Green Pass Campaign II, Session 1: Better Part of Valor

After a long haitus, I'm continuing the Green Pass campaign. A surprisingly large contingent of players assembled on Saturday night to generate fresh characters and pick up with the previous year had left off.

Nothing much happened on the first night, but at least most of the administrative preliminaries are out of the way now.

Another four players arrived late, and we had to scramble for space.

May 23, Caudex Annales 70 AUP

After a months of combing the Elysian countryside for heroes, recruiting agents of the Durnovaric Expeditionary Force had little to show for their efforts. The keep remained as undermanned as before, and the sort of mercenaries who did express interest were self-interested freelancers and opportunists of a sort scarcely more elevated in intention than the infiltrators that threatened it. Nevertheless, the guard extended full courtesy when a contingent of aspiring heroes arrived from Centerpoint along with the morning caravan after overnighting in the Notch.

The castellan's scribe duly noted their company in the register of dignitaries, though none of them were landed or titled (or if so, they concealed it in both word and dress) save the gnome, and he only peculiarly. Among the fellowship of 11 were:

• Zegzinu Yeggtatt, a hulking saurian from foreign lands
• Helga Omega, wonderworker
• Terra Daystar, amiable elven nightblade and lover of novelty
• Dunflow Darcin, taciturn barbarian
• Malcom Hawk, mage and chief spokesman
• Bar Helm, another barbarian
• Meros Tale, elven nightblade of a less gentle spirit
• Finkle Bagnozzle ("not to be confused with the Bognozzles") the Winceworthy, a gnome
• Orym Elandril of the elven court
• Reed Stormcliff, shaman-druid and veteran of the previous foray, with the war dog Mort,
• and the Piper, a bard of questionable etiquette.

A few of the company, including Reed in precautionary lion form.

The castellan bid them to seek the cause of such a great convocation of rival minions of a more typically uncooperative nature, including the observed warrens of goblins, orcs, and hobgoblins as well as the recovered scraps rumoring of sinister sects. He awarded them full rights of reclamation for any treasure recovered, regardless of its point of origin as plunder from caravans supporting the forward armies of Durnovar. And he humbly bade them to take care not to arouse the attention of any great evils sleeping beneath the haunted forest uplands north of the road.

With predictable ardor for the road and task, the heroes stopped only long enough to purchase a single 10' pole, then pressed onward into the nearest swamp. Finding a lone barrow, they encircled and assaulted it with terrible bardic music, perhaps expecting this to function as an alternative mode of exorcism in lieu of a priest. Instead, a company of vexed lizardfolk demanded silence and departure -- speaking tersely with their near kin, the saurian Zegzinu, in a language coarse on the ears of all the rest of the companions. The lizardkins' exchange yielded the information that nothing lay to the south but spiders, and that rough strangers were trespassing onto the swamp from the east.

A night in the swamp proved uneventful, whereupon the company rose to continue toward the chaos-infested forest valley. Just shy of destination, portions of the company trained in climbing (the barbarians and nightblades, mainly) elected to penetrate into the woods to scout above the valley. The woods made every effort to merit its reputation as a haunt of spirits, grasping unnaturally at anyone who passed, but no trees awoke and the effect proved to be little more than a trick of the mind. Nevertheless, Meros and the other scouts emerged from the dense wood to discover a midshrouded clearing on the moor, dotted with dozens of barrows in a crumbling state of disrepair.

The nearest barrow bore the sigil of a skull over a rose upon a menhir placed at its pinnacle, and its door was sealed with bronze bands from the outside as if to bar passage from within. A similar mound nearby was entirely overground. The entire field was deathly quiet, but bore traces of many abandoned camps that had been vacated in sudden haste. When the remainder of the adventuring party emerged from the forest, they pondered the wisdom of shattering the bands of the barrow to see what lay within. Upon reflection, and perhaps remembering the apprehensions of the castellan, they elected to lay debris outside the chamber to detect the passage of night walkers. The bard sprinkled dust to form the contours of letters spelling out an impertinent question: "WHO ARE YOU?"

They descended to form a fresh camp on the road, caring little to pass the night in a place of such desolation and ill report.

Casualties

None

Treasure and Experience

Coin: none

Kills: none

Exploration: 3 mounds discovered, none explored (300 xp)

Parley: 7 lizardmen (245 xp), 3 lizardwomen (60 xp)

Total experience from treasure: 0 xp

Total experience from kills: 0 xp

Total experience from exploration: 300 xp

Total experience from parley: 305 xp

Total experience per member: 605/11 = 55 xp

Been A While Since The Last Update

I regard this blog as an expression of my creative interests, and I just haven't been doing anything creative lately. A few reasons:

• The game night at LETU is still going strong, but is pretty heavily invested in 40K. That seems likely to be the focus of most dedicated players in the near future. We typically have sufficient players to have a board game overflow, but none of them are consistent enough to allow anything that carries over from week to week. So we've been playing simpler card games that allow a variable number of players, and feel more casual.
• This semester I have a large number of committee assignments adding to my workload, and can't really commit to anything that requires preparation.
• My wife's work-from-home projects are forcing me into doing more child care, which leaves me with less time for everything else.

I'm still feeling dissatisfied with the large stack of games and books I own that aren't being played, but there's not much I can do about it. The burdens of being an adult and a professional, I suppose.

MEK OP Game Night: Mage Knight Board Game

One of my very first posts was a lament for the absence of a high-quality "hex-crawl" board game -- that is, a board game that could simulate the experience of taking a medium sized expedition (say a mercenary company with a few dozen adventuring soldiers) and allow them to explore a region of undiscovered territory. Computer games have offered quite a few variations in this theme (including the HoMM series, the Warlords franchise, the original King's Bounty and its remake, and several similar games. Most of these aren't exactly to my taste, with minimal emphasis on simulation and a tendency to reduce combat to the "stack of a hundred dragons" approach that feels much satisfying to me than the kind of detailed and realistic large-scale combat you'd find in Total War or Mount and Blade. A good recent historical entry in the genre was the indie title Expeditions: Conquistador, which provides a simple but satisfying implementation of some of the major logistical choices that a real expedition would face. Even then, its combat was more squad-tactical than operational, with the result that you can end up conquering the Aztec empire with a platoon of barely over a dozen men -- whereas even Cortes needed several hundred Spaniards.

This Saturday for MEK OP, we took a shot at learning the Mage Knight Board Game, a modern-feeling treatment of the same genre as old favorite Magic Realm. "Modern", in this case, means that it replaces most of the old dice-rolling event resolution mechanics with a zero-paperwork deck-building approach that feels more like playing a puzzle game than an RPG.

The world's largest game of solitaire.

The fantasy tropes in the game are fairly predictable and derivative (yep, you're on a map full of rampaging orcs and dragons, and you need to capture castles and delve into dungeons, check), but the puzzle game mechanics with the cards feels uniquely well-designed relative to other similar systems. There's an intensely high level of pressure to optimally use each combination of cards, and a wide range of different permutations for the ways in which they can be used. In some respects it would be a good choice for card-counting poker experts, since being constantly aware of the exact contents of your "deed deck" makes it possible plan out your next five turns like a chess grandmaster. This results in a game that feels diametrically opposed to the randomness of a classical 70's-era hex crawl like Magic Realm, despite the enormous amount of shared thematic DNA.

There are a number of game aspects that can drive a simulationist to the point of despair, if you think about them for too long. There's virtually no possibility of death here, with the worst game situation being set of wounds that require a few turns to discard. In a single night, you can walk through three towns, hire multiple military units who are mysteriously awake at 3:00 am to go on dangerous adventures, and fight two major battles. You can conquer an entire keep single-handed without the need for any army, then travel ten miles to do the same thing again, all within 24 hours. Your character is some kind of empowered hero who can travel day and night without the need for rest -- which is fine in itself, but when you pick up additional units of mere mortals, you can actually use their abilities to move even faster. There's no economic system here, so all your troops work for free. Every dungeon has exactly one resident monster (out of five possible types), every keep has exactly one defender, every starting hero gets to recruit one unit, and every monastery protects exactly one artifact. It's all very neat and precise, which makes the puzzle game enormously predictable and strategically deep, but also makes it hard to lose yourself in a plausible narrative of play.

There's also such an emphasis on iconographic information (rather than note-taking and text) that the game ends up with a huge multi-table footprint full of wasted space. That huge board with 100 numbers at the top of the photo above? That's just to record your experience point totals. In an older RPG-style game with a record sheet, it would require a two-digit number in pencil and an experience table. Here, it takes 700 square centimenters of high-quality cardboard just to display a single token occupying one box with the number you care about.

Overall, it's probably best to think of this as a deck-builder card game with a large number of auxiliary systems, rather than a hex-crawl game with a card-based sub-mechanic. The majority of time invested in this game is going to revolve around trying to figure out how to manage your hand and play cards at the opportune moment. Unlike Magic Realm, where every different hero and map situation requires a radically different style of play (and generates a unique story along the way), Mage Knight is about each player performing a predictable sequence of universal tasks with near-perfect efficiency.

I can't say I dislike a game that has this much strategy under the hood. A good player could run in circles around the level of play we were able to reach on Saturday night, and there's an enormous time and practice investment required to become a skilled player. By the end of the night, everyone was taking ten minutes for each turn, trying to milk every last drop of utility out of a dwindling deck.

I still find myself looking for a combat system that creates a narrative dynamic that resembles some kind of styled approximation of real medieval combat, rather than playing a card-matching minigame. I don't think that this will replace any of my interest in finding a more simulationist treatment of the same topic. I should probably haul out my Fantastic Frontiers rules, and try to take a third stab at writing them up in a coherent form. There are definitely a few features of the rules for Mage Knight that I like enough to steal, such as the reputation track.

By the time we called the game around midnight, we had discovered two cities (the end-game objectives) but were nowhere close to being able to assault one of them with any prospect of success. I'd say that playing this through to the end will take at least six hours, and it might be wise to start early next time I bring it.

Tabletop Wish List

My wife asked me to create a list of games I'm considering purchasing, for the benefit of anyone who asks her what I might want as a gift. Here's a selection of things on my radar. Unfortunately, many of the games I really want are either out of print or too expensive to make a sensible gift. But there are certainly some exceptions I can include. I'll update this list as I acquire games, so it remains current.

Card Games
Star Realms (Expansions: Bases and Battleships, Events, Fleets and Fortresses, Heroes) - This fast and easy game is essentially a PvP variant of Ascension. It comes with a variety of custom decks, but each of them is individually affordable in the $10 to $15 range.

Core Worlds (Expansions: Galactic Orders) -  A more complicated and technical treatment of the same theme, this is also a relatively more expensive game at around $30. It takes much longer to play, and gameplay involves balancing a larger decision matrix than most other card games.

Mini Games
Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures - The game itself looks moderately fun, and the ship miniatures could be reappropriated for a other gaming purposes. Core game is around $25, expansion packs go for $10-15.

Memoir '44 - Looks like a fun WW2 implementation of the Battle Lore-style of simple wargame. Runs around $40.

Modern Euro-style Standards
Small World (+ expansions) - A Euro-style wargame with a light fantasy feel. Used copies are pretty common, will run around $40 new.

Pandemic (+ expansions) - Well-known cooperative game. Relatively inexpensive (around $25), and available at many general-purpose retailers like Target or Walmart.

Eclipse (+ expansions) - A multiplayer area-control game with some obvious Catan similarities, but more directly player conflict and a science fiction theme. Somewhat expensive ($60 or more), maybe better to purchase a used copy.

Stronghold - A medium-complexity castle-siege wargame using wood blocks for pieces. Shouldn't be too expensive, maybe $40 or so. I think it's only available used right now.

Classic Games
Dragon Rage - Given a nicely updated re-release, after decades of being off the market. Hard to find new, should run around $50 used. A traditional asymmetric hex wargame; think OGRE with dragons.

Britannia - A simple historical game that I remember playing back in college, running over a millennium or so of British history. Somewhat expensive in the newer Fantasy Flight edition. The old editions from the 80s are dirt cheap on Ebay ($20 or so), and still playable, although not as impressive as the new one.

SPQR - A nice Roman-era wargame that's hard to find these days. Please don't pay $845 for this on Amazon (the current list price!)

Mega-Sized Games (none of these come cheap)
Mage Knight Board Game - Hybrid deck-builder and 4x game that uses cards for movement and combat actions. Features a build-as-you-go modular giant-hex map like Magic Realm. I already found a used version of this online, but there are two smaller expansions I wouldn't mind having and would make reasonable gifts.

Twilight Imperium - Fantasy Flight's deluxe multiplayer sci-fi wargame, this takes hours to complete and works best with a large group of players.

Runewars - Another Fantasy Flight behemoth with loads of plastic and cardboard pieces. It looks fairly complicated, but supposedly it plays fast like an Axis and Allies clone when you get the hang of it.

Battle of the Five Armies - An adaption of the War of the Ring game to the final battle of the Hobbit, using some of the same game mechanics and game pieces.

Empires in Arms - Out of print for years, but you can still find used versions. Desperately in need of a reprint edition. Also comes in a computer edition.

MEK OP Game Night: WotR with Expansion

This Saturday we amazing had no Warhammer tables going, and so instead we set up for a 4-person War of the Ring showdown. I played Free Peoples for a change this time, and most of the other players had at least some familiarity with the system. I elected to add most of the optional characters and minions (and their dice) from the expansion set, but not any of the optional Fellowship cards or other rules.

As with my past experience, the game fits rather perfectly into a four-hour time slot. The game was resolved by a very narrow margin, driving through Mordor in a single turn due to military pressure, with a final corruption level of 9 at the end of the game. A bad tile draw for hunt damage would have resulted in a loss. Instead, we finished with only the second Free Peoples win I've ever seen. Virtually every member of the Fellowship ended up dead (or for the Merry and Pippin, lost in the wastes north of Mordor), and Minas Tirith went down before the Fellowship had even reached Lorien. Things were getting frantic by the end, and the final turn featured the use of all three elven rings!

And yet somehow I won with a deck
containing only two heroes

Then today (Sunday) my wife and brother-in-law played a few rounds of the DC Deckbuilding Game. That's just what's it's called, which perhaps suggests it's not the most original concept in the word. It's a simple single-resource system with streamlined play relative to other similar games. It probably compares most directly with Ascension, although thematically it seems intended to compete with Marvel's more complicated deckbuilder, Legendary. Overall it had the same basic qualities of other games in the genre, but the art was clean and set-up was easy. My BIL was relatively pleased with the thematic integration of the DC universe, which I gather is based on the New 52 reboot of the primary comic titles. There's probably some sense in which I'd feel more comfortable with a more classic Silver Age implementation of the theme that resembles the stuff I remember from my youth, but that's not likely to ever happen. In any event, all the official comic versions of DC heroes are likely to be washed away by the arrival of the new movies in the next decade, which will create new definitive versions of the familiar roster.

I won both games, as Hawkman each time. But as with most deckbuilders it's mostly a matter of luck to grab an early lead and then simply not doing stupid things to squander it.

Twilight Struggle: Why Is This Ranked #1?

Last week we were only able to stay for a couple hours, but we did get a chance to try out Twilight Struggle (TS) for a few turns of play. When we quit, I (as the US) was ahead by a few points, with a strong position in the Middle East balancing off a stalemate in Asia and a slight disadvantage in Europe. Overall we enjoyed the game. But it came with a high set of expectations: For several years running, this has been the highest ranked board game on BGG, with an enormous number of ratings falling in the 8-10 range. That's out of over 10,000 games total!

Here the Soviets are running rampant in the Arab world, unlike our game.

In many respects, it's pretty implausible candidate for the top slot on the rankings boards:

• It's not really a European-style game except in victory condition mechanics, and virtually all the other top-ten titles are Euros. In many ways it's more like a classic Diplomacy-era wargame from the 60s, a genre that usually has narrow appeal.
• It's exclusively a two-player game, unlike most of the other popular games.
• The production standards are good for its category, but it's still a retro counter-based game in a world of high-chrome releases with figurines and meeples. The card art is of the "grainy vintage photo" variety.
• The gameplay is completely free of social or diplomatic aspects, and enforces a cutthroat aura of (thematically appropriate) paranoia that makes it impossible to play a "friendly game" of TS.
• Good play requires a thorough knowledge of the deck and a certain amount of card-counting, a skill that isn't easily mastered by casual players. (A novice player will be crushed by an experienced one.)
• The theme itself (nuclear brinksmanship) is dry and sobering and free of all but the darkest sort of humor.

But it's remained durably popular, even rising in popularity as it ages (most games fade as players seek novelty). Why?

First, I think it's important not to discount the nostalgia market. There are quite a few aging wargamers who no longer have the time and inclination to cover their entire basement floor with Case Blue maps, but still want to recapture the vibe of 70s-era Avalon Hill gaming. And Twilight Struggle does a good job of playing like people remember the games from that era playing. That's not necessarily the same thing as actually playing like those games, mind you! Instead, this is a game that extracts the aspects of retro wargame play that are most memorable (sustained struggle around a single strategic objective, for example) and creates an entire game of nothing but that kind of element. It's a "good parts" version, as fans of the Princess Bride might say.

Second, it's something directly relevant to the lives of many players. As a theme, it feels relevant to most older players who lived through those events. This is unlike most other wargames, which exist in an inaccessible world of dusty tomes full of military jargon. Even if you don't remember exactly who Gary Powers was, or why he was in a U2 over Soviet territory, the notion that this stuff once made front-page headlines makes it feel instantly immediate. In some sense, the early success of wargames can be traced to ex-WW2 officers wanting to revisit the themes that had been headlines in their early lives. This is the same principle at work.

But the biggest feature that distinguishes TS from other games ranked close to it is the sense of constantly being in a state of crisis management. The uniquely clever twist of this as a card game is that you are often being forced to play cards that hurt you, rather than help you. There's a sense of drama to catastrophe, and the feeling of constantly being on the brink of it. Mitigating harmful effects is a more compelling thematic premise than advancing helpful ones. There are other games that use disaster control as a thematic overlay (Red November, say, or Pandemic), but they still present the threat as being external. In TS, you meet the enemy, and he is you. Just like the real Cold War.

I'm not sure where I'd rank this myself. It's not precisely my style of wargame, with low-level turn-by-turn strategy balanced by the high-level randomness of a few powerful cards. (I tend to prefer high-level strategy to allow long-term planning, with low-level randomness to vary the exact cost of victory in isolated battles.) But I like the idea of a game that is trying not just to kill me, but to force me to slowly strangle myself by means of my own decisions. It feels cunning and devious in a way that other games never attempt to be.

Fall Semester Kickoff

I've been neglecting this blog, partially because I've just gotten too busy to be an organizer, and I've settled back to being a player again. But I thought I'd still provide some highlights from the first weeks of MEK OP:

• Currently our big games have all been Warhammer. We usually have two tables of 40k going at once, and Kyle is finishing another set. So that seems likely to be a focus for the near future. We also have a Rogue Trader RPG campaign on Tuesdays, and for that matter, we also played a round of Death Angel on Saturday (and died horribly on the second floor). So I guess we've pretty much got everyone playing some version of Warhammer now. It's like a virus!

• We have a lot of board games now, and not nearly enough players for them. Yesterday I saw Carcassonne, Memoir 44, Empire Builder, Axis and Allies, my own copy of Conquest of Nerath, Axis and Allies, and all the old Fantasy Flight and casual card game stuff from last year. Vox is still designing his own RPG system too.

• I'm investing in a couple new games that I bought over eBay:
• Twilight Struggle is currently the highest ranked game on the BGG ratings, and so I thought I'd buy a copy to see what all the fuss is about. It's a two-player card-and-map game that simulates political events during the cold war. It's a GMT game (like Space Empires), so it will probably be fairly concise and austere in implementation (as opposed to the chrome-heavy stuff we currently have). Hopefully this can help to build a campus culture for hex and counter style wargames, too.
• Merchant of Venus is a reimplementation of the classic Avalon Hill game by Richard Hamblen. It's a whimsical sci-fi economic game similar to Firefly, but with heavier emphasis on shipping different kinds of goods around the map. Like all Hamblen games it's quite mechanically baroqe and crunchy on the simulation level, like a version of Monopoly written by 80s-era TSR employees. ("Roll on the Vermin Infestation table to see how many rats are raiding your hotel this turn, and all their colors and ages.") It also has a second version of the rules (the "Standard Game"), which is revised for more modern sensibilities.