So. How does this Space Infantry thing actually play? With a little luck and self-discipline, over the next few blog posts I’m going to write up a serialized After Action Report of a real, live game. A little creative license may be involved in some of the reporting — the goal being entertainment, after all — but the entire narrative will be generated by in-game actions.
Seriously, if a science-fiction game can’t get your imagination going, somebody needs to check your pulse.
Here’s the setup.
Cybers. I hate these guys.
This is the third scenario in a campaign game. In the SI rulebook, it’s the first campaign, “Jovvian War Prelude,” which comprises both surface and hive missions. I have yet to play the second campaign, which is all hive missions. The Advanced rules are in play, but I’m not using any of the Optionals.
With a couple of combat missions already under their belts, our valiant squaddies have accumulated some experience. Both Fire Teams, Assault Team A and the Close Combat grunt have all acquired Veteran status. They’ve also collected Talents, as has the Squad Leader.
As I’ll get to in the next blog post, one of the Veteran units, Fire Team A with its “Eagle Eye” Talent, is staying behind on this mission. Sarge has decided to drag along a Shotgunner for some extra close-range firepower this time out.
The mission map is Surface 2, a desert area the squad must traverse in their Pilum APC in order to find and rescue some scientists who are hiding out in widely separated cave complexes. The desert is populated by giant sand worms with bad attitudes, and the enemy selected for the mission is the Cybers — heavily armored robots that favor ranged fire attacks.
Looks like our squaddies have their work cut out for them.
OK. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m really bad about sticking to my plans.
According to my grand vision around January 1, this was supposed to be Opportunity Fire’s “year of the Pacific.” My plan was to hammer on the games I’ve got in the Game Closet that cover World War II’s PTO.
Oh. Ooops. Pffft. Never mind. Rather, this is My Year of Blogging Horribly. All I’m going to say about that is “Stuff happens.”
Let’s just say right now, I’m spaced out. There weren’t many game arrivals over the summer. The few items that did manage to land on my doorstep here in the swamp include GMT’s new “Space Empires” and Lock N Load’s “Space Infantry.” The latter item is currently getting a workout on the Big Table.
Space Infantry in action on the Big Table.
Designed by Gottardo Zancani, Space Infantry is a clever solitaire game of combat on the far-flung worlds of the future. The player takes on the role of squad leader. Your job is to select a group of combat teams and specialists, then lead them into battle.
The game uses random number chits, rather than dice, to determine the results of various actions. The chits probably wear out more quickly than dice (doh!), but they do a better job of controlling probability distribution in the context of the game. Their use also speeds up game play quite a bit. Instead of making a lengthy series of dice rolls (and recording the results), you typically draw all of the chits for the same type of action for all units in play at the same time.
Combat results, for example, are based on a comparison between a unit’s relevant skill (Fire or Melee) and a random number (which represents “Action Points”). Divide the Action Points by the skill, drop fractions, and the result is the number of successes the unit scores. In a combat phase, you draw random numbers for all of the units involved — on both sides — in the same sequence. Quick and easy.
Graphically, Space Infantry is produced to Lock N Load’s typically high production standards. Artwork is colorful and crisp, and the die-cutting is very clean. Most of the counters are 5/8-inch, but a few — including the angry-looking squad counters — are 1-inch. Surface mission maps are 8 1/2 by 11 inches and use a point-to-point design. “Hive” mission map tiles measure 3 7/8 inches square and are printed on the same stock as the game’s cards.
The future is bald, brothers!
The game cards, which carry information on squad personnel, are neatly done and feature little portraits of your troops. Those cards, by the way, put a song in my heart. Every face in every portrait is topped by a perfectly clean, hairless pate. That’s right: In the grim darkness of the future, there is only … BALD. That rawks.
Space Infantry isn’t a “roll-and-cuss” type of solitaire game; it has a lot more player input than many solo designs I’ve played. In the style pioneered by Dan Verssen’s “Leader” series of solitaire games, task organization — selecting the units and resources for each mission — plays an extremely important role in your ability to succeed.
Each mission map features different terrain types and technical challenges. Each type of enemy (there are six) has its own strengths and weaknesses. Correctly customizing your squad to meet each mission’s specific requirements is the heart of the game.
You assemble a squad by “buying” component teams with squad points. The teams typically represent one or two grunts, or a single specialist — and you have a range of different team types to choose from. You also get to load up your squad with an array of items like grenades, extra ammo, demo charges and medical kits.
There are both basic and advanced sections in the rulebook. The advanced rules are worth incorporating into play as soon as possible because they add considerable depth to combat resolution. The rules for the campaign games — two campaigns are included — add in an experience system that greatly enhances the metagame of task organization and personnel management.
The rules, including campaign rules and optionals, run to only 21 pages. You can play stand-alone surface missions with just the basic rules, which end on page 11.
It’s funny the stuff you learn if you go poking your nose into big, unmarked tents at Kennedy Space Center.
For our official Touristy Moment during a little camping trip over to the Space Coast, we decided to pay a visit to KSC yesterday. The weather was horrible, but it would be our last chance ever to see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad. So off we went.
Florida summer squalls never last very long, right? Or so we figured. I dropped the family off at the entrance in a thundering downpour, parked the truck, snugged into my big poncho and waded off across the flooded parking lot.
It rained pretty much all day, although the downpour slackened to a drizzle after 30 minutes or so.
Truthfully, the gray skies and morose drizzle sort of seemed to fit the occasion. Nine days until the end of the space shuttle program. Nine days until the end of America’s manned space program, with nothing much else on the horizon. For a space geek like me, that’s pretty depressing.
We rode a tour bus out to Launch Complex 39 and climbed the observation gantry. A few miles away, on Pad 39B, sat Endeavour — the “full stack” as they call it. Ready for STS-135, the mission being billed as “The Grand Finale.” Later, in the Space Shop, I eyed a couple of different t-shirts with “The Grand Finale” logo on them, but the idea of celebrating the end of the manned space flight progam just seemed too depressing to me. Instead, I bought a more defiant shirt with “I NEED MY SPACE!” splashed across the back.
“I hope we’re not about to enter another run like we had in the late 70s, after Apollo ended,” I said to my wife. We were sitting under cover at the Visitor Center playground, while Junior Crazy Boy bounced around and whooped it up.
“What’s that?” the Missus asked.
“You know, where we stick our heads up our butts because we’re feeling sorry for ourselves. We stop exploring. Stop wondering. Science goes into neutral.”
“No,” she pointed past my shoulder. “What’s THAT?”
I turned around. There, just behind the playground, sat a big tent. It was one of those extra-large tents with fancy windows, like caterers put up at outdoor wedding receptions and charity auctions.
“I dunno,” I said. “Looks like there’s something in there, though. A truck or something.”
“Go see what it is,” came my orders from HQ.
So I walked over and stuck my head in. Inside stood a couple of “prime contractor” engineering-types, wearing “prime contractor” polo shirts. They were standing beside a large-ish cradle truck that supported a big damned space capsule. It looked something like the recently scuttled Orion capsule, but a bit different. More angular.
“Come on in,” one of them said.
As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that the capsule was accompanied by a bunch of stand-up banners — you know, the type of promotional stuff Prime Contractors like to put up at trade shows. It was a prototype MPCV. If you haven’t been keeping up with current events, that’s this thing:
This particular capsule had one of the hull sections replaced with plexiglass. Inside, the thing was packed with gadgets — computers, sensors, wires, connectors.
“It’s actually flown,” one of the engineers informed me. “We used this one for the first live test of the new launch abort system last month.”
OK. That would be this test:
“I was lucky enough to be in the control room for the test,” the engineer continued. “We’re a little late getting the capsule here because we recovered it in good enough shape that we thought about re-using it.”
I told him that I thought it was too bad they didn’t have a new booster lined up for the system.
“Well, we’ve got a full test flight scheduled next year on a Delta IV Heavy,” he replied. “The new booster we’re developing for it is scheduled to fly in 2013. It’s a lot more powerful than Ares, which could only reach low earth orbit. We want to go a lot higher than that.”
“The program is funded?” I asked, more than a little surprised.
“That’s what they tell me,” he said. “The new flight schedule for the MPCV is being announced July 8, after we launch Endeavour.”
So there it was after all, sitting in an unmarked banquet tent behind the playground. The future of manned spaceflight.
And, no. They don’t have t-shirts for it yet. But they do have little paper cut-out models, thoughtfully produced by Lockheed Martin. My kid snagged three of them.
All I can say is that I hope the real MPCV goes together easier than the paper model.
Another little round of Real Life Interference isn’t the only reason this blog has again been too silent for a span of months. I’d also like to blame a bout of temporary insanity.
The primary symptom of the insanity was a sudden onset of time-consuming wargame complexity. For some reason — or lack of reason, more precisely — I decided to indulge in complex gaming exercises that I’ve managed to avoid for quite some time while still having lots of gaming good times.
Ah. Now I remember why, with few exceptions, tactical games set in the Pacific consume an inordinate amount of time.
Here’s a quick list of the new, somewhat fiddly, terrain types that appear in ATS Peleliu: coral outcropping, palm groves, bamboo, elephant grass, flimsy huts, casuarina forest, beach, shallow ocean, coral outcropping/shallow ocean, palm tree/coral outcropping, coral outcropping/casuarina forest, special anti-tank ditch, mangrove swamp, ponds, the japanese headquarters building, water cistern building, fuel bunkers, cave dugouts, airfield, airfield debris, pillbox/tunnels, aircraft hangar and fuel drum emplacements.
Name that terrain in ATS White Beach One.
Each special terrain type gets its own special rules. They’re usually a sentence, but some of them rate several paragraphs of combat, movement and line-of-sight effects.
On one hand, I understand the need for special terrain types. Landforms in the PTO were quite a bit different from the landforms found in ATS’ more “stock” European settings. On the other hand, I wonder if every single oddball terrain type needs its own specific blob of rules. If I played four or five PTO scenarios in a row, most of the terrain would likely become second nature. As it stands, though, I tend to flit from game to game on a regular basis, so the barrage of special rules means a lot of look-ups for me.
The terrain on the White Beach One map is also very close and cluttered. That means a lot of line-of-sight checks. When a number of stacks of playing pieces in close proximity are involved, those little sight checks can be pretty time-consuming as well.
Long story short, after one of my wife’s cats single-handedly defeated the Japanese defenders of Peleliu, I managed to get in a couple of short scenarios.
Then I really flipped the nutjob switch.
The next game to hit the table was “Birds of Prey,” from Ad Astra Games. Despite the fact that I’m a grunt at heart, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of air combat games. By “idea” I mean that I like all of the hardware, the sleek lines of beautiful jet aircraft and the mano-a-mano nature of play. What usually burns me out on them after a short spasm of air gaming is the complexity.
Yeah, I lost my mind for a while.
Birds of Prey is a very clever design that goes to great lengths to get the physics of air combat maneuvering “right.” It’s involved enough that I won’t even attempt a short description, but rather I’d invite you to look it up on BoardgameGeek if you’re curious.
I’ll just say that a lot of numbers are involved. A LOT of numbers. And some hefty 3-D imagineering using the game system’s “PHAD” (Pitch, Heading, Attitude Display). Once you grok the mechanisms of flight — which is enough of a challenge — you then face a daunting array of additional calculations in order to add in detection and weapons systems. Laminated play aids let you write out all of these calculations using a dry-erase marker. Individually, none of the calculations are that tough — but there are SO many of them. Even a “simple” one-on-one furball can easily take upward of 20 to 30 minutes to work through just one 6-second game turn.
I felt pretty satisified with myself when, after a couple of weeks, I got the whole thing to come together. After a few turns of serious dogfighting, however, it occurred to me that I was doing a whole lot of math and much less moving stuff around on a game map. The game is also very narrowly focused on only the “furball” aspect of air combat. Some of the more “grand tactical” aspects of air warfare that I really enjoy (hey, I wrote a series of college papers on electronic warfare…) are outside the scope of the game.
So back in the box it went.
Currently on the Big Table: “Semper Fi: Guadalcanal,” the PanzerGrenadier system sails into the Pacific. That’s something quite a bit less complicated. More on this one soon.
Before I dive into some serious cardboard bloodletting, I thought I’d have some fun (geek fun, but still fun) and dig a little bit deeper into something that’s caught my attention in ATS White Beach One.
ATS portrays US Marines as some pretty tough hombres. Since I’ve played a couple of other ATS titles featuring the Marines (Semper Fi! and Toktong Pass), it’s not the first time I’ve noticed it. But, finally, something this time pushed my curiosity button.
So I decided to take a look around some of my other ATS titles to see if the Marines were, indeed, the nastiest of the nasty that this game system has to offer.
Send in the Marines. Oh yeah.
I’ll confess that the first thing I discovered was that I have an embarassing amount of ATS stuff. I’m not a completist by any means, but my ATS collection consumes a fairly large shelf of the cabinet in my game closet. In case you’re not familiar with the ATS approach, many of the games are “complete,” meaning that each contains all of the counters needed to play. No single game is the only source for the core OOB for any particular nationality.
For example, White Beach One, Semper Fi! and Toktong Pass all contain several sheets of US Marine personnel counters. The upshot of this approach is that I’ve got a lot of unpunched counters — even though I’ve played at least a scenario or two from every game or module I’ve bought.
As it turns out, US Marines are indeed the baddest of the bad.
The counter format in ATS displays a personnel unit’s factors across the bottom as Firepower-Range-Morale. An infantry squad typically has four steps. when it takes its first casualty, you place a casualty marker on the unit and reduce the firepower and morale by one point each. The second casualty removes the marker and flips the counter to its reduced side. A third casualty result again places a casualty marker and a fourth casualty result eliminates the unit.
Finnish ski squads? Really?
Marine squads, as you can see, are rated 9-6-9 — which is the most potent combination of any squad in ATS. In all of the games of the ATS system, only Finnish ski squads (at 10-3-9) have higher firepower — although they’re somewhat limited by their shorter range.
My great-uncle was a BAR gunner.
In the OOB of a typical scenario, Marine firepower is usually augumented by at least one “independent” BAR gunner (which is treated as a leader for casualty results) and one M1919 light machinegun (a 5-8 light weapon) in each platoon.
Nazis. I hate these guys.
The “black” Nazi SS squads that appear in the Bunker expansion to ATS Berlin come close at 8-5-9, but they’re not very common.
Bunch of no-stat pansies.
Additionally, they suffer from the general uselessness of their higher-level backups. Old Adolph and Eva weren’t exactly well-known for their “follow me!” leadership.
The Marines at Peleliu, on the other hand, get Chesty Puller. The dude is so hard-core he gets an asterisk for his morale. ‘Nuff said.
Japanese squads are hard to dig out.
The Japanese squads that are the usual foe of Marines in ATS have their own very stony morale, but they don’t pack nearly as much firepower. Their stat line of 5-5-9 is frequently augmented with support weapons, however, and they benefit from a maddening array of fortified positions all too often. They make for some very tough opponents indeed.
Crazy enough to jump out of airplanes.
Giving credit where it is due, US paratrooper squads are also rated 8-5-9. They’re typically lighter on support weapons than the average batch of Marines, but their OOBs are liberally stiffened with good leadership.
More automatic weapons than Beau Geste.
The French Foreign Legion paratroopers that appear in ATS Dien Bien Phu are also fairly heavy hitters at 9-4-9. Their shorter range can be something of a disadvantage, but they frequently fight from entrenchments in the DBP scenarios and are very difficult to dislodge.
Ugly. And lots of them, too.
Finally, another common Marine foe appears in Toktong Pass– the large mobs of grunts from the Peoples’ Republic of Korea. At 6-3-6, they aren’t exactly born-again hard — but there are always a LOT of them in any scenario. I include them in this short survey primarily to illustrate why their lovely color scheme always gives me headaches.
After a little break in the action to deal with a higher-than-usual volume of RLI (Real Life Interference) — caused by heavy sunspot activity, I guess — it’s time to get things cranked up again.
For the next few months (optimism: on) I’m planning to focus as much as possible on games set in World War II’s Pacific Theater of Operations, and on the history surrounding those games when I’m smart enough to figure it out.
As I’ve mentioned before, the PTO holds a lot of personal interest for me. It was the slice of world War II where all of the Foster Boys fought.
The map for ATS Peleliu is 24 x 24.
My Dad was born in 1930, so it wasn’t his war. Grandad Foster was a shade too old to fight and, besides, was employed in the strategic steel production industry. But two of his brothers fought in the Pacific, as did one of my great uncles on Grandma Foster’s side of the family. (Another relative flew as a volunteer for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, but that’s a tale for some other time.)
Great Uncle Todd served in the 2nd Marines and fought on both Tarawa and Saipan. I keep the officer’s samurai sword he brought back from Tarawa under lock and key. Great Uncle Charles served in the 503rd Parachute Infantry. He fought both in New Guinea and in the Philippines, and jumped with the 503rd in their famous airborne assault on Corregidor in February, 1945. Great Uncle Preston was a Navy fighter pilot — but I’ve never been able to nail down the details of his service.
So, of course, I’m kicking things off by taking a look at game that has nothing to do with any of them.
“ATS Peleliu – White Beach One” is Critical Hit’s look at the 1st Marines’ early fighting in what would turn out to be the bloodiest battle in the Pacific War. It is not a complete game, as it does not include any of the myriad ATS markers needed for play. I own quite a few ATS titles, so that’s no problem for me — but I could sympathize with someone who may be disappointed in a $70 package (MSRP) that didn’t contain everything needed for play.
The new Japanese counters are very yellow.
The 24 x 24 game map covers a slice of Peleliu that includes a section of White Beach One and the area inland from it that stretches a couple hundred meters beyond the heavily fortified Japanese HQ building. The countermix is an odd assortment that includes a number of the ATS “standard” PTO countersheets (which premiered in “Semper Fi,” a complete game), along with a couple of half sheets with additional Japanese squad counters and USMC personnel counters that are emblazoned with the 1st Marine Division patch. There are also a couple of quarter sheets (or sixth-sheets, maybe) with counters for the Marines’ LVT-4 Amtrac and some new Japanese fortifications.
I call it an “odd assortment” because the mix of standard and new countersheets means that there are Marine squads both with and without the 1st Marines markings. The “plain” squads may not be needed, but I also couldn’t help noticing that the ATS “standard” Japanese counters are an orangish-tan color, while the Japanese squads on the new countersheets are a fairly bright yellow. Ack. Looks like the printer fumbled his Pantone color wheel.
Also note the size of the game map. Critical Hit’s promotional copy on their website says the game includes a 24 x 34 game map. In fact, it’s a rather tight 24 x 24 mapsheet. It also appears to be printed on a lighter, more coarse paper stock than my other ATS maps.
The package includes eight scenarios. Seven of them are set on D-Day, September 15, 1945, and one covers some of the fighting on September 17. Scenario 8 “White Beach Blood Red” is a monster, 18-turn scenario that starts with the inital landings. For the treadhead crowd, one of the scenarios covers the counter-attack launched by the lone Japanese tank company on the island.
