"Zulus, Mr. Rico! Zillions of 'em!" : A Quick Review of Zulus on the Ramparts by Victory Point Games

 

 

“Men of Harlech, stand you …  AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!” 

Don’t let this happen to you.

If I’m a little bleary eyed this morning, it’s because I was up past my bedtime playing Zulus on the Ramparts, a solitaire game about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift from Victory Point Games’ States of Siege series, designed by veteran grognard Joe Miranda.  In the few times I had played it already I had gotten a quick and unpleasant result, as the Zulu imps almost effortlessly overran my defences and the rifles fell silent.    This game was a different result.  Miraculously the Zulus held off until the defences were reinforced, giving me time to get all my heroes, Bromhead, Chard, Colour Sgt. Bourne, Hook, Hitch, and Ammunition Smith the Padre among others all on the firing line.  When they came on, we let them have it, and while they got close to our final redoubt, it was Steady Lads Steady and Men of Harlech and we dropped them as they came.   All through the night we held, and then the last impi came on like a black thundercloud,  and we were down to our last cartridges, but we held, by God.  It was a Martini Henry miracle with a bayonet and some guts behind it.

Well, as you can see, I enjoy this simple game.  If you’ve played other VPG solitaire games, like Dawn of the Zeds, you’ll recognize the basic idea.   The bad guys (four Zulus impis of various strengths) each start on their own track and their progress is chit driven.  If any one reaches the centre of the board, you lose.   You can help your cause by building two sets of barricades, if you have time, to buy yourself some more space and time to defend. As the Zulus advance, you are drawing cards which allow you to bring various heroes and personalities into play (like Dick, the Surgeon’s dog) and Pvt. Hook, or any of the various volley cards which allows you to engage the Zulus from various ranges.    Each turn you have to chose an action - do you fire a volley, work on extra barricades, pass out more ammo, or get one of your personalities into the battle to use their various abilities?  You have a lot of heroes (all those VCs, after all) which help, but never enough time.

There is a day phase, and a night phase, which is worse because it’s harder to hit the Zulus at night unless buildings catch fire, which they can do.  There are also some random event cards, and some what ifs, like Company G actually showing up and helping the garrison.  If you want pics and more comments, you can find the ZotR page here on BGG.  At $40 it’s at a midrange price for a boardgame, and the components have the usual VPG high quality of treatment - a hard mounted board, professional cards, and thick MDF laser cut playing pieces, so to my mind that’s a good game at a fair price.  While this is a solitaire game, it would be fun to take to the pub/club and play a few times.  A quick defeat can take twenty minutes, but an epic stand might take an hour.  My record so far is one out of three wins, so it’s a challenging game.

 I have this week off, so I’ll probably watch Zulu for more inspiration.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

 

 

Diplomacy Game Update and Tuesday Night Wargame

Two-part post tonight.  

The first part gives an update on the PBB Diplomacy game which now begins Turn 8 (F 1904). 

The three retreats from the S1904 Orders Resolution are as follows:

England:  F MAO to BRE
Russia: A WAR - LIV
France: A MAR - BUR 

The deadline for the F1904 Orders is Wednesday, April 13, at 23:00hrs EST.  Things to watch:

Russia is down but not out, and could retake Moscow unless the Austro-Turkish alliance holds firm.

Germany is poised to take London and give England the coup de grace.

Italy is prevented from really exploiting the advantage of a weakened France, as it has to much of its forces guarding against the Turkish expansion.  What will the Sultan do?

Second, and reviving an occasional Mad Padre Wargames practice, it’s Tuesday and that means a Tuesday boardgame.  Here’s the map of a micro-game designed by Paul Koenig from his D-Day series of operational level games on the first few days of D-Day, published by Victory Point Games.  Paul had two other games in this series, one on the British beaches and the other on the American landings.   I bought this copy and another PK game, on Operation Veritable, when VPG discontinued many of its small games.  This game, Juno: The Canadian Beach, is a one-map game, maybe 50 counters, pitting the Canadian 3rd Division against the German 716th Regiment, from June 6-8.  The Canadians have to get off their four beaches, capture the four villages near the coast and the town of Douvres, while exiting as many units as possible off the far edge of the map.  

There’s not a lot of chrome here.  PK describes himself as a war games designer in the mould of Jim Dunnigan, with a Keep It Simple philosophy. I like PK as a designer, because he has a flair for neat and elegant game mechanics.  Juno has a simple combat mechanic, but with three different ways of attacking, it offers a lot of options for clever playing.  The chit-pull activation system is ideal for solitaire play, and it’s small size means that I can set it up in a quiet corner of my workplace and spend 20-30 minutes a day on my lunch break  pondering my strategy. 

Situation at the end of 6 June.  The Canadians have gotten off their beaches and captured Courcelles, but have a ways to go as German defence firms up in the bocage.   Each unit is a battalion, and parent units are brigades (Canadian) and regiments (German).  The round counters under the unit counters indicate hit markers.  A unit can take one hit and is still fully effective, and two hits and be partially effective, but three hits removes a unit from the map.  

Most of the comments I’ve seen on BGG suggest that the Canadians have a tough haul to get a win in this game.  I’ll keep you posted.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

 

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Ligny From GMT's Battles of Waterloo Take Two

I haven’t had a lot of time to push counters around, but I’ve had enough to figure out a few things, including the fairly complex rules for command and control and activation of commands (corps and divisions).    The rules are rather complex, so I’m making slow progress.

Here’s the situation at the end of the 13:00 to 13:30 turn.  I don’t blame you for not making much sense of it.   The town of Ligny is in the centre, as is Blucher’s I Corps under Zeiten..   At the top, Pirch’s II Corp is beginning to march south to reinforce Blucher.  At the extreme right, the first elements of Thielmann’s III Corps is entering the map.  French are coming on at the bottom.

For the Frenchers,  left to right, Milhaud’s IV Corps CavRes, the Imperial Guard under Drouot,and Gerard’s IV Corps just starting to come on. The III Corps is out of the shot on the left.   Note that many of the units are followed by a n Extended Column marker.   While most units are brigade sized, the game has some tactical aspects, including large units taking up extra space while moving in column on roads and paths.   Units with 6 or more Strength Points  in tactical movement as opposed to road movement can flip these counters and adopt an extended line formation to maximize their firepower.

 

I haven’t quite decided how the French attacks are going to work.  I suspect it will be III and IV Corps, supported by the Guards artillery.  One of the interesting things about this game is the sequence of play, which is a chit pull system.  Depending on the Supreme Commander’s command rating, he can choose a number of chits representing Corps and Commands.    Blucher gets two, and Napoleon starts with three (his command rating depends on his health from turn to turn).  The sides take turns drawing chits, and once they are gone, they take turns trying to activate Corps and Commands that spent the turn without a chit.   I’ve pretty much got that figured out.  Now to work on the combat mechanics.

Speaking of games, Victory Point announced recently that it was discontinuing several of its titles.   I wanted two games because of their Canadian content, Operation Veritable, about the capture of the Reichswald in 19944-45, and their Juno Beach game from their D-Day system.   I also couldn’t resist getting “Toe-to-Toe Nuc’lr Combat With the Rooskies”, a tongue in cheek solitaire game about red-blooded B-52 bomber crews.  Hard to resist.

I suspect I’ll tell you about the B-52 game along with my next Ligny update.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Imperial Stars II

When I was a teenager, I was given a game called Imperium (1977) by Game Designer’s Workshop which became a classic in the genre of mighty starships being launched and tearing into each other in mighty fleets to capture planets and gain resources to build yet more warships  to control a vast galaxy- that sort of thing.  I wish I still had that game, it gave me hours of pleasure.   It’s been long OOP, and while I haven’t found another copy, I think I’ve found a game that’s almost as good.  

Imperial Stars II is a clever little game from one of my favourite clever little gaming companies, Victory Point Games.  The designer is Chris Taylor, who has done a whack of SF-themed games.  It’s a game about, well, starships being launched and tearing into each other in mighty fleets to capture planets and gain resources to build yet more warships  to control a vast galaxy

One of the admirable things about this game is that it includes two double-sided maps (11” by 17’) , giving you four possible maps to play on for a variety of gaming experiences.  This map in the photo below is a fairly cluttered one, with asteroids, nebulae, singularities and dust clouds.   Each special terrain hex slows down movement and poses a different headache in combat.  Maps vary in their degree of clutter.

Each game begins with a small fleet in being for either side, shown below in their starting positions on Turn 1.  Additional ships can be purchased from the groups in the boxes at the top and bottom of  the map. Ships are two kinds, escorts and capital ships.  Capital ships can survive one hit, and can be repaired.  Ships can also be turned into colony bases, which gives you a base of territory but reduces the size of your navy, so that’s a fine balance to maintain in the early stages of the game.  The light blue round tiles on the map are planets, which can be claimed by either player and turned into colonies.

The game is driven by these “Op Chits”.  They are turned face down and mixed up, and drawn randomly by players in turn. They determine how many things or Ops a player gets to do in each phase.  Besides the number on the chit, players get an Op for each colony they posses, which is an incentive to get as many colonies as you can early on.  After a “Galactic Cycle” when each player uses their five Ops Chits, the lowest number is taken out of play, which means that each full turn (or Galactic Cycle) is shorter than the last turn.  Essentially this mechanic builds a clock into the game and keeps the game fairly short.

You also have to like a game where all the charts and tables fit on a single half sheet of paper.

Another clever aspect to the game is that the planet hexes are assigned random qualities which basically act as power ups or wild cards.  Some have attributes that can only be used once, like advantages in a space battle, and others have ongoing benefits.  Here two ships from Red Fleet, a light carrier and light cruiser, close in on an unclaimed planet.

Having taken the planetary system, Red spends Op Points to convert the DD ship into a Colony Base, and gets the bonus, “Energy, Add Two Operations” which adds two op points to Red at the start of each subsequent phase for as long as Red controls the planet - one of the nicer benefits of the planet chits.

 

 

The situation at the end of the first of five Galactic Cycles in the game.  Red and Yellow both control five planets besides their home planets.  There have been no battles yet but I expect some will come soon.  Space combat is quite brutal and simple.  Ships fight each other using missiles if they have that capability in the first round of combat.  One hit destroys an escort and damages a capital ship.  Two hits destroy a capital ship.  Damaged capital ships can be repaired using ops points.  After the first round of missile combat, surviving ships fight a round of combat using beams, the number on the bottom left corner of the ship counters in the above photo.  Any ships surviving that round then fight another round of missile combat.  This sequence continues until one side is destroyed or runs.  Destroyed ships can be brought back into play as salvage, but that takes time and Ops Points.  A useful tactic is to build up fleets (up to six ship counters of the same side can stack in a hex) and try to intercept your opponent’s ships during his or her turn.  The forces of the two sides are symmetrical - same types of ships and same weapons capabilities.

Imperial Stars II is a simple and clever game, well suited to solitaire play because of the Ops Chits system.  It could be explained to another person in ten minutes and played to a conclusion in 2-3 hours tops.   At a fairly inexpensive price ($26.99 US) and with its four maps to give high replay ability, I recommend it to SF fans.  It could also be used as a scenario generator for miniature SF gamers who want some context for their space battles.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP

Tuesday Boardgame: Leuthen by Victory Point Games

 

In my last post here, I said I was celebrating the anniversary of Frederick the Great’s victory over the Austrians at Leuthen.  I’ve had a chance to play it through once now, and it’s a terrific game, though I suspect it is far more entertaining as a two player game than when played solitaire, and I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Leuthen is a design from Victory Point Games, a company that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know in the last few years.  They have an eclectic range of games, made to very high graphic and material standards.   One of the things I like about VPG are their jigsaw cut hard mounted maps and their thick, laser-cut, beautifully printed counters, so just setting up and playing a VPG game is very satisfying visual and physical experience.  For Leuthen they recruited Frank Chadwick, a legendary game designer associated with one of my favourite old school companies, Games Designers Workshop who has won the Charles Roberts award three times.  I didn’t know until now that he is also a best-selling SF writer, with a  series of novels set in his Space 1889 universe.

The box art describes Leuthen as a game for ages 13 and up, with a complexity rating of 3 out of nine and a solitaire suitability of 5 out of 9 (which I think is generously high), and suggests that the game can be played in 40 minutes.  Certainly it could be explained and played to a conclusion in two hours, I think.

One of the design problems for a war-game of Leuthen is that Frederick’s Prussians were able to surprise a larger but strung out Austrian army and defeat it in detail.  Chadwick solves that problem with two sided counters, which hide a unit’s actual strength and identity until it comes into contact with an enemy unit.   Also in the mix is a large number of Dummy counters for the Prussians, and a few for the Austrians.  The Austrian player sets up first, his units all face down (you can see below that the yellow Austrian counters with the eagle and bayonets are not yet revealed).  The Prussian then sets up his force, also with his units face down. so the Austrian player doesn’t know where the actual weight of the attack is coming from.  The Prussian player moves first and has just six turns to win.  I don’t know a lot about the OOBs of the two armies, but my sense is that the game is set at the brigade level, so if a player years to recreate the exploits of the Potsdamer Grenadiers, he will likely be disappointed.

 I tried to make things interesting by setting up the Austrians somewhat randomly, putting the units on the map as required according to their three corps groupings, but mixing up the dummies within each corps and placing them randomly.  That didn’t work so well, as I ended up with two Austrian dummy counters holding the key town hex of Leuthen, so I quickly did some redistribution.   I put all the Prussian counters facing uo, using the dummy counters when I could to bump into the hidden Austrian counters and reveal them.

 My strategy was to throw most of the Prussian weight at Leuthen and try to break the Austrian centre.   That worked fairly well.  While they are fewer than the Austrians, the Prussian units tend to have slightly higher combat and morale ratings, and more organic artillery, so they are more combat capable and rout less easily than the Austrians do.  The game uses a fairly standard ZOC system, and units have to pay a movement point to change facing at a rate of one movement point per hex side.  Since most units have a movement allowance of two, that forces you to think hard about facing, and to try as much as you can to protect a unit’s vulnerable flanks and rear.  For a fairly simply game, it does a good job of simulating the linear style of 18th century warfare.

I liked the use of cards to add some variety and nuance to the game.  The Prussian player gets to hold a hand of three cards, and the Austrian gets a hand of two.  The effect is somewhat reminiscent of the Command and Colours system.  Here I used the “Mollendorf Finds A Way” card to allow the Prussian infantry to ignore the defensive terrain combat bonus of the Leuthen town hex, which allowed the Prussians to capture it.

This photo isn’t very clear, but it does point to a key part of the game mechanics that is very clever.  Units are not eliminated or step reduced in combat, but if they are forced to retreat, depending on how bad the combat odds are, and what’s rolled, there is a chance they rout,  They can be rallied from rout, but every time that happens, the unit’s parent corps loses a morale point and the unit itself takes a permanent shaken counter.  So in this picture, the Austrian unit has a -1 to its combat value (on the left of the counter) and a -1to its morale (the number in yellow in the centre).  Here it’s being attacked by two Prussian units which is not good.

Here’s an example of how morale works at the corps level.  As the Prussians break through, more and more of the Austrian units are getting Shaken.  Here the Forgach unit of Nadasdy’s corps is shaken and on the edge of the map, with no where left to retreat.  If it retreats again, it is eliminated.  Beside it is another unit belong to Nadasdy’s corps, also shaken.  The Prussian Moritz unit is attacking Forgach.

The Prussian attack is successful and the Forgach unit cannot retreat off the map without being eliminated.  Each retreat or elimination drops the corps’ morale by one point, and Nadasdy’s corps’ morale now hits zero, which means his corps us demoralized.  

Corps demoralization is especially bad news, since all shaken units in a demoralized corps are removed from play.  Thus, in the above example, the Austrian Spiznasz infantry unit, also of Nadasdy’s corps, was shaken, and so it is also removed as are any other shaken units in that corps.  Any of Nadasdy’s units where are still steady now get a Shaken marker.   And it gets worse.  When a corps is shaken, the morale level of every other corps in that army is reduced by one, and if that takes a corps’ morale to zero, it too is demoralized, so the demoralization of one corps can cause a cascade event which can cause an army to unravel.

That is essentially what happened in my game, since the demoralization of Nadasdy’s corps caused the demoralization of Colleredo’s corps, and since a side loses when the majority of its corps are demoralized, with two of the three Austrian corps now pooched, that was a Prussian victory.

One thing you won’t find in the game is any command and control or unit activation rules. Chadwick’s designer notes argue that his approach instead is to give units low movement allowances, so once they are committed to combat, they are essentially committed until one side or another breaks, and so morale becomes a key part of the game system.

There aren’t a lot of paper and counter games of SYW battles, and this one is definitely worth getting at for fans of the period.  I think you’ll like the look and feel of the game, and you’ll find the challenges of hidden deployment and the fairly horrific consequences of corps demoralization to be interesting challenges to overcome.   The challenge for the Prussian player is to mass his small but superior force to maul the Austrians, while the Austrian player will want to husband his forces and commit then where he sees a chance to gang up on Prussian units.  Committing to low-odds counterattacks is a strategy of disaster for the Austrian.

The game’s rulebook promises that it is #1 in a series called Drums and Muskets, so let us hope there are more games in this series.

Blessings to your die rolls!  MP+

Crossing the Start Line: Challenge Day 1

Here’s a rousing picture to show the start of the Fifth Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, courtesy of Ralphus’ Wars Of Louis Quatorze blog, which reminds us that today is the anniversary of Frederick the Great’s victory over the Austrians at Leuthen, of which more below.

I see one fellow here has tripped over his paintbrush, but the rest of the Challenge participate are marching forward with the stalwart bearing of Grenadiers.

To give inspiration to my fellow Challengers, here is Klaus the Organ Grinder, who I met this evening at Kitchener’s Christkindl festival.  Sadly, the monkey is only a puppet, but he was wielded with great panache and the tunes were quite lively.  It was a worthwhile trip.  I stocked up on sausage and stollen for Christmas day and resisted the allure of the cheese pretzels and gluwhein.

 

Unfortunately there are still fellows lounging about on my paint desk, shirkers and stragglers from pre-Challenge projects that need to be chased off   They include this lot of Foundry 28mm Union ACW cavalrymen, who are about 95% done.   Hopefully I can get them finished and out of the way this weekend.

 

As I try to get the Yanks finished, I’ve made a start on my first batch of figures for the Challenge, a section of Artizan British WW2 commandoes, who are destined to play a part in my Weird War Two adventures.   This is my first time painting Artizan figures, and I am liking them.

 

I hope I’ll make some progress on them this weekend, especially tomorrow, while Mrs. Padre is committed to the Anglican Church Women’s Christmas Bazaar (I’ve promised a brief appearance, and I’ll buy you all shortbread cookies if you behave).  

However, to give me a break from painting, I did take down my unpunched copy of the Frank Chadwick designed game, Leuthen, by one of my favourite little wargames companies, Victory Point, and I’ll try and have a report on it done for the next Tuesday Boardgame feature.

 

 

In the meantime, blessings to your brushes!

MP+