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It was actually surprisingly easy to play once we got going, I had some apprehension going in since the rules are a svelte 24 pages but everything is set up in a very consistent and intuitive way. Oh and that rulebook owns. Really easy to look things up in when you need to. Highlight of the game was my glorious troops bravely charging through my own minefield to get into melee with the enemy 
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Sep 14, 2013 09:23
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 09:22 |
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Whoops, we did not. That would certainly have made the units less fragile. I enjoyed the more random recovery in Europe, it evened out in the end and made breaking more dangerous. I might have to get this game but I know I'll hardly ever get to play it 
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Oct 4, 2013 18:08
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Definitely, but it would have to be next week. I'm pretty hyped about a No Retreat Poland game as well, it's likely a "bonus" like the Crete (or was it Malta?) scenario in GMT's NR2.
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Oct 25, 2013 10:55
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Paul Koenig's Market Garden games may be what you're thinking of. Incidentally, VPG recently released PK's Fortress Europe, covering the entire Western Front. Anyone played that or the old AH game it's supposedly based on?
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Jan 28, 2014 17:03
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So I caved in and got Unconditional Surrender. I think I might be a grognard now because first thought as I open the box is I want to clip those counters. Will a nail clipper work or do I need to get one of those special tools? PYF counterclipping lifehacks
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Jul 19, 2014 17:32
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By the way, I managed to make a ghetto corner cutter with a nailclipper, a paperclip and some electrician's tape. I clipped all of Unconditional Surrender with it, highly recommended. Then I clipped Field Commander: Napoleon  
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Jul 25, 2014 13:17
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I played it a lot, it's a really interesting game. It's amazing how well it works at giving a believable account of the eastern front with a single player. The main reason it is different from other hex and counter games is that there are only very few actual "units" among the counters. Most counters rather represent the shape of the frontline. The combat system during the Soviet turn also ties into this, with the most important combat modifier being how many Soviet hexes are adjacent to the attacked hex. The Soviets keep attacking every possible hex in order of vulnerability until they can't attack anymore. This has to be seen in action to really be understood, but it's a simple rule that leads to believable results without any "roleplaying" as the other side. In fact, in order to win the (Axis) player must keep making the worst possible decisions for the Soviets within the rule. Other interesting things that it does is an initiative tracker that tracks the overall state, command, and equipment of the armies as well as the political will of the countries, as a unified system that is hugely important in most of the game. There is also a chit-pull mechanism for resolving most combats, where some chits have an "X" and get removed from play after being pulled. This means that every time you pull a chit, you are potentially permanently worsening the potential future pulls, as a way of simulating strategic exhaustion. I could write a lot more about it, it's really a one of a kind game that does so many things right. That said, I would still wait for the 2nd ed, if only because the counters in 1st ed are tiny and I have fat fingers.
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Aug 15, 2014 10:08
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Well VP is only one of three ways to win. In fact, when I played last week I got a (minor) victory at the end of the game in 1945, by slowing down the Soviet advance enough. It was a pretty intense game, I encircled Moscow in 1942 but kept getting events that refortified it. I never too the city. In '43 the initative dropped to Contested but I managed to capture Archangelsk and stop the Lend Lease, which meant I was able to keep the initiative until '44 when the Soviets finally started pushing back in earnest, finally breaking the two-year siege on Moscow. I agree that it can snowball really hard if you make a mistake or get unlucky - being in Axis Collapse means that the frontline will move 4-5 hexes per turn without you being able to do anything about it.
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Aug 15, 2014 14:16
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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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StashAugustine posted:On the subject of WWII games, how hard to learn is Unconditional Surrender? I managed to teach a group Cuba Libre verbally, is it more/less complicated than that? Once you've got the hang of it, it's really easy to teach. Teach the activation system, two different types of combat, and then start your turn. Teach the CRT and the supply system as it comes up. Total rules explanation: 5 minutes.
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Sep 24, 2014 05:45
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What timezone are you in? I'd be up for some No Retreat in the weekend.
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Sep 26, 2014 22:51
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Does anyone have recommendations for wargames that are: print and play, and playable solitaire? They can be free or paid.
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Oct 3, 2014 16:30
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So I played some Vietnam Solitaire: Special Edition over the weekend and it's pretty bad. I only played the special edition rules though, from what I understand the original rules may be better. Problems I saw with the game in order of seriousness: The game is a best-case design. What I mean by this is that the designer relies on randomness to provide a coherent and interesting game, much like BatHotH. In the best-case, this will work out great, and also have a low rules burden. In the worst case, however, the game may be entirely trivial or impossibly difficult, or just not make any sense at all. For example, the entire NVA might sit right outside Saigon for the entire endgame without making a move because the offensive die roll did not come up pointing at Saigon. Compare to the best solitaire game ever made (The Barbarossa Campaign), where, due to how the economy phase works the game always have an overarching story. Depending on how well you do and how lucky you are (and luck is somewhat mitigated by the chit system) you may do better or worse than history, but eventually the Soviets will bounce back and push hard. It makes sense narratively and every turns matters and feels tense. Further reading, The Lesson of Vlaada The game is broken. There is an exploit where you can keep the entire NVA trapped in Hue almost indefinitely. Eventually you run out of NVA counters to place in Hue and then the NVA can't appear anywhere else for the rest of the game. At that point you've just got to park a single unit in every other area to whack VC as they appear and you've won. I stumbled into this on my first game without reading about it. According to a BGG thread, this never occured to the designer. The combat system is annoying. It's roll-to-hit and most unit need to roll below or equal to 1 or 2 to hit. You can retreat after one round but you often don't want to so you have to roll a LOT of dice every time you fight some stupid VC unit.  He misses, I miss He misses, I miss He misses, I miss He misses, I hit, ok now for the next 5 battles.It's not offensively bad but I must say I expected more from a game that got its own episode on Three Moves Ahead and apparently spawned several clones.
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Oct 15, 2014 08:31
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We talked a bit about it earlier in the thread. In a nutshell, what's cool about it is that it uses completely asymmetric combat systems for the player (German) and AI (Soviet) which makes the AI turns not too complex to process but also organic feeling. Rather than track bonuses and penalties for every little thing the overall state of the war is condensed to an "initiative" score which limits what you/the Soviets can do. Drawbacks are a somewhat annoying and anticlimactic victory system, and terrible components in the current edition. There's a 2nd edition coming but knowing VPG (it's a small company with a lot of games) it won't be until halfway through next year or so.
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Oct 15, 2014 09:11
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Yeah, I'm hoping that they'll replace/remake the VP victory for 2nd edition. It's not nearly as satisfying as capturing the three major objectives anyways.
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Oct 15, 2014 16:43
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We talked about that a couple pages back but basically The Barbarossa Campaign and Navajo Wars are the thread darlings.
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Oct 27, 2014 18:40
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So I noticed that my FLGS has a "family games!" category on their website. Most of them are variants of Monopoly, Clue etc. And then there's this  edit: I told my wife, "you'll never believe what I found under family games". And she replied, "it's not the napoleon game is it?"
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Oct 29, 2014 09:54
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That sounds really cool. I'd love to play a full game but I don't really have the space to leave it unpacked. Did the Soviets get to fight at all?
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Nov 3, 2014 15:37
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The Last King of Scotland? (I did not actually play it) (it's not actually about Scotland) It definitiely ticks #1, it immedeately came to my mind when you asked for an under-represented conflict. It has some political elements. Morholt fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 22:33
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Actually I skimmed the rules now and it is a bucket-of-dice, roll-to-hit design. 
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Nov 3, 2014 23:01
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 The Barbarossa Campaign, ohh yeah. (I've clipped them since, don't worry) From the MilHist thread in A/T I learnt that the SS often had sub-par equipment due to Nazi bureaucracy being a mess, so they often used captured or even improvised small arms. edit: I once played No Retreat with a guy that as soon as he saw the SS counter went into a big speech about how the SS were the last true noble warriors  Then he told me a story about how this SS fallschirm regiment was encircled once, the Americans asked them to surrender, and the SS commander's reply? "Nuts!" ("Nüsse" presumably?) At this point I wondered if he was messing with me but then again Wehraboos aren't known for being smart so I just got out as quick as I could. Morholt fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 20:33
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COOL CORN posted:Got it backwards. He also belonged to an ethnic minority which made the Nazi-worship even more puzzling.
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Nov 19, 2014 21:05
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Tekopo posted:We've gone too far, TOO FAR! lol if you don't mount your counters on magnets and play on a whiteboard in your garage.  (not mine)
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Nov 22, 2014 00:15
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Tevery Best posted:Then why does not the same apply to Warsaw and Krakow? Krakow was the capital of the GG, so why doesn't it get the same treatment? Why is Moscow not Moskau, and Prague not Prag? Presumably because Poznan and Gdansk were part of Germany pre WWI, so the German names might have been more widely used.
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Dec 13, 2014 09:42
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Tevery Best posted:Krakow and Prague were part of Austria-Hungary, also a mostly German-speaking country as far as official matters were concerned. http://imgur.com/xwtZ7X9
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Dec 14, 2014 18:07
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I'd love to play USE, but can't really sit down until the 21st because of Christmas stuff.
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Dec 18, 2014 18:04
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Dibs on a spot if it turns out to be USE. The designer wrote some rules for PBEM games at the back of the rulebook you should check out in that case.
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Dec 18, 2014 20:49
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John Tiller's Panzer Campaigns or Modern Campaigns. More like computer wargames than board wargames, but really excellent. Didn't play any of the Shenandoah games as I don't have iThings, but I heard the second title is bad in that it's essentially decided by weather rolls and goes on for too long. e: You may want to ask in the grog thread Morholt fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Dec 31, 2014 |
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Dec 31, 2014 08:26
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I just found out that the head of the Swedish Academy (the Nobel Prize people) has designed several hex and counter wargames. Wargames: Literally Art
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Jan 14, 2015 14:28
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Zombie #246 posted:I haven't had the chance to play any real grognardy war games, but with the traditional hex and counter games, how is die rolling for combat handled? Will bad luck ruin your day or are there a lot of ways to mitigate it? There is commonly a combat resolution table, or CRT, where you compare the attacking and defending forces and use either the difference or the quotient to select which column to roll against:  Note for example, that in this CRT +0 gives 3/6 chance of a DW or better; +1 gives 4/6; and +3 gives 5/6. Note also that there is a variety of possible outcomes, rather than the simple "damage dealt" that is inherent in the bucket-of-dice model.
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Jan 18, 2015 09:32
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Is there a decent wargame about galley combat? I was thinking mostly early modern but ancient might work as well.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:06
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Battle for Moscow is expressly intended as an introduction to hex and counter games. I like it a lot although it can become predictable after several plays. There's also Unconditional Surrender: Case Blue, which is sort of a demo version of US: WW2 in Europe. It's very good but personally it didn't click with me until I played the larger game.
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Feb 4, 2015 08:25
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Selecta84 posted:The larger game meaning Unconditional Surrender from GMT? I saw some reviews and it sounded great but it looks a bit intimidating to me. A demo version like that one might help. Selecta84 posted:I thought about Vassal, too. Is there a KI for Vassal? Or do I have to play as both sides?
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Feb 4, 2015 09:04
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Selecta84 posted:Any easy hex & counter games with a good solo mode on Vassal? Dedicated solo games tend not to be on vassal however.
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Feb 4, 2015 09:18
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Lichtenstein posted:[edit] Also, no more GMT Nappy 20 games. I agree with this decision. Now I can rationalize getting some of the new games more easily, instead of waiting for Rising Glory.
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Feb 10, 2015 12:04
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Are there any hex-based wargames that calculate line of sight using interesting methods? I read Simmons' article on the subject and got interested.
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Feb 21, 2015 13:12
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Welp, I read the Combat Commander Chat as I was going to the game store and I have bad impulse control it turns out: I notice that it's not the most recent printing though. Are there any differences in the new edition apart from the cover? As for solo games, I always recommend The Barbarossa Campaign. It's a strategic hex and counter that manages to have an entirely rules driven opponent, and works well. It does have terrible components and there's a bunch of busywork in the form of flipping over counters and moving around chits each turn.
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Mar 2, 2015 19:35
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 Several hours later, all sorted and shorn of their umbilical corner fluff. Now to set up a scenario..
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Mar 4, 2015 15:45
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There was only one tray included and the game shop was out of them  I like the idea about smokes and objectives though.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:11
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 09:22 |
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Combat Commander trip report: Started with Fat Lipki and after a bit of experimenting with orders and useless firing the Russians proceeded to walk over the Germans. Just as the Germans looked beaten they drew 2 reinforcement events and one walking wounded which evened things out. In particular an IG 18 was routed several Russian units. Still, the Germans were close to the surrender limit and had units in bad positions in the forest around objective 4, and an advance into melee saw the Russians win. Then we played Hedgerows & Handgrenades which started out with an American squad plus officer stupidly moving onto the straight road within LoS of a heavy machinegun on the other end. Movement in other areas of the map went slightly better but still the American forces got fragmented and two units eliminated. The Americans got lucky with Sniper triggers plus a KIA event which eliminated two units close to my forward observer officer which we of course interpreted as him going full The Patriot on them. The Americans eventually recovered and took the center objectives by melee, which together with a few stray German units being killed off triggered German surrender. The Americans used 5 fire for effect orders, hitting the Germans once and the Americans four times  , historically accurate I suppose.The second map played a lot better, largely due to us getting a better idea of firing odds and when to discard. Overall very enjoyable and we'll definitely be playing more in the future.
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Mar 7, 2015 08:58
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