Power Grid

With most of our Monday night gamers either sick or at work, Jesse and I decided to learn Power Grid, an economic game where you compete to provide power to the largest network of cities. We used the German board; the US grid is also an option in the basic game. You have to carefully balance how much you spend on power plants vs fuel vs expanding your network; in the early game, you may find that the fuel to provide power costs you more than you earn from providing that power. Jesse went for wind turbines, which have no fuel cost but only power a few cities; he was able to pull ahead in the short term but didn't upgrade frequently enough. I went with coal and oil and frequent upgrades, and managed to surge ahead on the last couple of turns. We both had a good time with it but we think it would be even better with a couple more players.

Xia: Legends of a Drift System

Had a good game of "Xia: Legends of a Drift System" with Darci, Kris, Jesse and Tom Paul. Kris took the lead by exploring and finding Fame Points, but Jesse pulled ahead by trading. My moment of glory was destroying Darci's ship (which was already heavily damaged) by ramming, thereby earning the Viking title.

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu is based on the multiple-award-winning Pandemic game. In RoC you have Investigators instead of Scientists, cultists instead of diseases, and Elder Gods instead of outbreaks. The board shows four towns--Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport--each with half a dozen locations. If you get enough cards associated with a town, you can seal that town's Eldritch Gate; if you seal all four gates, you win. If you get overwhelmed by insanity, cultists, shoggoths, or Elder Gods, you lose.
In my first time through, playing solo, I drew the Hunter and the Driver as my investigators. The Hunter plowed along, wiping out cultists and shoggoths (atlhough she did go insane for a while); the Driver tagged along behind her until he collected enough town cards, then raced off to seal the next Gate. I won handily enough--but then I realized that I'd missed "if a site has three cultists, do not place a fourth; instead, an Awakening Ritual occurs."

So I tried again. In the second game, using a Hunter and a Detective, I'd gotten two gates closed when my Hunter successfully fought a shoggoth--but the Sanity roll you take for fighting a shoggoth triggered another two cultists appearing, on a location which already had two, meant Dagon Awakened, which added one cultist to every Gate location, which triggered another Awakening, and thens plummted out of control and then Cthulhu.

Stonewall off Ferrol

Phil came down from Williamsburg to learn Ironclads, and took the formidable CSS Stonewall vs the slightly less formadiable USS Niagara and the rather fragile USS Sacramento.  The scenario is one we've done several times before, with the Rebel ship attempting to get out of the harbor and cripple one of the Union vessels along the way.
In the first game, Phil took the Stonewall and sailed pretty much straight for the board edge, I took Niagara in close, suffering several substatial hits along the way; however, while Niagara is light on armor, she has lots of hull points, so she chugged along resolutely. And then I got in close astern and gave him a rake with my full broadside--11" Dahlgrens and 150 pounders. That wrecked his steering gear, and from there it was just a matter of following his wake and giving him one broadside while the other one reloaded.
In the second game, Phil took Stonewall again while Ryan and I swapped ships. This time Phil immediately cut right to go around the far end of the shoal, away from Niagara. I took Sacramento over to try to cut him off without actually getting in his way--Stonewall has a reinforced ram bow. I did nick him a little, but he outguessed me a couple of times and used me as cover to prevent Niagara from getting a shot. After punching huge holes in Sacramento's armor and setting her afire, the Rebel swung around to get another close range shot, which was reasonable (because he needed to cripple one of the Union ships to win) but a probably a mistake (because it let Niagara catch up). The two heavy ships tangled at close range, culminating in a ram which left Niagara low in the water, but also meant Stonewall was a stationary target at point blank range. The heavy Union guns battered Stonewall's hull enough to render her unable to make the oceanic crossing, costing her the win. A hard fought action all round.

Most Peaceful Wargame Ever

I just had the Most Peaceful Wargame I've ever had. 

The game was PanzerLeader, with a hypothetical Brits v Soviets scenario in May 1945. My Red Army forces rushed (because we're Russian) to the plateau in the center of the board, and took up Wellington-inspired defensive positions. The Brits had no line of sight to most of my units; if they wanted to attack, they would have to come up the slope and over the lip of the plateau, emerging into open ground at point blank range. I also left a few speedbump units to the south and at the crossroads behind me. 

I figured he'd assault, and that would weaken him enough for me to counterattack. My opponent, however, decided that "frontal assault into T34/85s and SU152s" didn't sound wise, so he left enough force to pin me and sent a few units around behind me to try to pick off the crossroads. The flaw in his plan is that his forces were sneaking from tree to rock, to keep me from Opportunity Firing on them; in contrast, when I decided to send reinforcements, I just ran an armor company right down the road from the hilltop to the crossroads, and was generally able to get there without risk of getting shot on the road. (I did offer him an Opportunity Fire shot on a T34/85, but he decided his Daimler Ferret scout car would rather run away instead of chipping my paint as my T34/85 rolled toward him).  Since I could reinforce faster than he could send attackers, he realized he couldn't take the crossroads; and it didn't weaken me quite enough to tempt him into assaulting the hill. This was turn 9, and the time limit was turn 10; there was not enough time for either of us to clear any more objective hexes even if we launched an all out assault, so we called it a draw without playing out the last turn.

Total shots fired: zero.

In a similar scenario on the other side of the room, the Americans sacrificed a few scouts to locate the Russian forces, then used artillery and aggressive armor attacks to break the Russian center for a decisive win.

Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear Solo

I've previously written on what I regard as some of the problems with the Conflict of Heroes series. Those haven't stoppped me from buying Awakening the Bear 2e and the Solo expansion, and I've just finished the first solo scenario. There's one change in the Solo version which I really like: you no longer activate one unit at a time and keep using it until it's out of Activation Points. Instead, you select any Fresh unit, take an action, and check whether the unit is Spent. If it isn't, you can take another action with it--or you can leave it alone for a few impulses while you use another unit, and then come back to the original one when you're ready. Higher AP cost actions (such as Rally, 5AP) are more likely to cause the unit to become Spent than low cost (Move in the open, 1AP) actions. However, you don't track Activation Point totals any more; as long as you're lucky with your Spent checks, that unit stays Fresh and can take action after action after action. Of course, you can also order a squad to scurry across the street into the building on the other side, only to have them become Spent after the first 1AP movement and get stuck in the middle of the street.

I did manage to win the first scenario, capturing the objective and polishing off two German squads while only losing one of my own. It was close, though, as the halftrack chased my SMG squad for a while, then got adjacent to one of my Rifle squads and put a hit on it. Fortunately the scenario timer ran out almost immediately afterward, and the Germans didn't get a chance to finish off my wounded squad. Final score, 2VP for the Russians.

PanzerBlitz

Six guys got together at Ryan's for a PanzerBlitz scenario based on the battle of Prokhorovka, which was part of the battle of Kursk.
In the scenario, the battlefield is divided by a 18-meter high causeway running north-south; its slopes are impassable for vehicles and difficult for infantry. There is only one road from the eastern sector across the causeway to the center, which means that the Russians can transfer some forces from one sector to another but the Germans can't,  There are numerous gullies and woods across the map, plus one wooded hill on the Russian side (perfect for putting an artillery spotter), and some towns, The Germans got four formations, including one late-arriving force on the eastern edge; as an example of one of those formations, my 2nd SS Panzer Division had 17 AFVs, 17 infantry, 5 artillery batteries, a couple of antitank towed guns and 7 halftracks. The Russians got five formations, including one that got two turns of movement before anyone else arrived; it raced across the map and took blocking positions almost at the German board edge.
Our right pushed the Russians back; as the Russians just blocked the road across the causeway and wrote off their eastern sector, our success was encouraging but not actually helpful. On the left, we got into some of the forests and were able to push the Russians back to about the middle of the map, but there we got stuck. In my sector, the center, I took the first forest, but advancing farther was impossible; there were woods all across my frontage, with Russians in cover in every woods hex. In order to shoot at them, I had to have an adjacent spotter; and that meant I had to move a unit to a hex with no cover, at point blank range from the enemy, and have it survive through the full Russian turn (indirect fire, direct fire, movement-with-overruns, and close assaults after movement) so it could direct fire on my next turn (turn order being shoot first, then move). So instead of launching a doomed banzai charge, I took over all the German artillery, found a great place for my spotter, and proceeded to drop barrages on every Russian unit I could see. That racked up quite a few kills, but the main Russian defense line was in cover and, once again, I couldn't shoot at them unless I had an adjacent spotter. I gather that, in real life, the Germans couldn't break through to Prokhorovka, so the scenario was historically accurate, but it wasn't very good from a play-balance point of view.
This was the first time most of us had played PanzerBlitz in over 20 years, so it was rather nostalgic. It was great, back then, because the game didn't cover just one battle, or even a limited set of scenarios; you had the pieces to make your own scenarioes. But that was back in 1974; playing it today was a reminder of how clunky the game was. Units out in the open were doomed, units in cover were invulnerable as long as they had enough pieces to block the enemy from getting into the same piece of cover. No morale, no opportunity fire, no command and control limits, no ability to ambush which means towed guns become largely useless, and so forth. I'd been thinking about getting a copy to replace the one I had back in high school; I'm glad I decided to hold off. Sometimes "everything was better, back in the old days" is because we don't remember the old days very well/