Wargames

Counter Culture: Plucky Behavior

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Total invested time: fifty-two hours. You and your opponent have been meeting regularly for weeks, massing forces, maintaining supply lines, conducting feints and probes. The counters are stacked nine high on the front, a veritable skyline of towering units. Finally, the time for the attack arrives.

Up goes the balloon, out comes the calculator to figure the crucial odds. You reach in to examine a stack, making sure you have enough factors to turn the vital tide; and whether it’s the coffee or the lack thereof, the beer or the surplus therein, your hand shakes. And, in slow motion…

A different kind of disaster at Caporetto.

Stack tumbles stack tumbles stack. An errant jitter bugs out all that work. The front is in disarray, counters everywhere. Was the Italian 30th Rifle in 4508 or 4509? Did I have a trench line in that hex or the one over? Was Eugen close enough to influence the battle? A victory lost, indeed.

Tweezers, my friends, tweezers are the answer.

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Counter Culture: Treehugging

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All used up? (Revolt in the East is an excellent, quick playing game, by the way.)

Once the counters of a wargame are punched and clipped, what does one do with the remaining tree, denuded of all its counters?

Now, before you answer, recall that we’re talking about wargamers here, people who willingly spend hours moving small pieces of cardboard from hex to hex or space to space according to rules both simple and arcane. Specifics matter to wargamers—it has to be la bonne pièce, no other will do. Completeness and accuracy in all regards are grails to wargamers.

So, the obvious answer, that one throws away the now-empty and useless counter tree, is not necessarily the correct answer, because the counter tree, whether laden or barren, is still a part of the game. On those occasions when a punched and played game is sold or bartered, can you honestly say it’s complete without including the counter trees?

Well, yes, you can, and I stopped hugging my trees a few years back, though I confess that when I sold my punched Star Fleet Battles collection about a decade ago, I included all the empty trees, some fifteen or so. And I bet the recipient appreciated them, even as he tossed them promptly into the trash.

I’ve never received an empty counter tree when I’ve purchased a punched game, so perhaps I’m an aberration in this regard. Am I the only wargamer who ever kept his trees?

Game Preview: Lensman (or Return of the Retro Rockets)

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From io9 comes news that a wargame based, sort of, on E.E. Smith’s Lensman space opera series, will be republished in a tidied up version. Originally published by Phil Pritchard in 1969, Lensman features multiple levels of play, from basic conquest to full-blown exploration and expansion:

Lensman provides three versions, each more complex and detailed than the last. Game 1 is a fun, quick game that plays in a few hours. Game 2 is a longer game with exploration, industrialization, production and lots of combat. Game 3 is the most complex version with tactical combat in deep space or in star systems uniquely generated for each game.

Most interesting is the design decision to provide two versions of the map and counters, one version keeping the essential look of the original and another updating the graphics to more contemporary standards. I assume that the map and counters will be double-sided, with one version on each side.

Playtest Lensman counters, taken from https://web.archive.org/web/20080523084920/http://www.lensmangame.com/ppl-newgraphics.html

I suppose that’s one solution to the age-old debate between NATO symbols and figures on wargame counters, though I’m fairly sure there’s not an established symbology for interstellar dreadnoughts at present. I’m partial to the “retro” version, if only because it allows me to imagine the dreadnought’s appearance myself.

No firm ETA or pre-ordering information on the Lensman game site as of yet, but the world needs more science fiction wargames, so I’ll be monitoring this one.

(Via io9.com; image from Phil Pritchard’s Lensman)

Counter Culture: Clipping Counters

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Continuing our examination of the physical culture of wargaming, we turn to counter clipping, that near-ritual compulsion some gamers have with trimming the nibs and bits off the sides of their counters to create a semblance of neatness and uniformity.

Before and After

Even though die cutting has become much more precise in recent years, with sharp blades and clean cuts leading to some publishers shipping games that have counters literally falling off the trees before the game is even opened for the first time, almost all counters still have some connective material remaining after they are punched or cut from the countersheet. Removing this connective material is the goal of counter clipping.

Ideally, these “sprues” are situated on the counter corners, as in the example above, where they can be easily removed, and most publishers today use this method. Some publishers, though, still insist on diecutting in such a way that the sprues are located at counter centers, making for a difficult removal process. The late and lamented Avalon Hill’s countersheets were typically center mounted in this way—though they occasionally were sufficiently misaligned that the diecuts wound up on the corner anyway.

Given the costs associated with purchasing dies, or the need to use whatever the contract die cutter has on hand, I can understand why some publishers remain with a center cut, but I feel that such cuts detract from the finished product. You can always tell where a center cut nib once was, even if you do manage to remove it somehow.

And why do people clip counters?

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Counter Culture: To Scan or Not to Scan?

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Like many wargamers, upon acquiring my very first scanner, I didn’t turn to the big pile of photos that needed to be digitally archived or the sheaves of important papers documenting my life that would benefit from being duplicated. No, I grabbed a bunch of unpunched countersheets and began scanning away.

Over There In Here

Initially, I was scanning as large as I could, with absurd resolutions, lossless file formats, and correspondingly massive file sizes. But then I had to ask myself just why I was making these scans.

Did I want to be able to print out a fresh countersheet in the event that I lost a counter, or was I simply interested in creating a reference copy? And if I just wanted a reference copy, why didn’t I just use the collective effort of the Internet, which had already put scans of most countersheets online on sites like iSimulacrum? Several game companies even provide counter manifests with their games as a matter of course, a practice that stretches back into the days before easy access to photocopiers and scanners.

Ultimately I came to the conclusion that making countersheet scans serves as a means of tinkering with the hobby, as many wargamers do when we lack the time to play the damn games. Whether it’s clipping counters or putting rulebooks into page protectors or reorganizing the Planos, we often play with our games rather than actually play them.

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Game Artifacts: The Twenty-Sided d10

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Twenty sides, ten numbers.

While inventorying my game collection, I opened up a recently acquired copy of Fantasy Games Unlimited’s solitaire-friendly Star Explorer (1982) to verify the contents.

Map? Check. Countersheet? Check. Log sheets and rulebook? Check. Two six-sided dice? Check. One twenty-sided d10? Um, check?

I’ve worked with all manner of odd polyhedron in my time, from oblong d3s (which have more than three faces) to those hundred-sided “Zocchihedrons” that never quite stop rolling. But a twenty-sider that serves as a d10? New one by me. Silly me—I’ve always used a ten-sided die for a one to ten random distribution.

The typical twenty-sided die, in the shape of an icosahedron, caries the numbers one through twenty, one number per face. The twenty-sider in Star Explorer carries the numbers zero through nine, each number appearing on two faces.

The oddity of this die required special rules for its use in Star Explorer:

1.2 Game Equipment and Scale

[…]

6) Dice. Two six-sided dice and one twenty-sided die are included. The twenty-sided die is labelled 0-9 twice. When a roll of 1D10 is required by the rules, players should roll the twenty-sided die, treating a roll of 0 as a roll of 10. When a roll of 1D20 is required by the rules, players should roll the twenty-sided die and a six-sided die. If the six-sided die roll is 1, 2, or 3, the twenty-sided die is read from 1 to (1)0. If the six-sided roll is 4, 5, 6, the twenty-sided roll is read from 11 to (2)0, creating a range from one to twenty. (Players also have the option of coloring in one set of numbers on the twenty-sided die with a fine point felt-tipped marker and reading the colored numbers as 11-20, while the uncolored numbers are read 1-10.)

Ostensibly, providing a single twenty-sider (albeit with oddly numbered faces) to serve as both d10 and d20 proved less expensive than providing a separate d10 and d20. Indeed, SPI stopped providing any dice at all with their games at one point in the 1970’s, blaming the “world-wide petro-chemical shortage,” but likely owing to cost [1]. Whatever FGU’s reason, this little die provides for a great bit of rules verbiage, even if I will break out my own d20 and d10 when I play Star Explorer.

[1] Balkoski, Joseph. "The Perils of Youth: The Lighter Side of SPI." Strategy & Tactics: 128 (Origins 1989), 48-49.