Dominating the Ice Age

by on January 29, 2013 at 11:37 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After letting things slide for a while, I arranged for a group gaming day this Sunday. Only Patch and Jason could make it over, and Dave managed to start coming down with what I had a week earlier, so there was only three of us available.

Since Dave had been showing early symptoms a couple days earlier, I arranged for the game of the day to be Jason’s copy of Dominant Species, since it should do better with three players than most anything else (Successors had been tempting). We gave a quick explanation to Patch, who hadn’t seen it before, and drew randomly for animals (I got the Insects, Jason the Mammals, and Patch went to the Birds), and we were off.

My start position was relatively isolated (note for next time: might want to guarantee every-other-hex start animals on the next three-player game) and I was consolidating my little empire nicely in the first turn when Jason nearly wiped me off the map with a Catastrophe. I tried to bounce back some in the second turn, but took more losses to my species, and spent the third turn purely trying to set myself up better for the rest of the game. My VPs were lagging behind, with Jason and Patch trading positions a time or two before Patch started amassing a pretty nice lead on the strength of multiple turns holding the Survival card.

However, things were starting to pay off for me. I spent a couple of Speciation actions to get my on board strength up again on the second to last turn, leaving me with one spare cube going  into the last turn (and as the Insects, I got to place that for free). I had managed to get an extra action from a first turn card (Omnivore), and everyone got extra actions from Parasitism and Intelligence on the second and third turns respectively, so the action display was fairly crowded by the end of the game. My ‘needs’ were a bit off of Jason and Patch’s, and I was thoroughly dominating about half the board until Patch managed to ensure the removal of three water elements from Wasteland (which hurt him, but not nearly as badly as it hurt me). A little later, I managed to remove several meat elements from Jason’s side of the board, which caused a large shake up in that area.

My VPs actually recovered fairly well in the mid-game (Patch and Jason didn’t go after the scoring actions quite as hard as maybe they should, and I managed to get a couple spare actions in there), and I caught up to Jason as he struggled to recapture the Survival card from Patch. At the end of the second to last turn, a couple card events insured that we all dropped a couple adaptations from our needs. Jason and Patch to had to drop their grass element needs from Regression, which gave me a strong position over part of the board, and I made things worse for Patch by insuring that several seed elements were lost on Wasteland for the final turn. I ended up with about eleven hexes that I was Dominant in, thanks to the collapse of important food sources for Patch and Jason, and I was able to get some sun elements in important places, and I was the only one adapted for that element.

The final scoring put me in the lead at 185 points, Patch in second with 158, and Jason in last for 145. I find it interesting that Jason lost with a score about equivalent to Dave’s in our first game, which was about a 40 point lead. I’m guessing that the game generates roughly the same number of total points each time, and they were split three ways instead of four this time.

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6 Red Packets

by on January 24, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Continuing our tour through Beyond Valor scenarios, Patch and I picked up “Red Packets” in February 2012. It’s effectively the original introduction to vehicles in ASL, and has a good reputation as a fun, fast-moving scenario. Better yet, it’s a meeting engagement, which is a scenario type Patch and I always enjoy.

Set on the opening day of Barbarossa, a German recon group stumbles upon a Russian recon and AA section moving to set up a defensive line. The Germans (me, in this case) enter the west side of board 22 with a Pz IIIF, PSW 231, and SdKfz 251/10 (37mm AT gun) with a HS with LMG and leader on board. The Germans also get a 9-1 AL, which I put in the obvious Pz III. The Russians enter next on the east side with a motorcycle platoon, a IAG-10-AA, and five (two platoons) of BA-8s. They’ve got numbers, bigger guns, but, even less armor, and the BA-8s are radioless, reducing tactical flexibility. Patch needed to either get 18 EVP off my end of the board, or kill all three of my vehicles.

I was having a really off night as we started, mixing up east and west, forgetting that the Germans only get a half move as they enter…. It was bad. I stuck mostly to the northern route, trying to secure that bridge before Patch got there. The south bridge was entirely out of range, and the jumble of wooden buildings down there promised a hide-and-seek fight no matter who got there first.

Patch drove his entire motorcycle platoon over the south bridge, unloading in O8. He backed them up with the understrength BA-8 platoon, while the other parked in the center with the lead vehicle parked behind a wall to take a pot shot at my PSW. …or so we thought. When Patch actually fired, we were both surprised to find the LOS blocked by O3. Meanwhile, the IAG detoured to the northern road, and parked to give him a shot down that road if I continued forward.


Opening moves, Turn 1.
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Keepers of the Keys of Heaven

by on January 17, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Posted In: Books

Roger Collins is a name I’ve known for many years through his Early Medieval Europe 300–1000, so when I realized that a book I was considering getting was by him, it became an instant first choice.

Covering nearly 2000 years of history in about 500 pages, even if restricted to a single institution (the papacy), is no mean feat, but Collins does it quite well here. There are places where names and titles go by at a dizzying pace, but mostly he picks an issue or a pope, and does a subchapter on it. This breaks the narrative into a large number of discrete chunks that mostly read very cleanly.

He actually starts in 1942, with an excavation under St. Peter’s which eventually turned up what was later announced as the bones of St. Peter himself. Collins points out a number of unresolvable uncertainties about the claim, and moves on to how this this claim ties into the Papacy’s view of itself. The book is well done and informative, for me especially in the period from 1790 to 1850, where the papacy went through it’s toughest struggle, loosing all of its temporal power, only to gain new respect in the spiritual field.

Collins maintains a good even tone throughout, treating the subject evenhandedly, and sceptically (when needed), showing how various policies were (and weren’t) reactions to the times. His final thoughts on the papacy are, “The papacy in the twentieth century was more defensive on its impregnable rock than at almost any other time in its past, and more disturbed by changes in human society and in thought than at any previous period, at least since the Reformation. The latter remains the great turning point in its history. Recent decades have, on the other hand, put the person of the pope at the forefront of the Catholic sense of identity to an unparalleled degree, and focused popular piety upon it. At the same time there have been losses, both of vocations and of faith, more in some parts of the world than others, as expectations of change, reform and leadership have been disappointed. The papacy may need to adapt to the changing circumstances and demands of the new millennium, but if its history suggests anything, this will be done slowly, reluctantly and with a firm denial that anything of the kind is happening.”

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2 Mila 18

by on January 17, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

In February 2012, Patch and I picked up our next ASL scenario. Neither of us had actually played “Mila 18”, from Beyond Valor before, so we decided to go for that.

Dealing with a 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, it is a situation that hits a raw nerve with many people (for good reason), but the scenario itself is interesting. There are no support weapons of any kind. Each side is nearly even in numbers (10 SS squads to 11 Jewish partisan squads; three leaders each). The SS squads have double the firepower, but are fragile (ELR 1, and they go all the way from 658 to 447 upon ELR failure), and all the partisans have HIP. An additional twist is that German units leave their guns behind when eliminated (in the form of labor counters). The partisans can recover these and promote from 337 partisan squads to 447 Russian squads, and they can be promoted to 458s. These promoted squads retain their ELR of 5, and split into HS/Disrupt if they fail ELR instead of reverting to the weaker state.

Feeling a bit lazy for brain-busting setups, and as I pointed out to Patch, I’m usually the one who gets to sweat over them (like in the last night scenario we did), I took the SS, and Patch set up the Partisans.

The Germans win either by getting double the CVP of the partisans (with a minimum of 10), or by Mopping Up 27 of the 33 buildings in hexrows L to Y of board 20 in nine turns. That latter condition requires an average of 3 successful Mopping Up actions a turn, and there is no way to be in position for any until turn three, so it’s closer to four per turn. There’s only eleven units to mop up with (after before-game Deploying; more could be had by Deploying HSs during the game), and anyone who Mops Up is TI, and therefore not in position to Mop Up the following turn. All that makes for a very tight schedule, and it seemed to me the point of it is to keep the partisan player from just hiding in odd corners where he can’t be found, and the Germans can’t generate 10 CVP in time. So my mission was to go in, and round up the partisans more directly.

Thanks to the HIP and German entry from off-board, we had our fastest Game Turn 1 ever, with no Partisans showing.


A quiet patrol, Turn 1. The partisans are somewhere between the light blue bars….
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3 The Czerniakow Bridgehead

by on January 10, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

While we were gearing up for “Six Came Back”, Patch got a copy of Storm Over Arnhem, and we tried that out next. I have to say it didn’t do a lot for me, despite finding the idea of the system interesting. But it may be that I just need to get more experience with the game. In any case, after that we went back to ASL, and a scenario from Beyond Valor that I hadn’t played before (I can’t remember if Patch had or not) in October 2011.

“The Czerniakow Bridgehead” is a late ’44 scenario with the Russians having entered Warsaw, and are now defending it against a German counterattack with Partisan help. The Russians set up 15 squads on the east (bottom) side of the board 23 canal, with 12 Partisan squads backing them up on boards 20 and 8. The Germans get 15 squads, 7 leaders, the usual mix of MGs, and three crews (presumably for the HMG and MMGs) on the west side of the canal. The Germans have 10 turns in which to get 20 FP factors onto board 8 while earning more CVP than the Russians.

I ended up with the Germans and went into the scenario with a lot of trepidation; the last time I’d attempted to attack across a stream it had not gone very well, and I was worried that I’d spend too much time trying to get someone, anyone, across the canal. There are four bridges across the canal, two of which are close to each other (4 hexes), and troops trying to cross one could easily support an effort against the other. I looked at Patch’s set up, set up the Germans… experimented a little… went back to the original set up…. And scrapped the entire thing and started over, this time orienting around the bridge at the opposite side of the board. The two-bridge area was the obvious choice, and Patch had obviously set up for it. So I decided to go to the other end of the board and try to cross at H4, with a HMG and MMG upstairs to try and break his defenders and interdict his movements across the board. I also put enough near the P7 bridge to make sure he had to defend that as well.

A final complication for Patch was that at the end of the initial RPh, all the Russian (not Partisan) squads take NMC. Patch rolled somewhat poorly with two squads pinning, six squads breaking (all but two of them undergoing ELR failure), one Battle Hardening, and one going berserk. Importantly, two of the four squads guarding my chosen bridge broke. The other two were actually my planned targets for the 1st level MGs, and Patch obligingly broke both of them under my fire, with the addition of ELR failure and CRs to boot. The only thing standing in my way was an 8-0 leader. I finished off Prep with a shot from the second MMG that broke a concealed Partisan squad in 20Q9.

Most of my movement was getting everyone lined up at the canal across the bridge and through the first couple of blocks on the other side. I did lose a HS to fire from his only remaining unit in the area (J8), but the remainder of the squad passed the MC and kept going. Over at the P7 bridge, I tried pushing with a couple of squads I had available for the task, figuring I would at least get him to reveal some of the Partisans concealed on board 20. Patch’s fire was very effective, causing ELR failure on both units, and getting a K/1 with the residual on the second one.

My advancing fire broke his 8-0 (reducing him to a 7-0 in the process), forcing him and the HS adjacent to surrender.


Situation, German Turn 1.
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