The Riches of India

by on July 12, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for the monthly gaming meet yesterday. The arrangements went very smooth considering that we got it put together in less than a week….

Jason has just gotten his own copy of Blackbeard and was itching to play that. I insisted we go for the long game, as I found the short version disappointingly too short to get anything done. Things went a little slowly at first, as it had been a while since our last go-round, but it finished right on time for a full day of gaming, with no danger of it going overtime.

Three of us, me, Mark and Jason put two pirates on the board at the start. I specifically did this as I put one pirate off the very lucrative coast of India, and wanted to have the other to use until merchants actually showed up there. Dave on the other hand only put out one pirate, and kept to one pirate at a time for the entire game.

With a fair amount of attention in the Caribbean, I shifted up to the New England area, and caught a prize before anything turned up in India. The problems of limited actions caused me problems all game, but in this case meant the merchant went away before I could spot him (due to the reset in Natural Disaster). But another immediately appeared, and I took a 4000-gold cargo and a… Dutch noble. The latter was a small problem, as he was valuable, but there’s only three Dutch ports, and the only without an anti-pirate governor was in west Africa.

On the way there, I cashed in my prize in the Madagascar pirate port, undergoing involuntary Debauchery & Revelry… and as soon as I got it taken care of, I was hit with it again! (Going to spend all the booty before they get out of port….) It was a very happy crew that set sail to ransom the noble. After that, I set out for a nice retirement home in the Caribbean (there being a shortage of friendly governors anywhere else in the world).

That also had problems. I had arrived in west Africa about the time the deck ran out and was reshuffled. By the time I got close to my goal the deck was already getting dangerously thin. Right before I arrived, I drew the Finger of Fate, which wrecked my plans to get a Letter of Marque and retire by forcing me to discard one of them, and hand the other to Dave. So, I could bribe the governor. Then Jason went into the port, and bribed the governor ahead of me to get a Safe Haven. So, I had to set sail and find another governor, finally retiring a turn ahead of the end of the game.

If we had remembered how the General Pardon card worked before hand, I would have saved the effort and just turned myself into the local English governor in Africa when the time came. I did get a couple extra points for turning in a last cargo at a Safe Haven and getting the 10% bonus, but it was not worth all the pain of chasing after this for pretty much the entire deck of action cards. For the entire last 3/4s of the game, I only ever spared one action point for my other pirate, and couldn’t even spare an action for him to accept the General Pardon.

In the meantime, everyone else retired their first pirates about the time I was setting out on this saga. I had managed to get a King’s Commissioner out, but missed Mark before he retired, Jason retired before I could try to do anything about it. I did, however, manage to block Dave’s pirate in, and catch his ship as he attempted to slip into port. The ensuing battle was furious with good modifiers and die rolls on both sides, with Dave winning by a point.

My anti-pirate career did not do well in this game either. Dave got the notoriety of defeating a KC: 2 x 11 combat factor, driving him up to a Notoriety of 30. He decided to bribe the governor and retire on the spot.

I think both Jason and Dave managed to retire further pirates, but no one equaled the fame and riches of the first ones. At the end of the day, Dave won with 113 VPs, Jason was in second with 97, I made 85 (I had been worried I’d be stuck at 8…), and Mark had 53.

The single pirate method seems to be the way to go—with the possible exception of my plan. If I’d remembered the pardon, I would have avoided a lot of pain (at some risk to losing my pirate…). But sailing from one side of the board to the other is just too long a process to be contemplated.

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Here Comes the King!

by on June 21, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, uncertainty and schedule shuffling led to gaming this Saturday with only three of us. A little hemming and hawing led to us trying an old, little-known game Dave has on loan from his dad: The Warlord Game.

The idea is that each player is a Baron of a fief in a kind of generic European Middle Ages, and you are attempting to conquer further lands until you are crowned King, and can make it stick for a year.

As a late-’70s self-published game, there are numerous difficulties in the rules that show they were probably written without any recourse to blind playtest. However, the production values are pretty good, and it’s not too hard to figure out what to do. All of us found it to be a more interesting and fun game to play than we has suspected.

The map looks like it is meant for four players starting at the corners, but the rules say 2-6 players and to draw randomly for starting fiefs. This caused a problem as Dave and I ended up adjacent on one edge of the board, while Patch was in the center. More important than his relative remoteness was the fact that it allowed him to wall off the middle of the board and then start grabbing the far side of the map in peace.

After the first year’s campaigning, we were starting to come in contact with Patch, and the first battle of the game was where Patch destroyed an army of mine, routing me out of the rich province of Lippstadt near the center and taking it for himself. Dave however, managed to take Soust from him in a quick campaign, while on the opposite flank I found myself slowly driving forward towards Grounau as I tried to turn his flank and get into the backfield areas Patch had not yet claimed. The combat chart is quite chaotic, as I demonstrated when a 1-1 attack wiped out Patch’s defenders in tough terrain.

An interesting facet of the game is that your initial growth is very powerfully powered by taking fiefs. Not only do they help provide you with future income, but you receive money and new troops for each of the first 12 fiefs you take. The new troops are very important, as not only will they make the bulk of your early troops, but you can only hire troop types you already have access to. Want some archers? Sorry, but you have to get eight fiefs to get one. This accentuated Patch’s advantage as he gobbled up territories on the central road network and the size of his army swelled. But it’s a great mechanism to produce forward momentum and punish the tendency of players to ‘turtle’ in this type of game.

Also, your personal unit upgrades as your power expands and your rank goes up from 6-6 (combat-movement) Knight (really, a Baron), to 8-6 Duke (both Dave and I ended the day there) to 10-6 King and 12-6 Emperor (optional to victory). Patch managed to crown himself King with 12 fiefs (out of 17 needed for victory), which comes with a fairly massive royal army which was hurrying down the road towards me. I had a few turns to continue to solidify my position, but it was going to become a problem. We had to call it a day partway into the third year, and figured Patch would have won, though we were giving him a much rougher time than it had seemed we could for a couple turns and the fighting was far from one-sided.

All in all, it’s an interesting game of empire-building (always a good subject), with a few flaws that could be polished off with some effort. As is, it’s a pretty interesting game that we’d like to give a workout with the rest of the gang.

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I Need to Brush Up On My Guderian…

by on June 14, 2010 at 11:12 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over yesterday for more gaming. After the drought of April/May, June is pretty busy. The game du jour was the new CDG Stalin’s War, which I got on preorder recently.

Mark volunteered to take the Soviets (who are supposed to have a really tough learning curve), and I gave him the beginner’s balance of 3 Replacement Points. This was a surprise, I was already expecting to take the Soviets. The other surprise wasn’t as good; Mark hadn’t had time to go over the rules, something we try to avoid.

The game got off to a poor start for the Germans, my initial 6 cards were a 4, a 3, three 2s and a 1 CC. The bright spot was that the 4 was Winter Uniforms. That left me with a 3 OPS June attack, and that’s where things actually went poor as I got ‘1’s on two of my attack rolls (my choice of attacks was probably not the best either).

I drew another 2 to fill out my hand, and had a hard time getting any momentum going as one or two OPS at a time with a need for constant breaks wasn’t cutting it. I managed an initial breakthrough near Minsk and was on my way to the vastness of central Russia. With my units in his rear, I started to encircle the entire southern half of the front on turn 3, greatly aided by some breakthroughs directly in the south.

And that is where things started going wrong.

Keeping those forces locked down for the bulk of the turn was a great strain. While slowed down, they are not immobile, and I didn’t want them causing havoc on my supply lines by sitting on top of the rail roads, so units sat trying to keep things together while Mark tried to reestablish supply to some of them. Worse, in the north Riga turned into big problem as he kept sniping away the overextended panzer corps that were trying to keep it cut off. I sank too many reduced units and too few OPS into Riga, and I lost valuable units to it for no gain. In the mean time I did take Smolensk and send a unit temporarily across the Paulus line.

The fourth turn did not see anything go better for me, with the added complications of Odessa and Sevastopol. Both are ports, so it is impossible to simply starve units out them (without cutting supply to all the other Black Sea ports… and even then they’re fortresses, which always allows limited supply). I spent too little effort on them, and so had more units in my backfield that I couldn’t get rid of. Combined with Mark’s very successful efforts against my panzer corps, much of my offensive punch was worn down, even with most of the winter effects negated.

I battled my way into Kharkov regardless, and immediately found myself overextended. Mark did a great job locking up the flanks of the advance and keeping me desperate to recover the situation. In the end, things were somewhat stable, but my armies were starting to take alarming losses, in no small part thanks to his shock armies fresh from Siberia.

The day ended at the end of turn 5, with me having made good on the opportunity to play two replacement cards, and actually start to get the German Army into fighting trim again. But, the offensives were over for the rest of the game, and it was now going to be the long struggle to last the game, which would not be easy. VPs were already down to 6 (from the starting 7). One point of that was Kiev, which Mark had snuck into at the end of the turn, though it would not last. Another was for it being Spring 42 without play of Hitler Takes Command, which I hadn’t even seen yet (that and Luftwaffe Support were the two cards left in my draw deck). So I freely consider this a Soviet victory.

The biggest problem is letting the panzers get too weak and get picked off. After that is figuring out how to deal with Soviet out-of-supply units until actually die at the end of the turn.

Between an hour from Mark running a bit late and I having to go over the rules with him, and Mark unexpectedly having to leave an hour early, it was a fairly short day. But we still got through 5 turns on our first go. Looks like this one will play pretty fast once we get to it. (Best PuG time is 6 turns on a long game, this would have probably hit 7 on a normal day, and should easily speed up to 8-10 later for a single afternoon.)

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Syrian Push

by on June 9, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, Jason came over this last Sunday, eager for another game of Pursuit of Glory. Forewarned, I had it all set up by the time he got here. After my long, long, game with Mark, most of my experience is with the Allied Powers, and I took the Central Powers this time.

Play was fairly smooth for me, since I’m somewhat familiar with all the Mobilization and Limited War cards by now. Jason is still learning and had to do a fair amount of head-scratching at various points as to how he was going to proceed. In spite of that, we got through 6 turns in one afternoon, which is the best I’ve seen so far.

Jason started with the standard Russo-British Assault, and I led off with Pan-Turkism, hoping to get a Jihad victory rolling later. Jason mostly ignored Egypt at first, but when I moved up through the Sinai with several units, he very quickly SRed in several units and played Anzac Reinforcements into Egypt before I was ready. I played Liberate Suez anyway, and took heavy losses in the best attack I could swing.

Meanwhile, things were typically busy on the Russian front, trading a couple spaces back and forth on the West side, and I moved into Ermia during turn two. Jason refused to play Secret Treaty for the event. I only played six cards in the first turn (can’t remember if I had a CC card or not), and the one card I didn’t draw on turn 2 was… Persian Push.

Both of us went to Limited War on schedule at the end of turn 2, and I gave him a nasty problem. I played Goeben on turn 2 right after he had played for RPs (and that reduced the RU RPs back to 0), and my first play of turn 3 was Gorlice-Tarnow, keeping him from getting any RU RPs that turn either. I then put down German Subs in the Med keeping him away from Invasions also on that turn, and limiting his Balkan options.

Overall, I undid most of the benefit by being too aggressive. He mounted a large attack which I saved with Reserves to the Front, counterattacked later during turn 4 (darn MOs) and left the elite III Corps out front. Jason knows how to put together strong attacks, and I lost the best TU corps way too easily.

Turn 4 was lead off with Lawrence and Djemal Crushes Secret Societies. I can’t really remember turns 4 and 5 separately at all. However, I was getting nervous, there was no sign of Parvus by turn 5, and both turns hands were pretty junky all around (some decent CC cards, but the average OPS/card was below 3). Kitchner’s Invasion landed at Adana followed by Maude and Galipolli Invasion (the next turn) and Salonika Invasion (as reinforcements straight to Cyprus). I attempted to block the beaches, but Maude forced his way inland, destroying the I Corps in the process. While I tried to patch together the next line, the reinforcements streamed in, forcing me out of Eregli and Mamure Station. He sped across Anatolia, taking Antyla the long way around, by way of Afyon.

He was finally starting to spread out a little too much, and had to pause some in turn 6. (A turn 5 I Order You to Die! in Kayseri helped.) However, the east wing kept going, turning me out of Aleppo, and would soon push me into the mountains Riyaq, while I formed a TU-A corps in Damascus. Parvus finally showed up for turn 6, along with Bulgaria.

Also, Persian Push showed up. I still had units in position to take advantage of it, and went over the plan in my head a few times in my turn. Towards the end of the turn, I noted that Jason had left his flank open as he advanced past Aleppo and Alexandretta. Of course my flank was wide open in there and there was no one to take advantage of the hole. As the sixth round came around, and I played Persian Push I suddenly realized I had the answer. The new TU-A division came in at Rakka (on the west edge of Mesopotamia) and activated, moving through Aleppo and Mamure Station, ending in Alexandretta. This cut his flank off and eliminated two divisions and a BR corps.

We had to call it a day there. I meant to save the position for future reference/use, but I’m afraid I didn’t have the time, and had to pack the game away (the problems of only having a dining room table to game upon). VPs were at 12, Jihad was stuck at 5. I’d say that it was looking towards an Allied win, but that last play could have been the beginning of some serious problems for him. My RPs were still healthy, though I needed to get some replacements soon. The Russian army was reasonably beaten up.

Oh, and I hit Total War at the end of turn 6, while the Allies had 3 points to go.

So far, invasions are the bane of my life as the CP. I have yet to successfully defend against an invasion, with all my efforts being too little too late. Some of that was an unwillingness to pull troops off the Russian front, which I should have done sooner than I did. I didn’t think I really had much to spare there, but when things started going from bad to worse in Anatolia, I found some spares.

Things would have been much simpler with an early Parvus to Berlin. It would have helped convince me to pull troops out, as the Russians were stuck at -1 VP, and it would have taken a lot of effort to get the 5 VPs they needed. Effort that I would have much rather seen than the invasion at this point. The Persian Gulf and Suez fronts were stable, though if I had ever stabilized Anatolia, I’m sure the push he’d built up for in Mesopotamia would have started.

I think I also need to play German Military Mission when it first comes up. I have generally ignored it for a late-game play, if needed (which I did on turn 6 this time). But now that I’ve actually defended in Anatolia, I have some idea of where to put the trenches (which I’ve always been unsure of).

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There Has Been a Victory!

by on May 30, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over today for our regular FtF session. It was his turn to pick, and he went for There Must Be a Victory from Against the Odds. It’s about the naval portion of the Seven Weeks War between Austria and Italy.

Mark took Italy (who ended up doing well from the war, getting Venice from France, who got it from Austria, but the actual fighting was a disaster). We only got through a small part of the game, but there was plenty of excitement to go around.

The main part of the game is on a small area map of the Adriatic, with battles going down to a tactical system with ships maneuvering around firing gunnery and ramming. Both sides have to roll to activate forces to move them around. Austria starts with a decent mobilization rating (desperate to fight to a conclusion quickly), but this goes down as the game progresses (as the war goes well against Italy on land, there is less reason to risk the expensive fleet). The Italian navy is hampered by lack of political will (not willing to risk the expensive fleet), going up as things go poorly on land, and hampered by their own admiral (amazingly over-cautious, apparently went to the McClellan School of Commmand).

In the event, the first turn consisted of Itally re-basing the main fleet from Taranto to Bari, while the Austrians besieged and bombarded Ancona. The second turn culminated in the Battle of Ancona, as the Battle fleets of both sides clashed. The rest of my forces had retired to resupply, and Mark’s had failed to move. The weather foul, which had a serious effect on the combat. Everything is at an extra -3 to do (on a d10), and maximum visibility was 3 hexes (generally goes down in battle as smoke from all the canons obscures vision).

We both started in line ahead formation, and the opening salvos were completely ineffective (-3 weather, -~7 defense, -2 range, plus gunnery of 3, not happening). Mark made the decision to ram my flagship with his. That was well and good, but the next ship in my line was also an ironclad ram, and it rammed his flagship. This ended up with both flagships going down and the entire combat immediately degenerating into a free-for-all mess. I did better, ramming another good ship of his almost immediately, and getting my first ram out of the way before he could fall victim (covering him with another ship for counter-ramming also helped).

Mark ended up losing three good ships (only one ironclad) and scuttling a fourth when she had to be abandoned, while I only lost my flagship (poor Vice-Admiral Nameless, he shall be missed). This got me 30 VPs compared to his 12 (and 4 for the earlier blockade). The bad news of course, is that three of my ships were pretty battered, especially the steam ship-of-the-line Kaiser who had been in the thick of the fighting and performed 2-3 rams despite not really being meant for that kind of service. I had gone in with one less ship, and the quality was slightly on his side, but I got a crew quality bonus (+1) that really made the difference.

Turn 3 saw Mark get a random event which forced him into further inactivity, while I repaired the Kaiser and blockaded Ancona and Bari. I also bombarded Ancona again, which did far better than the first try, with fewer ships. We had to call it during turn 4, which was shaping up for the Second Battle of Ancona, this time with much more of both side’s fleets present. I would have had more ships overall, but the bulk of them were fragile gunboats. With clear weather the gunnery battle would be much more important, but I’m not sure I would be able to make it work.

Final VPs where we left off was 38 to 12 in my favor. If the new naval battle didn’t break me, I was still in a position to dominate the war for the next few turns, but my ability to dictate activity would slowly erode. I think I was in position to win, but it is hard to say for sure. Of the AtO games we’ve played it is by far my favorite, and I hope we can try it again. In the meantime, I’m planning on Stalin’s War for our next adventure.

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