They Shall Not Grow Old

If this is something that interests you, then you probably already saw it when it was in theaters - unfortunately, it wasn't playing at any convenient  date/time for me when it ran locally, but it's currently playing on HBO. I had a chance to watch it last night.

Even if you didn't see it, you probably know something about it.

If you're on the fence or missed it in the theaters, I highly suggest watching it.

You probably won't learn anything new in the larger sense, but this is not a documentary about the war as a whole or any particular battle. It's simply about the life of the British soldier on the front line. Consequently, what you learn are facts about how they lived (and what the British will do in order to make tea! And how many underage soldiers there may have been) and what they felt (or their recollections of such - the audio is mostly from BBC recordings and Imperial War Museum interviews, but i don't know how far after the fact they were conducted) and how they felt about it after. Individual names, dates and place names were purposely left out of the film to convey the "every-soldiers' experience".

There are some absolutely breathtaking sequences - not in the, "What a lovely sun rise over the mountains." manner of breathtaking, but of the "HOLY S***!" kind of way - like men and horses coming under artillery fire or the heaving of the earth skyward as explosives are let lose underground (around 1:42 in the trailer for example).

Technically, the film is a marvel - the colors are vivid and natural looking and images are mostly quite clear, something that could not be said of much of the footage prior to restoration by Peter Jackson's team. There were some weird things, where the people in the background were moving but the foreground seemed static - I'm not sure if that was an artifact of the digital restoration, the change in film speed, or a production trick done for emphasis (the background motion in these cases often wasn't of any particular interest, the camera was emphasizing the faces of the men).

Honestly, I think my only criticism was that it wasn't longer - while it didn't feel rushed, they had over 100 hours of footage, and the film run time is less than two hours.

Wikipedia link

Pueblo, Co

I spent most of last week traveling to and attending a work-related conference in Pueblo, Colorado. Pueblo is pretty small and a little rough around the edges, but I found it charming - the architecture has what I consider a southwest feel and I enjoyed the change of scenery.

There is almost nothing at all war gaming related to report. However, I stumbled on some tangentially related artifacts.

On the flight in, we flew over a vast collection of what appear to be Quonset huts set into dirt. My Uber driver told me they are WWII-era ammunition storage bunkers. Who am I to doubt him?

There was this Flying Tigers plaque at the "airport" (it has just one gate and two United Express flights between Pueblo and Denver daily):

 
And in downtown I walked by the Medal of Honor memorial everyday on my way to the conference and back to the hotel:
 

I did watch the Russian mini-series, Enemy Lines, in my hotel room each night via Amazon Prime. It's another commando-raid based series, with the usual gaming inspiration and romantic subplots.

Also, during the conference, in the margins of my notebook, I scribbled some ideas for a minimalist 2d6 RPG for cosmic horror / Call of Cthulhu type adventures (I read Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow while I was there). With 5 hours to spare at the Denver airport on Friday awaiting my flight home, I purchased and read Ursula Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, which is the 2nd Earthsea novel (highly recommend for inspiration for fantasy gaming of the not-swords-but-plenty-of-sorcery type).

The latter has me itching to get back to The Library Book "campaign" sooner rather than later - I really wanted to paint up some suitable miniatures to add some variety to the enemy forces, but I may just go with what I have and not worry about it.

Since I've been home, I've turned my attention to edits for G Company and evaluating my miniatures collection with an eye towards deciding if it might be better to part with some of the projects that haven't had any activity in 5 or more years. This has been inspired in part by George Arnold's article in the latest issue of Lone Warrior (#208).

Any even briefer update on G Company

Apparently, I'm taking a ready, fire, aim approach here.

In any case, the close combat rules were not nearly decisive enough for my tastes - and while you ware welcome to use the standard Unit Status Table results as originally written, I have added that any result less than 5 renders the unit combat ineffective/removal, with good order units still having the option to fall back to turn that to a disorder.

Hopefully this gives a good reason to engage close - a chance for a decisive victory - with the added risk that you could lose your units in the process.

I also fixed an error in wording in point 5 of the turn sequence.

As always,the link is in the sidebar.

OK, I swear I won't change anything for at least 24 hours now!

G Company Updated (Yes, already)

A very brief post to say that I played about 30 test games tonight (OK that's an exaggeration but it was a lot) and the rules have been updated.

Thanks to Peter Schweighofer and our brief conversation in the comments on my previous post, I changed how the status check works at the start of the turn, and also added an option to fall back rather than eliminate a good order unit.

I also added an option for the side that loses the card draw to move units at the end of the turn provided they haven't fired.and are in good order. This is to keep things moving (no pun intended) in case of long runs of cards which happened to me far too often in testing tonight.

Finally, I changed the artillery arrival chances so that it arrives 50% of the time on the side's next won card draw.

And because people like pictures with their words - here are some Germans awaiting priming. I finished scraping off mold-lines tonight and only stabbed myself once (in my stomach which was a new one. It wasn't deep or terribly painful, but I reprimanded myself for poor knife handling).

The dark blue figures are proper Airfix from a few years ago, the dark grey are Classic Toy Soldier, and the light grey are Chinese knock-offs of Airfix, available from CTS.

G Company (aka Company Fire Lite)

tl;dr new rules available over on the side bar called G Company. I also changed the link for Company Fire to point to the living copy of the rules so they are as up to date as they can be.

First a caveat: these rules have not been play tested thoroughly, but they spring from a previous play test that was an abysmal failure, followed by tweaking during half-a-dozen subsequent games, so I have higher hopes for these out of the gate. Changes may yet follow.

Although it clearly is based on Company Fire, I changed quite a bit  by marrying some of my ideas from CF with inspiration from One Brain Cell Toy Soldiers , a set of rules I played when I first started gaming lo those years ago (After playing quite a number of 1:1 rules since, including expensive professionally produced sets, I think you could do worse for 1:1 WWII games than these). It seemed therefore that a name change was in order: G Company.

Lo-fi test game. The yellow pentagons are disorder markers.The triangles represent artillery targets.

The turn sequence is the same general mechanism as CF -a deck of cards, some of  which are movement, some are fire, and some both. I felt this was absolutely necessary if I were to claim any family resemblance to the former game. I do however allow a card's side to move and fire in the same turn regardless of card drawn, and all of the other side's units have a chance to fire.

Theoretically this increases the amount of shooting, which helps speed things up, as does the increased rates of movement (with some restrictions - I may port this over to CF as I rather prefer it I think). Close combat is automatic between adjacent units regardless of their composition or status, but lone weapons teams and disordered units are still penalized so a bit more deadly there too.

In the name of simplification, I have reduced the number of adjustments and dice to be rolled during shooting and close combat. Group fire in particular requires far less dice.  I also reduced the states a unit can be in from four to three, which helps move things along a little more quickly.

All of the above helps, I think, for it to feel more "cinematic" and game/toy-like rather than an attempt at simulation.

That said, eliminating units easily is still difficult - it is possible to have many of your units become bogged down as disordered.

I just can't get away from the ideas that the nature of this kind of combat is to shoot to force the enemy to hit the dirt - maneuver and  close assault to finish the job and that it's easier to pin the enemy than to kill them with small arms fire.

If it turns out this is too simulationist in play,  I suggest automatically removing disordered markers at the start of each turn (ASLSK removes pin markers at the end of the turn automatically, and that's what gave rise to this idea - since disordered here functions like a traditional pin in other games). This removes the chance that they'll be removed from play at the start of the next turn (which is an intentional possibility to reflect failing morale, wounded men being unable to physically carry on, etc.) and also means they'll be able to advance on the enemy

Or, to increase unit removal if you think they're sticking around too long, you could adjust the unit status table - say 3 or less is removal, 4-5 is disordered, and 6+ is good order - which more closely aligns with the odds to recover in the 1BC Toy Soldier rules linked above (just flipped a bit).

As in CF, vehicles are included more as a necessary evil than a design focus.

The intent is to provide quick infantry games that feel WWII-ish and reward good tactics, but  something far less complicated than CF. To make things more "toy soldiery", tanks are tanks - I don't worry about heavy or light, or front vs side or rear armor or anything like that. Even LOS is greatly simplified. However, the rules are simple enough to modify if you want heavy tanks to be different from your medium tanks.

But you probably want to play a different game if you're really into vehicles and I am not offended if you do.

I purposely left out lots of explanatory material - nothing on mines or bocage (which I only added in the first place because I needed them for games I was playing) and at just four pages, the rules function as their own QRS.

Hopefully, for anyone who has played a wargame before, making any judgement calls about grey areas won't be too difficult and any missing bits, especially for mines (which I've never settled upon) and terrain, can be grabbed from CF if necessary.

And of course, as if it needs to be said, feel free to hack these up to suit your vision as needed.

ASLSK#1: First Full Game!

Toy soldiers will resume shortly, I swear.

I know it's not that big of a deal but I played my first complete game of ASLSK#1 on Monday night. It was the full 5 turns allotted to S1, "Retaking Vierville" which pits elements of the US 101st Airborne against German Grenadier and Fallschrimjager units.

With the exception of close combat and the routing phase, everything went surprisingly smoothly and with minimal reference to the rule book (the scenario does not use squad weapons and I still haven't worked in smoke grenades yet. Next time). I'm not entirely sure I handled everything correctly mind you, so I'll probably watch some Youtube examples of play to make sure.

Close combat is Morschauser-esque in its brutality - both sides can be eliminated in the same close combat phase - which is why there are no Germans in the buildings in the center right.

It was a pretty convincing US victory - although that may fly in the face of the victory conditions - the closet the Germans came to occupying any of the target buildings at the end of the game is that red melee marker. Per the scenario: "The Americans win at game end if there are no Good Order German units in buildings N5, N6, M4 and L3." So, technically there's a good order German in L3, but in none of the other targets.

Tonight I worked on prepping some Airfix Germans (not even Chinese knock-offs) - scraping off mold lines (a thankless task that I'm not convinced improves things with my hamfisted handling of the blade. In fact, some days I wish I just played with unpainted plastic like I did when I first started war gaming). I'm thinking of playing a mini-campaign with the 2x2 Crossfire scenarios and using my Company Fire rules, both full and lite versions, to sort out any remaining bugs.

More on that campaign idea in another post.

ASLSK #1: Getting Deeper into the Water

Last weekend, one night after my son had gone to bed and I was otherwise too worn out by Dragon Con to do much, I worked through three complete turns of the first scenario from the Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kit #1 in my effort to learn the rules.

Still missed a bunch of things, but I identified much of what I missed at least (residual fire is an interesting concept that my brain was having trouble remembering).

The US paratroopers were giving the Germans quite a wallop when I stopped playing. The picture below is just a small sample (the situation was similar on the rest of the board):

One of the problems the Germans had was my choice of table entry points - next time, I'll try coming in with a different approach.

I also didn't use any smoke grenades - and probably won't even try until I get more rules under my belt - but I think they'd have helped a bit.

Hoping to get another attempt at this scenario in tonight - even if just a few turns again.

Dragon Con 2019

This past weekend - Labor Day here in the US - was also Dragon Con, the highwater mark on the nerd calendar in these parts.

 I took my son for a single day last year and he enjoyed it enough that he had a full pass this year. Attending a convention like this with an 8-year old who can't sit still for things he likes let alone things he doesn't, means going to panels of interest to dear-old-dad was out, but we managed to make a time of it doing things we both enjoy.

Mostly that meant hitting the retro arcade where we played games from my youth:

There is a large RPG and table top gaming event list, but most of these are not child friendly. Reaper is present every year for a Paint and Take, but when I suggested to my son that we do that, his response was "We do that at home."

Fair enough.

Costumes are a huge part of Dragon Con for a lot of people - but I don't take pictures of costumes so you'll have to go elsewhere for that. I did snag some pictures of some honest to goodness robots though:

One of my long time loves is puppets, so when my son spent some time with his mother, I caught a puppet show, of course:

Outside of gaming, the puppet track is my favorite part of  Dragon Con - I hope to turn my crafty skills, such as they are, to making a puppet for next year.

And of course no trip to a convention is complete without spending too much money in the vendor area (the line was so long on Saturday, I have heard that the wait was around 3 hours. We went Sunday morning when everyone was in bed with their hangovers).

I may have gone overboard on my son's "mementos" - here's a sample (I happen to love Lego minifigures, too, so I may have pushed some of the acquisitions):

And this is mine:

My son already has a Princess Unikitty, so he won't covet this one. She may or may not turn up in a game.