The King is dead; Long live the King

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

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

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

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

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.