Posts Tagged playtest

3 results.
Mar14

FB19 Waffenbrüderschaft – test run

by Rindis on March 14, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

“…and that’s it. This is the latest ASL scenario I’ve finished.”

And so Patch gets a good die roll to end our current game the day after I said that. One last weekly post:

A little while back, Patch and I volunteered to help playtest further Festung Budapest scenarios. We ended up starting with a Saturday FtF session where neither of us was adequately prepared. In fact, I wasn’t able to get the counters all pulled before Patch arrived. So I left Patch to start planning the Russian defense while I pulled out the Germans.

It is January 25th, and the Germans and Hungarians are counterattacking to take Hill 259 on the outskirts of Buda. This dominates the west edge of the FB maps, rising to level 7 at the top. The scenario is reasonably large, space-wise, being 15 x 26 hexes, covering from level 2 to the top of the hill. In version 4, which we played, the Germans enter in two groups, with six squads, two tanks (Pz IV and Panther), and two halftracks (one with a 20mm AA cannon) in the north of the east edge, nine SS squads (of varying quality), with two halftracks (one is a flamethrower 251/16) entering in the middle, while the Hungarians get nine squads (including three assault engineer squads), and a Zrinyi II assault gun with 9-1 AL in the south, and along part of the south edge.

The Russians have fifteen squads… and six crew-served guns (two 82mm MTR, two 76.2mm ART, and two 122mm ART). Four of the guns have to set up on or near the top of the hill, but everything else gets the run of most of the map. There’s also six hexes of buildings to rubble (with the usual FB chances of creating falling rubble or debris), and the first thing Patch realized was that it was theoretically possible to cut the main German armor off from the rest of the map with the rubble. It would take some falling rubble or debris, but it would force bog checks on the tanks, and be impassible to the two halftracks. I pointed out that A2.5 would allow the vehicles to enter a turn later, having gone around the obstacles (assuming that debris counts, even though A2.5 only mentions Blaze/rubble, but that’s pretty obviously within the intent of the rule, as debris doesn’t exist outside of HASL).

On the other hand, it’s still a way to choke off paths into the rest of the board, and Patch did a modified version of this scheme, leveling buildings to get better LOS into that corner from the hill. He only got falling debris once, scattering it into T27, T28, S29. This left S26 as a VBM path out of the NE corner, and W24 at the edge of the set up area, but I forgot about that when I set up. For the rest, Patch found that despite a fair number of units, he had a lot of area to cover, and went with a ‘shell’ defense that would fall back during the game.

Victory features the common idea (in FB) of the attackers needing to get four out of six objectives. More than half of them feature the top of the hill, with the Axis needed to get 9 buildings at level 5, elim/capture two of the four guns that set up at level 5 or higher, getting three AFV with functioning MA at level 5 or higher, and/or getting two squads up to level 7. The remaining two objectives are to capture all the stone buildings and getting 22 CVP. Ground snow is present (making going up those crest lines even harder…) and the Axis is at Ammo Shortage level 2.

I concentrated the SS troops towards the north end of their area, planning on one big mass mostly aimed at the X27 area. The Hungarians set up entirely along the south edge, planning on concentrating on the three stacks there, and bypassing/flanking two more that were covering the east edge part of the Hungarian set up area.

I started off the game with the southern area, flooding the Russian defenders with Magyar hordes. I managed to press in fairly hard, and keep a concealed reserve, which proved to be somewhat superfluous when his forward stack turned out to be a Dummy. Elsewhere, I was much more cautious with my entry, not liking some of the terrain I had to cross. The FT halftrack parked in AA25, two hexes away from two Russian stacks, and revealed both of them with the FTs, but didn’t manage to do anything to them. And then late in the turn we had our only Sniper activation, which hit the HT and Recalled it.

FB19 1A
The initial assault, German sector.
FB19 1Ah
Initial assault, Hungarian side.
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Oct25

Many Archons, Handle It!

by Rindis on October 25, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for a playtest session of Archon yesterday. Well, part of the gang. With school and work, getting everyone together at the same time is going to be difficult until just after Christmas.

Anyway, we had four this time. Me and Mark, who had played it two-player before, plus Jason and Dave. Everyone had read the rules at some point (generally some time ago), and with the clarifications in the current version of the rules it was pretty easy to get everyone up to speed.

Choosing city-states was a bit easier this time, since the need for population growth was understood this time. I took Attica (first) and Arcadia (last), Mark took Argolis and Thessaly, Dave took Corinth and Lokris, and Jason took Aetolia and Messenia.

Play went fairly smoothly, and seemed to act a bit more like I expected. After a few rounds, RPs weren’t desperately short, but no one was amassing humongous unspendable stockpiles either. Dave I think set the record for income at about 12-14 RPs late in the game.

The biggest comment from everyone is how austere the game is. Sending out colonies is pretty easy, but gaining control over the area, or doing any sort military adventurism is very difficult. Not because it’s expensive in population or resources, but in actions. With a need to build multiple units (at one action apiece), and then activate them for movement, an offensive is very difficult to manage. I was the only one who conquered another city-state, and it took most of the game to get to that point. I could have managed a second at the very end, but mis-thought what I was doing, and took an army as a casualty to preserve my population/militia. That left me with the potential to take another province, but not enough actions to recruit the force needed.

While that is accepted as part of how the game is, the big concern is population growth. Population growth fuels a fair amount of the game (both in that population is needed to do things, and that having too much population needs to be avoided), but the random mechanism for it is proving too chaotic for most everyone.

Having the last pick for initial city states ended up with me taking land-locked Arcadia. This meant that my colonization was powered purely by Attica (Athens). However, with my other distractions (building an army), and a three turn period where I could do almost nothing (kept getting ‘play now’ cards which drained my hand of actual actions), my colonization efforts never got going.

Final scores: Dave 34 VP (city state w/temple, city state w/democracy, 5 controlled colonies, 16 RP), Jason 34 VP (two city states, 3 controlled colonies, 22 RP), Mark 24 VP (city state, city state 2/democracy, 3 controlled colonies, 11 RP), James 19 VP (2 city states, 1 city state w/democracy, 9 RP).

Playing time came out to about 3 hours, perhaps a bit less.

Not sure when we’ll manage more than 2 people face to face again, or what we’ll play at this point.

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Oct12

Archon!

by Rindis on October 12, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had Mark over yesterday for gaming.

This time, at long last, we did a playtest game of Archon. It’s designed by Richard Berg, and is scheduled to be included as a separate game in The Glory That Was Greece, Volume III of the Ancient World series.

The general idea is a simple card-driven game of the rise of the Greek city-states, and their colonization of much of the Mediterranean Basin. Each player starts with control of two city states, and tries to gain control of other ones and/or colonize and control Ionia, the Dardanelles/Bosphorous, Crete, the Nile delta, southern Italy and Sicily (the Greeks also reached much of the Black Sea coast and France, but these are deliberately left out of the game). Somewhat like Berg’s recent Blackbeard, the game consists of a single run-through of the deck, which certainly keeps the length down.

Mark and I had read the rules many moons ago, but had forgotten pretty much all of it by this point, so it was the blind leading the blind. Still, it wasn’t too bad, and the game actually went about the predicted amount of time (4 1/2 hours for the first play—it should drop to 3).

We started with fairly basic choices for city-states. I took Attica for the resources, population and navy (and supplemented it with Argolis for it’s navy), while Mark took Laconia (for the home defense, it took a bit to realize that wasn’t going to be starting armies) and Boeotia.

This was technically the start of a resource imbalance that wouldn’t show up for a bit. Shuffling didn’t go so well, so a lot of card pairs were still clumped together. I expect that’ll sort itself out next time. We got drought for the first couple turns of the game, which seriously cut short our available resources. In fact, a couple of cards that demanded naval maintenance wiped out my treasury, and then the navy. So much for that advantage.

However, once the long drought was over, I quickly started getting resources faster than I could spend them. It’s not that there was nothing to spend them on, just that spending them takes actions, which are very precious. Much of the middle game was spent trying to figure out how to actually be able to take a neutral city state (purposefully made difficult). We each managed one (Corinth for me, and Phokis for Mark).

The main driving force in the game is population. It grows steadily, if randomly, through the game, and having too much can be as much of a problem as too little. The die rolls really favored me, with Argolis gaining population faster than anywhere else. Of course, this ‘forced my hand’ somewhat, as I needed to found colonies and maintain a standing army to take up all the spare people.

We only really understood some bits in the rules about controlling colonies for VPs very late, and the end of the game was a scramble to establish control of what we had established. Overall, Mark did somewhat better than I. I abused the fact that I went last to get more than he did, but he was a bit better organized and burned some of my colonies, whereas I never did return the favor. With an extra turn, he would have done much better.

By strict VPs, it was a blowout: 91 to 49 in my favor. Much of that was the middle part of the game where I was consistently drawing 13 to 17 RPs a turn (RPs left over at the end become VPs). I horded them at first, and then realized I couldn’t spend them fast enough anyway…. Without the RPs, it was much closer, 17 to 16 in my favor, and again that was mostly because I went last.

Anyway, we think it shows some real promise, and we hope to try a multiplayer session of it soon!

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