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.

Doctor Who Project: The Macra Terror

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They’re in control!

Though only four seasons in to Doctor Who‘s run, by the time of Ian Stuart Black’s “The Macra Terror” (Story Production Code JJ), one would be forgiven for thinking that the series has a limited number of stories to tell. The prior story, the Cybermen sophomore effort “The Moonbase,” plays as a virtual repeat of first Cybermen story, “The Tenth Planet,” with Kit Pedler writing both. Now we have Ian Stuart Black riffing on his favored theme, that of a hidden power secretly controlling people’s minds for some nefarious purpose, as last seen in “The War Machines.” Only this time, replace a self-aware computer in ’60s London with crab monsters in some future human colony, with a touch of the utopia hiding a deadly flaw (as seen in his “The Savages“) for good measure.

On the surface, it’s not a bad story idea to revisit, and the approach here differs from “The War Machines” in focusing on the dehumanizing force of brainwashing and subliminal messages rather than the dangers of technology run amok. Advertising jingles carry a strong propaganda message to the colony and play in the background even as the actors speak, suggesting that they are always playing, forcing happy thoughts into all of the colony’s inhabitants. As the leader of the colony states, they regulate their lives by music.

The Doctor and his companions arrive on this far-flung planet to inadvertently assist in the capture of a dissident from the unnamed colony, whose crime is twofold—he’s not happy, and he has seen something forbidden that he refuses to repudiate. The Doctor takes a liking to him immediately, while Ben and Polly just want to get the free shampoo and massage on offer as a reward for helping the colony capture this dangerous ne’er-do-well. Their glee at such services leads one to wonder if there’s a shower on board the TARDIS. But there’s a price to be paid for the spa treatment, as Polly soon finds out.

Beware the Macra Terror

Yes, she’s seen the Monster-of-the-Week, the crab/insect creatures known as the Macra. Quite often, one mourns the loss of so much Second Doctor footage. Well, not so much here.

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Doctor Who Project: The Moonbase

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Will somebody please tell us what it all means?

Just when you thought it was safe for the Doctor and his companions to visit an isolated human outpost that coincidentally contains a device capable of destroying the Earth, the Cybermen show up yet again to spoil the day. In almost every regard, Kit Pedler’s “The Moonbase” (Story Production Code HH) reads as a remake of his “The Tenth Planet,” aired a scant four months earlier, only with a different Cyberman weakness and a different Doctor at the helm, plus a groggy Scotsman who thinks a Cyberman is an avenging angel. We have: a remote international base (on the Moon instead of the South Pole); a commanding officer who effectively shrugs his shoulders at strangers knocking on his door; a doomed Earth spaceship; a group of Cybermen knocked out by quick companion thinking; a whole bunch of technobabble that sets up the doomsday device on the base; and a Cyberman weakness that requires humans to act in their stead and lets the Doctor turn the tables on the silver suited cyborgs.

And yet, derivative as it is, “The Moonbase” winds up being very different from “The Tenth Planet” almost entirely because it’s the Second Doctor rather than the First doing the table-turning.

A bemused Second Doctor

If nothing else, “The Moonbase” represents the moment where Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor finally comes into his own as a fully developed character, out from William Hartnell’s shadow. To be sure, Pedler makes the connection between the two Doctors, with the Cybermen recognizing the Doctor (and vice versa):

Cyberman: You are known to us.

Doctor: And you to me.

The Daleks in “The Power of the Daleks” similarly recognized the Second Doctor, suggesting, again, that the Cybermen know of him from encounters between the original 1986 meeting, where the First Doctor regenerated, and their current 2070 engagement. But there, we didn’t recognize the Doctor even if the Daleks did; here, we feel like we know this Doctor: he’s crafty, cautious, and cunning, aware of his limitations and confident despite that knowledge. By the this story ends, we know how the Second Doctor thinks and acts. Pedler simply nails it. We almost feel badly for the Cybermen, because we know this is going to end poorly for them. You might say the Doctor blows them off their feet.

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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.

Doctor Who Project: The Underwater Menace

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Just one small question. Why do you want to blow up the world?

Thus far in its four seasons, Doctor Who has had its share of evil villains bent on controlling the universe and dastardly foes driven by petty greed and egotism, but not until Geoffrey Orme’s “The Underwater Menace” (Story Production Code GG) do we get a truly mad scientist for the Doctor face off against. And oh, boy, is Zaroff mad.

Zaroff the Mad

In some ways, using a monomaniacal scientist determined to prove his genius by accomplishing that which no other scientist ever has—to wit, blowing up the planet—turns Zaroff (Joseph Fürst) into the kind of monster that the show’s original “no monsters” remit tried to avoid; first season shows in particular featured opponents who were driven by complex and internally consistent, though perhaps misguided, desires, like Tlotoxl and Autloc in “The Aztecs” or the eponymous Sensorites. Zaroff just wants to blow up the planet like some human Dalek, and as such, he provides no real challenge for the Doctor and his trio of companions, wasting the elaborate stage production of “The Underwater Menace” in the process.

With new companion Jamie aboard, the TARDIS shows up on volcanic specks of rock in the Mediterranean, the only above-water vestiges of the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Polly finds a medallion from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics near a cave mouth, to help place the story sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s; it must have been dropped by a shipwreck survivor who was, like the Doctor and friends, captured by the Atlanteans, who use such people as sacrifices to their deity or as labor in their mines or sea farms.

Those sea farms, producing plankton and tended by slaves who have been implanted with plastic gills, cause the Doctor to dive into his Five Hundred Year Diary and come up with a name that saves them from becoming shark food as an offering to Amdo, the Atlantean god. He remembers that a Professor Zaroff, thought to have died in the 1950s, devoted his efforts to feeding the world through plankton, and by brandishing this name, he secures an audience with Zaroff, sparing his companions in the process. As he does so well, the Second Doctor plays to Zaroff’s ego in order to learn all he can, and it transpires that Zaroff has promised to raise Atlantis back above the sea. He just intends to lower the oceans by dumping them into the Earth’s molten core rather than lifting Atlantis itself, though, with the slight side effect of causing the planet to explode. When the Doctor notes this outcome, Zaroff readily acknowledges this result as a feature, rather than a fault, of his plan. Where are the rational Daleks when you need them?

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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.