The Vulcan Academy Murders

by on January 9, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is a relatively early Star Trek novel and it shows. Vulcans were one of the obsessions of the early fandom (…with good reason), and this novel obviously flows out of that. The bulk of the novel happens on Vulcan, largely at the Academy of Science, and Sarek’s home.

It does a good job developing the glimpses given in The Original Series, and filling out Vulcan culture a bit. Even better, the strained relations between Sarek and Spock are handled very well, and are the main character-driving action of the novel.

Plot-wise, it is less successful. We start with a quick action sequence of the Enterprise against a Klingon ship that feels horribly cliche, but its entire purpose is to launch the main plot. One crewmember is injured beyond the ability of twenty-third century medicine to help, but there is an experimental procedure being developed on Vulcan….

Problems start plaguing the facility where this is happening, and it becomes apparent that what seemed like inexplicable malfunctions are murder….

Sadly, the murder mystery element to the novel is the weakest. A little more tension on whether it was murder or not might have helped, but one look at the title undermines anything that could be done on that question. Then the identity of the murderer isn’t that mysterious as there’s too few logical candidates. And some of the sub-threads from this are a bit weak thanks to amateurish writing that starts relying on too many exclamation marks (a problem Lorrah thankfully outgrew in all her further novels).

Overall, it’s actually a fairly solid novel, but purely for character and setting reasons. It has been decades since I read The IDIC Epidemic, which is a sequel of sorts (it starts shortly afterwards, and features some of the same secondary characters), which I enjoyed quite a bit, and was part of the motivation for reading this one. If I am remembering it well enough, it is Lorrah’s best book, but this is a good place to start before going on to it.

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Medieval Sun

by on January 5, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Back on Christmas day, Mark came over for some company, and a good day of gaming. We had kicked around the idea of a quick SFB duel, but didn’t actually get that far. Instead, we turned our first attention to Sun of York, which we’d last had on the table a couple of years ago.

We had a good time with the second and third scenarios, but they did both finish fairly quickly. Both of us had trouble with getting any kind of balance of troops and orders in our hands, so the first charge basically decided the game without any reserves available.

First up was The Battle of Blore Heath, and I was only able to field three units per battle, with no backup. Mark advanced into the middle, and my archers forced the entire section down to low cohesion, and I followed up, chasing after him, and charging into his weak position to take the center battle and win the battle. I had only a couple weak units on my right, and he had taken that battle, but the collapse of his center happened right afterwards.

Next was Ludford Bridge, which was a bit faster since we had properly refreshed on the rules. Sadly, the photo for that one didn’t come out, and I don’t remember as much about it. But I managed to force a decision on both flanks and took them to win that fight. Oh yes, I had a decided superiority in quality, as Mark drew 1 cohesion troops led by several with 2.

As I recall, the first time we played, things drew out a bit, presumably due to a combination of being able to feed new troops in and having trouble with orders to come to grips with each other. I seem to remember some melees going a few turns, which was decidedly not the case here.

It’s a fun system, but getting a more stable opening to turn into a proper set-piece battle seems to be a problem.

After that, we turned to Commands & Colors Medieval, and we played the Battle of Solachon with me as the Byzantines (sadly we ran out of time to play it again). As has been usual with Medieval, cavalry predominates, and it all had bows. The action started on my right flank, where there’s compact formation of good Byzantine cavalry. Luck was on my side for the entire battle, starting with a ranged attack that did two blocks.

That petered out after a bit, and the action largely moved to the other flank, though Mark tried getting at the medium infantry on a ridge line stretching across the center. The left also went well, with good dice continuing to pick up banners for little cost. The end shifted back to the right, where I captured a Sassanid camp, which gave me my last needed banner. 6-1

Overall, it was a fun, relaxed day, and we got a few things back to the table that have been on the ‘to play again’ list for a while.

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2022 in Review

by on January 1, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

Overall, 2022’s been a good year. At least if you’re not involved in a land war in Asia. Personal savings is down a bit over the year (thank you rising prices), but the overall household continues to gain stability.

Fox Den‘s multi-year project to republish Panzerfaust & Campaign continues, and in fact, I am hitting that particular transitional name with #71 going out the door at the same time as this post. Overall, I got paid in eight out of twelve months this year, which isn’t bad, and a couple of times the amount was fairly high. It’s still minuscule compared to the sweat equity, but I’m on schedule, and with 50-year-old magazines, I consider everything to be low-volume evergreens. For a fair chunk of the year, I was also doing mid-month releases, which got about half of Lowrys Guidon and the three Wargamer’s Guides out, and those last have been doing well. Hopefully, I will find some extra time for some more mid-month releases this year, the two pre-Lowry issues of Panzerfaust I have (#51 & #52) are coming up in the queue.

The five-days-a-week gaming schedule continues eating up the rest of my spare time. Final Fantasy XIV continues being the biggest time sink, with the rocky start of Endwalker over with (and it was a good end to the story arc started in 1.0/2.0), most of the side stuff done, and now trying to get other jobs up to snuff. I got the big “lump” in my series of Paradox reviews done (back-to-back full game reviews), now I just need to squeeze them into the blog’s posting schedule.

And again, the blog was on the standard post/four days schedule. I have more to post, but most of the time I’m running with about one post in the can, and struggling to get the next out on time because of the lack of spare time. However, I started the year with several games to write up, and this time… well, about the same, but only four Vassal games, and I’ve had three face-to-face sessions in the last week, and those need writing up.

Overall, I ended up trying out eight new games over the past year, and while the 1914 system (Serbien Muß Sterbien) is one I don’t think I’ll go back to, I’m still impressed by it, and I don’t have an overall negative impression on any of them. Game buying is back up (in money, at least), but part of that was getting Hollow Legions 3rd edition, which completes the update of my ASL materials. If I can avoid getting sucked into many new HASLs (spoiler: nope, I have Sainte-Mère-Église on preorder), big-ticket items should stay down in the future.

Yearly reading is under my goal again. On the other hand, one of the books I read was Chandler’s massive Campaigns of Napoleon. Good book, but not one to read in a hurry. Overall, it would be one of the better non-fiction books of the year, along with part 2 of Sumption’s series on the Hundred Years War (I got part 3 for Christmas). Similarly, Gill’s books on the 1809 Danubian campaign are good, and I’ll be returning to that a bit later. And finally, Russia Against Napoleon is recommended.

On the fiction side, Mark handed off some ST:TNG novels that he got duplicates of, and I also found out there’s a bunch on sale on Kindle every month, so I’ve read a number of Star Trek novels. Early TNG novels continue to underperform, but Prime Directive and The Captain’s Oath are very good TOS novels. Outside of Star Trek, most of the fiction I read this year was quite good, and I’ll note The Tea Master and the Detective as being one of the best of the year.

The big bad news here is that Covid followed Dave home from a convention, and we all got it during the worst heat wave of the year. Thankfully, it got milder as it went through the household, and me and Smudge’s symptoms were pretty mild. We’ve had other scares, but that’s the only time we’ve had to actually deal with it, and other illnesses have been largely absent. My job isn’t quite as stable as I would like, but so far, so good, and things shouldn’t get any worse without a collapse that I don’t think is coming (we’ll see if that holds up for the year, if so, things should be fine).

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Celtic Spread

by on December 29, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had another group game back on the 18th, this time for Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea, the last four-player game that hasn’t hit the table since the break. Mark brought his set over, and me, Jason, and Dave sat down to realize how little we remembered.

This time random draws gave me the Celts, and my first experience with the western side of the board. Mark was at the opposite end in Egypt, while Jason got Troy, and Dave got Carthage.

I deliberately shorted myself of anything but settlements for the first couple turns, giving me a nicely accelerated growth for the second half of Epoch I, and my VPs started catching up as I could maintain good growth and a number of cities.

Epoch II went very fast (one turn) thanks to an event to end the epoch early (second time we’d seen it, but it doesn’t go off in the first Epoch), and I was still working to expand out to the limits of the token mix. Dave had done well with much the same strategy, spreading out across most of North Africa, and then into Sicily and southern Iberia. I eventually colonized Corsica and Sardinia, which helped keep me in contact with Dave, after my fishers in the Med were wiped out multiple times.

Mark had gone straight up the Levant coast, and got early contact with Troy. This turned into a long-running fight in the east as Jason pushed to the Levant, and then Mark pushed back into Anatolia. The entire second half of the game saw escalating struggles over the region that sapped a lot of energy. At the same time, Mark took exception to Carthage expanding to and past Libya, and that turned into another constant struggle for the end of the game.

Two constant active “fronts” took Mark’s low VP position and left it trailing ever further behind, and the struggles continued as he gave up on catching up, and acted as problems for Troy and Carthage, while I could only be grateful he was far away from me. I started putting pressure on Dave myself, wrecking cities in Sicily, and giving him some of the bigger disasters as I saw the number of cities he was building with growing alarm. He was in contention for high points for most of the game, and did almost all of it through city VPs (he built a wonder very late, though we were all fairly light on them).

I ended up with the lead at the end of the game, largely thanks to to not having a lot of interference in the last couple turns. The big calamities seem to have run dry during Epoch IV. As you can see, I’d been run out of the north edge by barbarians, and hadn’t bothered to clear most of them out, as I had other areas to expand to instead. Final scores:

Rindis/Gaul = 51
Jason/Troy = 45
Dave/Carthage = 42
Mark/Egypt = 30

Once we got the rules straightened out, play was very smooth, and went well, other than pauses for shuffling (including Hand of God coming up four times a row…). Everyone had a good time, and it probably won’t be too long until ACIS comes up again.

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The Galatians

by on December 25, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I happened upon a positive friend’s review at the same time this went on sale, and picked it up. I’m glad I did, it is a good book.

The name “Galatians” doesn’t mean much to anyone who has not spent a fair amount of time reading about the ancient world. They’re best loosely thought of as ‘eastern Gauls’. Which is to say they’re a Celtic people who went east and encountered Greeks instead of Romans. They had a short-lived kingdom in the middle of Asia Minor early in the Successors period, which is part of why they don’t get talked about as much, the Macedonian Soap Opera was going on around them.

Also, that’s not the best period for general knowledge, which tends to skip from Alexander straight to Rome. And the previous is also about the limit of what I knew. So, a lot of this book was new to me, going into what is known about their initial emergence into Greek knowledge around the Banat region of Serbia, some serious raids into Greece, and then the eventual settling into Asia Minor.

That last is the bulk of the book, because there’s a bit more known, and they were active for a good chunk of time before becoming a Roman province. A lot is still uncertain here, as there’s little in the way of records from them, causing everything to be from the viewpoint of looking into something of a blind spot in history.

So, even at its best, there’s not a lot of detail or certainty to be had here. So Grainger has done a fine job with the materials to hand, making everything as coherent as possible, and presenting everything quite clearly. It’s a bit of a niche subject, but it’s handled well, and adds a bit of perspective to things that get hinted at in other books.

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