Opportunityfire.com

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m a bit of a magnet for all sorts of downloadable gaming junque. I’m not a total addict (at least not to the point of needing an external hard drive to keep up with stuff), but I’m always curious to see how creative minds approach any number of gaming-related topics. So, yeah, I’ve downloaded more than my fair share of PDF rulebooks, supplements, terrain tiles, counter sets and figure cutouts.

It did not escape my notice last month when the DriveThruStuff.com family of websites made their pitch for donations to their Haitian Relief Fund. As you may imagine, I was particularly attracted to the “Haitian Relief Bundle”,  which offered a large number of downloadable products - all digitally donated by their publishers - as an incentive for the rather small donation amount of $20.

OK. So I took the deal. But more on that in a minute. Right now, I’d like to give props to the krewe. Here’s the REAL deal: The gamer-powered donation drive for Haitian relief collected $178,900.

That’s extraordinary. That’s not chump change, boys and girls. Here’s a little perspective. In late January the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) pledged $750,000 for Haitian relief. $250,000 was immediate relief from existing funds and the remainder was pledged from anticipated future donations to a relief fund.

Now, the ELCA isn’t some televangelist who can rake in millions in a few days with warnings about lightning bolts from God - but neither is it a small organization (about 4.6 million members as of 2008).  Even if you figure that’s a little over 1 million households, that’s still anticipating far less than $1 from each potential ‘donating budget’.

I’m not privvy to the customer records at the DriveThruStuff web sites, but I’d be really surprised if they had over 1 million customers. The donation total was more likely generated from the giving of 10,000 - 12,000 people - which is a pretty generous response, if you ask me.

Of course, some folks are probably wondering about the goodies that were included in the downloadable bundle. A lot of publishers participated. The ‘order’ appears in my account the same way as a ’standard’ bundled product would - links to individual downloads for each product. That means I don’t have to waste bandwidth downloading product that I don’t want.

To be sure, the bundle includes some products that aren’t exactly world-beaters. If you’re not familiar with the state of the downloadable gaming press, then I’ll clue you in that it includes its fair share of less than impressive products. However, the relief bundle also includes a fair number of top-quality downloads - some of which ‘retail’ for more than $20 on their own. I was even nicely surprised to find several products in the bundle that were on my ‘wish list’ for the site.

Kudos to all involved - the web sites involved in the donations, the publishers who offered their wares and the gamers who ponied up. Great job, folks.

In GMT’s The Caucasus Campaign, I think it’s pretty clear that the Axis player faces a very tough task. The burden of playing the aggressor  is on the Axis, and they have to reach some very difficult objectives in order to win the game. Also, as often happens in East Front games, time is not on their side.

Are the game’s victory conditions balanced? Without a sampling of several score games played by experienced players to draw upon, that’s difficult to say. Early reports I’ve read from numerous playings (and my own first few plays) ended in more Soviet victories than Axis wins. But does that indicate a problem with play balance, or does it simply mean that the Axis player faces a higher learning curve?

In ferreting out the game’s balance, one issue to address is whether or not the various game mechanisms favor one side or the other - and whether or not the game system allows or inhibits historical outcomes.

In plainer English, what I mean is this: If you follow the rules, is it possible for you to play a game that broadly follows the historical model? I use the term “broadly” here because we are, after all, talking about a game - and from time to time a game has to abstract a few things. Still, it should be possible to closely approximate things like historical rates of advance or loss rates regardless of abstractions.

Three turns to Maikop and Krasnodar

I call it a “Minsk Test”. A good friend of mine enjoys playing, in particular, operational/strategic level games on the opening of the war in the East. In order to avoid wasting time on game systems that don’t “work” for him - and to save money - he has a fairly straightforward test that he applies to any game that covers the opening of Operation Barbarossa: Can the Germans capture Minsk in a week? If not, heave-ho over the side it goes.

It’s an interesting test in that it seems fairly simple. But in reality it’s a complex, subjective test of a number of important factors: Not just game systems like movement and combat, but also things like time scale, map scale and the modeling of operational fluidity.

Mind you, the test isn’t whether or not the Germans can ALWAYS capture Minsk in a week. Consistency isn’t the question, especially if you consider the historical result of the Germans reaching Minsk on June 28 to be among ‘best case’ results. The test is whether or not the game system allows for it to happen at all.

If a game flunks the Minsk Test, does that mean it’s crap? Not necessarily. Such tests are quite subjective.  But it can be a very valuable tool for assessing the suitability of a game’s systems and scale for the event it’s trying to model. Obviously, the ‘original’ Minsk Test puts games with a turn ’scale’ of longer than one week on shaky ground - but as long as the game can keep up with history, it can still pass the test.

[In the interests of full disclosure I'll note that my friend and I both believe a turn scale of 7-10 days is the most appropriate for big, East Front games. For quite some time my personal favorite in the Big East Front genre has been the Six Angles version of Mazahiro Yamazaki's "War for the Motherland", which features a sliding time scale that depends on the time year. The 'Americanized' version of the game, MMP's "Red Star Rising", is pretty good, too.]

So. Is there a Minsk Test that can be used to assess the way things work in The Caucasus Campaign? In a nutshell, yes.

In fact, there are two Minsk Tests. Either one will do. Historically, 1st Panzer Army captured Maikop on August 9 (Turn 3) while 17th Army took control of the Kuban crossings at Krasnodar on August 14 (Turn 3 again). 

Objectives nearer the start line don’t give a true measure of the system. You don’t have to be too sharp an Axis player, I think, to take Salsk on the first turn, for example. Can the Axis capture both Krasnodar and Maikop by Turn 3? Yes. But it’s better than that: If the Axis player wants to win the game, he NEEDS to have both objectives in hand by the end of turn 3.

Get a patrol on Mt. Elbrus by August 25, win a prize.

And that takes us full circle back to the issue of the Axis player’s learning curve.

Put simply, one of the important lessons to learn is that those powerful German mechanized divisions are NOT going to arrive at either Krasnodar or Maikop in the company of a neat, supportive line of happy and well-ordered infantry divisions. In order to achieve the early-game must-have objectives he needs for a shot at winning, an Axis player will have to put his mechanized units at some risk and race full-throttle for key points.

Of course, this means that the Axis is highly likely to lose a number of valuable mech steps that will take some time to replace. But the Axis really has only two choices here: 1) Go balls-out and hopefully reach critical deep locations with some under-strength divisions before the Soviets can build up their forces or 2) Reach those critical deep locations with lighter losses, but 1 or 2 turns after the Soviets have enough of a defense in place to kill all but a longshot chance of the Axis winning the game.

A second important lesson for the Axis player to learn: In the critical early phase through Turn 4, FEAR can slow you down more than the Soviet Army.  Most players familiar with any sort of East Front game fear step losses when they play as the Germans, and they especially fear panzer/mech step losses. As the man said: “And so it goes…” Managing fear and balancing risks is key to Axis success in this game.

Historically, the Germans made impressive territorial gains in the opening stages of their Caucasus Campaign. But recall that their forces were fairly threadbare by the time Hitler stuck his nose into things (and started shifting more resources into the theater). The Axis paid a high price for their territorial gains in the Caucasus. Any Axis player in The Caucasus Campaign will likely have the pleasure of the same (cardboard) experience.

In my distant and misspent youth, I was a lousy baseball player. An unfortunate circumstance, certainly, but it wasn’t anything that ever interfered with my love of the game.

(Then again, I suppose your passion for baseball is clearly unquenchable when you can claim to have personally witnessed 12 of the Braves’ losses during their miserable, 101-loss 1977 season…)

The sport itself is fascinating enough - the skills, strategies, personalities, history - but baseball’s place in the Circadian rhythms of the universe lend it a special significance. The arrival of baseball season - that long-awaited moment when pitchers and catchers report - signals both the demise of winter and the end of the ugly sports doldrums that strike our little, blue speck of a planet during those miserable months following the end of the regular football season.

APBA Baseball

A couple of weeks ago I was making my usual rounds on the Internet when it popped up right there on Tanga.com: A time-travel machine built of paper and cardboard - the APBA tabletop baseball game. And at half-price, too.

Ring up another sale, you merciless bastards.

It’s serious flashback material. Back in my college-johnny days I was an APBA maniac. Years (YEARS) before personal computers and the Internet arrived on the scene, I participated in multiple APBA play-by-mail leagues. Full-blown Master Game with scoresheets in triplicate insanity. Several 3-game series played out every weekend, details duly noted and everything mailed off to opponents scattered all over the US (and the ‘league office’) each weekend. Drafts, trades, budgets. All of the stuff that any decent computer baseball game can tick off in a matter of minutes these days.

I’m not exactly clear on when my big box o’ Master game stuff and 5 or 6 seasons of player cards disappeared from my game inventory, but during one of my moves the whole kit drifted off into the gaming aether.  Maybe when they released their first APBA Baseball for Windows? I don’t remember.

Regardless, it was a mistake. Yeah, sure, the PC game kept up with a lot of minutiae and eliminated a lot of bookkeeping - but it never seemed to generate the same quality game narrative I enjoyed with the tabletop version. I remember to this day some of those ancient PBM league games: Steve Carlton losing a no-hitter 1-0 on a sacrifice fly in the ninth; Jerry Royster scampering home on a short fly ball for a playoff win while I listened on the radio as the ‘real’ Jerry Royster powered the Braves to a loss against the damned Dodgers when he booted a routine groundball.

So here in the swamp is the starter version of the game again, ready to take a run at becoming a ‘family game’. That’s right. Lucky me. TRULY lucky me. I married a lifelong baseball fan.

The game’s format has changed a bit over the years. Years ago all of the play results were printed on over-sized boards. The basic and master games had separate sets of boards, just to increase the storage demands. The contemporary version of the game has all of the play results conveniently packaged on cardstock pages in the back of the spiral-bound rule book.

Now here’s a truly geeky observation: The new game set contains two dice: One large red 6-sider, one smaller white 6-sider. Back in the day I recall that the game shipped with dice that were the same size. One thing that is unchanged: The game still ships with that odd, thumb-sized, yellow plastic dice-rolling cup. Yeah. I’m THAT much of a geek.

Included is the 1953 ‘Fall Classic’ player card set. That’s 25-man rosters for both the ‘53 Yankees and the ‘53 Giants. My wife has already informed me that she absolutely will not play the Yankees, so I guess I’m stuck with Yogi and The Mick for now.

Play ball!

The first ‘new’ arrival of the New Year here in the swamp is the latest addition to LNL Publishing’s “Lock N Load” system, A Ring of Hills. I haven’t yet spent a ton of time with this one, but I have managed to poke around at it enough over the last week or so that I can offer up a few first impressions.

I’ve enjoyed playing the LNL game system since the release of the original “Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam” some years ago. It’s a bit more ‘cinematic’ than most squad-based tactical games, but it’s also comparitively lighter on rules and quicker to play. I placed my pre-order for Ring of Hills back in May, 2008 - so I’m quite pleased to see the thing finally land on the Big Table.

Map art comparison: Band of Heroes (top), A Ring of Hills

A brief caveat: A Ring of Hills (ROH) is NOT a complete game. It’s advertised as an ‘expansion pack’ for LNL: Band of Brothers and so it is. System markers and skill cards from Band of Brothers are required for play of ROH. The system ‘core’ bits in Forgotten Heroes (or Day of Heroes, for that matter) may also work, but since I own Band of Heroes I haven’t bothered to cross-check.

ROH takes the LNL system back into the territory I think it’s best suited to cover: ‘contemporary’ conflicts. Maybe it’s because the profusion of World War 2-era squad-based games invites too many comparisons or breeds too much familiarity, but to me the LNL system seems a better fit in the games set after 1945.  Nearly 30 years after the event the Falklands conflict is under-represented in board wargaming, and any game that competently addresses the topic automatically qualifies for a number of bonus points in my book.

The five geomorphic game boards are the same type of maps found in Band of Heroes - the notable exception being that each board has a central fold so that they fit in a standard sized game box. Graphically, the map art is a shade on the dark side - perhaps an effort to evoke the look and feel of the Falklands’ inhospitible quagmire of bogs, rocks and gorse. Something a little lighter might make terrain features easier to recognize, but with a few minutes’ study the dark tones don’t seem to inhibit play.

A Ring of Hills countersheet

Counter artwork is quite good and easily readable. I always enjoy seeing how a game system presents a ‘new’ setting or theater of operations. The Falklands conflict has been a long standing pet topic for me, so I was especially keen to see the UK and Argentine orders of battle get the Lock N Load treatment.

Anti-tank guided missiles make their debut in this module, in the form of the Milan system that UK troops used to good effect against Argentine fortified positions. Fixed-wing air support also appears in both OOBs: Harrier for the UK and the Pucara turbo-prop for the Argentines. The man-portable Blowpipe air defense missile puts in an appearance. Some new armored vehicles are also included: Argentine AML-90s, British Scorpions and Scimitars. There’s also an Argentine warship, ARA Guerrico (a French-built Type A69 corvette).

Some modern-ish goodies in the OOB

The module includes 6 pages of exclusive rules. As a warning to the unprepared, one of the special rules is “British Marksmanship”, which allows British Parachute and Marine units to roll an eight-sided die (d8) for their attacks instead of the usual d6. No d8 is included in the module, so players need to scare one of those up on their own.

There are 12 scenarios in the box, and they cover a broad range of the ground actions fought during the campaign. Some of the scenarios are rather large and feature the major fights, but there are also smaller scenarios that deal with interesting, lesser-known engagements like Top Malo House and the Argentine landing on South Georgia Island (during which the aforementioned Argentine corvette can act as a magnet for British ‘Carl Gustav’ rockets).

Overall, it looks like a well-done package. It will hit the Big Table as soon as there’s an opening in the schedule.

OK, how weird is this? With all of the new - and sometimes not-so-new - wargames sitting unplayed in the game closet, all of the sudden I’m having flashbacks from the Wayback Machine. It’s one of those middle-age things, isn’t it? I’m fiddling around with something on the Big Table, or maybe just starting to read the rules to a new game, when I am irresistibly seized with the urge to pull down and paw through one of my golden oldies.

Mind you, I am NOT a hoarder. I’m not even much of a ‘collector’. My game closet may still have space for the first two wargames I ever owned, but many of my other early game acquisitions moved out long ago.

Some months back I blogged a little about the second wargame I purchased, the SPI flat-pack “Barbarossa”. Today I’d like to wax all poetical about my first wargame, “Tank!”, which is an SPI flatpack from back in the mid-70s.

“Tank!”, designed by Jim Dunnigan, was originally published as a magazine game in issue 44 of Strategy & Tactics. The flat-pack version I purchased was published a bit later and included expanded rules and additional counters.

It’s funny how some things stick in your memory. I was barely aware of the existence of things called “wargames” when I spotted the Tank! flat-pack sitting on a bottom shelf with the history titles at a Waldenbooks store in the Altamonte Mall. I was instantly smitten. I couldn’t fork over my $7 fast enough and get the heck out of there. Whatever book I had been hunting was immediately forgotten. In the space of just a few minutes I became a life-long wargaming addict.

I’m surprised mall security didn’t lock me up for vagrancy. I sat in my trusty Volkswagen Squareback out in the mall parking lot and read every last scrap of the rules - the ‘basic’ rules folder and the ‘advanced’ booklet. When did they invent cool games like this? What had I been missing? How many more were there?

The generic map for Tank

Subscriptions to magazines like S&T and Moves were still in the future and $7 spare cash was tricky to come by in those days, so every game I bought got an extensive workout. I conned like-minded buddies into playing. I scribbled pages of notes and home-brew variants. The whole wargame concept was truly mind-blowing. I considered it one of the greatest creative achievements to ever roll off of a printing press, only one small step below the full-color Playboy centerfold in the hierarchy of print media wonders.

The main countersheet for Tank. The expansion added another small sheet.

With the advantage of 35 years of hindsight (and a few advances in the art of game design), sure, some of the game’s mechanisms seem a bit wonky. The old ‘Panic’ rules were an early attempt to introduce some chaos into game-play. ‘Panic’ was fumbly and gamey, but at least somebody was trying. And, as game designers have subsequently learned, no matter how you try to bring a sense of the chaotic battlefield into a game, many gamers are NEVER going to like any game that takes even one, single, well-planned movement point out of their absolute control.

Simultaneous movement was featured in a number of 70s-era SPI games, including Tank!. That could have worked out better, too. Looking at my old notes, I guess we home-brewed something akin to alternating activations pretty quickly. I also still have a couple of the old SPI ‘Si-Move’ pads up in the closet somewhere.

Tank! was a pretty ambitious design, all things considered. It tried to span the breadth of armored warfare systems across a 40-year period of intense technological change. It didn’t quite get everything right, but back in the day I thought it was definitely ‘in the neighborhood’ of what it set out to accomplish. It was also a great platform for home-brew tweaks. A few hundred hours of entertainment later, that $7 investment sure seems like a good deal.

I’m going to write this all up as a learning experience.

It’s not that I haven’t been in cold weather before. It’s that I haven’t had to do so much stuff in the middle of cold weather.

When I was a kid up in Kentucky (we moved to Florida when I was 10), icy winter weather was a mindless novelty. It was an adventure. I had a lot more fun with the frozen pipes, icy driveways and big piles of snow than my parents did.

Some years later, when I was in college at UGA, cold weather was still an adventure. All I had to manage was a walk to class. When a serious ice storm took down power lines all around Athens, it wasn’t anything to be concerned about - rather, it was an opportunity to see if there were any young ladies around who might need some help keeping warm in the evening.

In my distant and misspent youth, romps around high altitudes, snow fields and glaciers in places like Alaska, Montana and Colorado were just temporary visits to frozen wastelands. A few days (or weeks) of wicked low temperatures and it was back to summer in Florida and Georiga.

When the low temperatures visit the usually steamy swamp, however, it’s a bit different. It’s still an adventure of sorts - just an adventure that could end with some expensive repairs to cracked water pipes, water pumps and screened enclosures.

This morning when I cranked my trusty truck to let it warm up for the trip in to the Monday morning school drop-off and then work, the temperature sensor (which I have now nicknamed “Sherlock”) alternated between flashing “17″ and “ICE”. In the process of getting the road show rolling, I learned a few things:

1. Electric garage door openers will indeed freeze. But a few good pokes with a hoe-handle will get them in the mood again.

2. When it gets really, really cold, sometimes a truck tire will go nearly flat for no good reason.

3. Air compressors are argumentative little bastards when it’s 17 degrees.

4. The moisture that escapes from a tire air valve can freeze instantly when it’s cold enough. This not only renders an air pressure gauge completely usesless; it can also jam the air valve open and let out ALL of the air in the tire.

5. As you watch all of the air hiss out through a frozen tire valve, you can create an amazing number of entertaining phrases out of words with no more than four letters.

6. The electric garage door opener, the power outlets in my garage workshop and our heat pump were all wired through the same circuit breaker by the dumbass who built our house.

7. Spicing up your entertaining phrases with 9- and 12-letter words can actually help you keep warmer while you reset circuit breakers, track down power outlets on the external GFCI loop and inflate flat tires.

8. With the truck engine running, the defroster blowing full speed and the door closed, it’s impossible for a four-year-old in the back of my truck cab to hear me screaming entertaining phrases at the top of my lungs. I hope.

9. Even after all of this, I still managed to get to work before two-thirds of our staff. So I am not the biggest cheechako in the bunch.