A Long Road to Salerno

by on February 14, 2024 at 2:03 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark and I’s latest Saturday game was the full campaign of Salerno ’43. Since my earlier play of the short game, I’d been wondering what the full campaign would play like, and so when we got back to the ZOC-bond games, that was my choice. I had the Allies again, while Mark took the defending Germans for his first play.

The initial landings went well, with only Sugar Beach failing to advance two hexes, and the Commandos took Salerno and Nocera Inferiore. (…That would seem to be illegal, since that would have been an advance after a Breakthrough Combat in Salerno. It was a DS, but the allowed advance would be counted from the “landing” combat, not the second one; which as the first combat of the game, was missed. And they’re foot units, and can only advance 2 anyway. But this turned out poorly for me anyway.) Mark set up a loose cordon around the landings and counterattacked Nocera, disrupting the Commandos.

The second wave landed, and I attacked south, eliminating a panzer battalion, while pulling out of Nocera. Despite taking to the hills, and help from Fleet Air Arm, the Germans got a A1/D1 to knock out the Commandos guarding the way south on turn 2, and advanced to outside of Salerno. The Americans pushed south, while the 45th division started landing to cover the beaches, while the British pushed into the foothills and sent a brigade to garrison Salerno.


Near the end of Sept 10/turn 2.
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The Storm Before the Storm

by on February 10, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I started listening to podcasts at just the right time: There was a minor explosion of good historical subjects going on. This was largely due to Mike Duncan, and his History of Rome podcast. Not that you can tell by listening to the very early episodes; it took a while for his delivery to loosen up and become a very good podcast.

But it did become a very good podcast, and so is his later Revolutions podcast. So, I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me seven years to read his first book, especially since its a look at a period of Roman history that needs more attention.

And hey, Mike Duncan agrees with me, it’s why he wrote this particular book. This is a popular history book, and even less dense than most of those. It’s not particularly long, coming in at 265 pages in hardcover.

But, then there’s extensive endnotes, and a lengthy index. While this is geared to someone just taking an interest in history, all the tools to dig deeper are provided. In fact, the endnotes are particularly geared at getting you to the relevant primary sources. This is great place to begin if you want to develop an interest in the period. (One entry in the index, “murders”, then references eleven people killed in his narrative, and then cross-references to “killings, political”, with another seven sub-entries.)

And I should mention that period covers from the first real crisis of the Republic, the rise of the Gracchi brothers, and gives some nice background to the social forces at play at the time. From there, Duncan goes on to events in Africa and Spain, with Jugurtha rising to power, and the troubles in Spain leading to the siege of Numantia, and then to Marius and Sulla, whose attempt to rework the Republic into something more stable concludes the book (along with Duncan’s thoughts on why it didn’t work). So, for those of you used to McCullough’s Master of Rome series, the first half of this is before the series, and covers everything she talks about from before the first book, through the first three books of the series.

Duncan’s prose is very readable, the contents very informative, and overall he takes as neutral a stance as possible on what unfolds in his pages. Even if you’ve read up on Roman history, 146–78 BC is a period you may know much about, and this is a very good starter book on the period.

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Dark Growing Lands

by on February 6, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

I’m way overdue for sharing my latest thoughts about FF XIV. Last time, patch 6.25 had come out, and we were in the middle of a story to wrap up some loose ends. Now, 6.55 has come out, and we’re on the slow straightaway to the next expansion, Dawntrail, due out later this year.

To start in the same place as last time, there’s been two more variant dungeons, Mount Rokkon and Aloalo Island. Both share the general format, and have been a lot of fun to go through. We’ve yet to get through all twelve paths in any of them without some outside hints, though I think we’ve needed less direct help on Aloalo… but we’re still missing one path; we seem to be close on it though. All three have good stories to tell, which is nice to see. Now, if only the criterion version wasn’t set above our skill level….

The most recent patch also wrapped up a couple other side bits. The tribes got their unified story line, which was nicely done, but for a minute I thought we were going to get a new mini-game, and instead we just got a single forced choice in a cutscene. Good writing, but I think they missed an opportunity, though burying it behind the tribes would have been a problem.

On the other hand, they did bury the latest relic weapon behind Manderville, which apparently caused a lot of consternation for a few people. Personally, I like the Manderville side stories, so it was absolutely zero burden for me, and there were a lot of truly laugh-out-loud moments again this time.

Back over in the main story, things went… about how you’d expect after the setup. In many ways, it’s Zero’s story, as she reconnects with humanity after millennia as a voidsent, and with little else to deal with. At the same time, the big bad powered the action parts of the plot, and threatened to break loose into the Source. That’s kind of the main threat of voidsent writ large, so that is basically what must be expected. As always, it’s the journey that matters, and it’s well handled, with all the requisite dungeons and trials along the way, though I’m definitely feeling like it’s moving past my abilities.

Along the way, we did get to connect to the background of the Reaper class, which I haven’t taken, so that was all new for me, but was a nice integration of lore. And the main story paralleled FF IV‘s. I’ve yet to get to that one, but it’s a strong story, and there were plenty of references already in the main Endwalker story, so that’s a natural fit, though possibly one that needed a little more polish, though any deficiencies come down to trying to tell a fairly complete story in the between-expansions section. My biggest hope is that we’ll see more from the Thirteenth again sooner rather than later. The various bits steering towards a real resolution from that world are partially buried in optional content, so it could be hard to pull together the separate threads of Zero, Eden, Unukalhai, and Cyella, but there are hints that we will see more.

Of course, the wrap-up of this adventure left open the question… where are we going next? I had been expecting Meracydia, but no. (I was apparently not alone in this.) This has since been answered, thanks to patch 6.55 (not to mention earlier reveals), and we’re going to get to see the new world, which is indeed being positioned to parallel the New World of Earth (popotoes have been explicitly referenced as coming from there). So, back to ‘all new places’ for the expansion, as opposed to building off the limits of currently known areas (such as Coerthas and Gyr Abania did).

It’s not like we’ll soon run out of all new places to go.

The NPC lineup has been telegraphed, and the plot will obviously be driven by Wuk Lamat, who looks to have some nice depth that will get explored later. Story-wise, if SE is content to let the story be its own thing, and not put the fate of the entire world on the line, I think we could get a good story out of it. (Okay, it might still be a good story if the entire world is threatened, but that’s not really necessary, and after the last expansion, re-setting the stakes to a lower level is something I think is really needed.)

Meanwhile, Smudge and I are still streaming our alts on Sundays. As of this writing, they are just about to hit the climax of Heavensward. With about an hour and a half a week, we aren’t going to go very fast on this, but we are slowly catching up, which is great to confirm.

I do still miss Stephen Critchlow.

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Prairie and War Years

by on February 2, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

So far as I know, Carl Sandburg is hardly known today, though my edition of this set starts with a recounting of a speech he was invited to make before Congress. Generally, he was a poet, but became so fascinated by Abraham Lincoln he wrote a two-volume biography of his life before becoming president. That fired Sandburg’s interest so much he went on to write a further four volumes on the remaining five years of Lincoln’s life.

That was written from 1926 to 1939. In the ’50s, he condensed those six books down to three, and in the ’60s they made the transition to paperback, and my edition is the eighth Dell printing in 1968.

A roughly forty-year run as a popular biography is no small feat.

The telescoping of time is more pronounced than the above mention alludes to, as the third book (part two of The War Years) is merely the last year of Lincoln’s life. Some of this is natural, as relatively little is known of Lincoln’s younger life, needing to rely on memories recounted later by him and people who knew him, while the mass of correspondence and records grow denser later in life.

The split between the first two books is pretty obvious; The Prairie Years leaves off with Lincoln leaving Illinois for Washington D.C., and The War Years picks up with his tour east, and the concerns about the possibility of an assassination attempt on the way. Part two of The War Years picks up with the fight over the Republican nomination in 1864. Two-term presidents had been unknown since Jackson (thirty years before), and pretty much every Republican senator wanted a crack at it instead of him.

All along, we get stories of Lincoln’s stories, but these also become more prominent as the biography goes on. Given how they were a large part of how he explained his thoughts to others, it would be impossible to do without them. We also get plenty of quotes from newspapers and speeches friendly and hostile to him, and a good sense of how he was perceived at the time is given. Only two of Lincoln’s speeches are given in full (Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural, naturally), though a third comes in for a number of mentions (A House Divided). This is popular history, so the story of the Civil War is bound up in here, and generally not assumed that the reader knows the salient particulars, But, it is generally told from the viewpoint of the White House.

Overall, it’s well written and recommended. If you study the Civil War, there’s a lot that will be familiar, but there’s a lot of material that would be easy to have missed unless you’ve studied Lincoln in particular.

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Tiny Greed War

by on January 29, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had everyone over last week for a FtF session. The main idea was to go through a couple of recent smaller acquisitions we hadn’t tried yet.

So, first up was Greed Quest, which I got last year as part of the SJG Wiz War kickstarter. The base idea: go into dungeon, race for the loot at the bottom, then have to get out going through everyone else still going down seemed decent. I was disappointed to find that it’s just one linear path, and not more of a branching thing with options on where to go.

But, the actual gameplay is about the interactions of all the special effects of different cards, and the special effects of each room in the path. Generally speaking, you compete with the other players to be the one person to Go, and that gets you… one space. But there’s a number of special cards that go off in sequence that can affect things, and abort the normal stuff. Much of that doesn’t really let you move, so it seems more about guessing when other people’s good cards are coming out. Or dealing with the fact that your good cards are… not in your hand right now.

Anyway, I got off to an early lead (partially thanks to a mis-play on one of the special cards), and saw it slowly grind down in the second half of the ‘delve’, until me, Jason, and Dave were all at the Horde. Mark, was still stuck at room 4… and successfully got off Odd Reversal… which trades places with the person who won the Go contest. This led to a duel between me and Jason, who had tied (and moved into the Horde), and suddenly, Mark was in the Horde, and needed to get out with everyone else. But, now I was in room 4 on my way out. I managed to move back to the start in the next few turns, and took a… not that well deserved win.

Still, the interactions lend it a lot more interest than I had anticipated, though it seems like it should be very random at the best of times.


I was Red, Mark Green, Dave White, and Jason Purple.
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