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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.

I live in a Florida swamp for a number of reasons. Snow is not one of those reasons.

Early this morning, a dusting of snow and other frozen crud hit my swamp. I would like to call this to the attention of Homeland Security and the defense establishment because surely it’s the hostile act of some foreign power. It could not be a purely natural occurrence. Some evil, extra-territorial scientific genius must be behind the whole thing.

Below is a photo of the front of my truck, taken this morning. That is snow. SNOW, Gen. Schwartz, and as an American taxpayer I expect you and your Air Force boyz to solve this problem immediately. Russians? Space aliens? Norwegians? I don’t care who’s behind this - I want you to find them and .. deal.. with them.

Winter can be over now. Is it June yet?

Snow on my truck. In Florida. Damn.

It’s received wisdom in the sales game that if you want to accomplish something tangible, you need to engage in a bit of goal-setting. Stuff like “I want to make enough on commissions this month to buy that new match grade M1911A” or (in this economy, anyway) “I want to sell enough this month to keep my friggin’ job.”

Frankly, people who engage in setting up high-value targets as their economic goals usually scare the heck out of me. I understand that achieving lofty financial goals can bring a certain sense of security and other types of satisfaction, but I guess my priorities have always been sort of screwed up. Among the three Big F’s of goal-setting - Family, Faith, Finances - “finances” ranks third. That hasn’t always been the case, mind you but, fortunately, we all get to learn a few things along the road to middle age.

The other day, after reading one or another of those inanely harmless ’sales motivation’ e-newsletters with which I get regularly spammed, it popped into my head that it might be of some benefit to engage in a bit of wargame goal-setting. And what better time to set some gaming goals than the first of a new year?

In my last post, I mildly lamented the mismatch between the number of games I buy each year and the number of games I seriously play and blog about. I have no illusions that I’ll reverse that ratio this year. But what I’d like to do is hold my own feet to the fire a little by setting out a list of games that I want to give some blog-love at some point in the coming 12 months.

These are games that I already own, but they fall into that group that I either haven’t played much - or haven’t played at all. They look good. I want to get into them. I imagine they’ll be quite entertaining. But for some reason I’ve barely touched any of them. Now I’m hoping that if I set them up as goals - right here in bloggy print - maybe I’ll be too embarrassed not to play them before the end of the year.

Considering that I only blogged about 7 or so games last year, it’s an ambitious list. But here they are, each with a little commentary.

The Caucasus Campaign (GMT) - I started on this one last month, but the holidays rudely interrupted all activity (except gift wrapping/box stacking) on the Big Table. It will get the attention it deserves before I move along to anything else.

Panzerblitz: Hill of Death (MMP) - Purchased as a pre-order from the publisher, this one has been on the ‘play real soon’ shelf since its arrival. I don’t know why it keeps getting pushed back by other arrivals. It looks really good. I even have the Carentan module from the Operations special issue. I guess I just haven’t been in a ‘platoon’ mood for a while.

Baltic Gap (MMP) - I generally enjoy OCS games very much. I followed all of John Kisner’s design/development commentary on CSW. I bought it right after it was released. I had an intense 10 days or so of interest in it and farted around with it some. Then it went back in the box and onto the same shelf as Panzerblitz. And there it sits. I dunno why.

Asia Engulfed (GMT) - Europe Engulfed is one of my favorite ’strategic’ games. I was so anxious to see Asia Engulfed that I pre-ordered it. Why it is in the Game Closet without the first sticker going on the first block defies all logic.

SCS: Bastogne (MMP) - Don’t get me started. I feel really stupid that I haven’t done anything with this game since it arrived here in the swamp. I think the SCS system works very well at the scale presented in Bastogne. It reminds me a lot of one of my favorite SCS games, Fallschirmjaeger. Which, of course, I sold off a couple of years ago in a moment of inexplicable insanity. Maybe that’s why I haven’t played it - it reminds me that I’m half-wit.  Sometimes I’m such a moron.

John Prados’ Third Reich (APL) - This game isn’t even close to new, but I’m including it here for several reasons. While I have poked at it once or twice, I’ve never given it a total workout. And I haven’t revisited this game since I bought the ‘deluxe’ map for it. Neither have I picked it up again since the rulebook update. It’s been a long time, but I remember that I sort of liked the buy-n-pull-chits activation mechanism - so I want to give it another shot this year.

Of course, there will be ‘new’ game arrivals in the months ahead as well. Could I somehow, possibly, manage to double the number of games I blog about in the course of a year?

Probably not, but it will be fun to try.

I’m not a big fan of writing year-in-review stuff. Back in my newspaper days, for example, I hated with blind passion our annual run of “Top National Stories”, “Top World Stories”, Top Sports Stories” or whatever for the year. Junk like that is an absolute waste of soy-based ink. The dark secret to their appearance, in case you never figured it out, is that it’s easy to put together “Top Story” pages many days in advance. And the more pages you can put together in advance, the fewer people you have to pay to work the holdiay.

Is this the time of year when a wargame blogger ought to write “My favorite games of the year”? I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as it doesn’t make the claim “best game of the year”, then no tall tales are being told. “Best game of the year”, on its face, is a ridiculous claim - unless, of course, some writer somewhere has actually had the time and resources to play every game published in the past 12 months.

Just for the record, when I blog about wargames I am not pretending in anyway that this is “wargame review” blog. I may from time to time post pieces that function as game reviews, but I am not attempting to present a broad view of the hobby. I don’t blog about every game I buy. Real-world time constraints have a way of intruding into Blog Universe, so I usually only blog about games I enjoy. Even then, not every game that I’ve played and enjoyed over the last 12 months has gotten a blog mention.

For the record, in the past year I’ve written about a scant handful of wargames: Combat Commander: Pacific, Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear, Blood and Bridges, SWWAS Leyte Gulf, Fields of Fire, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Where There is Discord and The Caucasus Campaign. As my wife will grumpily attest, those are neither the only games I’ve bought this year, nor the only games I’ve played.

Some games I’ve bought, played and found rather uninteresting - or, at the least, not very blog-worthy. Some games I probably meant to blog about, but those blog plans got tossed into the paving machine for the road to hell along with numerous other good intentions.

As a quick note, I usually don’t buy games that out-and-out suck. I keep pre-orders from various publishers limited, and I try to direct my limited hobby budget into games that sound both interesting and competently produced. I am also not a “completist” with regards to the series-based games I enjoy. If a series game doesn’t sound particularly interesting on its own merits, I’m not going to waste money on it simply to have the “latest edition” of something in my closet.

Other games I’ve bought I simply haven’t had time to get onto the Big Table - usually due to their size, complexity, playing time or all of the above. In the coming year, for example, I’d like to able to devote some time to OCS: Baltic Gap  - which taunts me viciously every time I open my game closet door. Ditto SWWAS: Arctic Convoys. It’s been in the closet even longer - but it’s tough to find space and time for a 3-map game these days.

As we prepare to plunge into a new year, I’d also like to point out that I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. So it’s safe to say that the publishing industry is economically safe from anything along the lines of “Next year, I resolve to play more games than I buy.”

Play more games than I buy? Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. Hahahahahahahahaha. Not a snowball’s chance of THAT, my friends.

Happy New Year.