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.

A Quirky Little War

Of course, it would be an 80 degree day that my son would (finally) decide to take a handful of his army men outside to play. Despite the heat, I wanted to join in the fun and fortunately, I was invited to as soon as I finished work for the day.

What started out as playing with toys evolved by his own suggestion into a full-fledged game - albeit with some shifting rules of the kind common with 7 year-olds, but also an interesting initiative mechanism I would have never thought of. The young general commanded Army Tan, while your most humble and unbiased correspondent commanded Army Green. The rules appear below the pictures.

The dastardly Tan tank well hidden. 

The main body of the glorious Green Army advances against the despicable enemy.

A sneaky and underhanded Tan mortar - clearly an individual of dubious character.

The feline kaiju known as "Archimedes" approaches the Tan vanguard.
All shudder in fear of his fuzzy foot.

The devious Tan general contemplates his next move.

The Rules as They Were Played

The armies: Each player gets 5 figures and a tank.

The setup: All figures and tanks are to be well camouflaged at the start

The turn:

The Older Player asks the Younger Player to spell a word (in our case from this week's spelling list for school)

If the Younger Player spells the word correctly, they may take an action. If the word is one which has caused the Younger Player difficulty previously, an extra action may be awarded as judged fair by the Older Player.

If the Younger Player misspells the word, the Older Player may take an action.

After the action has been resolved, play continues with the Older Player asking the Younger Player to spell another word. The same word may be reused as many times as desired (or necessary if you're preparing for a spelling test).

Actions:

• Move - Generally as much or as little as desired and does not seem unreasonable. After movement, camouflage may be reapplied at no additional cost.
• Fire! - A ranged attack made using sticks and twigs gathered from the detritus on the lawn is thrown from a reasonable distance proportional to the player's skill level to attempt to knock down opposing figures.
• Melee - Close combat - move figure into contact with enemy. The enemy figure is knocked over. Any tank touched in melee is automatically destroyed.
• An enemy tank cannot be attacked until all infantry are knocked over.
• Medic! - Any 1 knocked over figure may be returned to standing.
• Cloverfield -  aka the nuclear option. According to the International Standards Committee of 7-Year-Old Rulesmakers, this option may only be employed by the Younger Player and at their discretion once per game. The Younger Player rips up a bunch of clover from the lawn and drops it from a height above the enemy soldiers. Any figure (not a tank) touched by the clover is knocked over.

Winning the Game: Destroy the enemy's tank. The enemy's tank cannot be attacked until all enemy infantry are knocked over.

Notes:

• Knocked over figures may not move, fire, or melee.
• The prone pose figure is impossible to knock down in ranged combat and therefore can only be defeated in close combat. This should be given to the Older Player as they cannot make use of Cloverfield.

The Dawns Here Are Quiet

It's become something of a habit for me to post whatever war related movie I most recently watched and so, here I am again. Please pardon my failure to give Midway it's due - I watched it last week but had no time to write, or rather I spent it doing other things. Today's feature, or more properly Sunday night's feature, was the 2015 extended 4-part version of The Dawns Here are Quiet.

I am aware of the 1972 movie, which is also available on Amazon Prime at this time. I chose this one because I liked the idea of it being in four parts, and I could watch just one part, as it was late on Sunday night.

As a word of advice for anyone considering following in my footsteps, starting a gripping four-part series late on a Sunday night is going to lead to a rough Monday. Each episode ended on a cliff hanger, and thus it was impossible that I not watch all of them. It would be like starting Game of Thrones now and thinking, "I'll just watch the first episode."

I have given you the benefit of my experience, but, of course, whether you heed my warning is up to you.

For those who like gaming small encounters, this movie offers a treasure trove of inspiration - being that it revolves around a handful of Soviets. Unlike, say The Pacific or Band of Brothers, these few are not just part of a larger group that the camera is focusing on, this is the entire group. Thus the encounters are of the kind of ripe for something like One Hour Skirmish Wargames or something like WW2 Operation Whitebox, an RPG set in WWII.

Unfortunately, a side-effect of watching this movie as a wargamer was suddenly being overcome by the need to field an all female Soviet squad in 54mm. The options, without doing some conversion, are few and far between (and mostly 1/35). For now, I'll stick with re-watching the movie.

In Good Company : Some Thoughts

In response to requests for a copy of the rules on my previous post, and in light of my lack of scanner I went to the Lone Warrior site hopeful that perhaps the rules had been uploaded there. To my great surprise, I found that In Good Company is available for download as of March 2019.

I recommend checking out the entire site - especially the downloads of rules and sample articles, and if you aren't already a member, consider it. The price is reasonable and you get four PDF issues of the magazine per year.

In any case, I digress.

My purpose here is just to add some of my thoughts on the rules as I played them the other night, what I liked and what I thought was missing, etc. There are barely three pages of rules, and a  "quick reference sheet", so it should come as no surprise that I might have questions or encounter areas where I felt something could be added.

Modifications:

The first thing you'll notice if you follow the link above is that the rules use hexes for measurement. As I have been reading Lone Warrior on and off for ten or so years, I recalled that Mr. White mentioned on more than one occasion that his table had 1.5" hexes. Knowing that makes converting to inches easy enough.

That said, for my game, while I used the conversion for movement, my table space was a bit spare - I was too lazy to get the plywood out. So, I opted to shorten the weapon ranges to about half of what they are listed as in the rules.

The second is that the game mentions Zulus specifically and I chose to treat that as "native" units - Martians in my case.

Now on to the rules themselves:

The hospital is clearly the most obvious point of interest in the rules. I chose to remove the figures from the table, but you could leave them in place, on their side for example. Removing the figures though did lead to the question, if the entire unit is in the hospital to where do they return?

I chose to have them go to where they last were. With only three units per side, it was easy enough to remember.  But, I think a good case could be made that if the entire unit is in the hospital, then it is out of the game.

Melee worked well enough - there was a chance for back and forth, and I liked that the lancers got +2 on their first attack (At least that's how I interpreted the rules). But I didn't like that cavalry stopped dead even if they defeated the first figure encountered.

For some reason, this doesn't bother me with multi-figure bases (as when I play Neil Thomas's OHW Medieval rules) but it bothered me with individual figures. I imagine I'll have the same problem playing G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T.  In the future I might house rule that cavalry can continue on into the second rank if they defeat the first figure they encounter.

The machine gun jamming on two ones was a nice touch and happened in my game on the first attempt to fire the gun. I assumed the roll to un-jam replaces the roll to shoot (and  no movement allowed) but it never came up as the crew was overrun shortly after.

Now, with three-ish pages of rules, obviously not every eventuality is covered.  Morale is missing and there are no way to differentiate troop quality explicitly defined. However, as I'll mention in a bit, there is a way to account for this rather easily.

Perhaps my favorite part of these rules and something I will try with G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. is that it uses multiple cards per unit. For a small game, this means the deck still has some size and shuffling feels like you're actually doing something. In comparison, G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. decks for a game this size are too small to really feel like you'll be able to mix up the cards enough to not know which is which.

It should be obvious (but wasn't to me until I thought about it), but you can simply adjust the cards up or down to reflect leadership / morale / troop experience. Say, 1 card for green infantry, 3 cards for veterans and so on. It requires no changes to the rules otherwise and allows for better units to possibly take more actions per turn, although not guaranteed, of course, because of the Stop card.

In Good Company: Battle of Firefly Church

Last night, I had the fortune of time to set up a game to try out In Good Company, a set of simple colonial rules from Lone Warrior #168. The rules have intrigued me for some time, not the least reason is that they feature a "hospital"- an idea borrowed from Pith Helmet - wherein casualties disappear upon being "hit" and either return to their unit, die, or stay in the hospital.

For the scenario, I borrowed a bit from the classics.

The Gentle Reader no doubt recalls that Firefly Church is located on a hill to the north and east of Hook's farm. While many battles throughout history have raged across this area, in this particular case, the forces of Army Khaki and Army Green, concentrated solely around the historic church.

Army Khaki has orders to capture and hold the church, while Army Green is to drive Khaki from the field.

The armies approach the fabled church.

The belligerents:

• Army Khaki - 1 unit each of cavalry, infantry, and a gun+team
• Army Green - 1 unit each of cavalry, infantry, and native infantry (Martians in this case, who suspiciously look like Saracens)

I will let the pictures tell the story and save my impression of the rules for another time:

The Green advance!

The machine gun unloads lead death, then jams in the face of the enemy!

The Khaki cavalry charge!

Chaos in front of the vaunted church!

Green cavalry set their lances. The stalwart Khaki troops hold their ground like so many statues.

With the thunder of hooves the Green cavalry crashes into the Khaki wall!

Khaki's cavalry turn to the din of battle at the church.

And charge into the fray!

The victors!

Weekend Movies: Two world wars in about 4 hours.

I watch a lot of war-themed movies - luckily for you, I don't post all of them here, but I watched two interesting ones this weekend.

The first one is a Russian film (with subtitles) called Battalion. Proving once again that there are no feel-good WWI movies, this one is about the first Russian "Women’s Battalion". Good drama, lot's of battle sequences and an interesting unusual focus for a war movie.




Tonight was The Devil's Brigade. I can't say I've seen a lot of movies featuring Canadians in WWII (I live in the US  so maybe that explains that). The movie is about the First Special Service Force. It features some great battle sequences set in Italy plus a bunch of fun training sequences prior (see, a feel good war movie. No one does this for WWI). [Edit: not that it is all puppies and rainbows or doesn't end on a heavy note, but it's the kind that still leaves you feeling something positive and not sinking into a dark pit of existential despair. ]

Cossacks! Urrah!

I finally had a chance to get a picture of the Cossacks together.

W. Britain's Cossacks riding to the sounds of the guns.

They are quite a satisfactory little group.

I find whenever I get out my Britains, I think, "I should just collect these and not worry about painting."

Then my wallet weeps and wails and I remember that I have to eat and pay for housing and all that.

And now, to honor our newly arrived troops: