RETROSPECTIVE - Command & Colors

Back in 2000 DBA (and its variants) was my gaming passion. At that time, I was a graduate student at Penn State studying the American Civil War. That's when this game was published.

Being a Civil War buff, I quickly picked it up. It immediately displaced DBA as my go-to game.

Battle Cry was the first published game using Richard Borg’s Command & Colors system. This system included several innovative features for a board game, such as:

• Modular terrain – unlike traditional boardgames the terrain was not printed on the board. Instead, the board was a bunch of blank hexes. In addition, there were separate hex-shaped cardboard pieces with hills, woods, etc. printed on them. By placing the terrain pieces on the board, you can create an infinite number of battlefields.
• Command cards – a player cannot move all his units in a turn. Instead, fog of war is created with command cards. Each player has a hand of cards and each turn may play one card, which allows him/her to order a limited number of units.
• Special dice – the dice have icons of the major types of units (for Battle Cry they were infantry, cavalry, and artillery). You hit a target if you roll a die and get the target’s icon. What was different from typical games was that modifiers (such as terrain) did not change what you needed to roll on the die but how many dice you rolled. It allowed for a streamlined combat system.

Richard Borg followed up with Memoir ’44, the World War II version of Command & Colors in 2004.

I reviewed Memoir a couple of years ago with the simple evaluation – “Best. Game. Ever.”

What I like most about the C&C system is that it is unabashedly a game (including plastic miniatures in the first two published versions). It strives for quick, simple, exciting games and it delivers. Nevertheless, it still “feels” right (a lesson I learned from Air War). For example, more than any other game, Memoir ’44 taught me that tanks can be very vulnerable to infantry in good defensive positions (I have lost so much armor by rushing forward against infantry in woods).

Because it offered a great game that feels right,it inspired me (and many others) to adapt the basic principles to other time periods (which Borg eventually did with C&C: Ancients, Battle Lore, and C&C: Napoleonics). Before those games came out (and even before Memoir ’44) I was using pieces of the C&C system for my own rules. I had some issues with the command cards – they don’t really work well for solo gaming and I didn't want to use Civil War themed cards for other periods. I eventually dumped the cards and instead used the DBA pip system for command. I completely adapted the combat rules. My units have the same number of hits and roll the same number of dice when attacking as in C&C. Terrain modifiers are the same as C&C. I even have a gridded battlefield. The end result has been years of enjoyable, quick-playing, yet exciting games. Without a doubt, C&C has overtly and irrevocably influenced my gaming experience.

A Quick Update

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past 2 weeks. Life got very hectic and I have not had time for any wargames or even blog posts. Most of last weekend was spent fixing my Amtgard weapons and I still have some more repairs to do this weekend. I am working on the next Retrospective but I'm not sure it will be done this weekend.

On a positive note, Family Game Nights continue.

Game Night Update

Lately, our game night theme has been

I previously mentioned that my wife gave me a copy of Fortune and Glory for my birthday. It has become our favorite game and we have played it every Saturday since then. It's essentially a dice-rolling game with a little bit of strategy (e.g. do I camp out and heal or press on into danger?). What really makes the game is the story (like I talked about earlier). The heroes have to battle Nazis, evade mobsters, face uncounted perils, and race back home to claim their fortunes. We've been having great fun with the stories the game generates.

Furthermore, the games have been tense! Last night, my wife had built up a sizable lead if fortune and was close to winning the game. However, she was blocked by Nazis in England and had to battle her way through to deliver a secret package. Meanwhile, I sneaked aboard a zeppelin and stole the Nazis gold. Before I could make it back home with my prize, Elizabeth arrived in New York with enough fortune to claim the victory.

Elizabeth won last week as well. At one point with me in the lead, she was ready to concede victory, but I encouraged her to keep playing (bad mistake). I got stuck on an adventure while she completed one and then was able to deliver a secret package for the win!

Elizabeth has been having so much fun, I'm wondering if she would enjoy a pulp RPG. Plots are forming in my head. We shall see.

RETROSPECTIVE - Diplomacy

In the mid-1990s, the Avalon Hill classic Diplomacy became a staple of my gaming life.

The game features a map of Europe in 1914. Each player is a leader of one of the main powers, intent on expanding his empire and dominating Europe. 

Every turn, the would-be conquerors give orders to their armies to hold their ground, move into another province, or support an advance. Combat is deterministic: the side with the most armies contesting a province wins. The interesting part of the game is that no player is strong enough to win on his own. He needs allies to support his advance, thus the need for diplomacy. But can your trust your erstwhile ally or is he lulling you into a position where he can backstab you? Of course, you may be plotting the same against him. Betrayal is a regular part of the game.

I had first been exposed to the Diplomacy during high school in the early 80s. A friend had it and organized a session. We played face-to-face at his house. The players would sneak off to isolated parts of the house to make their clandestine plots. I was Turkey and was betrayed by Russia on turn 1 (the Black Sea was supposed to be neutral!). I never recovered from that debacle. Anyway, I was impressed by the simple rules but finding seven people to play seemed a daunting task.

I picked it in the 1990s and organized a play-by-phone/mail campaign with a bunch of friends. We played weekly turns. Orders were due on Friday and could be phoned in. I processed the results and sent out an updated map via mail. It was a big hit and we would play several more campaigns, some using variant maps. I converted the later campaigns to play-by-e-mail but we continued with weekly turns.

There were a few memorable aspects of the game. In face-to-face games, you could see who was in a corner with whom, which tipped you off on what alliances were developing. In a play-by-mail campaign, your intel was limited. You had to gather and weigh various rumors (for example, in one game, a tip from a third-party alerted me to an attempted backstab). E-mail got even trickier. You could take an innocuous e-mail from one player, edit it into something more devious, and forward it to another player. (e.g. Germany has sent His Majesty a copy of a letter from France proposing an attack on Britain. Is it real or did Germany forge it?)

I thoroughly enjoyed umpiring the game. I traced the map onto a large sheet of paper and hung it to the wall of the den (which I promptly dubbed the "war room." Naturally, the map became known as the "big board.") I also included a little newsletter with each update. I titled it the "Times of Europe" and wrote it like a newspaper covering the dramatic events occurring in Europe. I had fun creating stories around the moves. For example, when Russia missed the deadline for reporting his move, the "Times of Europe" explained it as civil unrest in Moscow, which disrupted telegraph lines. It was an amusing entry when the Turks ordered their fleet into land-locked Serbia!

Eventually, the campaigns petered out. Because betrayal is a frequent aspect of the game, this can happen:

From http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic536690.jpg

Unfortunately, the game caused some bickering among my friends. I don't know if it destroyed any friendships but it strained some. I tired of the drama (plus my friend Jeff kept his minions in line and thus kept winning ;) ). At one point, I decided to stop the campaigns. I really have no interest in starting them again.

However, Diplomacy has had a lasting impact. I have used the basic mechanics for my Francesia campaign. Furthermore, it really highlighted the joy of creating a story. My favorite part of all those campaigns was the newsletter that I wrote to describe the events. As a result, Diplomacy transcended from a mere game to an epic story with heroes and villains, triumphs and tragedies, and finally, in the words of the Wide World of Sports, "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." This blog is a direct ancestor of those Diplomacy newsletters - I enjoy recording the results of games as much as playing them!

RETROSPECTIVE - Space: 1889

While I was flirting with GURPS in the late 80s, I developed a crush for another new RPG of the day - Space: 1889.

I was perusing the shelves of the local game shop when this cover caught my eye.

The text on the back cover was equally evocative:

Role-Playing In A More Civilized Time. Everything Jules Verne should have written. Everything H. G. Wells could have written. Everything A. Conan Doyle thought of, but never published because it was too fantastic. Everything you need for adventures of the century!

 At that time, most RPGs were the generic, medieval fantasy or less frequently futuristic sci-fi. There were some historical RPGs (Gangbusters and Boot Hill come to mind) but they were a fringe of the market. What Space: 1889 did was to take a historical setting and turn it into a science fiction (some may say a science fantasy) game. This was very different than anything else. I was not particularly familiar with the Victorian Era but I was a history buff (I was more interested in the 17th and 18 centuries as evidenced by my fondness for Rafael Sabatini's novels). However, I had read Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and knew about his other works that postulated trips to the moon. I picked it up and just fell in love with the setting. Frank Chadwick and the guys at GDW did a wonderful job of evoking the Victorian setting and ethos. I remember Carl Sagan talking about how Percival Lowell believed there were canals on Mars - which he took to be evidence of life. Well, according to Space: 1889, there were canals on Mars, and we could explore them! The game was like being transported back to the science fiction and scientific beliefs of the day.

The book itself was packed full of detail. From descriptions of Mars (a desert world) and Venus (a swampy world with dinosaurs) to lists of late 19th century equipment, Space: 1889 gave you plenty of material to work with. I spent hours just reading (and re-reading) the material and background information.

At first, I even loved the system. Character creation was skill-based, but it was not so complicated as GURPS. The basic system for determining attributes was very clever. There are 6 attributes; players assign each a value from 1 to 6. However, you could not use the same number twice. Therefore, one attribute will be very weak (a 1), another a bit stronger (a 2), all the way to 6. Thus, a character has a broad spectrum from weak to strong. Then players choose a career (or perhaps 2) for their character - this determines their skills. There are some options for free choice of skills, too. Creating a character is a breeze. The combat system seemed clever, as well. It simply used D6s (no "groping for dice"). To take an action, one rolled a number of D6s equal to their applicable skill level. Quick and simple.

Unfortunately, the system did not really hold up to use. I decided to run an experiment using an example given in the book. The hero, armed with a revolver, stumbled upon 3 Venusian grave robbers with daggers. In the book, the hero dispatched the enemy with ease and I expected the same. After all, the bad guys were bringing knives to a gun fight! I ran through it and the hero lost, badly. I tried again and got the same result. A couple more tries led to the same result. What was going on? Well, the combat system was a little different than the skill system - as I recall the number of dice was determined by the weapon not the skill level. Thus, what you were armed with was more important than how good your were. In our hero's case, the Venusian's daggers gave them lots of dice (especially because there were 3 of them). And once hit, a character needed to spend actions recovering. Basically, once the hero took a hit, the other enemies swarmed over him and skewered him. I was very disappointed (in hindsight, I think I was expecting something with a bit more pulpy feel to it, with the hero able to fight off hordes of minions). Anyway, I soured on the system and the game ended up collecting dust on the shelf.

I actually never playedit but I still love the setting. It is telling that when I got rid of all my RPG stuff in the 90s, I held onto Space: 1889. Over 25 years later, I still have that original book and I will never get rid of it. So how did it influence my gaming? I can't really say if it did directly, but it did spur an interest in Victorian history and science fiction. As a result, I re-read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and read A. Conan Doyle's Lost World. I would discover the Flashman series (historical novels set in the Victorian Era) and Byron Farwell. I still occasionally pull it out and ponder running a campaign using my Kevin's Krawl rules modded for the period. In fact, I'm going to close out this post and get out my old copy of the rules.

Star League Season 4

I have begun yet another season of Star League. This time, I am using my streamlined rules, which I automated in Excel so that I can play a game with the push of a key. To make the season more interesting, I chose a team and am playing its games manually. I mentioned adding some other features, like Star Power to add some decision points to the games I play manually.

I am currently halfway through the season. The current standings look like this:

Galactic Division
Blitz                        4-1
Knights                   4-1
Dynamos                3-2
Avengers                0-5

Stellar Division
Fury                        3-2
Helix                      3-2
Electrons                2-3
Gravitons               1-4

Note that I renamed the teams, although (aside from the Knights) the new name starts with the same letter as the old.

My team (the Knights, formerly the Canopans) is tied for 1st with the surprising Blitz (former Betelguesans). The Blitz already have more wins than they ever had in any season! It is interesting that last season's champs, the Avengers (former Antarens) have utterly collapsed. I didn't even make any changes to their roster and yet they are struggling. Part of their problem is their utterly anemic offense, which has scored only 3 goals to date.

Speaking of offense, the new rules have greatly curtailed scoring, which has dipped from 2.5 goals per game last season to 1.6. In 9 of 20 games, one team has scored no goals. I think part of the reason is that if a team missed a shot in the old rules it could (depending on the dice rolls) get the ball back and take another shot. The new rules don't have a provision for rebounds, lessening the number of shots, and therefore goals. I'll have to review the stats to see if my theory is correct. I'd like to increase scoring but I don't want to mess with the simplicity of the rules. One simple solution is to increase the offense ratings, but I may wait until next season to do it.

Anyway, allow me to leave you with a game report:

Knights vs. Gravitons
For game 4, the undefeated Knights visited the 1-2 Gravitons. It should have been an easy victory for the Knights. Should have been.

Early on, the Gravitons stunned the Knights when they managed to slip by the defense and smashed a difficult shot toward the goal. The goalie managed to get a hand on it and deflected it away. The Gravitons gathered the rebound and shot it past the sprawled out goalie. 1-0 Gravitons.

[Game note - I am using Star Power for both sides in my manual games, giving each side 1 per half. On this play, I used Star Power to re-roll the goal. It came up a no-goal, hence a save. But then the Gravitons countered with their own Star Power, which came up goal. I declared that they scored on a rebound!]

The angered Knights retaliated by powering their way to 2 goals. Then they grew lax and the Gravitons slipped a shot in to equalize the game at 2 goals each. The Knights had an opportunity right before the half, but the Graviton goalie made a tremendous save.

Early in the 2nd half, the Gravitons stunned the Knights with another rebound goal.

[Again, back-to-back Star Powers saw a goal denied followed by a goal scored]

The Knights coach ordered his players to push forward. For the rest of the half, the Knights controlled the ball and rained shots upon the Gravitons' goal.

[I choose a strategy of Aggressive Offense in an attempt to equalize the game. This put the Knights at risk defensively, but fortunately they managed to control the ball and remain on offense\

The Knights managed to put one shot into the goal to tie the game. Then, as time was winding down, they managed a break-away. The shot flew from the forward's hands. It curved past the goalie into the nets. Goal! With a last second shot, the Knights managed a thrilling 4-3 victory.

RETROSPECTIVE - GURPS

After making a foray into my 90s gaming experiences, I want to backtrack a little bit to the 80s and discuss a role-playing game.

In the early part of that decade, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. That’s not to say that I thought D&D was a perfect system. It wasn't (and still isn't) and some of its issues began to grate upon me. In the mid-80s, Steve Jackson Games came out with a new system, GURPS (the Generic Universal Role Playing System) that intrigued me greatly.

One of my beefs with D&D was its hit point system. As characters increased in levels, they could take more wounds before dying. This struck me as unrealistic (as Grognardia frequently noted, gamers became increasingly concerned about realism in the 80s and I was no exception). Any human (even a powerful hero) can be felled by a single sword blow or arrow, if it hit. Instead, gaining experience should lessen the chance of getting hit in the first place. I knew that the hit point system was an abstract way of denoting all this, but it bothered me. I thought that a better way would be to allow the character a roll to parry, block, or dodge an attack instead of abstract hit points. I decided to write up my own RPG and began jotting down ideas. That’s when I discovered GURPS and realized that it featured many of the rules concepts with which I had been tinkering, such as an active defense roll!

GURPS included a number of rules that I considered an improvement over D&D. At the time, I preferred its skill system, which allowed players to tweak their characters and make them unique. I liked that it used a single type of dice (I hate using multiple types of dice – i.e. “groping for dice” systems). I liked that it was universal so it could be used for multiple genres (I think that a D&D hit point system doesn't work as well for games with firearms. You can’t have a stereotypical western-style gunfight if the opponents have enough hit points to survive several bullet wounds). I thought the advantages system was very clever. In all, it seemed to hit on all the ideas for a new game that were floating around in my brain.

Alas, my love for GURPS turned out to be a brief flirtation. While I purchased the core system and many of the sourcebooks, I never actually played a game. This was a time when I did not have any regular RPG partners to experiment with the game. I tried to create some adventures but the character creation system, which appealed to me as a player, deterred me as an adventure designer. I erroneously thought that I would have to go through character creation for each NPC in order to ensure proper balance. It also struck me that the referee would need to do a lot of rolling (parry rolls for every NPC – ugh). While I admired much of the game system, it just never became a game I played.

Today, I am much less concerned with “realism” and thus have returned to many of the D&D concepts. In particular, I like class systems with broad archetypes. It just makes character creation a snap. I also use hit points; these days I’m OK with the abstraction. Yet some of GURPS’s ideas have filtered into my solo RPG system. I only use a single type of dice (D6) and, like GURPS, each roll uses multiple dice (although I use 2D6 instead of 3D6). My rules are essentially generic and universal rather than being tied to a specific genre or world (although each genre has its own tweaks to the rules, such as specific classes). Furthermore, I never gave up on the defense roll idea. I did make some changes, though. To ease the work on the referee, only player characters make defense rolls. In fact, I streamlined combat for the referee; the NPCs don’t even make attack rolls. Instead, I assume that the NPC will hit unless the PC can make a successful defense (which becomes easier to do as the PC gains levels). Conversely, I have PCs make hit rolls; if they succeed then the NPC is automatically wounded. For me, It’s quick, simple, and effective. Furthermore, it is a result of years of pondering the benefits and drawbacks of the GURPS active defense roll.