Winter Offensive 2013 After Action Report

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Sure, it may have been seventy degrees outside, but this past weekend in Bowie, Maryland, it was Winter Offensive 2013 inside, as Multi-Man Publishing‘s annual Advanced Squad Leader tournament and all-around gamefest took place.

A view from the Winter Offensive '13 trenches

Attendance at the East Coast’s premier ASL event initially seemed a bit off from years past (though no complaints from a table-space perspective), perhaps owing to the slightly changed date. Typically, Winter Offensive is held over Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, but the proximity of the Presidential Inauguration put paid to those plans this year. Saturday, however, saw a major influx of gamers, bringing the total up to 126 over the course of the event, pipping 2012’s 125 gamers.

The old gang was all in attendance, and, as has become my wont, I managed to play a total of zero games of ASL, though my resistance weakened somewhat when I saw a beautiful scenario featuring bicycle-mounted Japanese troops supported by some of the most obscure tankettes in the game in the Phillipines facing U.S. Army cavalry. Early war, PTO, junky tanks, and bicycles? Yes, please! Time to dust off the ol’ rulebook, I think.

GMT's Bloody AprilI managed to game aplenty, though. After spending much of Thursday catching up with people, I spent the vast majority of Friday playing a huge scenario from GMT’s Bloody April, a World War One grand tactical air game, with my Germans (including von Richtofen himself) facing off against Doug Bush’s British pilots.

Though the Germans tallied far more British flights shot down (the Baron himself had four kills), the Brits were able to accomplish more than enough of their objectives to see them win handily. The system is nice, though a bit cumbersome given the need to track nearly ten variables per flight counter on the map. Still, by the end of fifty turns, we had the climbing, diving, and dogfighting down pat.

Friday evening was given over to GMT’s Twilight Struggle against Chris Chapman, who took the Soviets against my Americans in a replay of the Cold War. Honors were even until the mid-war phase, at which point the Soviets scored quite a few regions. With a +16 VP lead, Chris seemed in control, so I started to play around with DEFCON, but the gamble led to an unfortunate end for the planet when the Soviets were able to push DEFCON to zero owing to my own card play. A rematch has been demanded!

Far too bright and early on Saturday, I faced off against Mike Vogt in MMP’s No Question of Surrender, taking the Italians as they besieged the Free French in their desert fort. This was my first experience with MMP’s Grand Tactical System, a company level, chit-activation wargame. While I like the underlying system—it’s simple to learn but difficult to get all the parts working synergistically—I was underwhelmed by the tactical situation portrayed. The Italians pretty much just crashed like weak waves against the French fort, and Mike was probably getting tired of rolling so much opportunity fire against them. Still, it was nice to see the rules in action, and always a pleasure to match wits with Mike.

By Saturday afternoon, a bit of heavy-gaming fatigue had started to set in, so lighter fare became the norm, and I played through two games of FFG’s Battlestar Galactica. Much to my dismay, I was never a Cylon traitor, though I was accused of such in both games (and even sent to the brig once). The Cylons won the first game without much fuss, but the second saw cagier play by the humans, leading to a narrow escape from the toasters. I’d gladly play this one again, but you need a good-natured group for it—the potential (nay, necessity) for offense in this one requires playing against gamers who enjoy gaming more than they enjoy winning.

Winter Offensive always leaves me drained in the aftermath, but for three days of gaming, I’m ready to put it on the calendar for next year. After I catch up on my sleep, that is.

Letter from a Time Traveller: Royal Mail to Issue Doctor Who Stamps

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Image of First Doctor Stamp via Royal MailThough it might be a poor use of a time machine, if given the keys to the TARDIS, I think I’d jump to March, 2013, to grab the Royal Mail’s planned Doctor Who stamps. As reported by the BBC, each of the eleven Doctors will receive a first class stamp, with various enemies on second class stamps. There’s also to be a first class stamp of the TARDIS itself.

The backgrounds for the stamps of the eleven Doctors draw from the opening titles sequences of their respective seasons and utilize the contemporaneous Doctor Who logo as well. As is typical, William Hartnell comes out looking classy as ever. (Poor Sylvester McCoy—that background does him few favors).

I’ll definitely be picking up a few sets of these when they arrive, though I do confess to a bit of curmudgeonly disappointment that the second class enemies are all drawn from the new series. Ood and Weeping Angels before the Ice Warriors and Daemons?

(Image via Royal Mail)

A Fresh Console for Christmas: New TARDIS Interior Revealed

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The BBC has unveiled our first glimpse at Doctor Who‘s revamped TARDIS control room, and it takes us away from the prior steampunk monstrosity back to a far more traditional look:

Image of new TARDIS control room via BBC

While I understood the prior control room as emphasizing the immense size of the TARDIS (and also providing lots of space for interesting camera angles and character positioning), this new look harkens back to consoles from earlier days with a more personal scale. The prior console took time to walk around, and the TARDIS felt like a ship rather than, well, a time machine. This is cozy without being cramped, and the lines are modern and eclectic at the same time.

Though it’s hard to tell from the photo, stairs seem to extend down behind Matt Smith, suggesting a lower deck where the Doctor can fiddle with the TARDIS to his hearts’ content. There are plenty of knobs and levers as well—the TARDIS should never have a touch-screen bridge along the lines of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The hexagonal motif in the walls also calls back to earlier incarnations of our favorite time machine.

A very promising new look here. Now let’s hope that the stories Moffat and crew tell in it are worthy of the revamp, because the first part of the most recent season left more than a bit to be desired.

(Image via BBC)

Richard’s Poor Almanac Now Online

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Richard Thompson, he of “Cul de Sac” fame, brings news that “Richard’s Poor Almanac” is now available online through comics portal GoComics.

Detail from Richard's Poor Almanac, https://www.gocomics.com/richards-poor-almanac/2012/12/03

“Richard’s Poor Almanac”, a series of observational sketch comics that ran weekly in the Washington Post for years, provides that same uniquely fussy drawing style we see in “Cul de Sac”, with the same wit and insight that never lets you look at the comic’s subject quite the same way again. Given that the collected print version of these comics routinely runs over $150 on the used market, to have access to them (albeit only one a week on Mondays!) is a great gift.

The presentation on GoComics leaves a little to be desired—the comics themselves are vertically oriented and far larger than the usual three-panel strip, so they appear in a reduced version on the screen. A simple click enlarges them, but these beauties deserve a custom presentation. Still, to have them available again is enough (although a reprint of the collected comics wouldn’t be amiss…)

Update: Looks like GoComics has made some changes, with a more frequent release cycle and, more importantly, a properly scaled presentation. Go and enjoy!

(Image detail from Richard’s Poor Almanac on GoComics.)

The Past Remade: Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition

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Baldur's Gate CDBack in 1998, a gargantuan computer game burst upon the scene, stored on five CDs and taxing the modest hard drives of the era with its multi-gig installation. That game, Baldur’s Gate, matched its digital size with an epic role playing story based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset (second edition AD&D, more precisely).

Though it hid the complexities of its rules behind the screen, as it were, the game made no apologies for its complexity or its scope. This was gaming nirvana: hours and hours (and hours) of herding a party of adventurers through an intricate web of plots and quests and events, all told from an isometric perspective with pausible combat and the elaborate branching conversations that would become the hallmark of its developers, BioWare and Black Isle.

Baldur’s Gate spawned expansions and sequels and devoted fans, but eventually the isometric, text-heavy, detailed role-playing game would become the purview of independent developers like Spiderweb Software as the industry moved to shorter, more easily digestible (read: simpler, dumbed-down) games. BioWare would move on to more action-oriented role-playing games, but even in light of such successes as the Mass Effect franchise, they’ve never recaptured the glory of Baldur’s Gate.

Or perhaps I’m just seeing this game in a rosy, nostalgic light. Given that Baldur’s Gate has just been re-released in an “enhanced” edition, optimized for modern operating systems and generally cleaned up and given a polish, I’ll have the chance to see whether my fondness for the game stems from a general belief in the superiority of the ’90s to the ’00s or if the game actually is that good. It certainly was that good, but how it stands up to that proverbial test of time is a question I’m looking forward to answering.

Doctor Who Project: The Chase

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Barbara, could I, ah, have your cardigan?

Terry Nation and his Daleks return to Doctor Who in “The Chase” (Story Production Code R), with their own time machine, ready to pursue our heroes through time and space with one aim: to exterminate. The possibilities are endless, the potential locales and eras limitless. And we wind up on a desert planet populated by fish people. And also on Earth three times. And then on a jungle planet with hungry fungi and truculent robots. By the end of the story, one mourns not so much for the departure of Barbara and Ian as for what could have been.

Much like an earlier Nation effort, “The Keys of Marinus,” “The Chase” bounces around from place to place, episode to episode, and as a result, far too much screen time is devoted to establishing the when and what of where the Doctor and his companions have arrived. This influx of exposition overwhelms any sense of anxiety about the Daleks who pursue them just minutes behind in the time and space vortex. And, of course, the intrepid travellers must conspire to get themselves separated from one another in each and every episode. That takes effort, drawing away from any depth of plot.

The action, such as it is, starts on the heels of “The Space Museum,” with the Doctor tuning in various moments in history on the Time-Space Visualizer he insisted on liberating from that eponymous institution. The Time-Space Visualizer is curiously heliocentric, with the names of the solar system’s planets around it, and indeed the entire story resounds with references to the Doctor as human, though likely an unintentional rather than prescriptive description. Shakespeare makes his first appearance in Doctor Who on the Visualizer, and the United States is referenced for the first time as well, as Ian requests a peek at Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

A thousand channels and he winds up on the History Channel

But then, in a fortuitous bit of channel surfing, the Daleks appear, chanting “TARDIS, TARDIS, TARDIS!” as they roll one after the other into their own time machine, ready to chase the Doctor and chums through time and space as revenge for the foiled invasion of Earth. They don’t seem overly concerned about the Doctor’s seeming destruction of their species on Skaro way back when, just the whole Earth thing. Because turning the Earth into a hollow spaceship to fly it around the galaxy was totally going to work.

Of course, our time travellers can’t just leave, because the party is split up on the desert planet Aridius, adding yet another lazy planet name to the Doctor Who canon. The fishy Aridians, whose planet was once water covered and who live in fear of octopus-like Mire Beasts, don’t seem at all surprised by the sudden appearance of the Doctor or the Daleks, who threaten to destroy the Aridian civilization if the Doctor and his companions are not handed over.

Fish men. In a desert.

Thankfully, a Mire Beast breaks through a wall and eats an Aridian, allowing Vicki, Barbara, and the Doctor to escape and meet up with Ian, who has passed out from the first of two head-beatings in this story.

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