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So now that I've got Cuba Libre I have a couple rules questions about it. First, how does removal/theft of Cash work? My reading of it is that when a piece carrying Cash is destroyed the owner can shuffle the Cash to any other piece or remove it, and Assaults, Captured Goods on Attacks, and Infiltrate take any cash that's destroyed. It's not entirely clear though. Also, just to be clear, when executing an Event the acting player chooses the effects unless it specifies a player, correct? Also, not a rules question, but what cards should I mention to new people (like, say, Wargames in Twilight Struggle)? I was thinking Meyer Lansky, Sinatra, General Strike, and Echeverria, as well as the capabilities.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:11
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| # ? May 17, 2024 19:24 |
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Feel really bad about P500ing FitL now because it looks like it cost GMT $64 to ship it to Australia via UPS. I paid $74 for it. Might wait till it hits my FLGS next time.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:24
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Cash is always given to the faction that removed the piece in attacks/kidnaps/assaults/etc. Even for attacks, I've never played it so that you have to roll a 1 (even though the rulebook isn't clear on this). Cash isn't really destroyed/shuffled around according to the owner unless the guerrilla is removed through an event, because you'll notice all ops/specials that remove pieces take cash. I wouldn't read the cards, because the game is so situational really that it depends on when they come up.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:24
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dishwasherlove posted:Feel really bad about P500ing FitL now because it looks like it cost GMT $64 to ship it to Australia via UPS. I paid $74 for it. Might wait till it hits my FLGS next time. Mine was much the same. $72 total to ship to Canada via USPS. Cost of shipping was $42 dollars alone.
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Sep 8, 2014 01:04
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I only P500d because I was afraid that the shops wouldn't have very big stocks and I didn't want to miss out. Shipped on the 28th, still hasn't arrived.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:18
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Alright well we are thread of the month! What's the game of the month for you guys? (please don't just say Fire in the Lake, new games, old games revisited, everything is welcome!) 
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Sep 8, 2014 13:28
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Squad Leader
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Sep 8, 2014 13:34
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You joke but ASL isn't a bad game, Trynant could probably fill whole threads about how he likes it.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:36
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I do legitimately like Squad Leader but I haven't played it in a while and it's not exactly what I'd recommend to someone new to the genre.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:37
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I'd love to say Kemet, but that doesn't really fit. Instead I'll pick perennial winner Twilight Struggle because it got me thinking about which COIN game I want. (Cuba Libre).
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Sep 8, 2014 14:03
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I haven't included my one yet, so I will make mine one that I have played recently: Andean Abyss (still a COIN, so I'm cheating in a way). I think Andean Abyss is a weird game, because you can't help but compare it to its successors. It has semi-obvious balance issues, it lacks some of the fixes that made the other games better (I love monsoons and their mechanisms in FitL), but its where the series started and really did a good job of making the game have the correct 'feel'. I think an issue with it is that some of the specials are WAAAAY better than others (although things like Air Lift don't seem great until you actually use them to strike unexpectedly), so it feels weird to go back to it. It also holds a middle ground between ADP/FitL length games and the shorter CL game.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:09
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Tekopo posted:I haven't included my one yet, so I will make mine one that I have played recently: Andean Abyss (still a COIN, so I'm cheating in a way). AA also has the problems of not having strong enough events, aside from some capabilities. While an op+special activity is usually better than an event in all the games, it's a lot worse in AA where many events are just a little aid added or whatever.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:43
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Yeah, there is quite a lot of variety in terms of how good/bad the events are, and some of the capabilities are crucial to stopping one power from winning. Then again, the same is true about ADP and some of the capabilities the Taliban get.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:45
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dishwasherlove posted:Feel really bad about P500ing FitL now because it looks like it cost GMT $64 to ship it to Australia via UPS. I paid $74 for it. Might wait till it hits my FLGS next time. You think that's bad; I ordered Sword of Rome because it was on sale, paid $64, and the shipping price on the box was $62.95 (also to Australia). I sent them an email to let them know they probably should up their shipping prices, but they didn't respond.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:42
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Does Warhammer Diskwars qualify as a wargame? Because if so, that'd be it. Otherwise my wargame of the month is Lichtenstein's vaporware Russian Civil War game which he's supposed to be making rather than working in some stupid shale gas corporation, dammit!
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Sep 8, 2014 19:37
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Man that reminds me, I should really get at least one Russian Civil War game, which one is the best?
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Sep 8, 2014 19:48
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Smuta: The Time of Troubles
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Sep 8, 2014 19:56
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Wrong Russian Civil War 
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Sep 8, 2014 20:20
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I didn't see it mentioned yet, This P500 had hit GMTs website Comanchería – The Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire is Joel Toppen’s second game design which tells the story of the First Nations people of North America. Like Navajo Wars, Comanchería is a SOLITAIRE game in which the player plays the role of the Numunuu, the Comanche people.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:59
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Ropes4u posted:I didn't see it mentioned yet, drat. I still need to actually finish a scenario in Navajo Wars.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:40
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My wargame of the month is Onward Christian Soldiers. It's poo poo, but I got it for free! (From a disenfranchised friend who bought it years ago because of the theme, while being a light eurogamer, rather than wargamer) It's pretty much Richard H. Berg chromey bullshit, but it's got an extremely neat idea in that there are no limits to movement, but attrition stings more the farther you go. Tekopo posted:Man that reminds me, I should really get at least one Russian Civil War game, which one is the best? As a self-professed connoiseur of the conflict, here are my impressions of a few games I've checked out while working on the aforementioned vaporware heartbreaker: Reds!: It's... Weird. For starters, it's strictly operational, which I'd argue is unfit to represent this particular conflict. It's got just the amount of rule exceptions yuo'd expect from Ted Raicer. OOBs are just plain horrible. Some decisions are just plain weird (for example, for the CRT you add up unit strenghts and compare odds the traditional way, then roll the dice and multiply the die roll result by the number of attacking units. Yeah.) and the overall result is swingy and imo not very historical. After deliberation on Mr. Raicer's motives behind these decision, I eventually acknowledged some of them as fitting and sometimes clever (Makhno allegiance, for example, felt like a cheap cop-out, but it's actually really spot-on). It's certainly a unique, and therefore interesting game, and I guess it gives some insight on the war every now and then. I wouldn't really recommend spending money on it, but if you have a chance to play on a game meetup or something, go for it! Triumph of Chaos: A horrible, sprawling grognard mess. Generous amounts of chrome piled on heaps of chrome, which so thick as to reach event horizon levels. No signs of thoughtful design to be found - though I acknowledge I might have missed some neat ideas, because somehow this game has worse rulebook than Fields of Fire and Through the Ages combined. Still, I can't help but admire it's ambitions, which are quite enormous. Strike of the Eagle: looks pretty decent actually, if you forgive the fact it's actually just a small and specific part of the bigger struggle. Can't really vouch for it, though, as in Poland you can only buy the original edition without improvements added by the Academy Games developers and my OCD just couldn't stand it. Admittedly, Russian Civil War is a bitch to gamify, as I've experienced myself: - The scale is tricky. You can't really cut the political/strategic layer and meaningfully represent the conflict, while the operational scale has too many interesting quirks to leave out with clear conscience. - You really have to convey the 'losing is fun' aspect to the gameplay. The odds are ridiculously stacked against the Whites, who pretty much have one, vulnerable shot at victory followed by a bitter and hopeless strugle for survival. It's like having a game that begins with Operation Typhoon and then jump directly to Bagration (while providing incentives for the doomed player to try his hand at staying on the offensive). For perspective, in Reds!, which I consider to have nearly perfect time frame for gaming this conflict, White player wins if there's any single living unit or city not under bolshevik control. - There's really a lot of unique stuff one has to consider, which can neither be ported straight from more generic systems, while not getting bogged down in chrome. How do you represent effects of cutting and regaining supply by an army that never managed to supply it's soldiers with loving shoes? How do you bake in the Miracle of Vistula, a seemingly bullshit random event that nevertheless defined the dynamic of a front? Which player benefits from the Polish-Soviet ceasefire and why shouldn't he declare it ASAP? - It's a savage civil war, details on whose were being consequently suppressed by the soviets. Getting some cold, hard numbers you need is oftentimes quite tricky. Still, one day... One day... Tevery Best posted:Smuta: The Time of Troubles ). It's a Russian wargame I picked up as a souvenir in Petersburg's artillery museum, mostly amused by existence of local wargames in a loving museum souvenir shop. It's a clunky, random mess of 80s-inspired design, but if you can get your grog on and stomach the awkwardness there's quite a few laughs to be had - and frankly, a few dim flashes of brilliance.
Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 21:42
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Tekopo posted:Man that reminds me, I should really get at least one Russian Civil War game, which one is the best? I don't know about best since it's the only Russian Civil War game that I've played, but I like Reds! from GMT. Designed by Ted Raicer, strategic scale, one map, not a lot of counters. The basic system is very simple but there's lot of chrome with special units, leaders and political rules. Despite that it's easy to learn and fast to play. No idea how out of print and impossible to find it is nowadays.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:44
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Thanks for the analysis Lichtenstein. Reds sounds okay so I'll have to have a look into the rules for it. I did get a chance to play The Spanish Civil War and it's not too bad of a design. It does feel weird that you are constantly removing/replacing units throughout the game, it makes it feel like units are expendable because you are going to lose them anyway, although the starting units in the game are rather crap. I'd like to try it again but the person I played with is gone now.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:51
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Tekopo posted:You joke but ASL isn't a bad game, Trynant could probably fill whole threads about how he likes it. The thread-eating love-it game you think of is Archipelago. Problem with me writing never-ending posts about ASL is that I still haven't gotten my head entirely around it. I have so much rulebook to digest. One day! I haven't had a good chance to get even the starter kits to the table recently either. Sadly I've only played two war games last month; Ars Victor and A Distant Plain. A Distant Plain wins out by a long shot, because it's a treat to get any COIN game to the table. Hope that's not too close to FitL for everyone.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:06
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Although to combine topics I wonder if you could do the Russian civil war on some bastard of the COIN system.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:08
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If AA had just come out, I would have called you crazy, but now with ADP, FitL and the freaking Gallic War coming out, I don't even know anymore.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:11
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Ubik_Lives posted:You think that's bad; I ordered Sword of Rome because it was on sale, paid $64. FYI Milsims stock GMT games and they are often much cheaper than GMT once you factor shipping unless it is a P500 game.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:19
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I think you could easily do one hell of a COIN game out of post-revolution 1918-19 years, after which things got a bit too frontliney/conventional. For the "proper" civil war there could be something neat to be done with the general, uh, COIN-like abstraction of operations highlighting the overarching political tensions, but it'd probably be too different to really consider the same series. Like Twilight Struggle to We the People.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:30
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On that note, what conflicts would the wargoons like to see made into COIN titles? (Or just into a title in general.) I might be weird or misguided, but I'd love to see a thoughtful COIN take on the cartel war in Mexico. I live in Arizona near the border, and my fiancee has family on both sides of the El Paso/Juarez border, so the conflict is immediate and present to me. But I almost never hear the conflict discussed in the mainstream American media, except as a footnote to "border security" screaming matches. (The few exceptions have been...well, disgusting.) COIN seems like an ideal system to shed some light on the conflict, given the urban-guerilla nature of the conflict, the political corruption inherent in the government's response, the campaigns of terror against journalists and bloggers, the rise and proliferation of the autodefensas, the influential relationship with a "neutral" neighboring power, and so on. It does raise a peripheral question, though--can (and should) a designer attempt to gamify such an immediate conflict? Particularly since the cartel war seems to have no end in sight, partly because none of the parties can really articulate an end goal (other than "eradication").
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Sep 8, 2014 23:36
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Gutter Owl posted:On that note, what conflicts would the wargoons like to see made into COIN titles? (Or just into a title in general.) US civil war Israel - Palestinian - might to many players in the current conflict. Falkland Islands The cartel could be seek cash and power as they do now
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Sep 9, 2014 01:02
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ACW didn't have enough 'hearts and minds', wasn't really asymmetrical, and only really had two factions. (There's quite a few conventional wargames about the ACW.) I would like to see something with Prohibition-era law enforcement, with a police faction attempting to contain various crime organizations.
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Sep 9, 2014 01:13
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Gutter Owl posted:It does raise a peripheral question, though--can (and should) a designer attempt to gamify such an immediate conflict? Particularly since the cartel war seems to have no end in sight, partly because none of the parties can really articulate an end goal (other than "eradication"). ADP seems to have worked out pretty well.
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Sep 9, 2014 04:38
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Anyone up for a Twilight Struggle game via Vassal this weekend? I'm playing my first game next week, and I'd like to have some experience before teaching it.Gutter Owl posted:On that note, what conflicts would the wargoons like to see made into COIN titles? (Or just into a title in general.)
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Sep 9, 2014 09:42
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Fat Samurai posted:Anyone up for a Twilight Struggle game via Vassal this weekend? I'm playing my first game next week, and I'd like to have some experience before teaching it.
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Sep 9, 2014 09:46
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I was thinking about splitting the Republican band between the irregulars (maquis) and the regular army and Government. There was some conflict between them. Foreing powers, maybe?
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Sep 9, 2014 09:48
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I'd love a Sino-Japanese/Chinese Civil war game. 3 players, the Nationalists, the Communists, and the Japanese. The game has two phases, at the start it is the two China players going up against the Japanese player. However, if the Japanese player fails to win, the game enters into the second stage, where the two Chinese factions go at it against each other, competing for victory.
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Sep 9, 2014 10:11
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Finally managed to play Unconditional Surrender face to face this weekend. We played the Barbarossa scenario in about four hours. The first turn took a long rear end time to play out as we were going through the list of DRMs for every unit every time but after that it went fast (considering the amount of things happening). The rules are also really elegant, we started playing after about 5 minutes of rules explanation. I do feel that the real strength of this game is in the grand campaign, but I don't know how I'll ever get to play that irl.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:48
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Once you get to the stage in USE where you can just do the DRMs without referring to the cheat sheet every single time, the game is surprisingly quick. It's pretty easy to remember that germans get +2, tanks get +2 and any sort of terrain just gives a -1 etc.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:57
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My game of the month has to be War of the Ring. Playing it again recently has reminded me how well it captures the source material, even if I hardly get a chance to play it due to length and complexity.
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Sep 9, 2014 14:22
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Fields of Fire reprint keeps getting pushed back...and back...and even further back...
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Sep 9, 2014 23:16
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