Tag: Cyrano

08/29/15

GrogHeads Reviews Colonial Conquest

Colonial Conquest has landed on our shores.  But how all-conquering is it?  Jim O takes a look.

Jim Owczarski, 29 August 2015

I love the moment in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” when Napoleon, having told the protagonists how he will conquer Europe with water slides, is gainsaid by them and proceeds to smack what I’ve always taken to be a “Risk” board with his sword declaring, “triomphe Napoleon!”  It’s not only wonderfully silly, but it reminds me of why “Risk” remains one of the best games ever designed — for all its faults.  It’s simple, it’s nasty, and when you finally do kick your opponent out of Australia (yes, it can be done), it makes you feel like a conqueror.  Lots of games since have tried to capture what it is that makes “Risk” special — there’s enough branded adaptations to fill shelves — and so Argonauts Interactive’s “Colonial Conquest” (hereafter CC) joins a crowded field.  It’s far from a bad game, and it’s nicely priced, but I can’t help but feel it was shipped a bit sooner than it should have been.

Much here will be familiar and I think that works in the game’s favor.  The learning curve is certainly gentle.  CC is played out over a map of the world divided into national areas and sea zones.  The board is more granular than “Risk” (although some familiar friends are present) which tends to lengthen play.  There are some strange geographic decisions relating to which territories are adjacent to which.  If I read the support forums for the game correctly, some of these were unintentional and are being fixed.  Others, like that below, remain and cause no small amount of frustration for reasons I’ll get into shortly.

Seriously?  Those 580 troops can't march into the Ottoman Empire?
Seriously?  Those 580 troops can’t march into the Ottoman Empire?

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08/22/15

A Preview of Fog & Friction

Jim gets his paws on an early copy of Fog & Friction and tells us what we’re in store for when the rest of us finally get our hooks into it.

Jim Owczarski, 22 August 2015

As an historical miniatures gamer down to my genome, I live for the spectacle of the gaming table.  In moments of weakness I have considered those willing to play on tables smaller than those used for ping pong a lesser breed of men and been dismissive of those games and rule sets than enable them.  With age comes wisdom, though, no matter what my wife would tell you, and I’ve grown to see the merits of games that offer a smaller footprint while still trying to offer a bit of what draws each of us to the hobby.  In this light, Pondfoot Games’ “Fog and Friction” (hereafter F&F) is a fine offering — it brings some of the toys, drama, and tension that make gaming the Second World War so appealing and lets you do it all on your kitchen table.

I’ll leave aside the fits and starts that this project has experienced as it’s tried to make its way to market (more here) and say that my remarks will confine themselves to the promo copy of the base set I received from the folks at Pondfoot.  The offering is simple enough:  two 60-card core decks, one each for the Axis and the Allies, and two 30-card expansion decks.  The game is non-collectible (first step towards toleration for me) but the designers hope to offer several expansion sets that will allow players to eventually fight in theaters other than the familiar terrain of Normandy represented in the base set as well as adding in new units and special cards.

Yep, decks of cards.  You were expecting model T-34s?
Yep, decks of cards.  You were expecting model T-34s?

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03/28/15

GrogHeads Reviews: World At War Compendium 2

Is the new Compendium for you? Read on!

Jim Owczarski, 27 March 2015

And now, as a public service, a simple decision matrix to help you determine if you should purchase “World at War: Compendium #2” (hereafter Comp2) from Lock ‘n Load Publishing.

  • Are you a fan of the World at War series’ take on the Cold War gone hot?
  • Are you enough of  fan of this series that you have purchased many — not to say all — but many of the games, modules, and expansions that have come out since the release of Eisenbach Gap?
  • Even if you are a fan of the series, did you neglect to pick up issues 8-14 of Lock ‘n Load’s “Line of Fire” magazine?
  • Are you a fan of the Bauhaus font?

If you answered “yes” to all of the above, there is no reason that I can think of for you not to pick up Comp2.   It’s available for a scant $49.99 from www.lnlpublishing.com  You’ll be glad you did.  Thus endeth the review.

If, on the other hand, you answered “no” to any of the above, read on; matters are a bit more complicated.

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03/19/15

Campaign: Leipzig – The Two-Sided AAR, part 4

19 March 2014

Cyrano and PanzerDE face off in the age of muskets and sabers, and find themselves on opposite sides of an Eastern German battlefield, in the first of a series of AARs that give you both sides of the action.

As a reminder, we are alternating between Jim (in blue) and Doug (in green)

As always, click images to enlarge

 

The tough part about doing an AAR and playing a game like this is that my aging brain forgets what the hell I was trying to accomplish during the long stretches between turns. I believe this to be a deliberate French tactic as Jim is younger than I am and less likely to forget why he walked into a room, for example.

Fortunately I drew a map early on and have previous entries in this AAR to remind me what group of pixel troops was doing what to whom. As a reminder, my strategy: 

Lowenburg_Plan

 

There are any number of reasons that I was never actually given the command of men in the field — not having enlisted surely among them — but I have to think that a profound lack of patience never looks good on an OCS evaluation sheet.

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02/28/15

GrogHeads Reviews Making History: The Great War

Before they made the sequel, there was the original World War.  Muzzy Lane’s take on World War I was recently released after a lengthy beta period, and our review teams gives it a go.

Jim Owczarski, 28 February 2015

Designing global strategy games in a digital environment  requires a commitment to both craft and art.  It requires an acute sense of what information, which details, can safely be kept hidden from the player — unless he really wants to know — and those which, if hidden, will leave players screaming at their monitors because they can’t figure out how to do something they really need to do.  More, it requires a careful understanding of how to communicate events going on in the world around the player in ways that don’t introduce absurd tedium — I’m looking right at you Europa Universalis III — while simultaneously preventing head-slapping aggravation when the player suddenly realizes that the Sudan sued for peace in its war against the Anglo-Egyptian government 12 turns ago and he never noticed it.

My respect for what Muzzy Lane attempts in its “Making History: The Great War”, then, is great.  I only wish I could say they’d done a better job in the event.

The topic isn’t a surprising one given the centennial observations of World War I and a number of other developers have offered their takes.  If nothing else, Muzzy Lane’s is familiar as it uses the Sandstone engine previously seen in “The Calm and the Storm” and “The War of the World”.  Players are the now-commonplace nigh-omniscient rulers of nations charged with the building of infrastructure, armies, technologies, and economies, and then guiding those they lead into the tempest of Europe in the years after 1912.  Units are typically “division” sized (more on that in a bit) and the game. which one should note up front is turn-based, runs in one-week turns.

“The Great War” (hereafter TGW) does not skimp on the choice of nations to control.  Every strategy guide you read for games of this type tells you that it’s a bad idea to try and learn a system from some remote corner of the globe, but I already know a great deal about this history of the British, French, German, American, &c., empires and definitely fancied the notion of playing out the first half of the 20th Century from the Emirate of Jabal Shammar

Caption:  You thought I was kidding?
Caption:  You thought I was kidding?

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