Two Rounds of Killiecrankie

by on August 23, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

A little bit ago, Mark got the Jacobite Rising stand-alone expansion for Commands & Colors: Tricorne. I’m not sure why he got this while skipping Tricorne, but we ended up trying it out recently. The first scenario deals with the initial Scottish rebellion after the Glorious Revolution, and pits a mostly Highland army vs a mixed government army on a field with a number of scattered hills.

I had the Jacobite forces the first time, and decided that my left wing was probably the strongest compared to their opposite numbers. This first scenario uses the “opening cannonade” rule (which is only used when the scenario specifies it), though there’s only one light artillery unit on board, and it must retire and reform afterwards. The cannonade didn’t do anything, and I went Forward to shore up my entire line. Mark brought the the artillery back up, while Advance Right let me get closer and get a hit on his regulars, but his flank charged in At the Quickstep, with his regulars having a Melee Bonus that was preempted by a First Strike for four (!!) flags, and he could only ignore two of them. He then forced my highlanders to retreat with three flags (one ignored), and then traded two blocks for three on attacks against another highlander. I Assaulted Right, finishing off his highlanders and nearly getting his militia at no cost to myself. Mark countered with Assault Left, and failed to Reform his militia, but did a hit to a highlander. Inspired Leadership let me work on the crumbling Government flank letting me get all three units there and Leven for a cost of one block.

Mark used Scout to get Lawder into the center, and I Moved Back and Reformed to get that flank consolidated, and return a couple of blocks. Mark Probed Right to do a hit to my regulars, and I Probed Left to get into charge range. Line Command ordered the bulk of the remaining Government units who mostly stayed still and fired to do two hits to a highlander. Infantry Attack let me get my center into contact, and a lost a full strength highlander to a failed rally roll, nearly lost another (took three hits), but got his lowlanders in two attacks. 6-1

For the second game, the opening cannonade again did nothing, and Mark led with At the Quickstep to move his right flank up and do one block to my regulars. I failed to repair the damage with Reform, and ordered an Infantry Attack in the center to force him out of the center building and occupy it. He Advanced his Center to do a block and force me back out, while also doing a block and retreating my lowlanders. Line Command let me get the left and center up, and a lucky hit killed Cannon. Line Volley forced me back a little, while Assault Center let me take the building again after taking a hit, though I retreated back out on a Scout.

I failed to Reform again, and Out Flanked, getting no results. Mark then Out Flanked, coming into contact on both flanks. He eliminated my forward regulars, the regulars on my left, the leaders with them, and a militia, all of whom failed to rally after being forced to retreat. I Assaulted Right, and forced two highlanders to retreat, the second of which also failed to rally, even after a Rally Check Bonus. Mark moved up At the Quickstep, and I had an Inspired Leader Right, who routed another highlander. Mark Counterattacked and eliminated a regular in two attacks. 3-6

Afterword

This is the sixth Commands & Colors game I’ve tried, and it continues to be a fun light series with a different feel each time. Here, every time you retreat you have to roll to stay on the field at all, which seems a little harsh; the dice have two flag results on them, so there will be lots of retreats and most of the time they will rally. There’s a lot of modifying the number of dice you roll, combined with different numbers of dice at range for each unit type. However, it’s consistent enough that it’s not nearly as annoying in practice as I would have assumed.

Both games had a fair amount of luck going into them, though nothing like the five routs in a row I suffered in the second game. It was being fairly close until parts of my line collapsed, and I’m lucky to have gotten any banners at all during that game.

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The Worm Oroboros

by on August 19, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

First off, I recommend against buying the Evinity Kindle edition. While it does have the original illustrations, it also has a number of errors, and breaks up the text with tags for the original pages—breaking up paragraphs and sentences willy-nilly. This is, I believe, straight from old Project Gutenberg files, though those do not have the pagination notes any more.

As for the book itself, it’s a 1922 proto-fantasy, using some tropes of the sword and planet genre. Though that last is really just an intro or broken frame to introduce the action. Supposedly, this all happens on Mercury (which here just means “not on Earth at any time”), and the initial viewpoint character is transported there as a vision and introduced to some of the major characters (for the benefit of the reader). After the second chapter, this device is dropped, and never mentioned again, so it’s not even a framing device. These days, there’s no problems with the idea of a landscape with people and places that have no reference to Earth, but I imagine an introduction was considered necessary when written.

Complicating matters is that it is written in Elizabethan English, making it a bit rougher for most readers to get through. It’s been praised for how consistently he keeps up what is effectively a foreign dialect, and doesn’t miss the mark, spoiling the illusion. That is beyond my ability to judge. The really rough parts are when a letter or other writing appears in the novel, as none of the characters are great scribes, and the text is an appropriately phonetic approximation of words that quickly becomes very tedious to parse through.

On top of the rest of this, the story is basically a chivalric romance, set in prose. (In fact, I could see Pendragon, with its passion system, being an excellent RPG for this world.) So, we follow the struggle between the island power of Demonland and the continental Witchland (tell me there’s not a parallel going on here…), as the hubris of Gorlice of Witchland has him demand fealty from the Demons, and war results. (And I will note that various fantasy staple terms are used here, demons, imps, pixies, etc., but they are more ethnicities than meaning to evoke actual fantastical powers.)

In the end, it’s certainly an important book, and generally entertaining in the high heroic mode of great men doing great deeds and leading great armies. Personally, the pacing was all over the place, with all the elements you’d expect: sieges, battles, heroes in single combat, beautiful ladies, politics, beautiful ladies politicing…. And a too-long sequence of climbing a glacier. If you are willing to buckle down with the language, it will reward you, but you have to be mindful of that going in.

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Sekmem

by on August 15, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After warming up with Sumer, Mark and I went for a second battle in Chariots of Fire. Mark’s initial thought was to get straight into the chariots with Megiddo, but it’s a much larger scenario, and we switched to Sekmem, which turned out to be a good choice. It was more interesting than it looked, is only moderately bigger than Sumer, with two wings per side (melee and missile), and gave us good infantry tactics practice, and let us clear up more of the rules.

Mark had the Egyptians who have a much larger force of shock infantry, and start by entering the far edge of the map. The Canaanites all start in the walled city of Sekmem (any number of units can be in a city hex here, and it’s also where they go when routed). The map is basically a broad valley, with the north and south edges rising up through levels 1-4, all of which are considered rough terrain.

The Egyptians had the initiative for the first turn, and came in with their shock infantry filling the south side of the valley, with the missile troops (all bows) following behind. Then my light infantry poured out of the city, forming up four deep in places because of a lack of room to maneuver from a single hex in one activation. Mark moved the SI up with his momentum (we still hadn’t noted the cohesion hit this causes), and finally my SI filed out of the city in column, and piled up on the southern side of the valley.

I got the initiative for turn 2, and sent my shock wing forward, getting a little in front of the missile troops and starting to come out of column. The Egyptian line got to ~5+ hex range as they got their chit next, and then the Canaanite LI shook its line out with the bowmen right behind the slingers. My momentum came next, but Mark successfully trumped it to get his shock wing into contact (at this point we had noticed the cohesion hit on shock and heavy infantry that moves more than once a turn). Thankfully, I had two shots at most of his units, as they came adjacent to two different slingers, because I had a lot of high rolls, with two units going to low ammo, and one entirely out of ammo, but seven of his shock infantry were now at two cohesion hits (so a well-distributed one hit each after the penalty for moving twice).


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Swords Around a Throne

by on August 11, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Elting’s history of the Grand Armee of Napoleonic France is justly well regarded. It’s a massive tome that dives into just about every aspect of one of the most successful armies of military history. The main problem is that it isn’t really a history. The beginning talks about the French Royal Army before the Revolution and what got carried forward, the end talks about what came afterward, but the rest is a muddle, as far as chronology goes, going back and forth on whims over a span of well over a decade in which things changed drastically.

This is of course so various topics can be examined in quite a lot of depth, and all the things that go into an organization as complex as a large field army can be looked at. Even within a subject, this discussion free-flowing and by subtopic, but the book is wide ranging and thorough enough that you could start with the easy mechanical parts of the Grand Armee at any point in time, and use this book to build outwards and get a sense of all the things (logistics, supply, replacements and reserves, etc) that are a part of it.

An interesting point about the book is that Elting is American, and makes no bones about it. At one point in his description of the Revolution he pauses and says, ‘okay, here’s what this is all about, because there’s no parallel to these events in American political history.’ He makes a number other references to his background, but that is by far the most germane, though there’s some good ones comparing his first-hand experience of military matters to Napoleon’s campaigns.

Overall, the book lives up to its good reputation, and is worth a read for anyone interested in Napoleonic military history. The wide variety of subjects handled means that any non-specialist will get something new out of it, and possibly a good number of specialists, which is a pretty good feat for a general market work.

The bad news is that the Da Capo Kindle version is in desperate need of post-OCR cleanup. Like with many such, it starts okay, but slowly goes downhill the further through the book you get. In this case, much of the book has one or more noticeable errors per page, which is one of the worst rates of errors I’ve seen. Obviously the cleanup effort was especially perfunctory in this case, which is a real shame in a book this important.

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Sumer

by on August 7, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

At the start of June, Mark and I got to trying out the Great Battles of History series. Or, I did, as Mark has played a little of it in the past. That said, we were trying Chariots of Fire, which apparently has somewhat different rules than the rest of the series. (I am disturbed by the fact that the series seems to have never picked up a single unified rule set, other than the variant Simple GBoH.) In fact, we were starting at the beginning, the battle of Sumer, ca. 2320 BCE.

This basically marks the transition from the old kingdom of Sumer to the kingdom of Akkad. There is, naturally, not a lot known of this period, and it’s obvious this is more of an excuse for an evenly-matched training scenario. Both sides get ten shock infantry, three light infantry (one of each of the three missile types), and one battle wagon (or battle car, as I’ve seen them elsewhere), and one heroic leader. The last is the only real difference between the two, with Sargon (the historical winner, and soon ‘the Great’) being one better than Lugal-zagessi in all ratings.

The map is flat and featureless, under the presumption that the battle would have taken place away from all the valuable irrigation infrastructure (I really doubt that, but again, training scenario…).  We used the standard setup (you can figure out your own) given in the rulebook. So the first few turns consists of the two sides advancing on each other across an empty plain….

I had the Sumerians, and edged constantly to my left as we advanced, with the hope of being able to wrap around his flank. It’s technically a chit draw system, but there’s only one formation on each side in this small scenario, and an initiative roll means one person gets to choose what the first chit of the turn will be. However, there’s still four chits, as each side gets a “momentum” chit, where they have a chance to make a particular wing go again. Overall, the wrinkles to a regular chit draw system are nice, though it feels a bit odd in this extreme case.

Both of us were somewhat nervously edging up as we got into range of each other. I got a double move at the start of turn 3 (tied initiative, drew my momentum, which was successful, followed by my main wing chit; we did not catch the double-move cohesion penalty at this time) and moved about half of my line into contact with the Akkadians, with my right flank refused.


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