The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (part one)

by on July 15, 2013 at 10:35 pm
Posted In: Books, History

Quite some time ago, there was a photo on BGG of a bookshelf with the poster’s references for a game on the Battle of Lepanto (I have no idea how the game is coming along), and Braudel’s two volume work on the period was on it. A little while later, I spotted them in my local used book store, and I picked them up.

They’re an interesting set. Really, the book is a series of two to four page essays. These are grouped into larger subjects (subchapters), and those into chapters, and those into three parts split across two volumes. It is big, weighty, history and it is not something to read to get interested in the subject, it is for when you already are interested, and want as much information as you can get on the Mediterranean (and surrounds) in the period 1550-1600. It will certainly stay on my shelf as reference.

Braudel organized his material to proceed from the things that change the least, to the things that change the most. So the first part deals with the geography of the Mediterranean and the surrounding lands. Ironically, the ‘large picture’ of geology is where our understanding has changed the most, and the early parts are noticeably out of date. Past that, he starts talking of agriculture, and peoples, and movements, and starts the slow process of building up a detailed picture of the world he is writing about.

Part two (which is split between the two volumes) deals with long-term trends, which in the first volume mostly means the economy. From the flow of metals into Europe from the New World, to patterns of trade, there is, again, a lot here. Unfortunately, he does assume you already know about certain things, like bankruptcies of the Spanish crown, so there is not always an explanation when I could use one.

As for the rest, well, I’ll check in again in about six weeks….

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AP52 Into Vienna Woods

by on June 23, 2013 at 11:30 am
Posted In: ASL

Patch came over yesterday for some ASL goodness. A couple scenario suggestions fell through before we settled on “Into Vienna Woods” from Action Pack 5. As usual, I took the defense, since it allowed me to set up before Patch arrived, though Patch had been mentally reviewing the possibilities on the drive down.

Though it’s not all defense. The Germans enter eleven SS squads onto half of board 58 in this April ’45 scenario, and need to take the top of the hill from five and a half defending Russian 527 squads. At the end of turn 3, the Russians get ten elite 458 squads and a pair of SUs to retake the hill, and the Germans need to hold all six level three hexes (which all come with trench counters) at the end of turn 6 to win.

Board 58 is unusual, with no walls or hedges around, nor buildings, and a good number of orchards scattered about. Pine woods are in effect, which makes woods slightly easier to move through, and a taller obstacle to LOS, as well as alpine hills, which cuts off same level LOS. Combined with the orchards cutting of different-level LOS, and you can’t see much in this one.

I set up a shell defense that I hoped would be able to fall back to the hilltop for the last stand (with my lone leader at the top of the hill, hoping broken units could get at him). I had a suspicion that Patch would work his way around the south flank of the hill to surround me, and cut off the reinforcements, and so had a couple positions there to try and hold that down. For some reason, I developed a blind spot to the north, and only convinced myself to put something near the gully approach as I finalized my setup. However, I didn’t really check what I was doing, and ended up tying my north flank with a Dummy.

Patch arrived, and soon sorted out his assault. He went for a pincer, with the bulk of his forces in the south, a sizable force in the north, and just a couple units in the center. His entry went well enough, since I couldn’t see much, and he managed to break my squad in AA5, who was forced to rout away from the hill. As it turned out, I had the easiest time with LOS to the north, which ironically has some of the most jumbled terrain.

AP52 1G
German Turn 1.

His second turn did not go very well for him. I had managed to pull a squad out of the center, and plug it into AA5, while my HS slipped up the slope, and my central LMGs found good targets. I rolled average, which was generally good enough for a NMC or 1MC, and Patch rolled high, so an amazing amount of his ML8 force broke, which delayed the assault. He got into CC in AA5, which remained tied up in Melee for about three Player Turns.

AP52 2G
German Turn 2.

Still, for my turn 2, I only had two Good Order squads left, and he managed to break one as it tried to get into the trench system. The final defense on turn 3 saw my final stack desperately holding off the Germans as they closed in from both sides. My reinforcements came in just in time to see the trenches under attack from both sides. I roughly split my forces into two groups, north and south, and came on, with some assist from Armored Assault. Or tried to; Patch had found a very nice site for a LMG firelane that held up the advance.

AP52 3R
Russian Turn 3. Counteroffensive.

The Russian AFVs in the scenario are an odd pair: a SU-76M and a SU-85 which are both outmoded by 1945. The SU-85 only has limited HE ammo, and proved not to have any on board when I tried it, and the only alternative is 2FP attacks with the AP ammo.

Well, not the only alternative, I ended up smoking two hilltop hexes with it.

The 76M is an open-top infantry support vehicle, and Patch managed to get rid of it with a pair of stun results. But first, it drove up the hill for the armored assault, and scored a critical hit against his squad holding the end of the trench line, allowing me to retake it. I had a moment of thinking that I had just saved the leader and three squads still holed up in the center, the last of which had just broke. But Patch had encircled them and they surrendered instead of routing. Patch declared No Quarter rather than be saddled with that many prisoners.

The rest of the game involved a desperate struggle for the north end of the hill, as I tried to keep Patch from moving too much up there, while I also tried to shuttle more troops in there as backups. He managed to get some troops back down the hill as well, and blew up the SU-85 with a panzerfaust shot (Patch felt he probably sent too much after it, and he’s probably right, the smoke it was firing was a problem, but he really needed to be concentrating on the goal).

He naturally got in for CC on his final turn, but was unable to do more than CR a squad (out of two). I moved in my 9-1 and a fresh squad, but did not attack with them to keep them concealed. This forced Patch to do two attacks, one against the concealed units (he wounded the leader), and the other against the rest, which failed. I didn’t get anything. But with the Melee still raging, I held the hex control that I had regained on turn 4, and won a very tight game.

AP52 6R
End of the game. The counters trailing off to the bottom-right are the final contents of U4.

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Clash of Galicia

by on June 17, 2013 at 10:39 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over on Saturday, and we played through most of the Galicia scenario in Clash of Giants II. Mark and Jason have played the game (both scenarios) a few times, but this was my first time with it.

Mark felt the Russians had an overall advantage in the scenario, and gave them to me. Which left me to set up first, and try to figure out what I was doing. Not too hard, other than wondering what to do with the masses of cavalry that have limited utility, and with both sides setting up far behind the borders, there was time to sort things out.

Quite a bit of time from my perspective, as it happened. An interesting feature of the game is that it uses a chit draw to activate each army (four on each side for this one), and then roll to see how active it is (how far units can move, and in the early game, if they can attack at all). I never rolled over a 2 during the first two turns (with 6 being best), and so crawled towards the border. The Austrian SE flank also performed poorly, and the lines didn’t even come in contact until about turn 3.

Meanwhile, Mark hit first, and hard in the NW near Kielce on the 4th Army front. Both sides get a pair of offensive chits that improve the odds one column for all combats in a single phase. The Austrians get theirs early, and Mark used the first one  on turn 2 and what was left of the 4th Army was sent reeling back. By the time the second offensive was done on turn 4, there were very few units left in the 4th Army at all, and the line eventually was anchored on Radom. Mark managed to surround it around turn 5 and attacked. In a miracle, both of my units rolled ‘1’s to survive, and the majority of Mark’s units flipped. I managed to re-establish supply the next turn, and held out until turn 8, where Mark turned the flank and was cutting off the position again and approaching Ivangorod.

On the other end of the line, things were different. The initial offensives hurt the center, but not as much, and Mark wasn’t able to do anything about the 8th Army. Around the time the game shifts to the better movement tables, my die luck got better, but I still had problems, rolling four ‘1’s for movement on turn 5, and the first Russian activation of turn 6. Then I rolled three ‘6’s for the rest of the turn. Thankfully, the attack restrictions go away after the first few turns, and despite some very slow movement, there often wasn’t far to go (though it hurt the reinforcements) and I could still attack.

After a short shoving match, I started seriously hurting the east flank, and entered Austrian territory for the first time. The ‘bend’ near Tarnopol took a lot of damage during my first offensive chit, and I pushed him back to Stanislav over the next couple turns. Fighting through all the rivers in that area was difficult, but he couldn’t keep a defense together. Meanwhile, I had some early success on the extreme flank, but got slowed down by losses, and regretted sending as many reinforcements as I did to the other flank (where he probably couldn’t make things any worse than they were).

The Austrians start gaining VPs for places held on turn 4, and got 6 VPs then. He got another 4 to hit his max of 9 VPs on the next turn. I was already pushing him out of his victory locations by then, but it was too little, too late to avoid him hitting his ceiling. The Russians only get VPs for what they hold at the end of the game, and since we couldn’t quite finish, it’s hard to say just what the final score would have been. However, my two offensives never actually broke the line, even after doing a lot of damage to the Austrians. So I don’t think I was going to get a chance to get to the further Russian VPs of taking the passes across the Carpathians, and probably wouldn’t have gotten a chance to try to take Premsyl, so I’m guessing I would have only managed 5 VPs.

Despite some recurring bad luck with the movement dice, I certainly enjoyed the game. It’s a very clever system that takes most of the familiar ground of hex-and-counter systems, and then adds a few twists to get the right feel. Combat is a matter of checking unit quality to see if the involved units lose a step. Higher odds mostly just improve the chances, but the checks are still made. This makes combat become a contest of attrition, with even solid victories resulting in flipped units. However, there’s still a fairly solid feel of maneuver, and the combination of maneuver and attrition is not one often seen.

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Pursuit of Gallipoli

by on June 2, 2013 at 11:26 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Jason came over Saturday, and we played Pursuit of Glory. He was only available for a short day, so we knew that we wouldn’t get anywhere near to finishing, but it had been a while since either of us had played it, and Jason didn’t want to get too stale with it. Neither of us had any real preference, so I took the Allied Powers on a random roll.

I stuck to a conventional opening, playing Russo-British Assault, and destroying Fars, while the Russians picked off a cav division, and reduced the Turkish IX Corps. Jason lead off with Pan-Turkism, and started arranging the defenses.

Jason admitted to taking a somewhat reactionary approach to several things in the game. He certainly wanted to not worry about the Russians too much, but I managed to force the issue. I also moved the two Indian divisions in Baluchistan up to Southern Persia, and then played Secret Treaty to advance them into Isfahan. Right afterwards I moved them up to take Tehran, Hamadan and Qum. Combined with a spectacularly successful bombardment from Churchill Prevails, VPs got down to about three on the fourth turn.

Jason decided he really needed to do something about that about the time I was looking at Armenian Uprising, and wondering where I could get another VP from (since the card is worth one, and the Armenian unit would be able to take another).

My cards were being somewhat ‘lumpy’ during the game, with all the Mobilization combat cards showing up on turn one, and most of the ‘must play’ events showing up on turn two. I had been forced to a somewhat limited invasion policy, since I had to discard Egyptian Coup for Ops twice. However, I did end up using Kitchener’s Invasion to come ashore at Suvla Bay, and then got ashore before he reacted. Frustratingly, the next turn’s MO was “No BR”. I did spread out and cover the bulk of the European side of the Dardanelles, which caused some confusion and head scratching, as I don’t think I’ve looked at the straights rules since the first time I read through the rulebook. We got it mostly sorted out, but there was the question of if taking Maidos put Seddul Bahr out of supply. (Since it’s a lower numbered straight, it can’t be used for movement by the CP anymore, which would imply OOS, but the rules are a little vague on that point, since it just mentions ‘tracing a line of supply’, and is less than clear on the full mechanics, especially as there is still a technical route there.)

I never managed to get much put into Mesopotamia, so that front was stymied for the bulk of the game. However, we both assembled decent lines on the Suez Canal, and at the end of the day, I attacked across the southern flank, and on the second try cracked the line, and crossed into Sinai with a couple ANZAC divisions.

At the end of the day, it was turn 5, I had just played Lawrence, and so could see that both Bulgaria and Parvus to Berlin were about to come up. While sorting the cards back out, I noted that it looked like I’d be drawing Romania next turn. I was planning on holding Russian Winter Offensive to hit Erzerum at the beginning of the next turn, and try to bleed the Turks some more.

Pursuit of Gallipoli
At the end of the day.

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The Pacific Ocean

by on May 26, 2013 at 12:50 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked up The Pacific Ocean a while ago at a library sale. It’s a history of the exploration of the Pacific Ocean written in 1940. It was the first of the “Oceans of the World” series, all written by different authors, and searching around shows that the other ‘forthcoming’ books were indeed released. This one was written by Felix Riesenberg, who, according to Wikipedia, wrote quite a number of books on nautical subjects (including one which served as a standard textbook); he also took part in two failed expeditions to the North Pole via airship, and had a Liberty Ship named after him.

It’s really meant as a young-adult level book, which makes sense given that it was published by a division of the McGraw-Hill company. It’s more in the lines of ‘true sea stories’ dealing with Magellan, Drake, Cook and the like, and not a thorough study of the subject.

Being seventy-three years old, it does come from another time. This is most obvious in the first chapter, which discusses the possible origins of the Pacific, and you are reminded of the fact that Continental Drift theory was known, but not yet accepted. “It is an interesting theory, over which geographers still dispute. Wegener lost his life in Greenland trying to substantiate it, and the observations taken there over a long period of time seem to indicate that Greenland is still moving west, as he predicted it must be.”

An even more telling part, is the second-to-last chapter, which deals with the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry, as this was written in 1940, when tensions were extremely high, but war had not actually started. The chapter is nicely sympathetic to the Japanese point of view, and recognizes past grievances. “The same difficulties that Perry met with in 1853 and 1854 exist today, and anyone who studies his attempts to cultivate the Japanese will find an astonishing Parallel between his negotiations and those that have made relations difficult in recent years between the United States and Japan. The Nipponese mentality and psychology have not changed, and neither have those of the United States.”

In the end, it’s a decent enough book, and might be worth picking up if you happen across it. But it isn’t worth seeking out.

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