When I was a kid growing up in Clermont, one of our next-door neighbors had a fallout shelter on his property. This was circa 1969 and a lot of the nuke scare had passed, so the thing may well have been stuffed full of empty beer bottles — but still, there it was right in his front yard: A little reminder of the Great Game that was playing out on the global field between ourselves and our Soviet buddies sitting just on the far side of the polar ice cap.

These days it’s hard to imagine growing up in a world that was so sanguine about the probability of nuclear warfare. Clermont was dotted with family-sized fallout shelters. Some of the local public facilities like the library, city auditorium and the high school gym were still labelled with the appropriate Civil Defense signage. Most of the adults I grew up around clearly remembered that Florida wasn’t exactly Fun Central during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We were beyond the era of “duck and cover” drills in school, but not by much. The high schools still taught a (mandatory) class called “Americanism Versus Communism”. Leonid Brezhnev was the bogeyman on the nightly news; less entertaining than Nikita Kruschev but also somewhat more stable, albeit in an under-handed, bogeyman sort of way.

The Cold War was in full swing and by my understanding at the time, the Soviets made great antagonists. Their alphabet was indecipherable and their spoken language sounded just plain weird. They had Siberia, T-62 tanks, borscht and advisors helping shoot down American aircraft in Vietnam. Bad. Guys.

Being a kid, of course, it’s not exactly like I walked around all day scanning the skies for the tell-tale contrails of approaching atomic doom. Nuclear devastation was a fairly remote concept. During a visit with one of my uncles who was a missile silo commander at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, I remember tooling around with him in one of their training simulators — completely oblivious to what I was ’simulating’ when I turned my launch key at the end of our countdown. For me, it was just a very cool way to play at launching rockets.

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, I’m really happy that my uncle wasted all of those taxpayer dollars and never had to do his job outside of a simulator.

In my last game-related post, I took a quick look at the mechanism for handling artillery fire in Avalanche Press’ new-ish Infantry Attacks: August 1914. It’s a very rigid system that requires pre-game plotting for every fire ‘module’ for every turn of the game. The design goal is laudable — but the implementation leaves something to be desired.

If nothing else, the physical process of plotting an impact hex for every fire for each turn of the game can be enough to drive a man to strong drink. There are some long scenarios in the package — we’re talking day-long, regimental-size engagements — and artillery is usually plentiful.

When things go off the rails, cancelling a large group of plots certainly conveys some small fraction of the infantry commander’s frustration — but I know lots of gamers who will probably only ‘enjoy’ wasting an hour of pre-game plotting once or twice before they decide to find another game to play.

Jeux Grenier Games’ “In The Trenches” series has been around a bit longer than Infantry Attacks (maybe a year’s head start), and that system’s treatment of artillery tilts in the opposite direction.

In The Trenches: Through Mud and Blood

As I’ve noted previously, In The Trenches is more of a ‘firefight’ scale game than a ‘battle’ game. At 100m per hex and 5 minutes per turn, it slices out bits of larger engagements for players to game. The game focuses on the action after opposing forces have closed to within small arms range, so artillery plays something of a lesser role. Nevertheless, artillery still consumes a decent chunk of the rule book and it still can cause a significant amount of casualties.

In The Trenches, among other things, introduces artillery fire ‘patterns’ into the mix. Your batteries can fire ‘drumfire’ (one hex), ‘barrage’ (a concentric 7-hex pattern) or ‘hurricane’ (a linear 7-hex pattern). There were lots of elegant artillery theories running around during the Great War, so the patterns are an interesting bit of period ‘feel’.

So far, so good. But the game comes off the rails a bit with regards to how all of that fire power actually gets placed on the game board.

There’s no plotting. Rather, a player has three target markers for each firing battery. On the first turn of the process, all three markers are placed on possible target hexes. Two of the markers are ‘dummies’ — only one of them actually designates the ‘real’ target. On the second turn of the process there’s a short scatter routine and then the fire mission impacts with its assigned pattern.

Since the scenarios begin at fairly close range, there isn’t much artillery to sling around in any given scenario. Which is a good thing, because the fires are far too flexible. A 5-minute call-for-fire response wasn’t all that common in 1940, never mind 1916 or 1918. Hurricane fires (’curtain barrages’ to you old-school types) in particular took extensive (as in hours-long) planning, registration and coordination. They were hardly a fire mission that could be laid on to any target in the field on five minute’s notice.

The use of a trio of ‘possible’ target markers also brings into play something of an artillery “shell game” that has a bit of a gamey feel to it. The placement of dummy target markers constitutes a bluff that can be used to influence an opponent’s actions. Does that part of the call-for-fire process have any sort of real-world analog?  Assuming, of course, that “call-for-fire” even has a place at all in a game covering the Great War.

On the positive side, in order to account for the larger, more massive bombardments that often preceded Great War attacks (or trench raids, for that matter), In The Trenches also utilizes extensive ‘pre-game’ artillery fires in some scenarios. Typically the opposing sides set up, and then the attacking player engages in some pre-game carnage as outlined in the Scenario Special Rules. Given the ‘firefight’ scope of In The Trenches, I find this particular mechanism works quite well.

So: We’ve got two game systems covering tactical combat in the Great War, neither one of which quite scores a direct hit with its artillery rules. Infantry Attacks is too rigid and uses a pre-plotting process that can be downright mind-numbing in bigger scenarios. In The Trenches features a system that’s too flexible — probably even too flexible for a World War 2 tactical game. And it can turn a bit gamey in the use of the trio of target markers.

Neither game is entirely ruined by their artillery problems. Infantry Attacks can get a bit tedious when a lot of big guns are involved, but all of the planning and plotting does force a frustrating Great War ‘feel’ on the game. In The Trenches downplays artillery to an extent, so the ‘gamey’ aspects don’t crop up as often as they could were the game set at a higher scale.

In both cases, then, it’s close, but no cigar.

My son Juan Carlos encounters a Mayan shaman in Chichicastenango.

Here in These United States of the 21st century we’re pretty proud of our technological progress, our online connected-ness and our tweet-every-time-we-fart social media.  We invented the Internet, dammit, and look how cool it’s making us. Or so the theory goes.

But I’m working on a little theory of my own here, so bear with me. I’m thinking that, contrary to current cultural myth, the Internet is an abject failure in communications. Rather than taking advantage of our new digital tools to expand the horizons of our knowledge and improve our understanding of the world, we’re instead using them to draw inward on ourselves and create self-centered villages of pseudo-information and half-truths.

It’s not a big surprise. Television — another revolutionary medium pioneered here in the USA — was also a failure. TV placed in our hands the ability to both see and hear the world as experienced by others, but instead we used it primarily to recycle bathroom humor and watch Monday Night Football.

I got to thinking about this the other day after showing around my workplace some photos from my family’s just-completed vacation to Guatemala. The general theme of my co-workers’ comments was basically “Wow, that’s so strange. I can’t imagine living in a place like that. It looks like another planet.”

Well, no. It’s OUR planet. In fact, more of our planet “looks” like Chichicastenango than it “looks” like the suburban US. How is it possible, in this era of lightspeed social networking, that so many people can have such a narrow worldview?

Simple, really. Just consider for a moment the typical, modern-day social media experience. Who do you interact with most frequently on services like Facebook and Twitter? Are they strangers, foreigners, people who see the world differently and who challenge your understandings and beliefs? Or are they people you know, like-thinkers who share similar worldviews and who generally serve to confirm the beliefs you choose to hold? Do you use social media to reach out curiously to the wide-wide world, or to create a tribal ‘orbit’ that circles inward upon itself?

Obviously, I’ve got a strong opinion on the topic. Let me be clear: I despise incuriosity.

[Note: I don't use the word "despise" frequently, and I intend it here with all of its old-fashioned vitriol and malice.]

The way I see it, curiosity is THE driving force in the development of humankind.  The incurious stunt our progress, crush our capacity for growth, diminish our acquistion of new knowledge, destroy creativity and just generally screw things up. What saddens me most is the historical example — repeated frequently — that demonstrates each time we create new tools which carry the promise of exponential human growth, we instead use them to turn more tightly in upon ourselves and erase from our view everything that isn’t us.

So how did a short vacation to Guatemala turn into a rant against vapid anti-intellectualism? That’s easy. A properly-executed vacation is a big pull on the flush handle of my mental toilet. All of the crap goes glug-glug-glug down the drain, to be replaced by a new bowl full of sparkling, fresh thoughts.

Now, back on topic. Since I’m taking a dim view of collective curiosity today, I’ll further theorize that our Internet use has grown so quickly — and the formerly ‘traditional’ media have collapsed so rapidly — primarily because media like television and newspapers didn’t fail fast enough to suit us.

What the explosive growth of blogs and agenda-driven ‘news’ websites tells me is that we like our information sources fragmented and unregulated, enabling us to pick and choose those sources that most closely fit our comfort zones. With first cable, and then satellite, television tried to fragment into this same sort of universe of tightly self-centered information galaxies — but compared to the costs of running a website, TV production is vastly more expensive so the effort produced only half-assed results.

But now with the Internet we can quickly and easily get the whole ass. People who get their news from parroted headlines on Facebook and re-tweets on Twitter can get just about any version of the ‘truth’ that they want: Obama started the war in Iraq, trickle-down economic theory really works, the Earth is flat.

Take your pick. And why not? Just about everybody else does.

Little wonder then that artillery plays an important role in two recent wargames that cover tactical combat in the Great War: Infantry Attacks, published by Avalanche Press, and Through Mud and Blood, the third installment of the In The Trenches series published by Jeux Grenier Games.

The games operate at different scales, so it’s no surprise that each treats artillery differently. They’re also set during different periods of the war. Infantry Attacks: August 1914 (as the title implies) focuses on the earliest stage of the Great War, specifically on the opening battles of the war in the East. Through Mud and Blood presents a number of ‘firefight’ scale actions set in various theaters and during different periods — although primarily the later war.

What is surprising, to me at least, is that neither game seems to get artillery quite ‘right’. In both cases I think I see what the designers are trying to do. Unfortunately, both seem to fall a bit short of the mark.

[As a brief caveat, please note that I claim to be neither a professional historian nor a trained historical researcher. I am, however, the grandson of a World War I infantryman and I've widely read and studied the subject for close to 40 years. In my distant and misspent youth I was privileged to sit many hours listening to my grandfather talk about his service in The Great War. Not that that gives me any extraordinary insight into the techncial aspects of artillery, but it did spark in me a beyond-ordinary interest in All Things Great War.]

Infantry Attacks presents artillery as a completely inflexible combat arm. Off-board artillery (my main focus here) is allocated in discrete firing concentrations of bombardment strength points that represent batteries/battalions of various calibers. Each player then lists his available concentrations on a roster sheet and then proceeds to make a turn-by-turn plot of the hexes each concentration will target. Artillery affects only the hex it impacts. ‘Friendly fire’ casualties are possible if friendly forces are adjacent to the impact hex, and there is also a minimalist scatter routine (as in the PanzerGrenadier series).

A player can cancel the fire plot for a given concentration at any time — but once a fire plot is cancelled, that particular artillery concentration can’t fire for the rest of the scenario. On-map artillery batteries can fire at whatever they can spot, and they can also move. But once they’ve moved, they can’t fire for the rest of the scenario, either.

I think I understand the goal of the mechanism. Artillery wasn’t very flexible in 1914, and there were frequent instances of fires shifting to the wrong places at the wrong times or not shifting at all. The mechanism in Infantry Attacks encourages careful planning (especially on the attack) and a scrupulous adherence to the pre-planned schedule.

Historically, even in 1914, artillery wasn’t completely inflexible. Most nations made some sort of attempt to put  tools in the hands of the infantry that they could use to communicate with the artillery. Sometimes communications worked in a limited fashion; often it did not work at all. The relationship between infantry and their artillery in 1914 wasn’t exactly a happy one.

For the wargamer, the question is whether or not Infantry Attacks’ fire plotting mechanism is an acceptable trade-off between process and effect. A system that used a couple of tables and a few dice rolls to attempt communications might have a better ‘feel’ to it - but such a system would need to include target reference points and possible pre-plotted fires for each concentration. ‘Real life’ artillery fire planning can be pretty complicated. So would the results, essentially, be the same — only for a lot more work and dice-rolling? And would such a mechanism increase the complexity of the rules?

I’ve only managed to get in a few plays of Infantry Attacks since its arrival here in the swamp. While the artillery mechanism feels very limiting and is at time frustrating to deal with, it occurs to me that the strict limits on how artillery can respond to the changing battlefield is one of the fundamental differences between Infantry Attacks and its parent system, PanzerGrenadier.

The games use the same core game mechanisms to simulate two very different types of warfare. At first encounter, I think a lot of players probably wonder how the same system can accommodate both ’set piece’ infantry warfare and World War II’s mobile warfare. It occurs to me that one of the key differences lies with the artillery.

Since this subject is running a bit long, I’ll pick up the tale of the “In The Trenches” system in my next blog post.

I love visiting KSC and environs because I grew up during the Great Space Race and it reminds me of all the amazing things our country did when I was a youngster. I hate visiting KSC and environs because it hits me in the face with the fact that we’re not doing those amazing things anymore.

One of the places my wife wanted us to visit was Space View Park in downtown Titusville. She stumbled onto the place by accident on the morning of the last Atlantis launch when she took Juan Carlos over to see the thing go up. Even devoid of the thousands of people who jammed the place on launch day it’s an interesting little slice of history.

I’d never been to the park before. It’s a lot smaller than I thought from watching the video she shot during the launch. It’s a long, thin strip of land that runs from the north side of town out to the coast. Viewed from the town side, it points directly at the distant Launch Complex 39 and the VAB. The neatly-kept walkway is populated with various memorials to America’s astronauts and space missions, including a very nice memorial to the Gemini program just yards from the sea shore.

On the day of Atlantis’ launch, it was packed with thousands of people who had come down to the coast to watch one of America’s final shuttle launches. Last Saturday, there were six people at the park: Four members of my family and two drunks trying to bum lights for their smokes from the shade of a picnic shelter. Three more drunks were fishing from the far end of the pier at nearby Veterans Park (which includes the Project Mercury memorial) until one of them toppled into the ocean.

That sort of sums up America’s interest in space exploration and science very neatly, doesn’t it? When something ‘big’ is happening, tens of thousands turn up. The rest of the time it’s a neatly-kept facade that looks a little run down but still gets a lot of respect from a few Average Joes who remember better days — even though the people really in charge are basically a bunch of drunks lolling around cussing and falling into the smelly, mucky coastal flats.

Of course, we are the Nation of Short Attention Spans. Hundreds of millions watched Apollo 11. Hundreds of thousands watched Apollo 12. The TV networks cancelled the prime-time broadcast from Apollo 13.

If you paid attention to the Great Space Race back in the 60s and 70s, then you remember the vision promoted by all of the Big Corporate Space Vendors. There were books, fliers, pamphlets, film shorts and major motion pictures stuffed with space stations, moon shuttles, hydroponic domes and moon bases. Thousands of Average Joes living and working in space and on the moon, using science and technology to build a better world.

‘They’ promised us moonbases and what we got instead was a flock of dithering political hacks who can’t even pronouce “ineptitude”, let alone spell it.

But I digress.

Even when it wasn’t beat to crap by major road construction, downtown Titusville was getting a bit dusty and seedy. Saturday afternoon downtown was very quiet — no foot traffic, only a few optimistic businesses open and most of the place looking like it had just received a fresh blast from the sugar sand cannon. So much for Spaceport America.

Across the bridge and on into the space center, things are only a little better. The Visitors Center has some great ‘content’ — don’t get me wrong — but a bunch of it isn’t quite up on current events. There’s a lot of ‘flying Constellation back to the moon” action going on. Understandable, to an extent, but even that’s a bit aggravating because I was never a big fan of the space program reaching for something it’s already grasped.

The Astronaut Hall of Fame is an interesting mix of Space Memorial and Science Museum. Or at least it used to be. On this visit I couldn’t help but notice that more than half the ’simulators’ had fallen into disrepair and no longer worked and that one of the main theaters was suffering an air conditioning failure. Most of the visitors in the place were foreign tourists, so I  wondered what they thought about the current state of America’s space program.

It also didn’t escape my notice that the indoor gun range at the Police Hall of Fame across the street had about three times as many ‘customers’ as the Astronaut Hall of Fame. It has a cool armored car parked out front, though.