WARGAMING: Saturday (4 March 2006) At Great Escape Games!

Hi Guys,

Well, yesterday, I mosey'ed (How do you spell mosey?) on over to Great Escape Games with two objectives in mind:

1. Possibly play a Battleground WWII minis game with Kurt, Mark and gang and/or...
2. Play some board games with the excellent Dave Story, Kimbo and anyone else around for boardgaming day...

I came out very well, indeed!

======

Dave and Kimbo beat Kurt and Mark to the store by a good margin so we all sat down to play one of Dave's latest acquisitions:

"Conquest of the Empire," the newer Eagle Games variant.

Here's a Board Game Geek (BGG) link:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/17710

And here's the BGG blurb:

This game is a remake of the 1984 classic that was part of Milton Bradley's Game Master Series. In this game you are one of many Roman generals vying for power in Imperial Rome, employing legions, cavalry, and catapults to reach your objectives.

This version of the game has two sets of rules, one set similiar to the original version (except that it has fixed the broken catapult rules) and an original set of rules based on Martin Wallace's Struggle of Empires.

Mike O'Brien and Charlie joined us so we had a full table of five.

Like most Eagle games, while it was rich in game components (...hundreds of little plastic gaming pieces and hordes of little cardboard counters), I found gameplay a little lacking.

I also suffered one of my all-too-regular curses... of playing opposite Mike O'Brien. Mike's a great guy and all, but we seem to have gameplay styles that conflict HEAVILY with one another! I ended up planted in the East with bases in Macedonia and Egypt. And, of course, Mike also ends up in Egypt and decides to make it his home base of operations... right where I wanted my home as well... ensue COMBAT!

I barely won, and only because I was persistent. And meantime, my chances for victory were utterly lost. It turns out that "Conquest" is as much a political game as a game of ancient warfare.

We ended early and Kimbo and Dave were the only two competitors. I had a good time and saved a whole ton of armies to give someone else a hard time. Poor Mike was nearly wiped out.

======

Meanwhile, Kurt and Mark showed up.

As usual, Mark showed up with some gorgeous new terrain that he SCRATCH-BUILT and a horde of 15mm WWII figures. Kurt showed up too in his trademark brown leather jacket with his trademark sense of well-honed sarcasm...

Kurt, Mark, Dick and I have been experimenting with Star Mogul from Alpha Forge Productions and have, well... been disappointed.

http://www.alphaforgegames.com/

Star Mogul has some balance issues and when Dick's forces were slaughtered in the last game, the guys decided to try and rewrite the Star Mogul rules a bit and in the meantime, find another skirmish game to play around with.

Well, it turned out that Mark liked Easy Eight's Battleground WWII (BGWWII) so... lo and behold, that'll be the next rule set!

Two links to BGWWII:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/20441

http://theminiaturespage.com/rules/ww2/bgww2.html

While, I didn't play I did observe the game and I liked it. Kurt played Russians and Mark, Germans. Mark, as usual, set up a scenario in which he was hard-pressed and Kurt's troops carried the day.

The game mechanics are good and flow well. I can't wait to play the game again.

And speaking of BGWWII, one of my friends who I played BGWWII with has recently moved (...studying in grad school) and has set up his own web site. I'm talking about Jon Compton, the editor of Fire & Movement magazine and one heck of a nice guy.

Here's a link to his new web site:

http://www.joncompton.com/bio.html

======

Meanwhile, Mike, Kimbo, Charlie and I decided to get one more game in before we headed home and somehow, we decided on Wellington from GMT Games.

BGG link to follow:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/11265

BGG blurb:

Adapted from the designer's "The Napoleonic Wars" covers the campaigns in Spain
and Portugual between 1812 and 1814.Simplified diplomacy as the four players
play in two teams (Spain & Britain vs France Nord & France Sud).

We each took the following roles:

The Good Guys (...because I played them!):
1. Me as the Spanish
2. Kimbo as mighty Wellington and the English

The French (...and Bad Guys!):
3. Charlie as France Nord
4. Mike O'Brien as France Sud

The game was an interesting historical scenario and I had a good time overall, but I wanted to mention that the event cards had some pretty confusing wording. If it wasn't that I was playing with an easy-going bunch, I could have foreseen games ending over such arguments. Rules lawyers would have loved those cards.

Well, pretty early on, it started getting ugly for French. After a few initial victories, my Spanish really started kicking Mike O'Brien around (See! I told you I end up opposite him just about every game... even when we're allies!). By the end of turn three, the French were almost entirely forced out of Southern Spain.

Charlie did a better job with France Nord until about turn two when Kimbo set out with a reinforced Wellington and started ripping holes in the French bulwarks in central Spain.

And, it just went downhill from there.

We fell into a pattern:

- The French threw everything they had at Wellington... who ran when necessary and...

- Meanwhile the Spanish cleaned up, claiming the open territories that the English created.

- Which oddly enough, are rather historically accurate results.

I won the game... allied victory that time.

======

And I also wanted to report that my friend, Tas'es new blog is going gangbusters:

http://pauljamesog.blogspot.com/

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.