The Years of Endurance

by on January 17, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is a popular history of the first half of the Napoleonic Era written during 1941. The author’s introduction is interesting, as his main purpose is to remind the British public that they’ve fought a Europe united under a hostile leader, and won, before.

So, it’s about 80 years old at this point, and still does fairly well. Like, say, Churchill, Bryant is opinionated, there is a moral lesson to be had, and he is not at all afraid to let his opinions be known. This volume runs from the rise of the First Republic through the Treaty of Amiens. There’s two further volumes, for everything after Amiens, and the Congress of Vienna.

Overall, the writing is good, and it makes for a fairly good popular history, especially as long as you remember the point of view is going be distinctly pro-British. He does point out the economic troubles and dislocations Britain was going through (I can’t speak to his thoughts on causes and outcome), and has good coverage of the mutinies in the Royal Navy. The main weakness is to see an unalterable morality underlying everything (which Britain is generally, but not inevitably, superior in); that said, one of his main critiques against Revolutionary France and Napoleon is hubris, is not a bad judgement.

I’d have to say that there’s no way to give this any unqualified approval. But if you’re doing a bunch of lighter reading on the period, this worth including, and if you see it for decently cheap, it’ll be worth it. I got the Endeavor Press Kindle book on sale ages ago; it’s no longer available, which is a pity, because the text is in generally good shape for an OCR conversion.

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East Asia Battles

by on January 13, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over for some one-on-one gaming back on the 28th. The main thing up for the day was to try out his Commands & Colors: Samurai Battles set. Neither one of us had ‘studied’ ahead of time, so we spent a fair amount of time going through the rules, which were generally familiar enough, but with some important differences.

Mostly, it’s a lot like C&C: Medieval. You’ve got the main colors system, leaders attached to units, and the rest familiar from Ancients, but you also have the color- and stature-based ignoring of sword hits from Medieval. You also have “honor & fortune” tokens, which are akin to the “inspired action” tokens of Medieval, but they’re meant to cycle a lot faster than those. Instead of army-based actions, these tokens let you use a second deck of “Dragon Cards”, which have a number of neat actions on them; they can also be used to add a die to any combat with a leader available. And then there’s the fact that there’s no evading, and retreating can be downright dangerous/expensive, as it costs tokens, and if you run out, units start deserting.

Between getting through the rules, and a slowish first game, we just got through one playing of the introductory scenario. Things started badly for me when Mark led off with the C&C:SB equivalent to Darken the Sky, which wiped out an entire Medium unit. I spent what seemed like a lot of time just trying to come to grips his army, and not doing a very good job at first.

I eventually managed to get in and smash his left flank, and then moved things over to concentrate in the center. But Mark got some momentum back, and managed a 3-5 victory with both armies in pretty bad shape.

Thanks to overall lower unit speeds (notably the lack of light cav), and the fact that there’s no evade, and every reason not to retreat, this one feels less maneuver-centric than CC:A and CC:M (though it is there). Because of that, I don’t think this can become my favorite C&C game, but it does hold the promise of delivering well on the period (which I’ve liked ever since Nobunaga’s Ambition), and it comes with a stunning forty scenarios, so I hope we get to really delve into it at some point.


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Konosuba: Oh My Useless Goddess

by on January 9, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I found the first couple episodes of the Konosuba anime pretty rough going before it turned into a truly funny series. And that problem is present here in the original novel too.

The main problem is Kazuma and Aqua as a pair aren’t all that appealing for me, and don’t interact that well. Once you add in Megumin and Darkness partway through, the chemistry really changes and the story starts finding it’s footing.

I will say “start” as even the rest of this book is somewhat episodic, and doesn’t cohere that as a continuous plot (this is was originally serialized as a web story, which means this is more of a short story collection stitched together). However, the various bits do get more developed and better done as it goes on. We also get to see this oh-so-unlikely and dysfunctional team start to come together as a team. Well, kinda. I mean… they’re still all mostly useless adventurers.

At any rate, there is some pain before it gets good, but it does indeed get to be fun fairly quickly, and I recommend the series for fun lighter reading.

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Nation Building at Versailles

by on January 5, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Back on the 26th, I managed to get Mark and Jason over for a three-player day. We tried out Mark’s copy of Versailles 1919 (Mark and I have a trial game of it on Vassal which is still on-going).

It’s a good design, but it takes a bit of getting into, since there’s lots of unfamiliar mechanics. The board does a nice display of nearly everything you need to know, though it took a while for me to realize all the big numbers were actually showing the order to do the main action in.

The general idea is that issues come up, and are ‘on the table’, until they get resolved, and the nation with the most influence on them gets control of the issue (this feels a bit like the PP in Origins of WWII, but here you have to recycle influence instead of getting a set amount each turn). The resolution provides various “resources” in various post-war politics (like isolating Germany), and will often make various people unhappy. The major nations’ happiness is on a track, the the populations of most of the world can have unrest, which can turn into an uprising, that causes a settled issue to become up for grabs again. It’s a fairly chaotic system, but, you still feel like you are in control. That’s a fine line to walk.

Another interesting bit is that after the first uprising everyone chooses their goals. You get victory points for having controlled an issue, and for controlling tokens with your empire on them. You also get points for how many tokens aligning with your strategy are out there at all (we didn’t look up the details of scoring until we were done, and that surprised us). There’s a small deck of these strategies, and the ones in play are put out at the beginning, but you don’t know which one is yours at first.

I actually got off to a decent start as France. The initial rounds were so-so, but I managed to start using the cycle of tokens to get some early bigger issues. The initial uprising turned out to be in Europe (I’m sure that’s common), and Jason, as the US, had a good collection of those. So, Disarmament came up for re-settling. And then it came up again. And again. And again. Eventually, I got control of it instead of Jason, which broke that cycle (and… Prussia, I think, ended up with Mark).

We forgot to pick goals the first few times as we got so buried in the process of uprisings, and settling issues, it got forgotten for a while. But by the time it happened, I had a narrow lead on issues, so Jason picked Mobilization, Mark took Reparations, and I chose Nation Building (with Contain Communism as the unpicked strategy).

Mark concentrated on keeping England happy at first, but took some nasty hits about… two-thirds of the way through, and sank fast. France’s happiness suffered for a bit, but I took the first demobilization (I think an event encouraged it), and ended at 12, which was notably higher than England and America. I had also managed to do very well with settling issues, and ended up with quite a collection (though I did lose Disarmament back to Jason near the end). The ending dragged out a bit, since no one was particularly motivated to settle Game End, but after a few other issues passed it, it got settled by Jason.

The final scoring was a surprise. Mark had done well on issues, with 50 VPs to my 52, while the constant bleed of European issues had helped suppress Jason’s collection, which ended at 37 VPs. However, Mark was at the bottom in happiness (Reparations doubles the score for that; 0) only had settled one reparations issue, and got 10 VP overall for his goal, and had three British tokens, for a total 63. Jason did well with reparations and empire building, and did okay with everything else for a final total of 61 VP. I only picked up 2 French tokens, but did well with empire building and naval squadrons, got Italy to not sign the treaty, four regions were pretty restless, and of course, I got the 6 for highest happiness, for a grand total of 78 VP.

We’re all liking the game in general, and this is going to have to make a return appearance sooner rather than later!

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2021 In Review

by on January 1, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

Well, overall, I certainly need to rate this year as better than the previous one, just like nearly everyone else in the world. However, I do have a self-made problem or two.

The problem I’ve given myself is a lack of free time. Over the past several years, there has been the idea to republish my dad’s old wargame magazine in PDF. Several months ago, I finally had a thought on how to do it the way I wanted (as searchable PDFs) with my current software, and away I went. At the moment, I’m putting out an issue every month, and am struggling to keep myself on track with that schedule. Since it was a bimonthly magazine that he ran for about ten years, my monthly schedule means this is about a five-year project, that I am now about six months into….

During my annual trip to see my parents, we poked around a bit and dug up a few other materials from back then. The main goal was the issues that I didn’t have personal copies of, but I have borrowed a couple of the old catalogs, which I plan on putting out just to show what sorts of things were available to wargamers in the early ’70s, a… nearly complete run of Lowrys Guidon, which was a mini-zine which would have become a real magazine in a couple of years if Panzerfaust hadn’t happened, and a few other bits.

Also, I’ve got a fairly full gaming schedule. I’m currently gaming with Mark over Vassal both Saturday and Sunday mornings, as well as doing ASL with him Monday evening, gaming with Patch on Wednesday evenings, and playing Stellaris with my Dad on Fridays. This chews up a lot of the rest of my free time.

So, currently, I’ve got about seven Vassal games I need to write up, and a couple of face-to-face games here to write up. So, there’s a backlog of content for the blog, and all the gaming is providing more faster than I’m currently writing it, but the lack of free time, is why it’s building up. I expect this coming year will be dominated by my struggles to keep both going for me.

My gaming also includes plenty of time with Smudge in Final Fantasy XIV. We’re currently semi-early in the story for Endwalker, and streaming a fair amount of our adventures with it on Twitch. I will have to find time here to write up my thoughts on that here too.

And to go with all this gaming, there has of course been new games purchased. Thankfully, nowhere near as much as last year. I’ve been aware of Root, and the production values on it are really good (almost as much paper in there as a big GMT game…), and I really need to get Atlanta to the table soon. Mark and were recently talking, and we have managed to try a fair number of new games over the year. The overall low-light has been Undaunted: North Africa; I need to try it some more (it’s not actually bad, just not as good as everything else), but there is a disconnect in scale that’s rubbing me the wrong way. It seems the scale is different in the original Normandy set, so that might do better with me. High-light of the year goes to The U.S. Civil War, which is a very well done strategic-level ACW game. Normandy ’44 gets honorable mention here, which shows that Mark Simonitch really can design good games.

I have also been going into amateur game design. Last year, I did an extensive re-write of a SFB campaign, and Mark and I have just started going through a game on my rules. I also pondered a concept for a second campaign (my idea from the ground up), and have put together some notes towards developing that. I also brushed off my 25-year-old JumpWar design this year and did a rewrite that I’ve done some testing on. I hope to get some more done this year. And I’ve got two more ideas in the brainstorm stage. One is a tactical combat framework that started off as an effort to fix Up Front and Great War Commander, but morphed into an attempt to fix East Front Tank Leader and Panzer. The other is a game on exploring space beyond the frontier of an expanding SF civilization (think Source of the Nile in space—or don’t—it won’t share any mechanics with it). Hopefully, I’ll find time to do more with at least a couple of these ideas.

I lowered my reading goal for this year… and I’m still a couple books short. Some of that is being busy these last six months, some of that is just the dropoff in my reading thanks to altered life schedules. Still, it’s been a pretty good year, book-wise; I don’t think I came across anything bad or disappointing. Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War is one of the highlights, and I just got the second volume for Christmas, so I’ll be back into that soon. Past that, Antipater’s Dynasty and Phantom Terror were very good history books, along with Morris’ The Norman Conquest. I finally tried out Brian Sanderson, and he does indeed do well in the fantasy genre. I’m currently reading Leviathan Wakes, the first book from The Expanse, and it is being very good, and not what I had expected.

The sad news is that two days ago, Smudge’s dad passed away. He had a serious stroke a few years back, and never properly recovered, and has been declining ever since. We went up to see him just before Christmas, and he was certainly happy to see us all. We went up again yesterday to visit her mom, and keep her company for the day.

That aside, it’s been a reasonably good year here, and an improvement over 2020. Hopefully, I can find the willpower to keep on with Panzerfaust and the blog without falling down too much on either. If all goes according to plan, I’ll release #71 in December, which is the name change to Panzerfaust and Campaign.

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