Wargames

Side-Scrolling Spitfires: Wing Leader (GMT Games)

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The art of design involves knowing what to remove as well as what to add. So I find what Lee Brimmicombe-Wood has done with Wing Leader: Victories 1940-1942 (GMT Games, 2015) rather appealing: he’s created an air combat game, at squadron scale, that eliminates an entire dimension, portraying the combat interactions of fighters and bombers from a side-on perspective. By focusing his game of Second World War air combat at the point of contact between the opposing sides, the need to maneuver squadrons to their destination has been eliminated, and with it, the need for that Z dimension on the plot. Wing Leader provides the sharp end of the stick, as it were, without the rest of the stick.

Wing Leader: Blenheims in Trouble

Similarly, the differences between aircraft types have been smoothed down to a small range, demonstrating the broad similarities between aircraft of the same generation. There are certainly contrasts between, say, a Spitfire and a Me-109, but they come out in very subtle ways that require the player to use the planes to their proper, and historical, advantage. Which is not to say the game lacks chrome, as Wing Leader includes forty beautifully drawn aircraft types (with data presented on nice cardboard cards) from Great Britain, the United States, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. I defy any discerning gamer to resist playing a scenario involving Regia Aeronautica CR.42 biplanes against RAF Hurricanes over Malta.

As can be seen in Lee Brimmicombe-Wood’s earlier large-scale air combat game, Downtown, once fighters start mixing it up in Wing Leader, they quickly become ineffective in combat, not from losses per se but from progressive disorganization. Squadrons deteriorate slowly and then very suddenly in this game, and a single dogfight can reduce a fresh set of planes to a leaderless gaggle over a game turn or two. Loss, morale, and status tracking takes place on a set of charts, using counters for various states. The ergonomics work well, as though there are quite a few variables tracked, the counters mostly flip when needed to the next state, and ammo is only broadly traced. It’s not fiddly, the bane of many a game that uses charts and counters for tracking.

Wing Leader: Wing Tracking Chart

I had the opportunity to try the system recently with regular gaming opponent Mike Vogt at the District of Columbia’s finest game store, Labyrinth Games. We played a scenario set during the Sedan campaign in 1940 that features both sides escorting bombing missions. It was a fairly hefty scenario, with seven to eight squadrons per side, but we gamed through it in a decent time frame, perhaps four hours tops, and came away with a good sense of why you don’t let Stukas reach their targets.

As with Downtown, once the fighters lost cohesion and headed for home, the end of the game dragged slightly, with little to do but roll up the final bombing raids and flak attacks, but the overall experience remained solid. The game flowed quickly, with a fairly simple sequence of play that allows for focus on tactics rather than rules. Proper usage of squadrons was rewarded, and poor usage penalized. (Mike won a German victory by four VP, helped by some abysmal British bombing, if anyone is keeping score at home.)

Wing Leader: Victories 1940-1942 stands as the first in a series of games exploring the development of air combat during the Second World War. The second volume is already under development, promising to bring more aircraft from later in the war into the system, and I’m keenly following its progress. Not, of course, that I need much more in this life than a game that gives me Gloster Gladiators and Fairey Battles in the same box.

Winter Offensive 2015 After Action Report

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How many wargamers can you fit in 4,500 square feet of conference space, assuming you factor in room for tables, chairs, dice towers, and a keg? At least 165 if you were at Winter Offensive 2015 in Bowie, Maryland, the latest installation of the East Coast’s premier Advanced Squad Leader tournament, held annually over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend.

A Sea of Gamers

This year’s event saw the most attendees ever, nearly twenty more than last year’s record crowd. By noon on Saturday, all available table space seemed to have filled up, though most people were happy to share space. Attendance was likely boosted by the debut of the long-awaited “final” core module for ASL, Hakkaa Päälle, which (re)introduces the Finns to the tactical gaming system.

The printing on the new Finnish counters came out quite nicely, and the light grey color chosen works well in the system, as long as you don’t have them fighting the Italians, who share the same counter palette. The counter material also rounded quite nicely, as I brought my handy-dandy deluxe counter corner rounder with me to the tournament for the express purpose of clipping the Finns. Quite a few people stopped by and asked about the labor-saving wonder device, which gently rounds off the otherwise nubby edges to produce an aesthetically pleasing and easily manipulable counter. I dare say I converted at least a few people to the church of Oregon Laminations (just in case there’s a rounder referral rewards program I don’t know about…).

Fear the Finns!

I had the privilege of taking the fresh Finns out for a spin against regular gaming chum and all-around good guy Mike Vogt, who had the Soviets on defense in 172 “The Last Attack,” a scenario chosen almost entirely because one of the Finnish leaders enters the game on a bicycle. He didn’t last long, but the match went almost to the end. Mike set up a canny defense (and employed some absurd fire discipline) and was able to slow my progress enough to hold one of the required victory conditions for a well-deserved win. We had a series of interminable melees that I kept pouring units into, only to see them ground up. Probably not the best strategy, but a greater principle was at stake. I was not going to lose those melees. I did, of course, but that’s beside the point. A pleasure as always playing against Mike.

Long-time opponent Doug Bush provided the other major gaming event of the tournament for me, our traditional all-day non-ASL match. Following on last year’s playing of SPI’s BAOR, we switched to a tighter scale with SPI’s Berlin ’85, covering a hypothetical attempt by the Warsaw Pact to overrun the NATO West Berlin garrison at the start of WW III. The map, a Simonsen classic, took some getting used to, with its welter of colors and symbols depicting the various types of city terrain and transportation routes, but after a point, they became comprehensible and showed well under the counters. I have a real fondness for the SPI counters from this era, with their crisp lettering and glorious colors.

Berlin 85

The combat system reflects the game’s early ’80s pedigree, with locking Zones of Control, mandatory attacks, and a heavy reliance on retreat results. I still managed to lose quite a few Soviet mechanized battalions to ill-advised attacks against West Berlin police units holed up in heavy urban terrain, and while my East Germans managed a sweeping thrust from Potsdam into the American Sector that threatened to unhinge the NATO defense, Doug managed to hold off my attacks long enough to edge out a Marginal Victory once NATO succumbed to a surrender roll. Both Doug and I agreed that the game deserves another playing, as the system contains a few subtleties that, once grasped, allow for a different tactical approach. A real gem against a great opponent, and a game I’m happy to have added to the played list.

As ever, I managed to get in some side gaming as well, more this year than ever before. Group favorite Pax Porfiriana made the table three times (and, it must be said, I somehow won all three, leading to a prohibition against my playing it anymore). Mike introduced everyone to Panamax, a game about shipping through the Panama Canal. That game, a cross between worker placement style action choices and 18XX financial manipulation, hit the table to rave reviews and got played a good three times. A Study in Emerald came out on Friday night, with the Restorationists solidly thumping the Loyalists, who made their move about a turn too late. I had the honor in that one of putting a stake through the heart of Vampire Sherlock Holmes.

And, of course, the annual playing of Battlestar Galactica on Saturday night ended with, as always, a Cylon victory. The humans were done in by the cagey play of John Slotwinski, who held the Admiral card and concealed his robotic nature long enough to jump the human fleet into the middle of nowhere for the win. We used the Pegasus expansion, adding another Battlestar and Cylon Leaders to the game. The new rules didn’t add much complexity and worked well with six players, but with our standard five player games, I’d opt to use the base rules alone.

My thanks to the team at Multi-Man Publishing for another fine Winter Offensive, and to all my opponents for three days of amazing, and exhausting, gaming.

Fender Bender: Car Wars Classic (Steve Jackson Games)

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Show any gamer of a certain age a small, black, rectangular plastic box with a snapping lid and he or she will think: Steve Jackson Games. Inside would be a moderately complex strategy game with thick cardstock pieces you had to cut out yourself and that would blow away with the slightest breeze. But it didn’t matter. You were about to play Ogre, or Car Wars, or Battlesuit. My fourteen-year-old self could hardly contain his enthusiasm.

So, from the moment I saw SJG’s Car Wars Classic on the shelves of my very fine local game store, Labyrinth Games in Washington, DC, I had to have it. Not a strict re-print of the original from the ziplock and pocket box days but rather the fourth edition of the game, packaged to re-create the allure of the original, down to the same box cover art, Car Wars Classic ticks off all the boxes. Nostalgia? Check. Impulse price point at $20 retail? Check. Five pages of rules on how to play the game as a pedestrian, including details on pushing a dead body out from behind the driver’s seat of a wrecked car? Um, check?

Look out for the mines

It struck me, as I took the game out for a spin at Labyrinth with all-around good gamer guy Mike Vogt, that I might not have understood just what Car Wars had become in the intervening decades since my initial purchase in the ’80s. In fact, upon encountering the infamous turn rate key, I realized that I never actually played Car Wars as a youth. I dutifully cut out all the car and cycle counters, set up the road sections, and then put it away, absent any actual counter pushing. I still find those cardstock counters in bags of random gaming detritus to this day.

Mike and I played about thirty seconds worth of Car Wars Classic, equating to thirty turns and roughly two hours of real time. Being of a mathematical bent, Mike rather enjoyed the game, with the calculation of turns and momentum and degrees of skidding; I found it all very tedious. Getting the cars into engagement range took forever, then a flurry of inconsequential combat that barely dented each car’s armor, then more turning and skidding and calculating to try to make another pass. The rulebook didn’t help, being laid out in a chatty style, very much akin to a role playing game rulebook rather than a wargame rulebook, sixty-four pages of excessive detail and no clear flowchart of how to shoot the damn machine-guns. Don’t get me wrong—I take an odd delight in rulebooks with more chrome than a ’57 Chevy at a doo-wop concert—but the Car Wars Classic rules just left me cold.

A daily driver

I had far more fun designing the cars than actually driving them, a situation I also find in games like Galaxy Trucker, where setting up the conditions for the chaos that follows is more fun than playing out the chaos itself. Several learned Car Wars hands suggested that our initial situation—a one-on-one duel—doesn’t showcase the strengths of the Car Wars system, and I can see where multiple opponents, or a more directed scenario, like a convoy escort, could enhance the experience. But on the whole, I’m going to leave Car Wars Classic on the curb. If I need a vehicle combat fix, I’ll turn to outer space and either Star Fleet Battles or Federation Commander, both of which have much more interesting details and a more streamlined play style. (And yes, I realize that SFB is a poster child for massive, unwieldy rules.)

On the positive side, at least now I know that I don’t need to jump onto the promised Kickstarter for a new edition of Car Wars. But if one of my gaming compatriots picks it up, well, I’d probably get behind the wheel again for another spin.

Game Preview: Next War: India-Pakistan (GMT Games)

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Over the past several months, I’ve had the opportunity to help playtest the forthcoming third entry in GMT Games’ Next War series, Next War: India-Pakistan, an operational level wargame covering a hypothetical conflict between the two South Asian neighbors. The testing has been done mostly online via VASSAL, but no matter how convenient computer-mediated wargames can be, nothing replaces pushing physical counters on a map. So recently, I sat down with the game’s research designer, Doug Bush, over a paper playtest copy of Next War: India-Pakistan at Labyrinth Games in Washington, DC.

Playtest images from Next War: India-Pakistan; not final graphics

Please note that all components are playtest versions; the final components will be spiffed up to GMT’s usual stellar standards, not that these don’t look fairly sharp in their current iteration. Pakistani forces are in light khaki, while Indian forces are in dark brown.

The game, a one-mapper, plays rather quickly in person, as the counter densities are very manageable. Even with potential superpower intervention—there are rules, and counters, for bringing Russian, Chinese, and U.S. forces into play, including some great aircraft counters—one never loses the map in a sea of counters. Consequently, solid fronts don’t develop, forcing both players to watch flanks with a wary eye. Feints and counter-thrusts become the order of the day. The mostly open terrain is criss-crossed with major rivers and canals, slowing movement and making bridges very important to hold (or to destroy). Marshes dominate the center of the map near major population centers, posing a barrier to armored units, and the mountainous region of Kashmir is also modeled, complete with rules for mountain troops.

Doug and the NW:IP team have done a very nice job differentiating between the relatively balanced forces of India and Pakistan, and Doug has posted some detailed design notes on ConsimWorld on the decisions behind various unit strengths. The air matchup provides a wonderful cornucopia of planes, with indigenous Indian Tejas fighters squaring off against the U.S. supplied F-16s of Pakistan. (Don’t mind the air display from an earlier game in the series, used for playtest purposes only.)

Playtest images from Next War: India-Pakistan; not final graphics

Various scenarios in the game posit both Indian and Pakistani offensives, including some smaller scenarios that only use portions of the map. Next War: India-Pakistan promises to be a definitive treatment of any possible conflict between these two proud and strong nations. The game is currently on GMT’s P500 pre-order list, hopefully to be published in 2015. I’m looking forward to having the finished product on my shelf.

Continental Drift: End of Empire 1744-1782 (Compass Games)

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My wargaming tastes skew decidedly modern, with the vast majority of my collection covering conflicts from the First World War forward. And yet, something about End of Empire: 1744-1782, the latest offering from Compass Games, covering the battles of the final five decades of British domination of North America, grabbed my attention.

The Battle of Quebec

Based on William Marsh’s earlier Command magazine game of the same name, End of Empire presents an operational-level view of King George’s War, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution, plus assorted minor tiffs of the era. Two full-sized maps, linked horizontally, provide coverage from the Eastern seaboard west to the Mississippi and Lake Huron. Four and a half 5/8″ countersheets with striking graphics round out the handsome boxed package, which retails at about $100.

Recently, I had the opportunity to take two of the smaller introductory scenarios out for a spin with regular opponent (and all-around good guy) Mike Vogt at one of our game sessions at Labyrinth Games in Washington, DC. We played the Invasion of Canada scenario and also the War of Jenkin’s Ear scenario, both with a limited number of units and a short time frame. Our experience was mixed.

Leadership sits at the heart of the game system. Most units are severely constrained in their abilities unless stacked with a leader, who himself needs to pass an initiative die roll to do anything other than sit in bivouac on a given turn. While representative of the era’s command-and-control capabilities, a string of poor rolls can leave a player in a dire (or bored) situation. Mike’s Americans in the Canada scenario burned almost half the game in an immobile state, and in Jenkin’s Ear, we basically just rolled dice over and over for thirteen blessedly-brief turns until someone had a chance to move. The need for effective leadership also leads to giant stacks under the leaders with strong initiative. Again, likely representative of the historical reality, but the effect is odd for gamers used to maps filled with counters rather than dueling Death Star stacks.

For Jenkins and his ear!

I admire systems that foil player plans and prevent omniscience from becoming omnipotence, but for playability’s sake, there needs to be a middle ground. Our sense was that the system buckles a bit with smaller scenarios—the larger scenarios, covering forty to fifty turns and with hefty unit allocations, likely smooth out poor initiative results. We’re hoping to find out by taking the full American Revolution out for a spin via PBeM using the VASSAL module, thoughtfully approved by Compass. I do appreciate the inclusion of the shorter scenarios, if only so that I can claim to have gamed one of the decisive battles of the War of Jenkin’s Ear, complete with a thwarted Spanish amphibious invasion of the Florida coast.

End of Empire stands out as a near-definitive operational-level study of the conflicts of the British Empire in North America. Compass has already demonstrated exceptional support for the title, not only through the VASSAL module but also by sending out mounted errata counters to customers at no cost and providing additional scenarios and rules updates online. Very few games deserve second editions; End of Empire is one of them, and I’m happy to have this non-modern outlier in my collection.

From the Finland Station: The Finnish Trilogy (Mikugames)

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Board wargaming is something of a niche market to begin with: even the largest game companies, like GMT and MMP, have print runs measured in the mid to low four figures, and except for some evergreen series games, once a game has sold through its print run, it’s gone, available only on the secondary market. Smaller game publishers have even smaller print runs, leading to a general sense amongst wargamers that you buy when the games are available or your forfeit your right to complain when you spend five times the retail price at auction. At the bottom of the wargame production hierarchy (in terms of production quantity), you have the boutique producers, usually a single person with a single game that has been lovingly crafted and produced, for little to no personal profit beyond seeing the game in print. For boutique games especially, you have to strike immediately or risk never getting a copy—and for many gamers, that’s simply a fate not worth considering.

Selected Components from Vol. 2 of The Finnish Trilogy

Thus, I now own a copy of Volume Two, The Continuation War, of Mikugames’ The Finnish Trilogy, focusing on Finland during the Second World War. Produced over a ten year span by Mikael Grönroos, The Finnish Trilogy is a series of massive operational level wargames, very much old school in concept, with thousands of counters and a large map. Monster games like this just don’t get produced any more, particularly not on semi-obscure fronts. The rules are not old school, though, with lovely bits of chrome (ice breakers, echelon combat, flanking bonuses, and airbases built on the ice) and a modern sensibility. There are even custom dice for the combat resolution system and small map sections for individual scenarios.

Beyond the evident care in the rules and orders of battle, though, the production quality of the game itself rivals that of the big publishers (and quite exceeds it in the maps and player aids). Lavish yet (mostly) sensible use of color abounds, and the game promises to be a visual treat when set up as well as an intriguing game situation. The mounted, die-cut counters (eleven big sheets of 1/2″ counters in Volume 2) strike me as slightly thinner than most “professional” wargames, but not so thin as to be in danger of shifting around on plexiglass when playing. The counter artwork does fill the entirety of the counters, so I’ll have to be quite careful with my prized counter corner rounder to not remove vital information.

Counter detail from The Finnish Trilogy

I’m not entirely convinced by the decision to use Cyrillic for the Soviet headquarters and aircraft designations—anything that can interfere with a player picking up on the situation at a glance should be scrapped for better playability—and some of the Soviet color choices are difficult to read (brown unit icons with red lettering inside).

Still, it’s a handsome game and a real gem in my collection. So much so, of course, that I have Volume One, The Winter War, and Volume Three, The Lapland War, on the way as well now. With very few of Volumes One and Two remaining (and Volume Three sold out), it seemed the prudent course of action. Sometimes the game does go to the swiftest.