Wargames

Winter Offensive 2016 After Action Report

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If awards were given out for truth in advertising, then Winter Offensive 2016 would win handily. This year’s edition of the East Coast’s premier Advanced Squad Leader tournament coincided with the largest snowstorm in quite some time. As of this posting, it’s still going on, as I abandoned not-so-bucolic Bowie, Maryland, on Friday the 22nd, opting not to ride out the storm at the Comfort Inn Conference Center. More than a few hearty souls have decided to hunker down, though, obviously tempted by the prospect of being snowed in with nothing to do but play games until the roads clear. Certainly seems like one version of paradise, I have to confess.

By the time I left, about three hours before the onset of the snow, at least sixty people were still rolling dice and pushing cardboard. Over a hundred people were reported to have pre-registered, and more gamers showed up on the con’s initial day, Thursday, than I recall in recent memory. The usual crowd turned out in full force, with the crews from North Carolina, New York, and Norfolk all well in attendance in addition to the local lads. Still, despite the decent showing, Winter Offensive felt smaller this year, solely because the sliding wall partitions between the three convention rooms remained closed for unclear reasons. Also unexpected, MMP gave pre-registered attendees a gratis copy of ASL Journal 11, crammed full of new scenarios, including a pair of three-player scenarios sure to see much play.

So, with only twenty-four hours to play, I tried to cram in as much gaming as possible. Starting off on Thursday afternoon, I matched wits with all-around good guy Mike Vogt in BoF8 “Sting of the Italian Hornet,” an Advanced Squad Leader scenario full of funky Italian vehicles. (I sort of have a weakness for funky Italian vehicles.) We had pre-arranged the match, so I spent a fair bit of time before the con sketching out my Italian defense, putting my infantry guns up front and hoping to keep them hidden until Mike’s Canadians rolled their vehicles by, so I could try for flank and rear shots. Of course, Mike made an unerring beeline right for the gun positions, and both were quickly surrounded by infantry and tanks. I got some lucky shots and landed a few big hits, managing to keep the Canadians at bay long enough to stymie Mike’s carefully plotted advance. He moved as quickly as possible through the protective smoke he artfully laid down, but time was against him.

Advanced Squad Leader at Winter Offensive 16

A solid scenario (if a bit tight for the Canadians in terms of their goals) against a great opponent. Definitely the kind of scenario that reminds you why ASL has been around as long as it has—lots of moving parts that fit together very well to produce an entertaining (if not entirely historically accurate) gaming experience.

Thursday evening, Mike and I joined John Slotwinski, Doug Bush, and Ken Dunn for the traditional Winter Offensive match of Battlestar Galactica. Many, many Basestars were used in the early going, with four on the map at once, accompanied by the entire piece mix of Cylon Raiders. Sadly (for me, as a Cylon), the Galactica and Pegasus escaped from that trap using Cain’s emergency jump one-time ability, and the humans had a fairly easy coast to victory thereafter. In my mechanical defense, I didn’t become a Cylon until after the great escape, so I might have been inadvertently instrumental in helping the humans win just a little bit. Not that anyone cared, because the first action taken after the narrow escape was to put me in the Brig. Hmph. A fine session with some thoroughly enjoyable gamers. As should always be the case after a good game of Battlestar Galactica, the recriminations will last for months.

Battlestar Galactica at Winter Offensive 16

Friday, Doug and I set up Mikugames’ Tornio ’44, a company-level game on the Finnish naval landings behind German lines in central and western Finland, designed to trap the evacuating Germans after the Finnish/Soviet armistice. The game uses an interesting combat system, where the final odds ratio of a combat corresponds directly to the number of dice rolled; the opposing player must spend that dice roll total via a menu, from an inexpensive and relatively mild Broken status through retreats and step losses. The situation itself offers a fascinating challenge, as the Germans have to face Finnish units arriving from several avenues (most of which are chosen by the Finnish player) while keeping escape routes open and protecting victory point locations. The gameplay ebbs and flows. My Finns opened strongly, then the weather turned poor, delaying my reinforcements by a turn and allowing Doug’s Germans to occupy one of my planned avenues of advance. I was able to recover somewhat, but the density of German artillery began to take a toll on my units. We had to call the match half-way through due to the onset of snow (in the real world, not the game) with the Germans arguably in better shape, VP-wise. Hopefully we’ll be able to get this one on the table again for a full session, because it’s the most interesting wargame I’ve played in some time.

Tornio 44 at Winter Offensive 16

As always, my congratulations and thanks to the team at Multi-Man Publishing for another solid event, albeit one that was cut somewhat short for me. It felt strange, and somewhat wrong, to be leaving on Friday as opposed to Sunday, but since I used up quite a bit of my luck via gaming, I didn’t want to take chances with Mother Nature this time out. I hope everyone still there has a safe and enjoyable time of it.

Triple Threat: Churchill (GMT Games)

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Three players is an odd number. Well, literally, of course, but also in terms of finding a good game. Some games play well with three, but the purpose-built three player game tends to be a rarer beast, particularly with wargames. One of GMT Games’ latest offerings, Churchill: Big Three Struggle for Peace, by Mark Herman, fits the bill with an intriguing blend of office politics and abstracted grand strategic combat.

Players take the role of one of the three leaders of the Allies during World War II: the eponymous Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. While nominally a co-operative game wherein the players allocate resources to various theaters of war against the Axis powers, it’s co-operative only in the sense that while everyone loses together, only one person really wins. And balancing that desire for a non-lose state (surrender of both Axis powers by the end of the game) against an individual win (most victory points without going too far above your opponents) provides the game’s essential tension.

Churchill: European Front

The conference system sits the heart of Churchill’s gameplay. Cards representing cabinet-level assistants are played to debate various agenda items during one of the war’s ten conferences, corresponding to historic meetings of the leaders and their teams during the war. Winning an agenda item through debate, be it resources for combat or political shifts in conquered Europe and Asia, gives you the ability to shape the outcome of the war. But, as long-time gaming buddies Doug Bush and Mike Vogt and I found during our initial playthrough at the first ever WashingCon last month, just because you win the debate doesn’t mean you win the war.

Doug took the Soviet side and painted almost all of Eastern Europe red on the road to taking Berlin, giving him a big VP lead, but because Mike’s Americans and my British failed to muster enough strength to knock Japan out of the war—caused mostly by our attempts to counter Doug’s clandestine machinations—at end game, we wound up with a group loss. The system played smoothly, and we managed to finish the five turn Tournament scenario in about four hours. Dice do play a role (no pun intended), but proper planning (and resource allocation) can overcome almost all luck-dependent situations.

The Churchill box comes filled with bits, mostly of the wooden variety, to justify its price tag. Counters take the form of GMT’s deluxe “rounded” counters, with individual counter die-cutting rather than die-cut strips, and the fifty-odd cards are of typical size and with a nice finish. The mounted map has a good matte finish and works ergonomically for the most part. A note to the sticker-averse, however: some of the wooden blocks do require stickering. Thankfully GMT provides extra stickers and blocks in case your manual dexterity just isn’t what it used to be.

Churchill fits a good niche: a grand strategic World War II game designed for three players that focuses on the conduct of the war more than combat. There’s no real panzer pushing here, just perilous politicking over production. Charts included with the game allow one or more sides to be run via flowchart in the event that you have fewer than three players, but the deal-making (and deal-breaking) at the heart of the game make Churchill best with three. Churchill occupies a prime spot on my very short list of games I’ll bring out when three players are on hand.

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.