The First Hundred Yards

by on June 18, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Everyone here at my place has been vaccinated, and through the wait period for full effectiveness. So, face-to-face gaming is starting up again. On June 5th, Jason came over for the afternoon, and he introduced me to The Last Hundred Yards.

You can definitely see some influences from Squad Leader (yet another game with the same basic terrain modifiers on fire), but there’s plenty of places where its different as well. We ended up playing the first two scenarios, with me as the Americans both times. We also had a fair amount of ‘good to see you again’, and… a long show-and-tell session, as I’ve gotten a lot of stuff over the last year.

The first scenario has the Americans completely hidden at start with a single platoon (plus MG), while the Germans come in with a full company. I set up with the MG at the village crossroads, a squad plus platoon leader across the way, another squad overlooking the fields on one side, and the last in the trees on the other. That last kind of backfired, as Jason got pulled in on that flank to move to assault the squad, who withdrew towards the church (the primary, but not only, German goal), and he was on my flank in a hurry.


The MG should be revealed here, but I hadn’t spotted that he was within three hexes yet.
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Phantom Terror

by on June 14, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is an interesting companion to Zamoyski’s Holy Madness. That book looked at all the leftover idealists of post-Napoleonic era revolutions, their passions, and their repeated attempts at change through coercive rebellion. This book is about governmental paranoia from the French Revolution to 1848.

He starts out with idea of policing being fairly new to the Eighteenth Century and at that point it encompassed a number things not associated with it today (including a lot of civil engineering, as it was supposed to work at the ordering of public spaces for public benefit). He also gives a background of the conspiracy theory of the time: the Illuminati.

And the book goes downhill from there. Well, no, not the book, but the paranoia and repression caused by the conspiracy theories rife in European governments for the next half-century. Zamoyski quotes a fair number of reactionary sources with wild accusations of vast networks of hundreds of thousands of conspirators working for anarchy and the overthrow of all social order.

An interesting part is how consistently liberal ideas are seen as a pathological contagion, which must be stopped and rooted out at all costs. (…Which, I suppose, is actually a primitive form of meme-theory.) This leads into the major theme of the book, which is how the concept of police-state comes out of this period as various governments try to clamp down on public opinion, and more importantly institute ever-wider ranging secret police branches to find and arrest the massive revolutionary conspiracies that they know are out there plotting against them.

Of course, people with little investigative training, paid directly for information they bring in are a great way to get results that would be hilariously off-kilter and transparently fallacious if the results weren’t tragic. Even better, one of the major results of all the internal spying was to make people suspicious and circumspect, and therefore good at hiding if they did start plotting something.

Much of the book is a continual recounting of the various conspiracy theories that these informers invented and governmental authorities convinced themselves were real. One lesson: a good judiciary is a grand thing, as a number of cases get thrown out when they hit the courts and the ‘evidence’ is quickly demolished.

There are weaknesses to the book. Zamoyski is obviously enjoying skewering all these shibboleths of yesteryear, but it’s hard to tell if he’s skipping over some genuine ‘conspiracies’ they uncovered (as unlikely as it seems). He does have some interesting viewpoints on the later revolutions that were largely missed by this activity, and how, quite often, any leadership they had was at least partly accidental. In fact, the book is an interesting take on the entire period and well worth a look.

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U42 Stand Fast

by on June 10, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Looking for small, simple, ASL scenarios to give Mark a chance to concentrate on the general flow and maneuvering a few squads, I came across a tiny scenario from Rivers to the Reich. It was originally Squad Leader/GI scenario 302 from the Series 300 pack, and uses a couple large overlays to mess with the very familiar board 3.

The Germans are defending the board 3 village (that doesn’t change) in early December ’44 with two 838 squads, two 9-1s and two LMGs. The Americans are attacking with five 747s, two leaders, a MMG, and a pair of DCs. They have six turns to find two ammo caches that are HIP in buildings inside the road loop and destroy them (which takes going TI for a turn—note by the wording of the SSR, this seems be either player’s turn…), or make sure there’s no unbroken German units at the end. The Germans set up entirely inside the road loop, and can only go one hex outside that area (including to rout, though berserkers are allowed to go wherever they need). Both sides can freely Deploy, and the Americans enter from any one board edge. The overlays are oddly positioned, as they don’t line up with other terrain, but they do cover the hills with woods and a little open ground, and Wd3 eliminates the only three-hex building in N1 on the board.

I took the Germans, and only deployed one squad as I didn’t see a lot of point to having a pair of LMGs if the only real point to them was a 1 ROF (and longer range in a short-range scenario), and put my three stacks looking down the three roads going into the loop. Mark entered in the SW, where there’s a nice line of wooden buildings as cover. This was also where the full-squad was, so I had good firepower, but Mark was generally content to stay to cover, but final fire broke a squad and HS.

Mark moved them back to T0, safely out of sight, but didn’t rally them for my turn. I stuck around for a prep fire shot at T1, but had no effect. Thankfully, his return fire did no better, and I backed off in APh.

He got both units back for his turn 2, and moved into the village proper. My squad took a shot at S3 and the LMG at T3, netting me 1 1/2 broken squads, a broken 9-2 and a pinned squad adjacent to me. His advancing fire had one success, pinning my leader in T4.


Situation, American Turn 2, showing the entire board. North is to the left.
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The Rose Legacy

by on June 6, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Okay, first off, if you can’t tell by the cover, this is a horse book.

Which is perfectly fine, and has a great literary tradition, though I never went through a horse phase. (Being a guy might have something to do with it, but then I never went through a dinosaur phase either.)

However, it’s needful to mention that this is a fantasy horse book, though not with particularly fantasy horses. No, we have some interesting bits of world-building with a vaguely 19-century kind of country (to judge by the bits of high society seen), and trains and automobiles, and things like horses are exiled to beyond the wall to keep people safe from the diseases they carry….

And then our main character gets punted to across the wall, and there’s a well-done sequence of ‘everything you know is wrong’.

And that’s where the general problems start creeping in like ivy wrapped around the foundations of the book. Notably, the world-building feels unfinished. There’s more to the iceberg than what we’re seeing, but possibly not enough to keep it all afloat. Notably for me, the two countries involved in the history here feel like they’re in a vacuum, with no mention of the rest of the world. This wouldn’t feel so glaring if it wasn’t for the fact that the back-story of the land starts with an overseas invasion from… somewhere we have zero information about.

Now, with where that goes, we are touching on colonialism in a children’s book. Holy cow. In fact, the entire second half of the book gets a bit more ‘adult’ than might be expected, though firmly in ways still generally appropriate for the age range.

The final plot sequence makes for an exciting adventure and a lot of momentum in reading through, but there are weaknesses caused by a lack of depth. There’s a revelation that suitably shocking for the main character, but we don’t get a well-rounded enough motive for it to really dig in. I have hopes that the further books will develop things from a fairly sudden ending successfully, because there’s enough here, I want to see it expanded upon. However, it doesn’t even come close to changing my go-to recommendation from Dragon Slippers for Jessica Day George books.

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18 Nimy

by on June 2, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark and I got to the second Mons scenario from the British Expeditionary Force expansion for Great War Commander in April, this time with Mark as the British defenders. They’re defending a canal in front of the village of Nimy with four platoons, good leadership, and a couple of Maxims manned by fire teams. There’s some cover around, and they get a couple of foxhole counters. Slightly into the game, they get another four platoons and a new leader.

The Germans  initially attack with ten platoons (a mix between fusiliers and landwehr), with good leadership and light artillery available (7 firepower—note the British don’t have artillery available at all). The turn before the British reinforcements, the Germans get another eight platoons a pair of leaders, and a heavy MG. Two of the objectives are in Nimy behind the canal (2 & 3), two more are bridges over it(4 & 5), and the last is a farmhouse in front of it (1). The expected nature of the scenario can be divined from the fact that the Germans have a a surrender limit of 15—the highest on the standard map track, and British have a limit of 10 (and they only have eight starting units). The scenario starts at turn 0 and sudden death is at 6, so there’s a decent chance of it going long by a turn or two.

By (the only) SSR, there is wire on on bridge, and Mark set up his Maxims in front of the other bridge, and the bulk of the line platoons behind the wire. The initially visible objective was 1 VP for the main (wired) bridge, while my hidden objective was 4 VPs for the same point. I set up completely east of the rail line, with my best leader in a center to head towards the buildings in front of that bridge, while the other ‘2’ leader would head towards the objective farmhouse, and the third leader could bring up some spare landwehr.

In fact, I started the game with Waldau Moving to that initial objective with five platoons, one of which took cover in a small orchard. Then an Air Assault suppressed his best leader (Major Stone) and platoon in (2). Mark then Recovered from that, and had an Air Assault of his own to suppress Waldau and his platoon. Another Air Assault suppressed Stone again, and then I Fired at the farm house (1) and the defenders of a second bridge behind the canal and broke the latter. However, Air Support (event) suppressed my second leader before I Recovered everyone.

Mark Fired, to no effect other than suppressing one of my platoons with Interdiction, and I put in an Artillery Request, which landed on the L7 bridge, but didn’t do anything. I then Moved the corner group up into Waldau’s command range, and the western group moved off its start line, but didn’t get far since it was entangled in fences. Another Move the next turn, and an Engineering Works, got me over the primary bridge and up to the second one.


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