The Age of Piracy! (Abridged Version)

by on July 19, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang, or at least some of it over yesterday to try out GMT’s Blackbeard, which Mark got some time ago. Due to schedule constraints there were four of us (the game supports up to five), me, Mark, Jason and Patch.

I’d played the AH Blackbeard a time or two ages ago, and while I remember that I generally liked it, I don’t recall much else. It didn’t take me long however, to realize that while this version is technically related to it, the relationship is quite distant. Offhand, I’d say the new one is much more historical and has a better flow as a game.

However, we stuck with the short game, and there are some definite problems with it. While the playing time is quite good (about 2-3 hours with four of us who weren’t overly familiar with the game), it seems to be way too short to feel like anything much has happened. You basically end up going through the deck of events once (possibly even 20 cards short of that), and it seems to us as if that’s just enough time for a pirate to loot a couple ships, rack up some notoriety, and retire—if he’s lucky. One additional note—a couple of us didn’t notice the lines separating the sea areas until they were forcibly pointed out to them. I don’t understand why, they were instantly obvious to me.

On our first go through both me and Patch took advantage of the second draw of the General Pardon card (the first does nothing, the third ends the game, only the second does the event on the card), to get to an English port and take the pardon and retire (converting all our notoriety and loot into victory points). Neither of us did anything much with the second pirates we activated right afterwards, and Mark and Jason never retired. At first we thought this left them with no VPs, but later review showed that they got a handful from accumulated notoriety. Patch had done better than I and won quite handily.

We went off to lunch at that point, and started a second short game when we got back. I don’t think it took any less time, but we started using parts of the rules to much greater effect. Most notably King’s Commissioners were quite active, and the bane of more than one pirate.

This time, it was more than some of us could do (including me) to retire a pirate before the end of the game. I started out well, picking off Patch’s successful pirate at the beginning of the game with my KC. After that it was all downhill. I took a gamble and started off the Gold Coast of Africa, where it turned out there weren’t any merchants. I moved over to the happy hunting grounds of India (about half the initial merchants were in that area. I took one merchant and got a valuable prisoner, but hardly any loot or notoriety (rolled ‘1’s for both on a +1 ship). The real problem was that my hostage was French, and the only French port with a non-anti-pirate governor was in the Caribbean.

So, I set out for the Caribbean, and that turned out to take longer than the game lasted. This was partially due to delays caused by my speed rating dropping below 0 halfway there from the combined effects of storms and events played on me. This left me at half movement in the middle of the Atlantic (transit box), and by the time I got to a port, got repairs and got close to my goal of a French port, I was drawing the last card of the deck (the General Pardon for the third time). Thanks to the early KC points, I again managed second, but not by a lot, and Patch was well ahead.

It seems like the only workable pattern for the short game is to cycle through pirates as quickly as possible. Catch a merchant ship, get a little loot and notoriety, and retire as soon after that as possible. Then start it again, and gain as much notoriety as possible, since that’ll convert to VPs on game end.

We actually had some time at the end of that, so we went for a round of Plague & Pestilence. Patch (as it turns out) and I have both played it before, but it’s been years…. Due to the Plague Ship showing up a bit late, and time constraints, we actually didn’t quite finish. I think I had the highest population (I’d managed to stay quiet and have good luck on the plague rolls, so I moved from a close third), though Mark had a seemingly endless supply of improvements, which could have kept him afloat. Both Patch and Jason were running pretty thin by the end of it.

Plans for next month are, so far, uncertain.

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In Which I Fail to Find California

by on July 5, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had Mark over today for our monthly wargaming session. It was his turn to pick, and he decided to go with a couple of shorter games to give us some greater variety.

We started off with Winds of War a ‘bonus’ game from Against the Odds, that started on a bet. Namely, a “I can make a game on anything” bet. The eventual result was a game on Japan’s attempt to bomb the US with hydrogen balloons during WWII. It’s… not much of a simulation, but it isn’t bad for a game that takes an hour or so.

I took the Japanese, and got to manage groups of balloons coming in from off the west coast, trying to find randomly distributed targets in the hope of causing some damage (I was more playing the wind than the Japanese). Mark, as the US, got a number of random markers that allowed him to interfere with what I was doing, by pushing around the balloons I was moving some more, or modifying the die rolls when I did find something.

Since the targets are face down and shuffled randomly, there’s not a lot of strategy involved. Most spaces are barren desert, so it takes some luck just to find the targets. What there is involves getting as many balloons onto targets at all, versus getting them off-course or keeping them from having any effect. I developed a strategy of moving most everything into position first, and then ‘landing’ them in clumps at the end of the turn, to minimize Mark’s ability to fiddle with their movement or force them to land in empty spaces (once targeted, a space is then empty for the rest of the turn).

Mark mostly stuck to modifying my die rolls when I did find something. Since the highest VP rolls are the lowest, this is pretty effective. It also didn’t hurt that I generally rolled high. So, I generally had one or two VP events a turn. Out of 50 VP needed to win as the Japanese… I got 14. It did, however, take just under two hours to play, including pre-game rules discussion.

It’s a cute game, but I don’t see how the Japanese can win, unless the US player gets too enamored pushing around the balloons with his modifier markers.

After that, we went to the main event of the day: Red Vengeance, a fairly simple game on the last year of the Eastern Front in WWII. It’s an old-fashioned hex-game with ‘buckets of dice’ combat resolution—a combination I’m not used to.

Mark decided to take the Germans, and lined up on the start line. I started on my start line. I was a little worried at first, since you must set up on these lines, and they’re in contact for almost the whole length. I could move back and out of combat, concentrating force for a few breakthroughs, but that didn’t seem right. So I stayed put and slugged it out.

This was the right decision. The Soviet units generally have higher combat factors (more dice), which gives a good general advantage, and both lines are packed enough that concentrating force at the beginning of the game would be difficult. The real key is that the Soviets go first, and get the first repair and replacements phase on the second turn. So the Wehrmacht has to take a second round of attacks before they can bring any weakened unit up to strength. It is very hard to kill a unit, as most have a second step, and you are only forced to take one casualty in any combat; after that, you can take further hits as hexes of retreats.

I also had some good dice during the first turn. (It seems unwise to play any game against me where I need to count on rolling ‘6’s.) Mark stepped back and repaired his line, but both flanks pretty much dissolved during the second turn. In the north, that’s not too bad, as the Baltic gets in the way, and the length of line needed gets shorter. In the south, things start opening up in Hungary and Romania, and it was causing some trouble.

The game claims a 60-90 minute play time. So far, not so. We did about 4 turns out of 11 in three hours before Mark had to pack it up to go home. I figure we were picking up speed, but you’d have to be pretty darn fast to get to the speed they’re expecting (sounds familiar…). At any rate, I had demolished a fair chunk of his forces, and while that’s not what victory really consists of, I think we agree that I was winning, though the speed I would really make through the winter months could determine a lot in the way of VPs.

Anyway, it was actually a reasonably fun game, and we’d like to give it another workout soon. Next month is my choice, and it’ll either be Metropolis playtest, or Federation & Empire.

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Two For One Starship Sale

by on July 4, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Posted In: SFB

With today (the 4th) being a Saturday, I got yesterday off for the Federal Holiday. Zjonni also had the day off from college, so he came over for some gaming yesterday. As he wasn’t entirely on top of things, he decided to go for Star Fleet Battles over learning any of the other games that I’ve given him some intro to, but he hasn’t played yet.

After a little indecision, he stuck with the D7 as his training vessel, and I decided to take the Hydran Lord Commander command cruiser (without fighters, thank you), as a good way to encourage maneuver. I carefully pointed out the gatlings, and the Fusion beams and made sure he had an understanding of why being overrun with a Hydran is a Bad Idea.

And it worked; the fight went several turns with a good amount of maneuvering for position going on. I eventually got him, but it took a fair amount of work, and I never really got closer than range two. I was helped early on when a volley of disruptors hit 1:4 with odds that should have seen three hit, I really didn’t have the reinforcement to deal with that, and it would have been an extra down shield (we both ended with not much left in that department). However, the dice were pretty cold for both of us early, though I got the advantage of the first shot with good rolls.

That took (including lunch out) until mid-afternoon. For a second game, we went over a couple of rules, went to a two-on-two battle and he wanted to try something different. So, he had a couple of Gorn CAs and I took two D7s.

The initial maneuvering went well, and I started denting one of the CAs at moderate range. Zjonni finally got in close enough with the CA I wasn’t concentrating on to launch it’s pair of torpedoes. At the same time, the one I’d been picking on was trailing behind and to one side, and it launched its facing torpedo. Then it turned in to bring the other to bear and launch it. I could probably have run them out to near their full range, but I went in a bit to volley what I could on the hurt CA, and managed to get one of the torpedo launchers. This meant I wasn’t able to run them out past the mid-range damage brackets. The D7 he was picking on by now had all the rear shields shredded, and now took most of its fluff, but was still a good fighting platform.

The next turn saw both hurt ships doing their best to pull out of combat, with moderate success. That left the two unhurt ships facing off. Since they were already inside of overload range, I went slow and charged everything hoping to get a good shot off as he swept out of range. Instead, he stopped and taced. I was going just fast enough to get to him. Disruptors can fire every turn, so they have a lower one-shot output than other heavy weapons. So it is easy to forget just how much damage a range-0 pass from a D7 can actually put out.

The next turn was spent finishing off wrecking the CA… and about this time it had to be called for dinner (since that was the same table). It was obvious I was going to win, but there was a lot hurting left; it was obvious that I was going to eat a plasma-G at full strength, never mind the phasers.

At any rate, two games, a lot of fun, and Zjonni is getting up to speed very nicely.

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Advanced Thracian City States

by on June 21, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well… today was meant to be a playtest of the game Metropolis (about the rise of the Greek city-states), but I haven’t received all my playtest materials yet. So, we went to Plan B: Advanced Civilization. Sadly, Zjonni has two finals to take tomorrow, and, I think, a paper to write, so he could not make it, leaving us with only 5.

The five-player game cuts off one of the four map panels (in this case the west side), and reduces the number of tokens available to each player a little. After randomly drawing for choosing priority, I took Egypt, Patch took Babylon (which he had last time), Jason took Thrace, Mark took Assyria, and Dave took Crete (the only power in play that hadn’t been last time).

The opening was pretty standard. I deliberately bounced once on the early Bronze Age so that I’d be in better shape in the longer term. I moved west into the rest of Africa, wanting to get to the available city site early, and of course north-east through the Sinai to establish a buffer zone. Relations with Patch were pretty good the entire game, my biggest problems were actually with Crete.

Things developed a bit slowly in Europe and Asia Minor. Jason used Thrace’s late AST barriers to keep a higher population early and took over Greece before Crete really got going. Assyria was perhaps a bit slow, and western Anatolia remained something of a vacuum for quite a while.

As things got going, Babylon took the brunt of the initial wave of calamities, as Patch had at least one for 4-5 turns in a row. Thrace pretty much took no damage. Considering that Jason is always a very able player, and is more practiced with Civ than the rest of us at this point, I… was not happy with the results. It’s not that I wasn’t doing well, but keeping up with him was difficult. And then I had about three to four turns of nasty calamities in a row. I took a Civil War early, with the second faction going to Dave/Crete. I eventually threw him out (except for one small little colony that I didn’t worry about much), but this was delayed by being the primary victim of an Epidemic. I finally knocked out the Cretan city that was in my territory just in time—Dave had a Flood that turn.

Finally, Crete was hit by a Civil War, and I was the beneficiary. This gave me back what was left, and gave me a city on Cyprus that I kept to the end of the game. This put me back in a good position, and I could do something about getting somewhere in the game.

We had a hard limit of 5 PM again, but we definitely got further this time around, and the game flowed more smoothly. Jason and I both broke the Early Iron Age barrier on the last turn. In fact I’d done fairly well, getting to eight cities, and trading away Epidemic to Jason (second time I drew that card!). Sadly, I caught Treachery in return (the second time he hit me with that—but there’s only so many trading partners for the high-value cards). If not for losing that city to him (which he reduced) I would have barely beat him. As it was, I was a mere 36 points behind him in second (inflating my score with the deepest discount purchases I could manage helped). I think we squeezed out two extra turns or so.

Egypt and Babylon (deservedly) get all the press for being the easiest positions, but I must say at this point that Thrace is actually very powerful. Some of it depends on just how much crowding is going on the northern side, but that’s true of any position. With any sort of real room, the late AST barriers really allow you to plan what you’re doing.

Final Scores:

Side Player AST Cities Civ Cards Cards Treasury Total Place
Thrace Jason 1100 200 720 8 4 2032 1
Crete Dave 1000 150 375 20 0 1545 5
Assyria Mark 900 200 560 5 13 1678 4
Babylon Patch 900 400 455 4 16 1775 3
Egypt Rindis 1000 350 630 13 5 1998 2

We still need to work out the next meet, but we’ll probably try for Metropolis… if possible.

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Certain Destruction Awaits

by on May 24, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had Mark over today to try out Stonewall’s Last Battle. It’s part of the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series, which has a pretty good reputation. Also, there’s a new game for it due out for the first time in almost a decade, so I’ve been wondering how anxious I really am to get it.

This particular one is on the Chancellorsville campaign, where the Union nearly surprised Lee, and then let him take the initiative (never a wise move in the vicinity of Lee…).

Today’s fight didn’t go nearly so well for the South. I took the Confederates in scenario 5, the first of the advanced scenarios. I’d borrowed Mark’s copy last month so I could familiarize myself with the rules ahead of time, which also put me in the position of teaching the Advanced rules to Mark. (He’s only managed a solo trial session before this point; which I also did before today.) It’s pretty much the full battle, starting with Hooker getting his left flank over the Rapidan on April 30.

Teaching and getting through the first couple turns took us the bulk of the day. The game is not horribly complex (though there’s a passel of game-specific exceptions in each one, that I hope they find a way to tone down at some point). Part of the problem is just a very procedure-heavy approach to the rules, and further familiarity would speed things up quite a bit.

At any rate, the Confederates begin with a bunch of restrictions on the first day that limits their ability to respond. The game started with some cavalry skirmishing as I tried to figure out how to slow down the approaching Union troops. I threw what I did have available in his way, but not with much success (even lost a complete brigade).

The second day presented a lot more action. I pulled out the bulk of Jackson’s Corps from around Fredricksburg and attempted to face off with the three approaching corps. Partially due to poor initiative rolls, this was a lot more piecemeal than it needed to be, and Mark promptly wrecked a couple divisions with combined assaults. Part of this was also due to not being able to figure out what to do to get a good defensive position.

As the turn went on, I pulled parts of my forces out the actual entrenchments around Fredricksburg to shore up the rapidly crumbling west. I hoped that what I left would be enough to prevent a Union breakthrough there. More or less in vain. He then attacked out of Fredricksburg and cleared about half the fortifications. At the end of May 1st, there were a lot of Union troops that were going to be too worn out to get too far (hopefully), but the XII Corps was just getting up, and I was in much the same state.

Obviously, good Confederate play is necessary to get far, and I’m a long ways from figuring that out. Also, there is still a ways to go in the scenario, and it has pretty stringent VP requirements for the Union. However, I don’t know how I could have really patched a line together, and (hopefully) managed a counterattack in the interest of keeping the situation from completely falling apart over the next couple days.

So, a fairly convincing win from Mark, and he’s looking at trying out a couple of different short games next time around.

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