Return from Crisis I

Yesterday visited the Crisis wargames show in Antwerp. Others have made more extensive reports on the show, so I'll not try to compete. But for me mostly it was a pleasure talking to so many people about their day and future plans.

I had planned to buy the latest edition of the Volley & Bayonet rules set to go with my Napoleonic French and Austrians for the 1809 campaign. Picked up the Marechal d' Empire /General de Division rules from Baccus as well. Now have to decide quickly which one I want to use for a participation game at PolderCon.

The books I bought just show that I can't be trusted to stick to one period. The book on the Iberian theatre of the War of Spanish Succession I bought because I met Nick Dorrell a decade ago in Eastern Europe. We then discussed the WSS (which I have this fascination for) and I sent him some stuff from Dutch sources.

The other WSS book I bought because I'm a sucker for logistics and systems of command and control. And I was intreagued to find that this author had at least read a few Dutch sources. I believe this was the first time Helion & Company visited Crisis. I was glad to shake the hand of Andrew Bamford, whose A Bold and Ambitious Enterprise (and follow up sourcebook) on the British campaign in the Low Countries in 1814 I used when writing on Waterloo. Consider that a recommendation.

And 10th century warfare in Germany just taps into my new found interest in that period. I hope to blog about how that came about. 


Note: Yup, it's been too quiet up here. And I stand reprimanded for that. As last year, I will try to do better. However, I haven't figured out how to do that, yet, without spending a lot of time. Which has been the reason why I dropped out before. It's okay to spend half an hour once every few days, but I have found that blogging takes more time if you want to do it well. But let's give it a shot.

First Impressions and Final Thoughts on Spiel 2014

There was some stuff that I hardly saw but quickly formed an opinion about:

Good impression: Historia was very much enjoyed by my friends. It offers a two-axis take on civilization with room for conflict.

Undecided:

Battle of the Five Armies: looks great as ever (but many of the miniatures are the same), and similar to Battles of Middle Earth. But maybe we should play those more before buying this one.

Greenland: the premise is great, but it’s three players.

Quartermaster General: this could still be Axis&Allies with less combat

Raid & Trade: didn’t see it played or explained but looked as if it had a lot of numbers on counters and the board. Excellent minis and artwork though.

Lord of the Ice Garden looked great, but the unpainted miniatures expansion adds €40 to €55 for the basic game.

Bad impression: Athlas, Empire Engine (cube producing micro game), Swedish Parliament (although the policy axes were nice), The Walled City (looked like Carcassonne the City and ignored the contentious history of Londonderry), 8 Minute Empire expansion (there is something contradictory to a micro game expansion)

Missed: Night of the Grand Octopus (but it will be in stores at some point), €uro Crisis, Airborne Commander, Fantastiqa, Fief: France 1429, Luchador, Nothing Personal, Pamietne Historie, Patchistory, Pocket Imperium, Samuari Spirit, Shinobi Clans, Stimmvieh, Tiny Epic Kingdoms, Wir Sind Das Volk, Battle at Kemble’s Cascade

It seems like I’ll need to play less to see more. I did that the last few years but I think I prefer playing to running around.

So how did I feel about this Spiel?

Even though I’m no longer excited by this year’s euro offering (Arler Erde looks too much like Agricola and Panamax might be another multiplayer solo hit) and Sci Fi and Fantasy have become mainstream (almost everybody has by now jumped on the zombie bandwagon) there is still room for excitement and surprise.

The Polish publishers have blossomed by adopting euro mechanisms but they keep applying them to historical theme. Now Greek, Romanian, Spanish and even Indonesian publishers are following in their wake. There is still so much unused and unique theme around one might despair of the next generic fantasy game. Wallace still produces interesting games, even if they are occasionally flawed. And there are still publishers wanting to take risks.

It’s been a good year.

Mythotopia and Spiel 2014 shopping

Saturday's 'one more for the road' game was Mythotopia, Martin Wallace's new offering. It's a bit of a cop out, really, to apply a mechanism to a fantasy (or sci fi) theme, but it works out well enough. As in A Few Acres of Snow the deck building mechanism is subordinated to the map manouever. You build the deck from 4 basic cards and 6 area cards, which gives every player a unique set of resources (grain, gold, bricks and military goods). You can add to your hand by conquering new areas and buying cards from the market for gold. What cards are for sales changes from game to game.

Another familiar feature of Wallace games is that you can take two actions, chosen from a wide variety of options. Some of the cards in your hand provide extra options (instead of playing them for resources). Most actions require playing resource cards from your hand. When you invade an area, the war is only resolved by a player ending it as the first action of her turn. This can protract wars as players keep adding resources to an area and tipping the balance.

There are challenges to your hand management once your deck grows, but the game offers the opportunity to place cards in a 'reserve' so you can use them for permanent effects or to save them for a better opportunity. But placing cards into the reserve counts as an action. There are also a few cards that help you draw extra cards or search your discard pile. Let's see about killer combo's...

You score victory points for the number of areas you hold and a range of achievements, the standard three being castles, cities and roads, and possible other special conditions: areas conquered, successful defense or dragons killed. However, for every type of achievement, there is a limited amount of times they can be claimed.

Victory is determined by a player claiming victory as the first action of his turn. Any running wars are resolved then, but you can only claim victory if you end up with the most points after resolution. We ended up very close to each other which made it impossible to clinch victory in the end. So we decided on a four way tie. I hope this is a one off bug, and not a feature. Despite the ending a good finish to the gaming side of the weekend! With the varying selection of cards available on the market and the changing set of victory conditions ensures a fair amount of replayability.

So what did I buy?

My buying strategy this year was focused on games I was pretty sure would make it to the table. I think I’ve managed that well. I’ve shied away from the overly complicated, and 2 and 3 player games, leaving micro games and multiplayer. Lost Legacy: Starship, Unicum, Auge um Auge, Mat Goceng and Verone have all been dealt with in the previous posts.

 Lost Legacy: Flying Garden looks very much like the Starship game, but with another ending. The cards of Flying Garden and Starship can be mixed for variation.

I was torn between First to Fight and Race to the Rhine. The latter is a game that is very close in design to what I had in mind myself about the breakout from Normandy to the Rhine in autumn 1944, as a logistic struggle between three allied players, rather than two player campaign. It also looks good, but I didn’t take time to see how it plays because there were always people playing the demo.

First to Fight has all the players controlling Polish forces over the course of WWII. Because the Polish forces were few and widely scattered, I felt it is a great challenge to get all that into one game in a coherent way. In the end the decision was based on Race to the Rhine being three players which made it unlikely to hit the table regularly.

Marchia Orientalis and 15 Dias are both games with a strong historical theme, which I like. Maybe they end up being forgettable additions to the genre of tile laying respectively influence building games, but I’m eager to find out. 

Just another day at Spiel 2014

After our pretty successful first day in Essen, we returned still burning with curiosity and enthusiasm.

Our first stroke on Friday was to try out Fire in the Lake at the UGG stand. We were quickly into the game as we’ve already played Cuba Libre. But while the mechanics are familiar, FitL is much more complex. There’s more units, more areas and possibly longer scenario’s. So we did a couple of enjoyable rounds, but not really knowing what would be a good strategy for each faction.

We then split up as two of us had arranged to play a prototype of Mahardika. This game about the Indonesian independence struggle has the feel of Pandemic, with a similar engine running ‘the Enemy’ (ie the Dutch colonial state and its allies) as the outbreaks. The main interest is how it ties in the history into the objective cards. You either solve two series of objectives, or you get defeated by the Enemy. It is hopeful to see this game coming from Indonesia.

Mahardika will not be published until later this year, but the publisher had Mat Goceng available, a simple card game where you duel your opponents with hidden identity and hidden objectives as the catch. I hope to play it soon.

We then reconvened to play Euphoria, a worker placement game that owes most of its appeal to the brilliant application of the theme to the board and game pieces. Brilliant green and orange, suitably dystopic locations such as the Incinerator of Historical Accuracy (it sounds even better in German).. It is also neat that the workers are dice and you roll for their value every time they are taken off the board. Some of mechanisms neatly tied into the theme such as the risk of too much knowledge leading to workers escaping, but the layer of theme remains thin overall. So if you like worker placement games, this might actually be one of the more fun to have around.

Then Tragedy Looper. One that has good reviews from folks at Fortress Ameritrash so I wanted to try it out. I was cast as the MasterMind, ie the bad guy/gm. I think it is a wise move that Z-Man have included a introductory guide for the Mastermind in the first game because it really is tough to play it straight off the bat. I still made a clumsy mistake on the second day of the second loop which cost me the game. The players did well in deducting several of the character roles but not all.

As a treat we got to play the prototype of Conan Hyborian Quests, which will Kickstarter in January. The mechanism seem fine for a skirmish game, with the players spending energy and deciding whether they recover fast or slow. As all the scenarios have a time limit these are important decisions. The Bad Guy/Mastermind has a similar mechanic, and he uses energy to activate units or to roll emergency defense.

The evening was started with a quick game of Lost Legacy: Starship. It is strongly modeled on Love Letters with a slightly different ending (players having the opportunity to guess who has the ‘starship’). Nice, but I’m not sure that it will be worth it having several of these.

The main feature was Onward to Venus, a solid Martin Wallace steam punk fiction design. Ranging between Venus and the Kuiper Belt, the great European nations of the early 20^th century take to the exploitation of these planets’ mineral resources, and some occasional big game hunting. The joy is in the possible crises on the planets (eg Martian attacks) and the bonus cards. After a tight finale we retired to bed well satisfied with another long and hard day’s work.

Spiel 2014 day one

I went to Essen with a rather long list of games I looked out for but it always proves hard to check everything you want and luckily you also run into happy accidents

Hyperborea was a great start to the show. It allows for different strategies, offers some interesting events and sets up for conflict. It’s rightly been likened to Eclipse. We went through a few rounds and then decided it was a winner.

Run, Fight or Die is the umptiest zombie game and I realized I was suffering from zombie fatigue after a decade of exposure. And although there is some kind of a challenge in there, it is mostly multiplayer solo.

Spartacus is one of the first games by Gale Force Nine and although it probably isn’t the edgiest design, the intrigue is fun. Trash talk flows naturally and you find yourself booing gladiators that don’t try hard enough.

Theme and the fact that it is published by a Greek company drew me to Gothic Invasion. How can you not get excited for the war that inflicted one of the heaviest defeats on the Roman Empire and saw the death of an Emperor? The designer gave us an overview. Play is card driven with 2 or 3 options per card. Forces and objectives are asymmetric, so there is a lot of maneuver on the map. You can see there is a lot of promise in there. Although it can be played with more than two, there is no rivalry or separate objective. It just didn’t do it for my friends so I was faced with buying a game that wouldn’t get played.

Time Masters tries a new approach to deck building by making time the key unit. It works, because the game speeds up and slows down. But I didn’t feel like I was achieving anything worthwhile by building the deck. Somehow I couldn't find a way to hold the cards due to the horizontal design. And who asks €35 for a card game these days? [edit: apparently I was misinformed at the booth or I misunderstood the price: the publisher has informed me the price in stores should be €30 and would have been €25 in Essen] 

The evening in the bar and restaurant was spent with Unicum, Verone/Council of Verona and Auge um Auge. All three are excellent for beer and pretzels. Unicum offers a small box for a short game with a neat betting war hidden in it. This is fun, but I just wish the ‘uniqueness’ argument mattered a bit more. If you can get into the spirit of bogus arguments that helps.

I think that Verone is a truly great microgame, with all trying to influence the outcome of the feud between the Montagues and Capulets. It is worthwhile getting the French edition because I like the art better (and it automatically includes the Poison expansion, which is a neat addition). Pic above is the English version.

I’m not sure about Auge um Auge though. It is mostly a dice rolling fest with an alliance system. There are some abilities that help you create series, which you need to inflict black eyes on your opponents. But the alliance system is what makes the game interesting, because ganging up and keeping the front runner out of fist fights is the key. It may be a bit long for the amount of fun it holds. Art work nice, as always with Sphinx games.

Crisis Loot

Okay, so I brought some stuff back with me, despite all the talking.

Some books for my Waterloo project. Although I have more than enough books on the Brits already. But on the Fields of Glory offers a battlefield guide and A Commanding Presence focusses on logistics. I'm a sucker for logistics.

Bought at very reasonable prices at David Lanchester

Three Ospreys about the 100 Years War. A project for 2027... or 2028. Teenage dreams since reading the Thea Beckman Geef Me De Ruimte trilogy.

Gained at the bring & buy

You must be worrying whether I bought anything wargames related at all and I can set your mind at ease here. I bought the hard copy of Chain of Command plus some dice, counters and the jump off points. Yes, I have the pdf version, but I like giving these guys money. They won best participation game award at the show and well deserved for the Hardest Working Men In Showbiz.

To the right is the Crisis complimentary miniature in the package (will fit in somewhere in my slavery & maroons project) and a bunch of Japanese 16th century civilians. They will fit well with any stuff I might ever do on samurai.

Purchases from Too Fat Lardies and Dave Thomas

I also added some 1/72 Stuarts, M3 halftracks and a Jeep to my American WWII forces. Too bad that I didn't like the SHQ 20mm Americans and almost nobody else makes them. Given the flood of Germans, Soviets and British I find this lack of love for the Americans in 20mm and 28mm (excepting the US paras of course) surprising.

Very spirited discussion around amateurism and professionalism in the wargaming hobby on the Dutch Miniature Wargaming facebook page (not just due to my post here). My mind is brewing with ideas. Damn! I have no time for that!


ps more beautiful pictures of Crisis at Little Lions and Modus Reg Magni Momenti

A Wasted Crisis?

So yesterday I had a wasted Crisis, but in the positive sense of the word: three Leffe Blond got me quite happy in the late afternoon. But it was mostly talking to some people I had been looking forward to meet.

Leo explaining the Samurai game to Bert and Jan-Willem

First of all, I had great time in the car with Dick, Michel and Hans, discussing games and possible purchases. Dick, thanks for the lift! At the TFL stand I finally met Sidney Roundwood, who was very generous in more than one way. Can´t wait to get to the UK once more. There's a not so flattering pic of us on the Pijlie's blog. That post is a nice reflection on Crisis as well.

At the well attended meeting with members of the Dutch Miniature Wargames facebook group, I spoke to Julius, who will be off to Turkey for four years. And Fred, who's just moved to Amersfoort. I finally  handed René the copy of Okko I promised him a year ago. It was good to see Leo, Arvid, Jan-Willem, Bert and Joop having so much fun at the Samurai participation game at the Karawansaray stand.

Arvid on the right, also in explanatory mode.
Joop on the left composing a Haiku

Gerrit told me about the differences between paper, wood and resin buildings. Duncan had noticed my purchase of Haïtian revolutionaries and maroons and was demanding a follow up article. Jasper divulged that the book on the Duke of Alva that I'm looking forward will be presented in Madrid in three weeks to to one of his offspring. The most awesome news I got was that Neil had taken two young kids into his care. A very brave and very admirable thing to do!

I spent much of the afternoon getting to know Mats and Jos in the bar. Discussion ranged from maroons to 17th century flags to the Hoeken & Kabeljauwen to public relations and the raising of somebody else's kids. We seemed to agree on the 'state of the hobby' which is characterised by many willing to create valuable things for nothing and many willing to pay too much for very little. Think of the brilliant stuff put online for (almost) free and the prices people are willing to pay for GW stuff.

That is not a market in which many people can make a living. For most of the miniature manufacturers, rules designers and small publishers it is more a work of love in their spare time rather than a good living. The hourly 'wages' are only acceptable because it is something they love doing and the recognition they get from buyers and players. That also means that their web shops are occasionally badly done, that they have no presence on social media, that you can only pay cash at their stands. All of that costs them customers.

Some small shops will keep coming and going. Occasionally one will rise above the amateurism and take a significant slice of the pie, like Fantasy Flight and Z-Man in boardgames or Battlefront in miniatures. But Mats was right when he raised questions on the long term future of wargaming if miniature manufacturers, writers and publishers fail to link up to the experiences of new generations of gamers.  It's not lethal to the hobby I guess, but the Golden Age we seem to experience right now, might be one that doesn't last forever.

A better look at the beautiful table

This blog is characteristically short of images. I just didn't take many as I spent more time talking that walking aroudn. You can see all the pretty stuff at the blogs of Little Lions and Paint In.

Never Waste A Good Crisis!

It's been a few years since I've been to Crisis in Antwerp, or any wargames convention, but I am looking forward to this one.

I look forward to meeting people. I don't see my club members in Delft too often lately, so I need to catch up. I will also look forward to play in Peter & Petra's new demo game, or at least have a look.

But Sidney Roundwood will be there, and I look forward to meeting him in person, as well as Stefan of Monty's Caravan.

There will also be a meetup of the Dutch Miniature Wargaming facebook page, so in case you hadn't heared about it, come and have a chat at 13.30 hours at the Karawansary booth.

Anyone not listed above who follows this blog or wants to shake hands for the heck of it, gimme a shout in the comments.

Puppet Wars minis painted and demoed by the guys
next to the Wyrd Miniatures booth at Spiel

Oh yes... games...

I was hoping to score some 20mm US WWII minis, but that seems not so much of an option. I also hope to pick up some Darkest Africa stuff from Foundry for my maroon project. Maybe some books on the Napoleonic wars, eg Stephen Summerfield's books on the Prussians.What about some steam punk minis? Or a reasonably priced copy of Puppet Wars?

Of course I could let myself be persuaded into joining whatever new project boils up among my fellow Murphy's Heroes.  You can see where this is going...