Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerOne of the things I figured about Watson was that when he knew the answer, he’d be right on the buzzer. Yep.
Did very well last night, building up a very solid lead against two people who are quite obviously capable. One very good “Watson moment” too.
For those (like me) who missed it last night:
Not a bad showing at all. They handled the background on it all well too.
Patch made it over Sunday, and we tried out my latest game acquisition, Barbarossa: Crimea. It’s the sixth game in a series slated to someday cover all the fighting on the East Front at an operational level. Let’s hope that promise fares better than Europa’s; at least they haven’t decided to up the scope from the East to the whole war.
I’ve been doing some solo work with it, so I was able to give Patch a fairly decent run-down of the system. I just hope there weren’t too many errors and bad assumptions mixed in.
We started with the first, tutorial, scenario, “The Tartar Ditch”, covering the German push from Perekop to Ishun in late September ’41. It’s four turns, with a tiny number of units, and an even tinyer front (even at this scale, the isthmus into the Crimea is only 2-3 hexes wide). Patch got the Germans, who have a lot more to do, as the Soviets are hamstrung, and have a pretty straightforward defense anyway.
In a few solo plays, I have yet to see a German win. Patch came closer than I ever have. I normally run into trouble on the first turn, with neither Soviet fortified position giving way. Without that, there is just no way to make up the lost time of having to attack the same line a second time in such a tiny scenario. Patch managed to replicate the example play’s breaking of the line in one hex, but not the other; though he didn’t replicate the tactics, making two 3-1 attacks instead of a 4-1 and 1-1.
He did inadvertently replicate one bit of performance that I had. The German Stukas only managed to make it in to support an attack once during the scenario, with AA usually aborting them out. At any rate, he did a nice job of attacking all down the line in the second turn, including an attack with the only mobile units in his force down at the end of the line. I got lucky and managed to bounce out the Stuka assigned to the combat, and held firm there while the rest of the line disappeared.
This left him with still clearing his way to the second defense line on the third turn, which was easy enough, even with three units withdrawn. The final turn saw the expected attacks without supply on the final defense line. He actually rolled well on one combat and got in, but the final victory hex held. This is the closest I’ve seen the Germans get yet in this scenario.
Anyway, that took less than three hours, including the full explanation of the main game functions. We set up the second scenario, and broke for lunch before starting it up. I took the Soviets again, while Patch struggled with the Romanian army assaulting Odessa. We only got through four turns, but saved the situation off on Vassal, and we’ll likely continue the game.
While it’s still early, he’s watching his force whittle away with some trepidation, while I’m alarmed at how fast the defensive perimeter is shrinking. Currently, pretty much everything has been happening on the west side of the city, and he’s nearly through all of the defenses out there, just as I gain the ability to start constructing new strongpoints. The good news is that means that he’s entering the range of the guns of the Soviet Navy, which could slow things down.
Also slowing things down has been two turns of Mud. This started just as two fresh divisions came on, and kept them from getting into the action for an extra turn. I’ve finally decided to shorten my defensive line on the east side, but the mud has also delayed the units I freed up.
Patch is still sorting out everything with Interdiction, but has generally managed at least one point in naval movement box. Right now nothing is damaged, but that’s after repairing minor damage on three different ships, and a large number of aborts. I’ve managed to deliver all the Zap units (minus the ones I’m starting to build with the I-points I’m now getting), but it has often taken 2-3 tries.
Both Patch and I like games with a lot more maneuver than what we’re seeing at the moment, but then these are simple, constrained, situations. Certainly, there’s a fair amount of thinking going into the Odessa scenario, and it probably does better than a fair number of magazine games out there. I’m still getting some of the feel for the system, and some of the interesting points won’t come up until the Soviets get a chance at an offensive. But I have to say, I do really like the air system in it, and I like what I’ve seen of the naval system; both are nicely abstracted, while giving decent detail.
As usual, the household went up to Smudge’s parents for Christmas this year. It was a pretty good gathering, and the first time we’ve gotten to see her sister and her husband in years. Everyone is doing pretty well, and Smudge’s allergies are to the point where an overnight stay was possible again.
With money being very tight in the household (though it looks like things will steadily improve over the next year), it wasn’t much of a Christmas from a personal gift-giving or -getting perspective. Smudge’s parents tried, they got me the Halo Interactive Strategy Game. They know I like boardgames, and I give them full credit for the effort, but the reviews are atrocious (and from what I see, they’re right on), there were obviously meant to be expansions to it, and those have been canceled, and the ‘base set’ has been relegated to bargain bins across the country. It does have some nice plastic miniatures and modular terrain. I’ll let the guys in the group who are into miniatures argue over who gets those; it’ll find a good home at least.
And on Monday, my copy of Barbarossa: Crimea arrived (now there’s a study in contrasts). I’m still poking my way through the rules, but it does look pretty promising. I hope to play my way through the introductory scenario soon.
As usual, I have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. I’ve wasted a fair chunk of it playing Plants vs. Zombies. And by being under the weather. Not full-out sick, though if I’d tried going into work on Monday, it could have happened.
Anyway, Jason is free for the next month or so, so he came up on Wednesday, and we gave Paths of Glory a test run. He could stay ’til 7, and we already know the general system from Pursuit of Glory so we got about halfway through. He decided to take the Central Powers when he showed up, and lead off with the standard Guns of August.
The earliest game-shaping event was probably when I hit him with Moltke right after he discarded Falkenhayn for Ops. This left operations on the Western Front relatively expensive, and the action there stalled for quite a while. I was also able to keep his attention divided between the fronts by various actions, including an ill-fated British attempt to re-occupy Liege, and doing what I could to shore up Serbia. I spent a 4/4 card on RPs on turn 2 to partially rebuild them, and to get the Russians back into shape. The Germans drove into Warsaw pretty early, but I kept threatening the southern flank and picking on the Austro-Hungarian army.
The two main (caught) rules errors were the siege roll penalty on the first two turns, and the fact that British, French and German MOs have to be on the Western Front. The former potentially affected several sieges, but most notably, the Russian siege of Konigsburg. The Russian army got cut off and lost due to Attrition anyway (note to self, not a good idea, no matter how tempting it looks).
I used Salonika to SR a BR and two FR corps to the Balkans, and Yudenitch put out the only NE army our game saw in play. For a while it seemed like the east as a whole was going well for me. I got Romainia out a turn before Bulgaria. And I made a decent stab at taking Sofia (which I was thinking would put him out of supply; it wouldn’t, thanks to Constantinople, but it would certainly keep him from rebuilding BU units. That scheme collapsed, and things were starting to look grim in the Balkans at the end of the day. However, I had SRed the AN corps into the Near East and destroyed Beersheeba, opening the route into Syria, while the Caucasian Army slowly moved around causing problems in the north side of the NE map. I really needed to remember to transfer an extra RU corps into there to allow me to expand the perimeter.
The Western Front heated up towards the end of the day. Jason finally played Falkenhayn, we found our mistake on the MOs, and I remembered to start building better trenches (neither of us remembered to do much with them), and pushed him back out of France.
At the end of the day, it was the end of turn 9, the VPs were at 7, I was entering about my fourth turn of Total War, and Jason had yet to get to it. (Distracted by the high value of the war status cards, like I was the first time I played PuG.) I think I would have gone on to win, but there was a long road to go yet.
It’s a good game, and I certainly want to give it another go. Whether it’s as good as PuG I can’t say yet.
Well, I’m on my usual week+ vacation to see my parents. I should probably talk a little about it at some point, though it’s mostly pretty routine.
Of course, part of the point is that I get some time to play wargames with my Dad. I had a serious case of indecision, and some new stuff to show, and brought three bags worth of games (at about three boxes per bag). The initial talk was over whether to play Stalin’s War or Paths of Glory, both games I’ve gotten on preorder this year. Stalin’s War had the advantage of a familiar subject, though my Dad was hesitant after looking at the rules, as it was fairly obvious that it would take some work to play well.
But we ended up with that anyway, partially following the script of the sample game to begin with (our own card draws, and die rolls, but using that game to generate advice on what to do next). My Dad took the Germans, and only had a three OPS card to use for the June ’41 attack, but it went fairly well. He kept the panzer corps under control, and there was not a lot of Blitzing, mostly because I kept out of Blitzable terrain as much as possible.
We were under the misapprehension that towns were not Blitzable, like cities, for quite a while before we noticed the mistake, I’m not sure when we started making that mistake however. It may have affected the advance in the north, which eventually halted a couple hexes from Leningrad. (I pulled back into the city, but the Germans did not want to get involved).
In the south, I quickly fell back to the Don River, but only had minimal defenses in the Caucasus. Since most of the German drive was in the center, this took a while to become any sort of problem. During the fall, the Germans played Taifun only accentuating the focus in the center. I played Industrial Evacuation and shortly after evacuated Stalin to the Urals. This was good thing, as Moscow fell shortly thereafter. During the next year, the line wavered back and forth. I retook Moscow, and moved Stalin back in during Spring 1942, in time for the play of Lend Lease, the line south ran through Tula, which was in constant danger of being out of supply, and I tried to hold at Tambov, but kept getting forced to pull back to Saratov and the Volga River.
Keeping a line on the Volga was also a challenge. he couldn’t attack across it, and Stalingrad was relatively safe, but keeping up zones of control so he couldn’t move across it was a challenge. I was doing a similar thing in the Caucasus, but I didn’t properly think through just what a lack of ZOC on a unit meant, and he moved into the Caucuses.
To the north of Moscow, not much was going on. I had a gap in my line, but there is no rail that doesn’t go through Moscow or Leningrad, so the Germans couldn’t get far. Outflanking Moscow was an invitation to be outflanked in turn, as I usually tried to keep some sort of reserve in Gorki.
Most of 1942 saw the tense see-saw continue as I tried to keep up with losses with replacements, and start refitting the army as the Total War Reinforcement cards started coming in. One lesson I learned on the fly is to try and keep a good number of the 2-3 one-step infantry armies on the board as they are needed to create the 4-4 mechanized armies. Also, keeping a good number of the Fronts flipped to 2-3 is fine, as the replacement fronts will come in full strength without having to spend replacement points on them.
I was generally busy enough that I only used the Soviet ability to take two replacement cards in a turn, once or twice in the entire game. There were two Reinforcement cards I never played (27 & 28) and one that I only played very late (31).
I hesitated over starting any major Soviet offensives. I was afraid that I’d hesitated too long. The main problem was that the main area for offensives was the clear area between the Don and the Volga, which would put me into Blitzable terrain, and I was worried about getting units cut off, and chewed up, and having the even more fatal delay of having to build up again.
In the end, I managed to launch three thrusts at once, which I think did a lot towards getting the Germans solidly onto the defensive. The trouble started in the Caucuses, where we were still maneuvering for slight edges in position. The Romanians were holding much of that part of the line, with the Italian 8th Army moving into the area as back up. I attacked with the Front that I had in the area, and used Maskirovka to bring enough troops into the combat to destroy the German mountain corps operating in there. A further attack drained the Romanian forces, and the Italians came up. I then played The Duce Falls, removing the Italians from the game, and leaving him with no large units on that flank.
Meanwhile, I launched an attack on the Germans entrenched in Voronezh, backed up with troops to hold the line, if things should go bad. North of Moscow, I finally had built up enough troops to start attacking the German units holding the flank, and started driving at the soft part of his line, hoping to drive him away from Leningrad and the outskirts of Moscow.
Of course, with the amount of pressure I was applying at that point, there was no choice to fall back, especially when, after a couple of poor rolls, I finally had a round where everything went well for me. PQ-17 had been played right after Lend Lease and it finally ran out as this was starting, and the three Banked OPS per turn really make a difference in getting and keeping momentum going. At the very least, it allows an extra 0 OPS round, with combat fueled by the Banked OPS.
In Spring 1944, as the offensive tried to gain momentum, I played Hitler Opposes Defensive Works, more or less taking German trenches out of the game. The next turn, my Dad played Festung, which gave him a whole new way to stymie the defense. In the end, he relied on them too heavily, tying up the German army in immobile positions. I saw this from the beginning, but progress was slow enough, and there was always another position with more units, and more time tied up in several attacks to reduce them. I was seriously worried about running out of time.
The main offensive was in the north all along, from the initial drive between Moscow and Leningrad to the north of the Pripiet Marshes and the Baltic States. It was in there that I hoped to break the line and finally make it through.
I had also kept up pressure in the extreme south, and it was there that the initial break came. The Romanians had still had the bulk of holding the line down there, and finally ran out of strength. I had pushed up through the Crimea to the Dniepr, and finally broke through, sneaking around the end of the line, and into Odessa in late Winter 1945.
As the final action before the raputitsa set in, I finally achieved the breakthrough in the north, clearing the way free into Germany. There was nothing left in the German army to stop me, and Berlin fell in the fourth round of Spring 1945, the last of the Soviet victory cities (Konigsburg fell when the next festung to the north, guarding it fell the previous round).
Aside from a final Reinforcements play, the last event I played was Overlord in Fall 1944. I skipped Battle of the Bulge, wanting the ops more than the ability to choke off the panzers (though it was very tempting, and I had held the card for a couple turns hoping to play it). The final German event was The Bunker near the very end, and a few starred CC cards; the last non-new unit, non-CC even was Festung.
So a Soviet victory, slightly ahead of schedule, in large part due to a tough, but brittle, German defense. It was hard fought all the way, and I had to constantly worry about losing too much strength to keep mounting the powerful attacks to clear the way. A very good, and very tense game.