Enemy Business

by on August 2, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch came over on Saturday for some gaming, but only Dave was available, so we did a bunch of small three-player games.

First up was Enemy in Sight, which is my favorite of the descendants of Naval War (given the use of captured ships, mix-and-match navies don’t grate on me like it does in all the others). Dave had a very good first round (helped by getting a prize back to port), scoring 69 points while Patch got 45 and I only managed 21. A lot of the odder effects like breaking a line were at the very bottom of the deck, and so didn’t really come up. Dave naturally was the main target during the second round, though I was the one who ended up with his line broken twice (at the same time!) since I had gotten a pretty good force together in the middle. Patch came out on top, despite only sinking two ships and took a small prize to port to take him to 99 points. Dave sank two small ships to get to 86, while I sank four, had one afloat as a prize, and had put another captured ship in my line, ending with 74 points.

Dave had gotten 1st Raters the first two times, while Patch and I had started with nothing better than a 3rd Rate. For the third hand, I started with a 1st Rate, a couple of 2nds, and trailed off to 4th Raters, while Dave was stuck with lesser ships and Patch had a single larger ship (I can’t remember if it was a 1st or 2nd Rate). My first move was an attempted coup de main with good cards: dismast a ship (4R), boarding party with a 2nd rater (which surprised everyone), and use a 2nd-Rater ‘4’ card as grapeshot, against one of Patch’s ships. Sadly, he defended with 2 + 2 Rake, and the even odds ended with no result. However, that set the tone for much of the early game, with lots of larger value shots being used for grapeshot in capture attempts. The second half of the game saw us all down to small lines (Patch was at zero ships on two short occasions), and I couldn’t get any kills as everything was finished off by someone else. However, I had earlier sunk two larger ships, and got a 2nd Rate prize back to port to end at 127 points, while Dave got a 1st Rate prize to port and sunk two ships for 140, and Patch got 5 kills to win at 153.

After lunch, Dave introduced us to Love Letter, which is a very clever small card game. The abilities of the eight card types interact in just enough ways to keep anything from being truly obvious. Dave took an early lead with the first two points, but Patch and I caught up in the four rounds after that. To my surprise, I ended up winning a bit later, especially as I started off with the Princess in the last round, but I managed to knock out Patch early, and got Dave after he guessed wrong.

After that, we went to Family Business, which Dave and I had both played… decades ago, though this set had never been used. It’s not a bad game, though some of the Mayfair art is pretty bad. In some ways, its interactions are less complicated than Love Letter‘s, they just have more time to play out. I actually managed to win the first round, having drawn enough counters near the end to keep my remaining guys mostly off the Hit List while everyone else bought it. We did a second round, and I nearly won that one too, having gotten just about everyone else onto the Hit List, and then used Hit to kill Patch’s one guy off of the List. My guy entering the Hit List as a result then started a Mob War. After a couple turns of the Hit List burning down, Dave used St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to end the game as it killed everyone.

Overall, it was a great day, and everyone had a lot of fun. Enemy in Sight is always great, and I’d like to see Love Letter a couple more times. I don’t know that it’d survive a lot of plays with me, but for now, I’d like to see more. Family Business is probably best as a couple rounds every once a while.

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Jack of Shadows

by on July 30, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve found that the best way to sum up this book is, “It’s a Roger Zelazny novel.”

For anyone who doesn’t really know what that means, I’ll try to explain.

With a world where one half is perpetually day, and the other is night, the populations of both are similarly segregated. Daytime has normal humans and a technological civilization, and nighttime has sorcerers who come back from the dead an unspecified number of times. Magic and technology only work their respective halves of the world, and only mix in the twilight area. There’s some philosophical discussions of looking at the world in different ways, but mostly this is just allowed to make the novel something of a mish-mash, with parts fantasy, and modern day academia.

There’s a secondary-character subplot that never quite comes into it’s own, along with a few more that do. And after wandering around a bit, there’s an epic-scale ending.

And despite the way all that sounds, it works. It’s not great (and is not one of his best works), but just about everything in the novel ties back into his main themes. It doesn’t really come to any solid conclusions, and you could say the same of the action, though things are definitely finished.

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The Road to Culloden Moor

by on July 26, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Preston’s book on the last Jacobite Rebellion is an interesting volume. It looks for balance not by stripping away all romanticism or propaganda, but by embracing them. What papers and people were saying on both sides is looked at, not necessarily to arrive at a middle ground, but to show what they were concerned about.

The 1745 rebellion was the passing of an era, and like any such, a large number of stories and legends sprung up around it. And while The Road to Culloden Moor spends a good amount of time talking about them, and how they compare to the events they’re based on, this ignorant American could have used a better grounding in just what these myths are.

As a popular history, the descriptions of the battles are somewhat cursory, but then most of them were extremely brief affairs, on the other hand, it is hard to keep a great sense of the maneuvering going on (maps, as always, would help). But beyond that, the narrative of the entire rebellion, from Charles’… ‘escape’ from Rome to France, to the aftermath, is well done, and overall the book is very informative.

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Two Rounds of Cronium

by on July 22, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: CC:Ancients

Patch and I did our usual pair of Commands & Colors: Ancients games between bigger things recently. This time was the Battle of Cronium from the second bonus pack from GMT. Set during the Tyrany of Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, it’s very different from the Greek/Spartan contests we’ve gotten used to lately. There’s no hoplites (possibly this should get an Ex6 update), but there is a wide variety of everything else. Both sides have light, medium, and heavy units in both infantry and cavalry, and both have a unit of Warriors, and the Carthaginians have a Heavy Chariot unit. There’s a lot of units, and the goal is seven banners, so its a pretty big scenario as well.

I had the Carthaginians in the first game, so Patch went first with Order Three Left. Both of us then used cards that could order units all over to bring things up and dress the line. I used Move-Fire-Move to move light units up, and got my LC into archery range before pulling them back a bit, but did no damage. Patch used Coordinated Attack to move forward two Heavies, and got a LB into range who then did a block to an Aux on his first die roll. I used a second Move-Fire-Move to do a block to a Heavy, and forced his LB to retreat, taking a block in the process. Patch moved forward with a Line Command, burying his LB behind the rest of his line in the process. I then Darkened the Sky to do two more blocks to the same Heavy, a block to another Heavy, and two hits to a Medium.

Our armies finally came into contact as Patch Ordered Four Left, wiping out a Light and reducing a Heavy to two blocks, while I was only able to take a block off a Warrior and force them to retreat. I Ordered Four Right in turn, knocking out the weak Heavy and forcing his LS to evade out of line. Patch continued with Order Three Left, doing a block to my HCH who forced his MC back to the baseline in turn. He also did two blocks to an Aux, but they did two in return to his Warriors. And I continued the action with an Order Three Right, finally getting my leader on that flank in play, but my weakened heavies muffed their roll, and were wiped out by battle back from the Syracusan Warriors. The Leader-led Heavy forced an Aux to take a block and retreat, and used Momentum to finally knock out the Warriors. Patch used Order Lights to order two of his remaining four units on the flank, and moved his LB over there. An attempt on my HCH backfired with them wiping out a LC, but then they were eliminated by the LB. While his Aux did two damage to my remaining Heavy, they in turn the Aux out, forcing his leader to run back to the MC still on the baseline (and that leader’s third change of command). On his right, he did two blocks to my LC, who forced one of his to run back to the baseline. I continued the main confrontation with Order Two Right to use my LC to pick on his LS, but but while I forced an evade to the baseline on the first, the only damage from the second battle was a hit to my LC.

Patch used Out Flanked to continue switching the action to both flanks. He knocked out the Heavy and the Aux left on my Right, forcing my leader to run towards the baseline alone, but couldn’t finish off the wounded LC on the other flank. I used Order Three Right to move the leader up the remaining center line, and my LC made another attempt to knock out units, but only managed to take a banner in battle back with one of them. Patch Ordered Mediums to make his center active, and did two hits to my newly-led Aux, and forced them back two hexes, though they did do a hit to a Medium in the first combat. I then used Double Time to get most of the center in action, forcing his MC to evade, and knocking out two Mediums, while one of my units was forced back a hex. Patch then mopped up with Mounted Charge, knocking out my weak LC, and then using momentum to take out my HC. 7-6

In contrast to the first game, when I started as Syracuse I had no Left Flank cards in my hand at all, started with Order Four Center and took a pot shot at his HCH to no effect. Patch Ordered Lights to start bringing up units, and picked on my LC with his to no effect. I Ordered Four Right to do a block to his LC (they evaded in the face of Heavies, and then lost a block to a banner from archery). Patch moved up with Order Three Left, and I did the same with Order Two Center. Patch Ordered Two Left, and did a block to my LC as they evaded. I used Line Command to bring up everything other than my left flank, but scattered archery had no effect; Patch Ordered Two Center with similar results.

I Ordered Three Center to finally get us in contact, and knocked out an Aux in return for taking two blocks. Patch used Coordinated Attack to dress his line a bit, and I Ordered Mediums; on the right, we traded three blocks each on Mediums, and Patch knocked out my weakened Medium in the center with a First Strike. Patch Ordered Two Left to knock out the weak Medium and do a block to the Heavy next in line. I Ordered Three Right and knocked out his weak Medium, and on momentum did two blocks to his Warriors, who also lost a third block on a two-banner retreat. Patch Out Flanked me, and got his leader up to his HC to knock my HC down to a block and force it to retreat, using momentum to take my Heavies down to a block and force them to retreat. I used Leadership Any Section to move up the remaining right flank, and made his LS and HC evade away.

Patch then did a Mounted Charge, which allowed his HC to finish off my Heavies and HC on my right, and did a block to my Warriors on my left by making them retreat, and did two blocks to my remaining Heavy in the center, though they then knocked out his HCH. I Ordered Light to drive off his HC and do a block to a LC with archery. Patch Double Timed to bring parts of his right flank up the rest of his line, while I used Inspired Left Leadership to finally get that flank in motion, and drove off his LC, though I couldn’t do any damage, and I lost mine on a two-banner battle back. Patch used Line Command to move his entire center and knocked out my heavies, killing Dionysius for the win. 3-7

Afterword

With the variety of units all mixed together, this is a much more chaotic battle than most, and the lopsidedness of where the action happened only added to it. The first game had us trading units constantly after a slow start, and I thought I had it until that Mounted Charge. The second game was much more uncertain, though we started trading ranged attacks a lot earlier, but again, Mounted Charge came up for Patch, and smashed me. I had plenty of things I could do after that, but I just couldn’t get the time for them. Especially for moving my left flank up which had been abandoned by the cards for most of the game. Interestingly, we were both holding a Counterattack at the end of the first game.

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Uprooted

by on July 18, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Uprooted is big, sprawling, epic fantasy-type of book that really benefits from not being done as a trilogy the way so many in the genre tend to be. Not that it would take a lot to structure it as such, as a good chunk of the middle features major change in locale and secondary characters. But that would straightjacket the pacing, and draw things out needlessly.

There’s a lot of great things going on here, but I do think there’s a couple of places where it didn’t quite come together, though much of that was expecting revelations about the big bad and the main character that didn’t quite happen. There’s a few places where the first-person viewpoint gets in the way; notably, we get a lot of Agnieszka’s initial outrage at her prickly mentor, and while she later comes to better understand him, this isn’t really shown so much, and we just get her responding to him with a better idea of his actual meaning, so you have to be aware of that on your own to catch it.

People seem to talk about magic systems a lot in fantasy these days, and thankfully Uprooted avoids really tying things down on that route. At the same time it does a great job of providing the general feel of magic. Magic is definitely an inborn ability, and most mages work by rigidly worked-out formulae and spells, and usually have personalities to match. Agnieszka works on a completely different system that is very improvisational and organic in nature, which is shown to be something that has shown up in some very powerful witches in the past, but isn’t widely known or understood. I felt that this should have led into a deeper theme regarding the nature of the Wood, and the inhabitants of the valley, but despite being acknowledged, it didn’t actually get developed.

But these flaws are small and a matter of direction. For the rest, it’s a great book, with some very good action, and some truly varied action. Large parts of the book are unpredictable simply because it avoids doing the same thing twice when it can help it.

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