Punic Nightmare: Crimissos River 341 BC

[GJK]

Tsk Tsk...those counters aren't clipped....

[MengJiao]

Tsk Tsk...those counters aren't clipped....

  I know.  And its so sad.  When you rip into some counters from 1995 and the cardboard layers glossy paper are a little iffy...it can be nasty.

  That's why I like to buy used games.  There's always a chance they are all nicely punched and clipped.

   BUT this poor game sat around in some irresponsible person's DAMP Man Cave for ALMOST 20 Years and all they did was sit on the box once.

   I have a Man Loft and such sloppy behavior isn't tolerated.  NO SITTING ON GAME BOXES.

[Martok]

   BUT this poor game sat around in some irresponsible person's DAMP Man Cave for ALMOST 20 Years and all they did was sit on the box once.

   I have a Man Loft and such sloppy behavior isn't tolerated.  NO SITTING ON GAME BOXES.

What kind of barbarian treats his games like that?  Even though I rarely play them, I still make sure my games get safely stored.  Gah! 

[MengJiao]

   BUT this poor game sat around in some irresponsible person's DAMP Man Cave for ALMOST 20 Years and all they did was sit on the box once.

   I have a Man Loft and such sloppy behavior isn't tolerated.  NO SITTING ON GAME BOXES.

What kind of barbarian treats his games like that?  Even though I rarely play them, I still make sure my games get safely stored.  Gah!

  The world was so different 10-20 years ago.  GMT hadn't started making extra-strong game boxes and gravitational tidal forces were fluctuating from 2003 to 2006 and gameboxes were often caused -- through no fault of their concerned owners -- to lurch asymtotically and crumple their corners.  At leas that's the excuse I keep hearing and, you know what?  I say, Gah!

[bayonetbrant]

There's always a chance they are all nicely punched and clipped.

Somewhere there's a nice side business waiting to be founded by a guy with a couple of Asberger's employees who are slightly OCD.  You order your game from a company (GMT, Avalanche, LNL, whoever) and have it shipped to them. They have a couple of guys making $2/countersheet to clip everything and sort it into bags for you, and then they ship it on to you.  All the clipping, none of the headache.
And because it's a bunch of folks with Asberger's, they won't be talking to each other while working, and because they're all OCD, the clipping with be perfect

[MengJiao]

There's always a chance they are all nicely punched and clipped.

Somewhere there's a nice side business waiting to be founded by a guy with a couple of Asberger's employees who are slightly OCD.  You order your game from a company (GMT, Avalanche, LNL, whoever) and have it shipped to them. They have a couple of guys making $2/countersheet to clip everything and sort it into bags for you, and then they ship it on to you.  All the clipping, none of the headache.
And because it's a bunch of folks with Asberger's, they won't be talking to each other while working, and because they're all OCD, the clipping with be perfect

  I like the concept of slightly OCD.  BUT hyper. I think it covers a lot of my more "interesting" enthusiasms.  I'm really too hyperactive to do any counterclipping, but it would be wonderful to have some clipping happen somehow to satisfy the OCD impulses.  Not to Hoplite which somehow seems perfect with sharp corners, but to games like Flying Colors (I've gotten some beautiful used sets of that) or Roads to Leningrad (VERY NICELY CLIPPED by one user at least).
   It's funny how much a used game tells you about its user.  Or not.  Some have all the rules changes and magazine expansions all carefully photocopied and so on: BUT NO COUNTERS PUNCHED.  Evidently the user took great pleasure in some kind of completeness, but none in actually playing the game.  In other cases (my copy of Cataphract), some green subset of barbarians was lovingly encapsuled in many exquiste layers of the finest plastic and everything else was tossed helter-skelter like the entombment of some murdered gang of heretical pharaohs.  Tutt-tutt.  What happened there?  Loss of interest in the middle of playing with the musty old GBOH rules?
   Or a copy of Men of Iron, with only the Magazine game for Agincourt punched and clipped.  I at least ran through Crecy before moving on to a curiously pristine copy of Infidel!  Which I never punched either.

[MengJiao]

Wow!  Good on the Carthaginians then. 

Of course, you did give them a hand in this scenario.  So now the question I have to wonder is, what "extras" could they have done without and still pulled off a victory (were the addition of Etruscans and the removal of the thunderstorm rules necessary to win, etc.)?

  I wasn't very organized in setting up this scenario.  I was using parts and rules from 1995 to 2014 with a scenario from 2003.  I wasn't sure how well they were going to work and I miss-applied at least some of them.  For example, I'm pretty sure the Sacred Band could not have simply formed column and marched away even if it had disengaged and I think I mis-applied some cavalry rules.
  This was probably a scenario with far too many variables for a good quick rebalancing on the fly with rules from three different versions of the game system.
   On the other hand, I'm thinking of playing out a more balanced Cunaxa when I get back from the beach.  There are a few Persians who might have played their cards differently and for better or worse Plutarch apparently wrote a bio of this particular Great King.  So we have Xenophon, Plutarch, a Babylonian Cunieform Archive (mostly on the land holdings of the Great King's rather powerful and devious Babylonian mother) and maybe some fragments from the tales of a Greek physician in Persian service.