Ah SamBakZa…. If you haven’t seen these Korean music videos before, check them out, they’re quite fun.
If you have… part 3 is out.
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Had the gang over for wargaming on Saturday (Mark, Patch and Jason). We decided to go for a four-player game of Onward Christian Soldiers (1st Crusade), the three of us having enjoyed our previous experience, and wanted to try it with an extra player.
Jason, as the new person to the game, got the Northern Franks and the Sicilian Normans. I got the Southern Franks and Germans. Patch took the Mosul Turks and Mark had the Syrians.
It’s been very interesting. Jason got out of Anatolia as fast as he could, and headed for the area near Antioch. Some issues with what it takes to unite two armies under one command kept him from being able to start a siege. However, he proved adept at the assault rolls, and managed to take Antioch late in our session (about the 5th turn) for fairly minimal losses without ever starting a siege. He’s also established a few bases along the coast.
I hung around and took Lampron and Tarsus to base out of (Tarsus surrendered in return for me letting the troops go). Some poor activation chit draws really slowed me down. The Germans have since turned east with the idea of starting a County of Edessa. However, Kerbogha showed up at the earliest possible time, and that has kept the Germans busy. Baldwin just took Aleppo, so there is now a Christian base in the area. Kerbogha immediately marched north to engage Godfrey. A tense battle ended up with an unpredictable result that lost Kerboha a fifth of his army. He maneuvered around Godfrey, picked up reinforcements, and a second battle saw both sides get good formations again, and another Christian win (though a narrower one). At the prospect of a third battle, my nerve finally broke, and Godfrey retreated and hasn’t managed to move since.
The South Franks got a slow start, but have worked their way down to Syria, while Mark has managed to get a good number of troops in the area to block the Crusaders with. Mark has also been recruiting like mad in Damascus, but has largely gotten ‘1’s so far, leaving him far short of the manpower he’d like to have. Also, he’s lost two of the North Syrian leaders to successful assaults on the cities they were holed up in. Either someone is going to start moving south towards Jerusalem soon, or there’s likely to be a number of sieges where the Crusaders try to eliminate entire armies by holing them up in cities and assaulting them. Adhemar has already tried moving south, but ran into serious trouble and is now down to about 5 ASPs, after several battles.
Next time, we will (hopefully) finish off the game. It’s a messy situation, and a couple bad defeats could swing things.
During the game Jareth called with a problem: He’d just gotten a Blu-ray player and needed people to help test that it was working properly. ^_^ So, me, Smudge and Baron headed over that evening. Baron fixed a spaghetti dinner for everyone, and we watched a collection of Pixar shorts (Blu-ray) and introduced Jeremy to Giant Robo (DVD). And just talked a bunch.
A fun, fun day.
Mark came over yesterday. Spent some time yakking, and looking over his copy of Conquest of Paradise.
Most of the time, however, was spent playing The Biafran Civil War. A little game included as an extra in the 2007 Annual issue of Against the Odds (the main game is on the Atalanta campaign). Mark particularly wanted to try that one as he was having a hard time working it out himself.
Not a bad little game. The odd part is that it’s almost impossible to kill units by attacking them. An attacker can be eliminated, but a defender will usually just be pushed around. Which seems reasonably appropriate for the fighting in a modern civil war.
The rebels have an “endurance” track, which counts down each turn, and also is lowered as the Nigerian Federal forces take the cities and towns that are truly important to the rebels, and can be pushed back up again, at the expense of buying new units and equipment to carry on the war with. On the other hand, they get to use all of their troops every turn, while the Federals have to roll randomly to see how many brigades are actually active.
A random roll got me the rebels, and eventually a very narrow win. Mark had been unable to figure out how to get them to last more than a few turns. It’s tricky. At the beginning they just don’t have enough troops to do much, and early captures of a few towns, and some poor random events had the Endurance in freefall. But, then I actually managed to stalemate his main thrust after pulling back a minute. Personally, I think Mark took too long shifting to another front, and trying to overstrain me, but it’s really hard for the Federal forces to do much coordinated action with their random activation.
The game suffers from a good number of unanswerable questions, probably mostly due to them trying to fit all the rules into a small space, but it has some nice potential.
If you deal much with ink-jet printers, you know that printer manufacturers are making most of their money with consumables: ink and paper. The fight to maintain their profits include various methods of convincing people to use their own branded paper, and more especially ink.
I just came across this article at Trustedreviews, looking into how all of this holds up in actuality. The methodology looks pretty tight, though I need to look for the promised updates for color durability.
The interesting points include:
*The combination of printer+branded ink+branded paper did not win any of the overall quality scores.
*The branded papers did better than the branded inks.
On the entire ‘no-refills thanks to the embedded chips’ thing, it seems that’s something of a myth. The refilled cartridges generally work fine. However, Lexmark printers will claim ‘low ink’ for the entire life of an off-brand cartridge, and most off-brand (not refilled) Canon cartridges want you to transplant the chip from a real cartridge (odd…).
More worrisome is the fact that they did have some reliability problems with the off-brand inks.
Been meaning to post on happenings in the wargaming world for a little bit, but it’s hard to find the time to gather everything together.
First off, ADB, after several delays, is putting out it’s next round of products. There have been delays because their die-cutter told them they didn’t want to do it anymore, so ADB ended up shopping for a new one at the last minute. But, as of today, “Distant Kingdoms, Omega Five, Boosters 19 and 20 are on the cart.” Omega 5 and FC:DK were mentioned in Wargame News II (correction: Distant Kingdoms isn’t a boxed set, but akin to the “Attack” products—lots of stuff, but not a complete game). The Boosters are more ship cards for FC, I assume to go with FC:DK.
In all the excitement, other things have been pushed back. Captain’s Log 37 will probably come out in June, and it sounds like X1R and/or Y2 for SFB will be out for Origins (both have just had their counters done). Progress is being made on d20 Modern version of Prime Directive, with d20 and GURPS versions of the Federation sourcebook due after that. The next important FC release is Orion Attack, which is currently scheduled for August or September.
MMP is keeping busy, having quietly put another four items on their preorder page recently. Where Eagles Dare is the second half of a company-level treatment of Operation Market-Garden. No Question of Surrender is part of WED/TDC “Grand Tactical Series”, dealing with The Battle of Bir Hakeim. No Peace Without Spain is a strategic game about the War of Spanish Succession (I need to take a longer look at this one). And finally, Angola is a reprint/rework of a 1988 game on the Angolan civil war.
Meanwhile, Action Pack 4 hit its preorder number in under a week, spent a little under a month in final proofing, and now all the components have come back from the printer. It’s just waiting on the last initial shipments of South Mountain to go out, and then it starts shipping.
In the last month, GMT has shipped a reprint of Combat Commander: Europe, and a new version the Avalon Hill game, Blackbeard. SPQR Deluxe and Kutuzov will ship at the end of this month, and in June, respectively, and GMT has started charging preorders for them. And, they’ve added three new items to the P500 list: Crown of Roses, a block game of the Wars or the Roses. Nightfighter, a WWII nighttime dogfight game. And Serpents of the Seas, an age of sail naval game.