I've really enjoyed my ventures with the ASL Starter Kit-series of games, simplified ASL, but as me and my brother got to the third installation things started to go over our non-existant hair(s). Guns and tanks seemed to be too much with the complexity of ASL...
Ever since I got my new color printer and reacquainted myself with the Print-and-play games, I was glad to find Valor & Victory: The World War II Squad Level Game System, and printed out its' rulebook (link leads to pdf-file!). Having read the rules I had high hopes. Complexity-wise it's about on par with ASL Starter Kit #1, but as it contains artillery and tanks, it still holds rules for as much as all the ASL Starter Kits combined!
It seemed just the right amount of rules for my taste - just enough complexity to feel realistic yet streamlined enough to have a smoother flow-of-play than ASL(SK). I printed out all the necessary components, mounted on cardboard and set up for a solo run-through of scenario (or situation) H1: Hedgerow Hell (link leads to pdf-file!). In this scenario, elements of the American 38th Infantry Regiment are moving through Normandy when they meet heavily fortified German positions in the hedgerows.
In game terms, the German units set up along the south edge of the map, with six squads (three light MG:s), three leaders and two foxholes placed where-ever they want. The Americans - nine squads with three leaders - enter from the center flank of the north edge and have to exit four squad equivalents through the center south flank within five turns to win. I placed the German foxholes close to the center (2E5 and 2G5) and manned them with squads carrying MG:s. From 2G5 the MG could fire along both roads leading northeast and northwest, reaching any American squad exiting the hedgerows. The houses in the east would also provide good cover, so I placed squads, an MG and a leader there as well.
I then sent in the Americans in five groups on a wide front. As the attacker one always have to choose between coming in on a wide front or concentrating ones firepower (APFP=Anti-Personnel Firepower in V&V-terms) on a certain spot to better ones chances on a breakthrough. There's rarely enough units for both... I opted to go in wide, as a narrow approach could have left the Americans flanked and in a crossfire.
From the cover of the hedgerows the Americans opened fire on the Germans with little result. The group furthest east took a chance to cross the road, and although they lost half a squad doing it, they made it to the woods behind the German-infested houses. The Germans in turn, not willing to give up their fortified positions just opened fire, but their cardboard bullets did not find their targets.
The Americans in the woods behind enemy lines overpowered the lone German officer who was waiting behind the line. You see, I was in an ASL-state of mind, leaving the leaders behind the line so that broken units could rout back to the leaders to be rallied, but there's no routing in Valor & Victory, so the German leader was needlessly left behind, and paid the price with his cardboard life...
The two German squads with their light machine gun in the east house wanted to avenge the death of their officer, and prepared for a Close Assault on the two American half-squads with their leader, that smug-a** Murphy. Even when the Americans produced a handful of Grenades, the Germans overpowered them by a factor of two-to-one. Eight or less on a German Close Assault Dice Roll (2d6) would eliminate them all. Alas, they rolled an eleven. Hence they would lose the difference in Casualty Points (3), plus the cover modifier (+3) plus the amount of enemy units (+3), and the only way to satisfy nine Casualty Points was to eliminate all participating German units.
The East front was broken for the Germans. And then the Americans remembered they hade two Artillery Fire Missions (Light Barrage) available. As they now had spotters with Line of Sight to both remaining MG-nests both were ordered at once, at the Command Phase of round three. They were spot-on, did not scatter and delivered devastation - both MG:s were knocked out! The Germans were now down to a few squads in the hedgerows in the west, and these were consequently hunted down. The Americans placed smoke to cross the roads and attacked the German positions violently, and got the required four squad equivalents past the south map edge for the win.
I painfuly realized that I was in an ASL state of mind throughout the game, and as the game doesn't work the same way (although similarly) I probably played it a bit wrong. As already mentioned I kept the leaders behind the line to await routing troops, which does not happen. The leaders need to be stacked with the troops here, as they are required to form multi-hex firegroups. In ASL, you don't always want to keep the leaders stacked with the troops, in case they get shot at. But in Valor & Victory, the defender can distribute the damage as he sees fit, protecting the leaders if he chooses to.
Other than that the system feels solid, and I look eagerly forward to trying this against somebody else. I'm also keen to try out commanding tanks, as we never really got that far with ASL. If you have a good color printer and the interest in tactical WWII wargames I recommend printing the rulebook at least and giving it a read. This may be print-and-play, and free at that, but it has good support, both from the designer (Barry Doyle) and from fans who have provided several scenarios available at Boardgamegeek.
My sincere apologies to all RSS-subscribers. I didn't mean to flood your readers with repeats yesterday, but I had to make some subtle changes to the code that generates the RSS, which means your programs probably treated all items in the flow as new. It should be up and running now.
I'll try to keep my fingers in check and keep the tinkering with the RSS-page to a minimum.
I have a soft-spot in the place where my heart used to be for flicking games - Crokinole is my most played and absolutely favorite game. I was really interested in the flicking "war"-game Taktika when I came across it on Boardgamegeek one day, but it's a small-print game and could be difficult to get a hold of. Well, I was going to keep my eyes up for it anyway. Then I found out that there's a print-and-play version of the game. Well, not a version, but as the Flight of the Conchords would have put it, "something like, but not necessarily". I fired up my printer and an hour later I had my new game!
In Battle for Glyderion you have units glued to poker chips which you flick around the table trying to kill off your enemies. There are two armies, the Glyderion and the Slitherite ones. These are however identical. I sacrificed an older set of poker chips to get my units (you need 24 chips for each army as well as 32 special chips). You also need a measuring stick which is the length of six chips side by side with a marker at the one chip length. You then pick a scenario (there are 13 included) and start the game.
On your turn you either bring in a new chip from your reserve and flick it, either to move or to attack, or you pick a chip already in play in flick it. Naturally you need to hit an enemy chip in order to kill it, although of course it's not that simple. There are five different kinds of units, which differ in how you use them.
Infantry has to be within the range of one chip from the enemy in order to attack. On the other hand, you can flick it twice every turn you activate it. Archers have to be within the ruler range (6 chips) to attack a unit, and return to their starting position after an attack. Cavalry act as infantry, except they are reduced to a single flick in case they start their turn within a 6 chip range of an opponent. Catapults act as archers, except they cannot attack cavalry. Walls are immobile, cannot be killed by anything except Catapults, kill any enemy units that hit it and may be temporarily removed by the owning player to allow a friendly units passing.
Then there are six different kinds of special chips, such as Fog and Energize, which come to play in special scenarios.
I tried the first scenario, "Skirmish" solo to try it out. In this scenario, 4 infantry units from each side attack each other, first to kill two units wins. You select starting player by flicking from edge to edge of the table, whoever is closest to the edge (but not over) takes the initiative and can choose to go first or second. The rules state that you bring a new unit in by placing it on the table edge and flicking it. Even though it doesn't say so, I interpret this as, you have to bring it in on your edge of the table. I first tried free placement from any edge, and it didn't work. I also decided - for ease of flicking's sake, that you place it within one chip range of the edge.
The first scenario was quite boring, with just infantry, but I stayed on and tried the second scenario, "Conflict", with 4 infantry and 2 archers on each army, and a few flicks in, I started to see the beauty of the game. As the infantry can flick twice, they are used by first move-flicking them, trying to get them within attacking range of enemies. If you fail, you can use the second flick to retreat them back away from enemy archers. If you hit an enemy unit while moving an infantry, they end their turn immediately, often within range of that same enemy unit... The archers, as they can basically only attack or move, are probably best kept defensively, killing off enemy units that end up within their range. Killed chips stay on the table (as long as the attack didn't send them off the table) and are simply turned over. They then provide excellent cover for archers who might want to try a bit of offensive play.
I haven't tried playing with the other units, nor have I played this against anyone else, but I look forward to, and more importantly - I don't regret sacrificing a set of pokerchips for this game!
It had been a very long time since our last boardgaming meet-up, but now the wait was over. Jan invited us over for some sunday gaming and four of us answered the call - kid brother Jens and his soon-to-be wife Linda, Tom and myself. So I waved bye-bye-for-now to my new family and picked Jens and Linda up on the way to Karjaa.
Tom hadn't yet showed up, so the four of us started with a game of Gulo Gulo. I originally bought Gulo Gulo to have something to play with the kids when they were at my place, but it's a great dexterity game for adults as well. Although I must say, as an adult, you are at a severe disadvantage when playing againt kids with tiny fingers, (in Gulo Gulo you have to steal wooden eggs from a cup without disturbing it too much) but this just makes it a better game, as you can actually play to win against kids and they are still likely to beat you.
Jan had never played Modern Art before, and had requested it. As it's a great game, and I haven't played it for some time now, I was happy to oblige. Tom had joined us, so we were five auctioneers selling paintings. When we play games like this we usually go heavily into character, probably very non-PC and most definitely acted very poorly.
The math behind the game is quite simple, but I still can't wrap my head around it. I've actually quit counting and play by gut feeling in this game. Of course you count the potential market value at season's end for every painting before making your bid, but there's the whole giving money to the bank or the other player-thing as well to concider, and that's more calculus than I want to perform when having fun with friends.
Next up, The Adventurers! We've played this once before, and it's quite fun. The "problem" with the game is that it takes almost as long to set up as it does to play. In essence it's a very simple game, but every one of the four areas (the collapsing walls, the pit of lava, the river with waterfall and the crumbling bridge) has to be explained separately, as well as the tumbling boulder and collecting treasures, so it takes a while to explain. Add to that setting up several separate stacks of cards, tiles and characters and it's been a while... When you've set up for this long, you really should play it twice when you're done, but it doesn't really contain that much game that you'd want to play it again immediately. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game, when played every now-and-then.
Tom had brought his copy of Bang! which we played next. This is another one of those games that rely on the players more than the game. We played this at an earlier meeting as well, but now Tom had added some expansions. Jens got the honor of acting Sheriff, I secretly drew the Renegade-role (meaning I was supposed to be the last man standing). As it turned out, Jan was the Deputy sheriff, leaving Linda and Tom as Outlaws. Tom was the first to meet his maker, followed by Linda. At this point is was clear who the rest of us were, meaning I had to kill (I'm sorry - Bang) Jens and Jan to win, but Jan first, as the game is over if the Sheriff dies. Jens and Jan just had to kill (Bang) me in order for the good guys to win. A bit of 2-on-1, I'd say. At this point there had been a lit stick of dynamite passing around the table for several rounds. As it were, it exploded with the Sheriff, leaving just the Renegade and the Deputy sheriff standing. I guess meaning nobody won?
This game has some issues in my book. First of all that players can be eliminated and out of the game. This wouldn't disturb me at all, except that the game drags on. It's (in my not-so-humble) opinion about twice too long. I would prefer the game to be played in a pre-determined amount of rounds, awarding points (silver dollars, perhaps) for successful kills (Bangs) or something. As with any game with hidden roles, you need to be a lot of players to make it fun. We were five - which is probably less than recommended, but with more players the game would drag on even more.
We packed up and played Small World next. I really enjoy this game every time I play it. The best feature of Small World is that they've managed to make an epic game with a real narrative, that still moves on very quickly. Even with five players the game turns pass by so quickly you sometimes forget to move the turn-marker. Yes, some of the races have special abilities that seem a bit too powerful, but at least with more than two players, this is balanced by all other players jumping that race as soon as possible.
This happened to Tom, as he grabbed the Commando Ghouls, meaning he needed one less unit to conquer regions, and his units stayed active even in decline. Consequently, he was attacked pretty fiercely and had to run away to commando ghoul heaven.
Last but not least Jan had bought a Finnish card game called Modern Society. In modern society players play cards, such as "Human Rights Organization", "Dispute over Nuclear Waste", "Religious Fanaticism" etc., in order to influence green (environmental), red (social), blue (economical) and black (patriotism) and score points in these colors. Points are then used to buy laws in these colors, which provide both victory points and special abilities.
This game has/had great potential but screws it up in a few manors. Firstly, and mainly, the rulebook is (pardon my french) crap. They came in three languages (finnish, swedish and english), and some rules are different in between the editions. Most rules are written so fuzzily that they can be interpreted pretty much anyway you want. The graphics on the cards aren't very descriptive either. Why does "x2" mean "play another card" when the logical meaning would be "double the score", for example?
I like the idea of influencing separate values in order to score high/make others score low, but the problem in the game mechanics themselves, is that you get too few cards to play to have any practical choice of which cards to play. You usually play all your cards, so what you do depends entirely on which cards you draw. Additionally we managed to buy very few Law-cards throughout the game. Only a few of us even made it to the second level of Law-cards (there are four levels).
There are some great ideas in Modern Society. What it, oh so desperately, would have needed is a handful of proper outsider playtesters, playing the game without the presence of the designer, and a real editor with experience in card games. It's when you play games like this when you learn to appreciate editors.
All in all it was a great day to be gaming - my thanks to the host, and until next time, my Bivouacking Skeletons are planning their revenge!
Not mentioning the fact that I just redid the website design, and not only the design, but I converted back from WordPress to my own CMS. I simply grew tired of trying to figure out how WordPress wants me to do stuff instead of just doing it my way. Anyway - not mentioning that, I haven't really been updating the blog that much lately. That doesn't mean I haven't been busy... 'Cause I've been busy, the good way.
About five months ago I attended a get-together of a web community I am a member of. Also attending was a wonderful girl from Porvoo named Pernilla and, long story short, we hooked up. The weeks and months since then I've spent with her and her two kids. During the three weeks our vacations overlapped, when we weren't living in the swimming pool because of the heat (it's been the warmest summer in decades here in Finland), we managed to spend a week in the Åland Islands. Her family had already booked a cottage before we met, so I got to just jump in and join the fun, me and her, her kids, her brother and his family. We went on all the sights, the olde sailing ship the Pommern, the Castle of Kastelholm, the Fortress of Bomarsund, the Fish and Game Museum and a wickedGame Safari. We also visited the local brewery Stallhagen, where me and Jonas (my GF:s brother) tasted the local produce, leading to a very fun little mini-intoxication.
Since practically all my travels during my adult life have been solo, this was a welcomed change. I am a new man. Same as the old man, only better. ...and older.
Ever since I got my new color printer and reacquainted myself with the Print-and-play games, I was glad to find Valor & Victory: The World War II Squad Level Game System, and printed out its' rulebook (link leads to pdf-file!). Having read the rules I had high hopes. Complexity-wise it's about on par with ASL Starter Kit #1, but as it contains artillery and tanks, it still holds rules for as much as all the ASL Starter Kits combined!
The two German squads with their light machine gun in the east house wanted to avenge the death of their officer, and prepared for a Close Assault on the two American half-squads with their leader, that smug-a** Murphy. Even when the Americans produced a handful of Grenades, the Germans overpowered them by a factor of two-to-one. Eight or less on a German Close Assault Dice Roll (2d6) would eliminate them all. Alas, they rolled an eleven. Hence they would lose the difference in Casualty Points (3), plus the cover modifier (+3) plus the amount of enemy units (+3), and the only way to satisfy nine Casualty Points was to eliminate all participating German units.
On your turn you either bring in a new chip from your reserve and flick it, either to move or to attack, or you pick a chip already in play in flick it. Naturally you need to hit an enemy chip in order to kill it, although of course it's not that simple. There are five different kinds of units, which differ in how you use them.
Next up, 
We packed up and played 
