Sino-Vietnamese Showdown: The Battle of South Caobang and Red Dragon Storm (Kuro Neko Design Workshop)

My wargaming tastes have always tended towards the esoteric and the obscure. The world doesn’t need another game on D-Day or Waterloo. I’m far more interested in conflicts that have seldom been simulated via wargames, to enable me to learn something new and because such games tend to introduce fresh and intriguing approaches to conflict simulation itself, in order to more accurately model the novel situation at hand.

So I was quite pleased when I learned of not one but two recent games on a decidedly overlooked conflict (in the West, at least): the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, also called the Third Indochina War and, by the Chinese, the Self-Defense Counterattack. These two games, The Battle of South Caobang and Red Dragon Storm, both come from Shanghai-based publisher Kuro Neko Design Workshop (Chinese online forum here; no English website).

Red Dragon Storm and The Battle of South Caobang

After some e-mail back-and-forth with the publisher, I received both games about ten days later, from Shanghai to Washington, DC, with a stop at a transhipper near New York City. They both come with die cut mounted counters, glossy thick stock paper maps, and (perhaps most importantly for me) English rulebooks and charts, produced to the same quality as the Chinese rulebooks. The translations are perhaps a bit rough in places, but wargaming tends towards a universal language, so the intent is almost always clear—and I certainly appreciate the effort, for my Shanghainese is, shall we say, rusty.

The presentation for both games sits on par with that of contemporary American conflict simulation publishers. I would prefer slightly thicker counter stock, but it’s better than that found in most magazine games, and the die cutting itself is razor accurate, which I can’t always say about the major domestic publishers here.

Red Dragon Storm comes in a ziplock bag and seems a fairly straightforward, two countersheet, area movement game covering the entire war for either two or three players, divided between the defending Vietnamese player and two Chinese Military Regions. If playing with two, both players control one of the Chinese forces and half the Vietnamese forces, which feels like a rather elegant system. Thick stock cards (with provided English translations) help drive some of the play, and it seems designed to be completed in one sitting.

The Battle of South Caobang

The real prize is The Battle of South Caobang, the first of five planned grand tactical/operational games on the war, with two glossy hex maps, five countersheets, player aids, a book of pictures from the conflict, English and Chinese rules, and even a rubber-banded pack of ziplock baggies for the counters and two different colored d10s, à la GMT Games.

It’s a handsome boxed package, and the game system itself looks intriguing, taking into account the almost asymmetrical nature of the conflict, with detailed supply rules for the Chinese (who were logistically stretched to the limit from the start of the war) and the Vietnamese ability to create militia units anywhere on the map to block supply lines, representing the difficulty the Chinese had in pinning down Vietnamese units. Ten scenarios are included, one of which supports solitaire play. The English rules have been posted on Boardgamegeek for those interested in taking a look.

Though I haven’t had a chance to get either on the table yet, I’m more than pleased with these two games on a fascinating subject, and they’re staking a claim to the top of the “to play” pile. Red Dragon Storm and The Battle of South Caobang make a welcome addition to my library and serve as a stunning debut from Kuro Neko Design Workshop.

Thirteenth Doctor Announced: Jodie Whittaker Takes the TARDIS Key

The BBC announced the identity of the Thirteenth Doctor today, unveiling English actor Jodie Whittaker as the latest regeneration of our favorite time traveller.

Jodie Whittaker is the Thirteenth Doctor; screencap via https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p058vj2q

As the first woman to inhabit the title role in Doctor Who, Whittaker will undoubtedly come in for much scrutiny, but such retrograde hemming and hawing is par for the well-travelled course. Every change of actor has come with doomsayers, and yet these changes are at the heart(s) of the show.

The Doctor’s only real constant should be an old soul; all else remains quite mutable. Sometimes lost in discourses about the Doctor’s identity is the simple fact of his/her alienness. The Doctor is not human, not familiar, not normal, and every change of actor in the role should cause a bit of discomfort when compared to the prior actors. Certainly moving from an irascible male Scottish actor with significant eyebrows to a female English actor with blond hair provides that vital hint of dissonance that makes the show work.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Whittaker performs in the role, and I hope that the scripts for the forthcoming season treat the transformation with wit and verve and use the enormity of the change to drive the series forward.

(Image via BBC.)

Doctor Who Project: The Curse of Peladon

Doctor Who Project: The Curse of Peladon

Your legend seems violent and unpleasant, and rather too convenient.

The originators of Doctor Who‘s most iconic foes tend to be a bit protective of them (see: Nation, Terry, et al.), making Brian Hayles’ use of his Ice Warriors in “The Curse of Peladon” (Story Production Code MMM) quite refreshing. The Martian militarists’ prior two appearances (“The Ice Warriors” and “The Seeds of Death“) established them as honor-bound but utterly ruthless in their warlike tendencies. Here, in a story set in some vaguely defined far-future where Earth is part of a Galactic Federation, they retain their honorable mores but have committed themselves to…peace?

The Ice Warrior delegation to Peladon

Just so, and the tension between the audience’s expectations that the Ice Warriors will turn out to be the villains in this piece about court intrigues on a primitive planet and their actual motives drives much of the story’s interest. The Doctor himself sustains this uncertainty, darkly warning Jo that he’s dealt with them before, and he flatly accuses Delegate Izlyr of sabotaging the Federation’s efforts at bringing the planet Peladon into the alliance. It’s unlike the Doctor to be wrong like this, and to his credit Hayles never quite allows the Ice Warriors to escape beyond suspicion even after the real foes have been revealed, keeping this four episode story flowing.

Taming the Aggedor

And yet even at the end, the Doctor is never called to task for having mistrusted the Ice Warriors. It’s particularly interesting that the Doctor cannot see past his own admittedly well-earned prejudices where the Martians are concerned in the same story where he seeks to hypnotize and tame a giant beast that has haunted this planet for generations, one that slips out of his control and kills the High Priest of Peladon.

He has more faith in the inherent innocence of this vicious beast than in the possibility that the Ice Warriors could have changed over hundreds (or thousands) of years. Ever since the end of “The War Games,” the Doctor’s attitude towards his traditional foes has been stuck in a rut, where there’s no room for analysis or question; they’re just evil, an evil that must be removed from the universe. Slightly awkward, then, that here the Ice Warriors save the Doctor from disintegration at the hands (er, liquid-filled servo-arms) of a Dalek wannabe.

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Doctor Who Project: Day of the Daleks

Doctor Who Project: Day of the Daleks

Changing history is a very fanatical idea, you know.

For a show ostensibly about time travel, Doctor Who features very few stories actually about time travel. Louis Marks’ Season Nine opener, “Day of the Daleks” (Series Production Code KKK), tries to explore the paradoxical intricacies of altering history but, oddly, is kept from doing so by the lead villains, who make a rather flat return after nearly five years’ absence from the screen. For this story, about a ragtag band of guerrilla fighters in 22nd Century Earth travelling back in time to stop World War III from breaking out in the 20th Century, would have worked better without the Daleks at all.

Behold the gold Dalek

UNIT summons the Doctor and Jo to investigate the strange appearance (and disappearance) of an armed intruder in the home of Sir Reginald Styles, a British diplomat attempting to broker a peace between China, the UK, and the rest of a world on the brink of all-out war. When the would-be assassin is later found injured in a nearby tunnel, the Doctor surmises that he’s from Earth’s future, armed as he is with a disintegrator gun, made with Welsh-mined metals, and a crude form of time machine. This conjecture is confirmed when the assailant’s accomplices show up and capture the Doctor and Jo, who have lain in wait for them in Style’s study (after helping themselves to the diplomat’s well-stocked larder and wine cellar).

Be very afraid. We're from the future!

Through a series of misadventures—and Jo’s on-again, off-again skill with “escapology”—both the Doctor and Jo separately wind up in the 22nd Century, Jo in the custody of the Dalek-led human government and the Doctor with the guerrillas who are, it turns out, fighting against the Dalek regime. And what horrible fate awaits Jo at the hands of her captors? She’s offered grapes and wine and the promise of a feast. The Daleks have really lost their touch…

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Cincinnati or Bust: 1846 (GMT Games)

Once upon a time, GMT Games produced wargames and nothing but. Luckily for the gaming public at large, they’ve long since diversified their product line with games on everything from lemmings to stock cars, including their first foray into the niche realm of 18XX railroad games, Tom Lehmann’s 1846: The Race for the Midwest.

1846 GMT Games Edition

Originally available through Deep Thought Games, a bespoke and apparently defunct 18XX producer renowned for a several year waiting list, 1846 serves as a relatively simple (yet still cutthroat) introduction to the 18XX family of games. GMT’s lavishly produced and reasonably priced edition offers this game series to a wide audience, hopefully converting some new fans to the financial skullduggery of these railroad games.

I recently had the opportunity to play through much of a game of 1846 with my good gaming friends Mike and Jess at Labyrinth Games in Washington, DC. Neither of them had much experience with the series, but they both picked up on the fundamentals quickly and we criss-crossed the Midwest with rails before long.

Unlike the most well known of the 18XX games, 1830, 1846 has a streamlined process for launching corporations and also gives them the ability to deal in their own stocks. I launched a single corporation while Mike and Jess each launched a pair. My B&O focused on Cincinnati and environs; Jess tried to get into Chicago from the east and south; and Mike worked the routes around Lake Erie. Forced train purchases (caused by technological progress in the game, resulting in old trains being removed) pretty much drove all three of us into bankruptcy, as we hadn’t optimized our track purchases—or much of anything else—leaving us without enough funding for new trains. Though player bankruptcy doesn’t end the game, we decided to call it while the game was still in the third of five phases and while we still had some dignity left.

We all want to come back to it, though. There’s something about 1846, and indeed 18XX in general, that speaks to that part of the brain that wants to get an economic engine ticking just so—all while fending off the predations of others seeking to profit off of your every miscue. Brutal games indeed, and brilliant for it.

Doctor Who Project: The Daemons

Doctor Who Project: The Daemons

I’ve cast the runes. I’ve consulted the talisman of Mercury.

If the BBC didn’t pay royalties to Erich von Däniken for “The Daemons” (Story Production Code JJJ), perhaps they should have. The premise of aliens having guided Earth’s history, as put forth in von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, forms a central conceit in much of Doctor Who, and that ur-plot essentially starts here, in the Season Eight finale. There are hints of ancient aliens in earlier stories, notably “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” but in “The Daemons,” Guy Leopold (actually producer Barry Letts with Robert Sloman) makes the Chariots connection explicit by linking the alien in question to the Devil.

Gargoyle come to life.

As the Doctor explains—at the Cloven Hoof Inn in the English town of Devil’s End, just in case anyone missed the point—the Daemons, from the planet Daemos, came to Earth one hundred thousand years ago and helped homo sapiens defeat the Neanderthals as a sort of science experiment, in the process forever imprinting the notion of powerful horned beasts into the collective unconscious. The rituals that evolved around the Daemons came to form religious and magical beliefs, though the Doctor avers that because the Daemons are attracted to psychic energy, these rituals, passed down through generations, merely serve to focus human emotions, neatly squaring the science/magic circle.

The Doctor is not the only one who knows of the power of the Daemons, though. The Master is also in on the secret, and he’s dressed to play the part, posing as both the newly installed local vicar and as the head of the local black magic coven, the better to harness the town’s mental energies to summon the last of the Daemons, Azal. Conveniently, Azal just happens to have parked his spaceship in the nearby Devil’s Hump burial barrow.

I'm here all week. Try the veal!

The story goes off the rails quickly enough, with several long expository sequences given over to a giant heat barrier surrounding the town once Azal manifests, and as usual, the Master has set into motion a plot more likely to kill himself than anyone else.

For all the Master’s cunning, he really doesn’t think these things through, assuming that the ability to summon an ancient alien from an advanced civilization using a rooster somehow confers power over said creature (the Daemon, not the rooster). But then, the biggest threat to the Doctor comes not from Azal, nor Azal’s pet gargoyle that for some reason does the Master’s bidding, but rather from the Master’s chief henchman, a newspaper-clipping-clad Morris dancer. That’s the kind of story this is…

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