Settlers Game

In the first week of January (just shows how long I can wait before posting if I'm busy elsewhere) Nancy, Shaun, Paul and I played our first game of Settlers of Catan. We all agreed it was good fun, took us a bit over two hours. We played the recommended starting set up for a first game rather than use the randomisation of geography etc which gives the game its newness on each play. Using the standard set up, I presume, gives each player a roughly equal chance to win while displaying some of the different 'styles' required to master the game. In this trial, Shaun (White) won with an expansionist approach, Nancy (blue) came close with her trading approach, I (orange) kept myself happy with a coastal network and Paul (red) got frustrated by playing an expansionist style when he should have concentrated on internal development. All good fun and hope to play again in not too distant future.

Civ Game

The above picture shows the situation at the end of our game of Civilisation from the Dog Days (sorry about the blurry picture, forgot to use the flash). It was a rollicking good six player game that went for 13 hours. Babylon (Jess) won in a close tussle down to the last turn, with Illyria (Nancy) coming second and North Africa (Jarrad) a close third. Minor places were taken by Egypt (Paul) , Assyria (yours truly) and Thrace (Wayne). A great time was had by all. Most noteably, at different stages in the game everyone was under a fair bit of pressure to the point of being upset, but no one said anything they regretted and we all shook hands at the end. In the pressure cooker of a thirteen hour game, that's pretty good.

Below is a link to a slideshow showing the rise and decline and rise of the Assyrian Empire in the game of Civilisation we played at the end of last year.



In the slide show you'll see how Assyria expanded into Asia (Anatolia), dealt with a warlike Babylon pushing from the East and various minor coastal invasions in the South (North is to the bottom of the picture). Although I tried to keep the centre of the asian peninsula free of cities (allowing me internal lines of communication to deal with my war like neighbor and exposed coast ) I eventually had to build cities there to secure the position. In the latter part of the game you'll also see a barbarian (pink) influx into Babylon territory. I included it here because it was a nice thorn in the side of an aggressive opponent playing what is usually a passive people.

Victorious Babylonian

Holiday Gaming - online GRAW, EF, RK

Over the past two weeks I've dabbled a bit in online media for gaming. Surprise surprise.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - classic shoot 'em up for the thinking player. Have had it for a year or so and played single player on desktop, not the best at it (still haven't finished the programmed scenarios). High tension game, however, big maps and difficult scenarios with good sound and graphics. Here is the link to a user video on youtube which shows someone playing through the mission I have gotten stalled on (in the mass fire fight at the end). This dude makes it look easy.

Anyway, after maybe a year of having the game I finally 'patched' the game with the official patch and had a look at the multiplayer function. There seems to always be a dozen or more games going on online at any time, most of them being cooperative games on usergenerated missions. It's a game of small interlocking fire teams and rests a lot on observation and tactical movement. Good fun. Also of some interest is that one can make one's own machine act as a server. This is especially useful here in Australia considering the usually high 'ping' penalty we pay for living here (most game servers being on the other side of the planet).

East Front II - continue into turn 3 of the 1941 scenario of what looks like a russion cavalry brigade and tank regiment attacking a string of isolated german company's at a number of crossroads etc. The russian tanks appear poised to 'overrun' in the next turn.

Renaissance Kingdoms - Since I last wrote of this here I have done a stint as Field Marshal of the Royal Scottish Army, backing on to a term of about two months as Deputised Field Marshal while my predecessor underwent court martial procedures. My own time as Field Marshal was marked by a Court Martial of none other than my ingame wife, with me having to determine penalty once the Military Council had determined guilt. My penalty managed to upset nearly everyone to some degree for some reason. That was before Christmas. After Christmas I faced a vote of no confidence amongst the army as a result of the High Command being mighty upset at what they saw as the leniency of the penalty I had handed down in the court martial.

The no confidence vote was taken in each of the three regiments, the officer corps and the high command. These five results were tallied, equally weighted, and I ended up losing my job by one vote. The High Command voted against me and the officers did, but galloway and glasgow regiments supported me. There was only one vote cast in Ayr Regiment and it was against me and effectively determined the whole show. Ironically, this voter made clear that he thought the decision was fair and just but that I shouldn't have been the one to make it due my relation to the accused. I won the majority of the votes but lost in the tactics of it over the xmas new year break. So my character gets to live a normal life again after over a year as general of a regiment and then effectively as a warrior lawyer in the military courts as field marshal.

An unexpected turn indeed.

The Dog Days

Happy xmas (to those of you who celebrate it)! Believe it or not, amongst other gifts I received was a game - Settlers of Catan. I know it's been around awhile and that many of the regular readers of this blog will have played it, but I haven't and am sure looking forward to it. Though the boardgame we are planning to play sometime in the next week and a half (when the world here stops for summer dogdays* holiday) is a six or seven player game of the old Avalon Hill classic, "Civilisation". That'll take about 12 hours to play. Is pretty cool how can usually get folk together to play it once or twice a year.

A few days before xmas i got myself a 'little something,' one of those computer game magazines which has a game disk with it, "Age of Conan". It sounds like a megagame, and suffers from a lot of the commercialisations that come with these things, but I was grew up reading the original Conan stories and can't resist having a look at the world of Hyboria for thirty days before the free period of this online game expires. With holidays in front of me, hopefully I'll be able to advance enough to travel a bit and have a look around. Who knows, I might even like it?!

* The dog days is a term from the roman era referring to the sliding number of days after the solistice to correct the calander each year (I think). I use it to describe the null days between xmas and new year.

East Front again

Wayne has started up another scenario of Talonsoft's East Front II that we play by emailing turnfiles. Again, he is the russian and I the german in this WWII tactical hex based comp game. I think we're about one all in the present run of scenarios. This one seems to be a russian cavalry divsion trying to swarm over some isolated german outposts on the steppe, but that will clarify itself as the turns progress (we always play it with fog of war 'on').

5 player LOTR

Had a five player game, with Jess and Jarrad being the two first timers. We got further than in any other game (though still didn't reach Mount Doom before Sam the Ring Bearer (me) was corrupted by Sauron - along with all the other hobbits except for Merry). The dynamic was a bit different as one would expect with five players, with 'advantages' to the group and 'disadvantages' to the players, as I put it. Again, took about two hours (including a snack break).

The ring has now been taken from our home for a week to be used elsewhere. Little doubt that the young ones will soon have optimised their playing strategies and will be keen to show us 'oldies' how it is done when the ring one day returns.

Session 5: Sauron starts on 15. Shaun, Nancy, Jessica, Jarrad, Mark. Scored 57.

More LOTR

Went and played two three player games of LOTR. The first of them took around three hours, had several children watching for some of the time with their various hobbit and gollum imitations. Very funny, and they seem to understand the principles of the fellowship of the ring easier than us adults, judging by the results...

Session 3: Nancy, Wayne, Mark. Sauron starts 15. Score 46, eaten by Shelob.
Session 4: Wayne, Mark, Nancy. Sauron starts 15. Score 54, overtaken by events and Sauron grabs the ring. Pippin was alone for most of his fateful journey in Mordor in this game, but the eliminated players were still 'involved' in what was happening.

LOTR Sessions

Board from 25 Nov 2009 (Postgame)

Game 1: Paul, Mark, Nancy - 53 points - Sauron starts at 15 on Corruption Chart
Game 2: Mark, Shaun, Paul, Nancy - 46 points - Sauron starts at 15

Both games took about two hours, though wouldn't be much more than an hour once people are familiar with the game. Highly challenging with a sense of impending and inevitable doom. The game hangs together neatly, encouraging the company to support each other. Utilises on board tracks to keep the forward momentum, cards to generate actions, nice components, clear rules. As the company passes through Shelob's Lair (we didn't get past through it to Mordor in the second game) the tension rises, as Sauron reaches out for the company the fear rises, as the hobbits have to risk themselves to save their friends the group coheres.

A good game, am even taking it to someone else's place tonight to induct them. Maybe I'll give it a rest then...

Lord of the Rings - Knizia board game

Have just purchased Knizia's Lord of the Rings cooperative board game from the pawnbroker (of all places). Will let you know how it plays when we take on Sauron - but the concept of a 'corruption line', the artwork and the favoured status of almost anything designed by Knizia leads to good prospects.

After having read the rules and finding them somewhat intriguing because of the new possibilities opened by the group v the system approach I went for a quick google to see what sort of a game this was. I have found nothing but praise so far, but what was interesting is that I found this academic article on cooperative and collaboration game design ("Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games" - Zagal, Rick, Hsi). It uses Knizia'a LOTR as its case study of a 'collaborative' game that works, is itself an attempt to draw lessons for use by the MMORG fraternity. Worth a read, as are the archives for The Gaming Journal (which I found in the article's bibliography).

PS sorry again for delays, RK has taken over again. I'll post sometime a summary of what's happened there. Suffice to say my character is now Field Marshall of the Royal Scottish Army, married, and rather busy in the role play side of things.

As a final note, I've activated word recognition in the comments on this blog as a result of the massive spam influx on the previous post.

Sign of Life

For some reason, this post is the one that draws the second greatest number of googling visitors to my blog. At time I originally wrote this I wasn't around a lot, I am around a lot more these days. If you want to see what I'm up to more recently, click on 'Adelaide Gamer' above and leave a comment on the most recent post.

Postscript: I have left the large number of junk comments on this post as it is probably something in them which is drawing the visits (or perhaps it's the post title). Also, it's a reminder to me of the spam plague that can strike a site without notice.

[Above comments were posted 12 June, 2011]

Month and a half since I last posted here, and that was only a 'sign of life' post, like this one. Obviously things are going on distracting me from this place. Rather disconcerting since I was doing so well. Probably lost most if not all of my regular visitors. Can't see things changing here for a little while, so will have to content myself with sign-of-life posts like this one for a little while yet. Still, it's a long run project so I'll just get through this bad patch and hopefully be able to move forward again. Until then, if I'm patient with myself, will you be?

Still Kicking

Just to let you know I am still around and busy. Will start more regular posting again very shortly. Presently am (still) right into my Renaissance Kingdoms and Tribal Nations online RPGs, have recently gone through a stage of Mafia FPSing and am taking up Medieval 2 again for a strategic burst. Have again had my gaming/painting room taken over by a family member who needed a roof so have again lost opportunity to revert to my original self and create tabletop gaming things.

More later.

Atmosphere and Elegance

In commenting on this post over at the Grog I said the following:

I got closest (to the epitome of 'elegance and atmosphere', minimal rules, maximum affect) when I used the philosophy of cutting, not adding, elements in the rules and campaign setting. I boiled it down to a couple pages of charts. All was taken from AD&D (1.00000). The emphasis shifted from books and paper to dialogue, imaginings and the dice. With less dice rolled, each became more important. It was great.

When I walk into a game store these days that stocks the latest morph of D&D I never cease to be amazed at the number of volumes available, their expense, their quality of production and the amount of shelfspace they consume. Adding it all together I come to the conclusion that, besides being much more affluent than me and my 1e gaming friends were, modern gamers seem to be much more 'thing' oriented. I won't rant about the consumer society, but it worries me when I see the concentration on this vast profit making enterprise to the exclusion of home made fun and backyard businesses.

This isn't just about AD&D, RPGs, mass market computer games and so forth, but includes the other types of game as well. For example, in my little history of flight simming I have played on something for the Super80 way back when (!) right up to my present IL2 passion. I have tried maybe two dozen flight sims in my time. My favorites were 'wings' on the amiga, '1942 - Pacific War' on windows 98 and IL2 on XP. Each of these games faced off against more action oriented or more extravagent simulations, yet it is these to which I continue to return (in the case of IL2 and hopefully one day in the case of the others). Why?

Because they work well (elegant) and you can 'smell the avgas in the morning' (atmosphere).

It's like comparing the joy of the orginal squad leader game with the monster that it became - one is beer and pretzels , the other is abstract literary expertise. Both are fun, don't get me wrong, but you can probably guess which one I prefer.

Drummore, hive of activity

It is now about two weeks since I first distributed plans for Operation Drummore. There are presently around 16 soldiers in Drummore (which I expected) with squads from all the towns (which I had hoped for).

I am about to start a three day 'advanced training course' for six of my officers/NCOs. They will head out and 'scout' the nodes on the road between wigtown and drummore. I will be running a tour of inspection of their positions with two of my MacTavish bodyguards. I have all the different scouts operating on different 'settings', and will get a chance to see what they see, and what I see, during the inspection. We will all need to post our sightings on the regimental forum to pass the examination.

While advanced training is happening the soldiers will be all working in the Drummore mines, except of those rostered for sentry duty. They will post what they see on the Regimental forum. This is their basic training.

I have asked all the soldiers in the mines to give me their 'receipts' for their labours. I will be collecting them on the Regimental forum. This is our 'civil aid' mission.

While the above is all happening ingame, we are running a 'military camp' Role Play thread on the town's local forum. I also seem to be meeting a lot of soldiers in the generally otherwise empty taverns. This is raising the profile of the RSA in this isolated town.

From around 10 July, the first scouts will leave town to cover the route for the return journey. On the twelfth, the squads of the Regiment will pull up their stakes and go back to their homes. This will complete the basic training requirements for the recruits. By leading one of the squads and participating in the scout training or cover force, the NCOs will have completed the formal element of their training.

When we get home I will collect all the receipts which the troops have collected when they worked in the mines and see how we can use this to obtain some cash from the County.

Of interest, since we have been in town the price of bread has risen, the wages paid in the mines have dropped, and some of the locals are whinging about the fact that where we go we are bound to attract trouble.

Sigh.

(With this post 2009 becomes the year in which I have (so far) written more posts (n=66) than any year bar one (2007) since 2004).

The General's Office

It has been interesting getting a second chance to do the job of 'general' in the Galloway Regiment of the Royal Scottish Army in RK. The first time I ran around the country from one fragmented crisis to another until became an absolutely exhausted tragic hero in popular imagination. Good for tall tales in the tavern but not what was needed. Though, looking back, it was about the only thing that could have been done, and provided a popular base for the rebuild.

Here I am, half a year later, with the privilege of leading the Regiment again. The decay and demoralisation upon entry was pretty bad, and numbers are down. So. I have taken a rather different approach to my duties.

Have spent a lot of time in the General's Office, a subforum open basically only to the general. I must say I have got done a lot of work in there. I appointed officers to all the vacant positions in the regiment and set a timetable for setting up the infrastructure (town band forums, usergroups up to date, numbers, names) and a plan of action. People were hanging out for activity.

Putting a lot of time into it in the office, I soon had timetables, newsletters, task lists and piles of correspondence begining to pile up. It took a lot of planning and sweat to get it all happening.

And most of it happened behind closed doors.

Drummore or bust!

In RK I am on a little jaunt with 'my' regiment the Royal Scots of Galloway of the Royal Scottish Army ('RSA'). I had quite a plan worked up, drawing squads from the three main bands together in Wigtown and then marching them over to Drummore. There was force procection scouts planned to be on the nodes before we passed, a 'slack' day in Wiggie to absorb inevitable delays, and a coordinated push through to Drummore, picking up the scouts on that road as we passed.

Things have not gone as planned.

Whithorn put together two squads, which could have been one. They had a scout leave town, but he has kept on marching and arrived in Drummore after three days out on his own. I was intending to lead the second squad to wiggie on the day after the first squad. Turns out the first squad left the day after me. They have only now gotten to Wiggie, the day after we were meant to leave.

My squad has therefore had a day chopping wood. We would have left on the day planned except that the Kirk squad has also arrived a day late. And they didn't scout the road before them.

As for the Wiggie band, the band leader seems to have 'disappeared'. She is still opening her mail so I assume she has read her orders, but I have had no response and it seems that the no one in town is doing what they're meant to. Which means there's no wiggie squad waiting to go out, and there is no one scouting the road to Drummore ahead of us.

The delays to Whit squad 1 and Kirk squad were both caused by waiting for someone to finish some business in town.

Dariangreen is trying to get something happening with the wig band. He used to be their adjutant before he became my military councillor so he has the contacts. Not much operational experience though.

When we get to Drummore I am seriously thinking of rostering the soldiers to mines/sentry duties, while I take the officers on a crash course of small unit tactics (command protocols, scouting techniques) so that they can then start training the soldiers of their bands on the return journey.

An interesting subplot that has worked was organising for the officers and those of my former bodyguard to be issued 'RSA Sporrans'. This entailed getting the town mayor of Whit (in the case of the non commissioned bodyguards) and the County Trade Minister (for the officers) to 'issue a travel grant' to these people. Basically, a grant is an inventory that is independent of your personal inventory that travels around with you. Thus, even if thieves rob your personal inventory, the contents of the grant remain safe. So I rebadged it as a RSA Sporran, had them issued, ordered the officers to keep emergency rations and weapons in them. Seems to be a popular move. Will have them issued to the whole regiment just as soon as we complete Operation Drummore and work out exactly who is in the Regiment these days.