Once more into the Burning Mountains

Last Friday, I decided I would try and play the full 14-turn game of Burning Mountains. As mentioned in an earlier post, this hex-and-counter game covers the 1916 Austrian offensive into Italy, also known as the strafexpedition or sometimes, the Battle of the Asiago. Each counter represents a regiment or a brigade.

Once I finally managed to find where I misplaced the map, I got started - 8:30 PM. This was a good deal later than I had hoped to start but it took me almost two hours of turning my room upside down to find the map. It took less than half an hour to set up the counters in their start positions.

I finished around 3:30 AM and the result was a draw (the results are point based and primarily reflect what the Austrians can capture. Italy's goal is to deny points to the Austrians as much as possible).

I'm not sure how I feel about the draw. On the one hand, historically, each side claimed victory - which sounds kind of like a draw to me. Despite the fact that the Austrians held more of the map than at the start, it felt like I spent 7 hours to end up essentially back where I started. Although, as I think about it, I guess that's a good summation of a lot of the fighting on the Italian Front : a whole bunch of effort, but nothing really changed as a result except a bunch of people died.

Regardless of my feelings on the draw, the overall game did seem "historical" and it felt "right".

The Austrian advance slowed as the campaign wore on (I believe historically the reason was that the supply lines were stretched, but that was not an issue here as they maintained connection to their baseline via roads. Assuming I understood the supply rules. Here the issue was units being needed to hold the towns and geographical features captured.). Meanwhile the Italians lacked the ability to stop the Austrians because they were largely unprepared for the attack (represented by some first turn advantages for the Austrians, and the Austrians going first each turn), lacked sufficient artillery (this was a killer), and forces arrived piecemeal.

As a solo game, it works well enough. At least there is no simultaneous or hidden movement/starting dispositions. However, other than combat there is no randomization, never mind enemy AI. Helpfully, it took me so long to play each turn, I often forgot what counters were in a given stack, making attacks against an enemy stack something of a gamble.

Speaking of stacks, in some cases they toppled over in the most annoying fashion - but I suppose that is to be expected from an eight counter high stack.

I still have some rules questions - but I honestly am not motivated enough to seek out the answers to them yet. Much of my time was spent head down in the rules and not eyes up on the table, so the immersion factor was low. If there was an emergent narrative, I missed it while doing combat calculations. I suspect my general lack of familiarity with hex-and-counter gaming general contributed to this. So, perhaps I should give the game another chance.

If I could find a way to store this game part-way through, so I could return to it over a few nights, I would like to play it again to try a more aggressive Austrian assault and to see if the rules come more easily.

However, barring a way to store the game away from cats (one in particular), it was an interesting and engrossing experience but not one I can repeat any time soon.