circled into Iraq for the first time, an aide pointed out pillars of smoke everywhere. “Industrial-strength looting” was the assessment. Bremer almost immediately came to the obvious conclusion that Shinseki had been right and wanted to triple the force numbers. Triple. That is not a mild policy disagreement. It’s an indictment of the whole plan.

Bremer sent a top-level analysis by the Rand Corporation advocating far more troops to Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld never even bothered to acknowledge it. Later, when Rumsfeld was in Iraq, Bremer tried to make the case again. But Rummy was more interested in reducing troop levels because of domestic political pressure.

Back in Washington, according to Barnes’s pro-Bush book, the president found his weekly teleconferences with the generals irritatingly long. According to Barnes, “Bush liked crisp sessions without whining or complaints. Once he had to interrupt a discussion of troop rotation to say, ‘Stop the hand-wringing!’ ” This is not a management style designed to expose problems and solve them. It’s a style designed to squelch dissent.

As security deteriorated, Bremer tried again to wake Rumsfeld up: “On May 18 (2004), I gave (Condoleezza) Rice a heads-up that I intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that the coalition needed more troops . . . That afternoon I sent my message. I noted the deterioration . . . since April had made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts with too few resources.” Again, Rumsfeld never bothered to respond.

All Bremer and (coalition commander General Ricardo) Sanchez wanted were enough troops to control Baghdad. Rummy couldn’t care less. When Bremer told him at a dinner in September 2003 that security was the No 1 priority, Rumsfeld replied, “That means moving as fast as possible on getting Iraq’s security forces stood up.” Bremer’s response: “Here we go again, I thought.”

Rumsfeld had a fixed idea that a smaller military could accomplish anything, and had absolutely no sense of responsibility for the chaos his war plan had unleashed.

His famous “stuff happens” remark in response to the early looting in Baghdad stands as the leitmotif for his entire view of the war. While Colin Powell had insisted that once you invaded Iraq you were responsible for its security, Rumsfeld thought that the Iraqis should fend for themselves.

This policy of neglect has something to do with the 30,000 innocent Iraqi civilians killed (largely by insurgents) since the US invasion. While Powell wanted to kill Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite radical, Rumsfeld balked. By May 2004, Bremer told Rice the coalition had become “the worst of all things — an ineffective occupier”.

What deeper conclusions can we draw? The post-invasion plan was all but non-existent, an act of recklessness. The reason, however, was not just incompetence; it was a deliberate decision by Rumsfeld and Bush not to commit sufficient resources for nation-building.

Rumsfeld, after all, had never been a neocon. He loathed the idea of using large numbers of American forces to reconstruct a broken society. So he deflected responsibility and ordered the crudest tactics against the insurgency: torturing large numbers of innocent Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, sending troops into combat with insufficient armour, engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with Iraqi and jihadist terrorists who knew the terrain intimately.

And Bush? There’s a very revealing statement in the Barnes book, reminding us of something that Bush said back in 1999. Bush’s main political interest “is not in the means, it is the results”. Once he had declared war, his decision was done. It was up to others to implement it. And he was bored and irritated by the follow-up details.

In Barnes’s book, Bush said during the Iraq occupation, “If Bremer’s happy, I’m happy. If Bremer’s nervous, I’m nervous.” But if Bremer is to be believed, he was deeply unhappy and Bush either dismissed his concerns or had no idea that they existed.

In an earlier statement, Bush had spoken of his faith. It is ludicrous to think, as some Europeans do, that this president invaded Iraq on instructions from the Almighty. But Bush’s kind of faith may help to explain the shambles of the occupation. He once wrote, “(My faith) frees me to enjoy life and not worry what comes next.”

His mindset is focused on grand decisions followed by results. There is no toleration for mess, whining, criticism or second- guessing. The nitty gritty — which can mean the difference between success and failure in wartime — was not his concern. He delegated the whole thing to commanders completely intimidated by Rumsfeld and institutionally trained not to challenge their bosses. You want to know why we are where we are in Iraq? We’re beginning to piece it together.

Back to the gaming table

2006-01-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Finally. A chance to get back to some PanzerGrenadier.

Today I’ll take a quick look at the game preliminaries – map, OOB and what’s going on in general.

Here’s the map setup for Scenario Three: Fontana Alba.

It uses two map sections, which is a fairly compact battlefield. The Romanians deploy on board 4 (the left-hand section). The Soviets set up on board 7, east of the river. Additionally, all Soviet units can begin the game in “Dug In” status, which provides a defensive bonus and gives them the advantage of “first fire” in assault combat.

The town on the eastern board (Fontana Alba) is one of the keys to the victory conditions. To win, the Romanians must occupy all town hexes on board 7. For the Russians to win, they must inflict at least 5 steps of casualties on the Romanians AND clear all territory east of the river of Romanian units.

The game length is 30 turns.

By looking at the relative forces and the victory conditions, the basic situation becomes clear. The Romanian cavalry force has to cross the river and capture the town from the Soviets. In the later stages of the game, they must then be prepared to fend off a Soviet counter-attack.

Here are the forces involved. First the Romanians:

The total force amounts to 10 platoons of cavalry, two heavy machine-gun platoons, a mortar platoon and two units of wagons. The leaders were selected randomly from the ranks designated in the OOB: a Major, a Captain and three Lieutenants. The Romanian leadership draw turns out a mixed bag, so their leadership is going to be nothing particularly great. None of the leaders carry a combat modifier. The Romanians also have the support of several off-board artillery sections (two 12-point concentrations each turn).

The Romanian force must capture Fontana Alba from this Soviet force:

That’s eight infantry platoons, two machinegun platoons, a mortar platoon and a section of 45mm anti-tank guns, along with a couple of wagon units. The Soviet leadership draw is better, but they have considerably fewer leaders in their initial setup.

Soviet reinforcements appear on a successful die roll by the Soviet side, with their first possible appearance on turn 13 (0900 in ‘game time’).

The counter-attacking force is formidable: 12 infantry platoons, 3 machinegun platoons, two mortar platoons and a platoon of T-26 tanks. They get four leaders for this force, with the addition of a kommissar (who can use rather heavy-handed methods to help Demoralized troops recover improved morale). When the reinforcements arrive, the Soviets also receive some support from off-board artillery (three 10-point concentrations each turn).

The Soviets also seem to benefit a bit from slightly better leadership draws. A couple of high-ranking '10' morale leaders (one with both combat and morale bonuses) will probably come in very handy at some point.

A stiff challenge for the Romanians indeed, although the Soviet victory requirement of eliminating all Romanians east of the river is also a bit of challenge.

Next entry: To battle!

We interrupt this program

2006-01-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

Contrary to some rumors flying around my house, our 9-month-old Baby of Mass Destruction is not the crawling-around-the-floor incarnation of Shiva the Destroyer of Worlds.

But there was this email I received from the Missus yesterday afternoon:

“You know those wine bottles we talked about moving? You have one less to move tonight.”

At first I thought perhaps, after a tough morning before the big baby hand-off to Grandma for the day, she had decided to gulp down a bottle of Chateau Vanniere 1992.

Wrong.

The small wine rack we keep (rather, kept, as of about 9 p.m. last night) in the kitchen had suffered a casualty at the tiny but persistent hands of BMD. Only a week ago, he was quite content to sit in the family room and play with his Gymtastic Play Wall while Mom stood in the kitchen a few feet away and prepared his fresh-fruity breakfast. Something about the New Year has motivated him, though, to begin crawling after her when she puts him down and steams off in some other direction.

As we have discovered, he is now capable of High-Speed Crawling. And he has a Stealth Mode, too (which, however, he does not use when in pursuit of Sam the Cat).

Mom had no sooner stuffed the first piece of fruit into the Baby Food Musher, when she looked up to see our 19-pound marauder – having completed his hot pursuit into the kitchen area - reaching up to accost one of the lower-racked bottles.

The crash followed quickly, it appears. Broken bottle, scared baby, messy tile floor. No permanent damage – although Dad will spend the next 3 to 7 days receiving an occasional Glare of Death from Mom because, of course, it’s All My Fault.

Except for a few cheap stinkers that we shouldn’t have kept around to begin with, the surviving bottles have been placed in a secret location. We will probably convert the small rack into a climbing wall, or bib hanger or something appropriate to our new life’s mission.

And the Baby of Mass Destruction will have to move along to his next target.

Let's play! PanzerGrenadier:Eastern Front Deluxe

2006-01-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

I’m going to start the New Year waxing eloquent about one of the ‘other’ big sandboxes my brain likes to play in: Gaming – in particular wargaming.

Since nearly the Dawn of Time, I have been an avid wargamer. I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 or 15 when I picked up my first ‘real’ wargame, “Tank” in the old flat-box format from Simulation Publications, Inc. (aka: SPI). That particular archaeological artifact inhabits my ‘game closet’ still – something of a collector’s mentality being rather common in the gaming hobby.

The subject for the next few days is Avalanche Press’ recently-released game “PanzerGrenadier: East Front Deluxe” (or “EFD,” for brevity’s sake).

EFD is a considerably up-gunned remake of Avalanche’s original PanzerGrenadier game. In addition to some tweaks here and there to the Soviet and German forces, the game includes an all-new order of battle for the Romanian forces that fought in the south. This allows for numerous interesting additions to the scenario book and, indeed, EFD includes (I believe) 112 scenarios.

The enormous increase in scenario count over the original is abetted by EFD’s use of Avalanche’s new-style card stock game maps, of which there are 8 ‘geomorphic’ sections in the box. The original PG included 4 hard-mounted map boards. IMHO the new cardstock maps are a massive improvement, both in economy and in playability.

The ‘negative’ in the package is that some of the unit counters are printed on the thinner die-cut stock found in the series’ immediately previous release, Beyond Normandy. The thinner counters aren’t by any stretch unplayable, but I much prefer heavier counter stock – especially when it comes to considering how well the pieces will take a pounding over time.

I’ll admit that my assortment of PanzerGrenadier titles had been idling in the closet for some time before the release of EFD. I didn’t particularly care for either Afrika Korps or Desert Rats for some reason, although I did rather enjoy the few games of Semper Fi: Guadalcanal that I managed to play. But the two desert games sort of led my attention adrift and, what with my gaming time considerably reduced by the Baby of Mass Destruction, my wargaming focus went elsewhere.

But I am an East Front junkie, and the arrival of EFD (along with the receipt of Beyond Normandy as a Christmas gift) has re-kindled my interest.

A brief aside: My apologies, but time constraints prevent me from going into great deal detail about the hobby of wargaming or the specific mechanics of “hex-and-counter” war games. If you’re interested in them, you can gain a broader understanding of the topic by perusing websites like Boardgamegeek or Consimworld (see my links section).

For those more familiar with board wargaming, EFD portrays combat from roughly the battalion or regimental point of view. Individual playing pieces typically represent individual command elements (“leaders”), infantry or vehicle platoons or sections of heavier weapons like field artillery or anti-tank guns. Each hexagon on the map represents a scale distance of 200m from side to side, and each game turn represents 15 minutes of ‘real’ time. The 112 scenarios in the EFD scenario book cover a broad range of situations from small games using a single map and perhaps a half-dozen units per side, to very large games played on four maps sections with each player controlling several battalion-sized formations.

For the first test drive of the new game, what could be a better choice than one of the new scenarios, featuring the new Romanian order of battle? The initial scenario that I’ll be scribbling about here is Scenario Three, “Fontana Alba.” A roughly battalion-sized force of Romanian cavalry must cross a minor river, seize and hold a small town. They are faced by a smaller initial force of Russian infantry, although at some point (triggered by a dice roll) the Romanians will face a counter-attack by additional Soviet troops supported by off-board artillery.

Baby of Mass Destruction permitting, in the next entry I’ll kick off the Battle of Fontana Alba.

'We're Americans; we don't torture'

2005-12-29T06:42:00.000-08:00

Whoever buys into that statement isn’t exactly keeping up with current events. Have you seen the so-called ‘toys’ manufacturers are assaulting kids with these days? Jump, spin, click, clack, shout, vibrate, jump, hop around and otherwise raise hell. That ain’t a toy. That’s torture.

You wanna make Saddam spill the beans? Need the Baghdad Bogey-Man to confess all of his crimes against humanity? Put away the bad rock music, sleep deprivation, rubber hoses, saps, blocks and tackles, bright lights and needle-nose pliers.

Just make him spend a couple of nights with “Jump and Shout Elmo”. He’ll crack open like an egg dropped 50 feet onto a parking lot.

JC, our 9-month-old Baby of Mass Destruction, loves Elmo. He looooooves Elmo. Elmo makes an appearance on whatever Sprout Network program he’s watching and all other activity comes to a screeching halt. Elmo is The Man (or The Thing, at least).

It follows logically, therefore, that at least one of our sets of relatives would send along something Elmo-related for Christmas. Most of the Elmo toys are aimed at a little older kid (they’re ‘age inappropriate’ for a 9-monther). That kept Mom and Dad out of the Elmo market this year, but it didn’t stop everybody.

After JC pulled off the wrapping and chewed it a bit, we figured there couldn’t be much harm in giving Jump and Shout Elmo a shot. We even left him in his box so he didn’t get too carried away. Didn’t matter. Torture is torture, even if it’s still attached to its retail packaging.

Push the foot button and Holy Crap! The thing starts up an awful racket, jumps up and down and starts spinning its Elmo arms around like a little demon-possessed muppet in another Exorcist sequel.

JC watched all of this for a few seconds and thought it over very carefully (as you can see in today’s photo). Then his little face clouded up and he flat started wailing at maximum volume. Jump and Shout Elmo scared the living crap out of him. It took Mom and Dad and all four of the grammies and grampies a full five minutes to get him back in sorts again.

As a result of the Screaming Elmo from Hell experience, we decided to keep the Bounce Higher Tigger – which carries on even more maniacally, if you can believe that – in his box for a few more months. It’s not like JC doesn’t have a ton of other fun things to fiddle with between now and then.

Jump and Shout Elmo, implement of torture, now sits on the back of the top closet shelf, awaiting a brighter – and more age-appropriate – day.

Merry Christmas, indeed

2005-12-27T20:45:00.000-08:00

What does a ‘good’ Christmas look like? I think today’s photo just about sums it up. Our 9-month-old Baby of Mass Destruction flopped out exhausted on the living room floor.

Naturally, he woke up 30 minutes later and was then absolutely hell on wheels to get to bed. But after a big baby day of tremendous sensory overload – what with all of the grannies and grampies, the noisy toys, the bouncy toys and the vibrating toys – that wasn’t a surprise.

The whole family got together, of course, to help us welcome our new addition. Not to get too mushy or anything, but that was what made it our Official Best Ever Christmas. The last couple of years have been jam-packed with big change, and this Christmas just reinforced the message of how marvelous it has all been and how much I have to be thankful for.

OK, that’s the end of the mushy part.

This season was also, I believe, a harbinger of things to come. Nearly every holiday-oriented task (and a lot of the mundane things too) came down to a photo-finish this year. After 45 years of not much holiday hassle, year 46 started the process of payback.

I’ve never been big on last-minute shopping, but I did some this year. I can’t say ‘never again’, although I’d like to.

We were late arriving at our church’s Christmas eve service, despite the fact that we built an extra 30 minutes of ‘baby time’ into our planning. We should have built in 90 minutes. Argh. As one of the few churches in our neighborhood with a night-before service, the place was packed when we got there (it’s a small church) – almost standing-room only. By the time pastor showed up wearing his Magii turban and fake beard, there wasn’t a seat left open.

The ushers had long ago run out of programs when we arrived, so we spent the service guessing at the page numbers in the hymnal and trying to remember the rest of the liturgy from memory. The Missus, as a life-long Lutheran had fewer problems than did I (a Southern Baptist in remission). But I’m getting the hang of it, so I muddled through.

After the service, we had the usual potluck Lutheran Happy Hour. Some of the church ladies, bless them, made JC a beautiful little quilt. They love the heck out of the little guy, so he spent most of Lutheran Happy Hour getting passed around by all of the grannies. Fortunately, he’s never met a stranger and he responded the same way he always does when they line up to give him hugs – everybody gets a big baby smile and, if they’re lucky, a little drool or their eye-glasses grabbed.

Then it was off to the house and the joy of my first Christmas as Dad the Toy Assembler. Nothing too complex – some Fisher-Price gizmo that JC can either straddle and paddle around the room or pop up and walk behind. Still, we had put off wrapping most of our gifts until Christmas eve (BIG mistake), so the Missus and I were both up until around 2:30 getting everything done.

Next year, we will start wrapping gifts the day after Thanksgiving. We will plan better, clean faster, be more efficient. Blabbity-blabbity-blab.

Yeah, I believe THAT.

Why is he "Ol' Scratch"? Let me count the ways

2005-12-24T04:32:00.000-08:00

I couldn't say it better myself. So here's an editorial on the subject from the Great Gray Mother:

December 23, 2005
Editorial

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.
Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.

There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and rushing to make it permanent.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military for more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from military to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in September to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration abruptly reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid having the Supreme Court review the legality of the detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself, and the appeals judges refused to go along.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program is legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created to supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said that the presiding judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges and that several judges on the court wanted to know why the administration believed eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants was legal when the law specifically required such warrants.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues. Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative considered by President Bush for the Supreme Court.

-The New York Times

I guess the Grinch stole Christmas TV, too

2005-12-23T07:55:00.000-08:00

Last night, after a couple nights of un-entertaining college bowl games on the TV, I was determined that we were NOT going to tune into sports last night. Not that we pay much attention while we’re racing through our pre-holiday chores and other insanity (the Missus decided last night was a good night to stuff 200 membership letters for her non-profit).

At any rate, I figured on December 22, we would be able to find plenty of Christmas-oriented programming. ‘Life of Jesus’ type of History Channel fare, that sort of thing. After scanning every channel on our satellite, I found ONE program – something on the Science Channel about the ‘historical’ life of the Apostles. Everywhere else it was crappy programming as usual – perhaps even crappier than usual.

Are you kidding me? Nothing on the History Channel, nothing on A&E, nothing else anywhere. Is this the onset of some kind of new wave of political correctness? None of that Jesus stuff on our TV network, at least not until Christmas eve. No Grinch. No Christmas Story. No Charlie Brown. Not even a Bad Santa that I could find.

Four hours of history’s worst air disasters. That’s all Christmas cheery. Four hours of ‘reality based’ crime drama (‘slay’ bells ringing, as it were). The usual death, destruction and car chase stuff.

Serves us right, I suppose, for losing that Ice Age DVD. Dammit.

Starting off with a grumpy bang

2005-12-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

Ol’ Scratch (aka Dick Cheney) the other day predicted that critics of the administrations secret surveillance scheme would face "enormous public backlash" for their criticism. Where is this guy spending his spare time? On one of the moons of Saturn? Here on Earth there is growing, genuine discontent with the administration’s escalating assault on our civil liberties in the name of ‘security’.

The security song can only be played so many times before it starts to wear out its welcome, sort of like one of those hit pop tunes that gets played way too many times on the radio. Absent a rock ‘em, sock ‘em ‘terrorist attack’ somewhere that knocks down another big building, it gets old even faster because nothing happens to scare the sheep back into line.

No doubt many of these liberty-consuming policies make us ‘safer’. But so would posting a machine-gun toting government goon squad on every street corner, issuing Internal Security Documents to everybody and conducting cavity searches with roving security patrols. But then that wouldn’t exactly be an America worth defending any more, would it?

I find especially lame the administration’s contention that using the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court just isn’t fast enough. First, how is obtaining a warrant up to three days AFTER surveillance has started (which is allowed under FISA) not fast enough? Second, how many local prosecutors, sheriffs and chiefs of police would love to able to say “it takes too long to get a search warrant, so we’re just going to start knocking down doors whenever we feel like it”?

To the apologists who would argue the two examples aren’t the same thing, I’ll say this: Bullshit. You didn’t pay attention in civics class. Half the laws on the books (and a sizeable chunk of the US Constitution) are intended to protect us FROM government abuses. Our country was founded to protect us FROM the abuses of a remote government. When government – any level of government – starts to discard those protections, all of our liberties are in greater peril. That the protections in this case were discarded by a secret executive fiat only serves to magnify the problem.

Totalitarian societies can generally be very ‘secure’ – at least for those who toe the political line. Part of the price of political liberty is a lower degree of internal security. That’s just the way it works. A higher rate of gun crime, for example, is the price we pay for our constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

In the last 5 years, terror attacks on the US have killed, what? 3,000 people? In that same span, how many people have died in fire-arm related violence? I don’t know. But in 2001 – the year those 3,000 died on 9/11 – over 29,000 American civilians died of wounds from firearms. So what’s really the bigger threat to our ‘security’? Yet how many people who sing along with the administration’s security song also fight tooth and toenail against gun registration and licensing schemes, background checks and ‘assault weapon’ bans? That’s a rather odd dialectic, isn’t it?

Freedom isn’t free, as they say, and it isn’t always just our military who get to pay the price. We don’t have goon platoons on every street corner conducting security searches on every passerby – so occasionally some gomer with a gun, bomb or knife does some harm. Welcome to America.

Me? Call me a whacko. I like my guns (the government doesn’t need to know how many I’ve got, and neither do you). I don’t want the government listening in on my cellphone or checking up on my reading list at the library without a damned good reason and a court order.