Mel Gibson Lets me Down Again

For people of a certain age the name Mel Gibson means Road Warrior. The young Dr. Fischer to be would never have guessed that the awesomely cool Mad Max would eventually morph into a cackling maniac with an addiction to humiliating public misbehaviour. But the present day Dr. Fischer had at least some small hopes that Mel would hold it together for We Were Soldiers, a film based on the events at Ia Drang in late 1965.

The battle of Ia Drang is important in a number of respects. It's the first major encounter between the United States and the forces of North Vietnam in that conflict. It's an example of the early use of airmobility in that war. It features many of the hallmarks of that conflict- overwhelming American air and artillery support, a generally professional level of performance by the American troops, and the vital role of intelligence in the war. Finally, it represents a mammoth and bloody encounter that takes place in an isolated and strategically meaningless area. All these elements would repeat throughout the conflict.

In terms of the movie, I was hoping for at least a decent war film and maybe some interesting looks at the terrain. I have to say that We Were Soldiers was instead just terrible. Because the movie changes the Entire Ending of the Battle. In history the Americans don't "win," they make it through the battle. Surviving the encounter and holding the position are massive challenges but the battle doesn't end on a high note. The North Vietnamese simply melt away.

In the movie the Americans find themselves about to take on a final attack. At that point the pour out of their trenches and rout the Vietnamese. Moving at a run the 400 Americans drive the 4000 enemies UP a hill. The Vietnamese gather beyond the crest of the hill and level all their weapons at the ridgeline, waiting for the Americans to come across. It's going to be a massacre! And then two American helicopters appear literally fifteen feet above the Vietnamese and blast them all into oblivion. They don't approach, they just appear, like Jason from Camp Crystal Lake appearing behind you when you look in the bathroom mirror. They're Stealth UH-1's! Mel Gibson and his troops end the film moving through the ruined Vietnamese base camp, humbled at the massive destruction.

Yet Another Bad War Movie

The rest of the movie is pretty average but the end is so wrong on so many levels. It's not editing for time, it's not combining characters to make the story manageable, it's just completely altering the event. Why not just rewrite the whole war, make it a brushfire skirmish on a small Caribbean island and have Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison lead a rag tag squad to victory against giant zombie spiders. Get Michael Bey on line one!

Spencer Smith Minis Arrive

After reading issues of Battlegames and various classic Charles Grant books it's become a fantasy to own a collection of toy soldier style Spencer Smiths. On a seemingly unrelated note, my mother in law took the wife to England this Spring. The connection?  I was able to think quickly and arrange to have a massive pile of lead delivered to their hotel and then carted back to the US in their luggage! The wife was a good sport even as she wished my hobby was feather collecting or stamps.

I've experimented with two styles of painting for the new minis. The first is to leave strong black lines as borders between colours and body parts. The second is to use only blocks of paint and ignore shading, highlight, and all the typical tricks we use in modern figure painting.

Here are the grenadiers. I used the painting guide from Nec Pluribus Impar site detailing the army of Piedmont in the War of the Austrian Succession. Because really, why not build an army from an obscure conflict that's completely overshadowed by the following massive conflagration? And even an army fighting in the less well known theater of that obscure conflict.  I'm sure I'll find oodles of opponents.

Up next are the fusiliers. I used just blocks of colour and skipped any defining lines. I have to admit, it made the process absolutely zip on by.  It almost feels like cheating to whip off a unit so quickly. In the end I think I'm going to stick with this approach. I like the speed and my skills are not up to maintaining extremely fine lines, even when I base coat in black.

In both cases I am pretty thrilled to perfect my facial hair drawing skills. Lucky this is a heavily mustachioed time period! Cavalry is next.

My New Haul!

Myriad Games in Salem had its bi-yearly charity auction this weekend and I was able to attend for the first time. The store takes donations of old games and then auctions them off, with anywhere from 20-100% of the proceeds going to charity (the remainder go to the game's donor, not the store).

A Pile 'o Fun

This auction certainly had its' highs and lows. There are plenty of copies of Munchkin and Trivial Pursuit to go around! And also Scene It, which is secretly a lot of fun to play. There were also some wild old gems including an interactive VHS game (Dragon Strike!) and a lurid oil painting of a demon from Dungeons and Dragons that was just both hard to look at And hard to look away from. But buried amidst the dross were some real treasures. Basic games like Dominion, Bang, and Carcassonne. Some more outre entries like Space Alert. And some lovely little treats. I was outbid on Blood Bowl but then my luck changed.

I managed to walk away with thirty pounds of Tide of Iron game and expansions, a copy of Hybrid and Hybrid:Nemesis, A Combat Commander set, and a huge box of Space Marines. Now some of this is headed to eBay but what's left is going to be awesome and basically have paid for itself.

So a productive afternoon, if you use the word productive in the inappropriate sense!

As an aside, how do we explain Rackham to our children? Yes kids, there was once a company that produced an endless stream of insanely beautiful miniatures but one day they all decided to change their business plan and then go bankrupt. Have fun with your horrible Mantic miniatures. Tragic. But that being said, the games are first to eBay I suspect.
Hybrid

A Close Call

I recently picked up an iPad to use as a email and banking tool. Suffice it to say that the iPad is terrible for those things, as well as pretty much every other task but one. It's a nice gaming platform. Since it was free and full of buzz I threw down zero dollars and picked up Hearthstone.

Hearthstone is an online card game similar to Magic. You have a deck of cards and play against an opponent. Each player has some hit points and the person who can reduce their opponent to zero hit points first wins. Some cards attack your opponent, some protect you, some deploy minions who can attack or defend or both and some cards alter your minion's abilities. You can play as one of several classes, Rogue or Cleric or Warrior for example. Each class has special cards and abilities. The game has huge replay value based on the number of cards available and the various classes.

So here's the rub. The cards are available for purchase in virtual packs of five. You don't know which cards you'll get and some are more rare and powerful than others. The more packs you purchase, the greater the chances of getting some awesome and useful card. You can also earn virtual currency by playing the game enough times. In theory if you played all the time you could earn a lot of currency and then buy more packs without spending actual money. Keep in mind these "cards" and "packs" only exist on your computer.

In its favor Hearthstone is a fun game. It's fast and entertaining. That being said:

Sheer Craziness

After a Lot of playing I suddenly recoiled and grabbed my head. God d@#m, I just spent ten hours perfecting my skills of doing Nothing, wasted time earning Points so that I could waste more time doing Nothing, and lost a lot of games because I wasn't up for spending real money on cards that Don't Even Exist.  It's insane!

I like board games because they're fun, they're social, and I feel like you do tune your brain while playing. You lean to manage resources, cooperate, take chances, and focus on goals. In Hearthstone you're alone, losing a ton unless you throw down some serious time or money, and perfecting your skills at playing Hearthstone. "Hey honey, I'm going to ignore you and the kids and after three hours I'll be marginally better at a completely abstract and otherwise useless task."

So Hearthstone is gone and the next day I built a new door for the chicken coop. Whew.

Final Charlie Don't Surf Playtest

I had one more chance to test the game last weekend with trained wargamers this time. The good news is that after a few minutes of play the game flowed pretty well without my constant direction. One thing you look for in a convention game is to have the GM disappear into the background and let the players concentrate on having fun. So that was good.

I continue to be very happy with the 6mm figures. The main drawback to them is that NVA and American uniforms are pretty identical at that scale. I'm going to have to give them all banners of some sort.

The battle of Hoa Tan was a huge success for the Americans, with high NVA losses and (relatively) few US casualties. We found that Charlie Don't Surf is accurate enough in that this scenario is terribly hard for the NVA players. They are outnumbered and outgunned from the start and ambushes and snipers just don't slow down the American steamroller enough to make a difference. I hate to meddle with the historical order of battle but to make the game fun for all the players I'll be cutting down on the American troops.

The consensus in the end is that the rules are decent, the game flows quickly enough once you have played a turn or two, and that the terrain is almost con-ready. Compared to my usual games which appear at Huzzah with the paint still drying that's not too shabby at all.

The John Carter Game is Mine at Last

When I was growing up our family friends the Tsocanos had a huge supply of Joe Kubert Tarzan comics. As the old folks remember those magazines also included Korak (son of Tarzan, and I blush to imagine someone might not know that), Carson of Venus, and John Carter of Mars. As a result I grew up assuming that John Carter's adventures were commonly known pop culture, along with Captain Scarlet and the Thunderbirds.

This was not the case.

That being said I ended up reading the John Carter books, buying the John Carter miniatures, and in off moments wondering whether life on mars with a sword in my hand and a princess on my arm might in some ways be more cool that school and cub scouts. At least a John Carter movie would be pretty awesome.

Again, wrong.

Really, It's All Intuitive

All this is a lead in to my recent impulse purchase of a used copy of the John Carter: Warlord of Mars game, published by SPI in 1979. I had always been curious about this game and now as an adult I could own it and play it and try and exorcise those memories of that horrible movie. Plus, it turns out the game was designed by Mark Herman, a very famous and successful designer. Further, it has an introduction from Scott Bizar, the owner of Fantasy Games Unlimited and an old friend, mentor and employer who helped shape my early gaming years. Finally, the family was going to be out of town for a few weeks so I had plenty of time to learn the game and play!

Wrong again!

After five minutes of reading the rules I was left wondering if I had actually played games like this in the past. I could swear I remember playing Squad Leader and Panzerblitz, Arab Israeli Wars, Mordor, CA, Seventh Fleet,  but maybe I just imagined it all. Because these rules are just impenetrable. There are 28 pages of "sections" and "cases" and they're all arranged digitally (ie. case [6.53]). There are also eight pages of charts and tables (at least they have the decency to call it "Charts and Tables" and not a Quick Reference Sheet). There is a Prison Companion Table, an Arena Duel Table, and a Hand of Fate Table. Plus many others.

Counters! 400 of Them

I'm probably laying it on a little thick but I think my capacity for sections and cases has diminished. About 176%. Maybe I was just extremely clever as a teen and now just mildly clever as an adult. That's probably it! Still, it's another one of those "you can't go home again" moments.

Having said that, the Kubert comics are still awesome! Reprints are available.

Another Charlie Don't Surf Playtest

Last night I inflicted miniatures gaming upon my board gaming group at Myriad Games in Salem. Suffice it to say that they were Very Good Sports and that I completely botched any rules explanations and probably left them mystified.

That being said, what lessons were learned?

Did I mention those people were indeed Very Good Sports as well as being Inhumanly Patient? If you like board games and you're in the Salem, NH area then you should absolutely pay the store a visit.

Renee's ambushing troops accumulate some shock

Secondly, while I feel I'm not unclever, I'm still struggling with the TooFatLardies rules. Charlie Don't Surf is not complex in its' foundation but the basic structure begins to fray when various details are addressed. So, for example, squads and platoons move and fire easily enough. The rules concerning them are intuitive in that once you've moved one squad you know the system. Unfortunately there is a somewhat different system for attack helicopters. And snipers. And antiaircraft fire. And artillery. Not vastly different, but different enough that you need to know them as addition sets of rules.

And then there are the modifiers. I understand the justification for modifying die rolls but there are a Lot of modifiers in Charlie Don't Surf. I ended up just ignoring a lot of them during the game and setting an arbitrary target for success in order to speed the game up and cut down on paper cuts as I flipped through the rules.

Helicopter stand in background

So beyond needing a bit of streamlining the rules are still basically sound and do create a nicely realistic Viet Nam conflict experience. The NVA are outgunned but with snipers and bunkers have the ability to slow and blunt the American advance. They do need to stay mobile. If the Americans can pin the NVA in place that's the end of the battle- and that's very period appropriate.

The terrain was also tweaked a bit and is getting closer to where I want it. I've gone through two bottles of Fray Block as I cut up dozens of tiny rice paddies out of towel material. I'm going to need a few more before I'm done.

Hopefully I'll get one more playtest in before Huzzah. Not with the Myriad folks though, they have done their part!