Who knew that the boardgame Monopoly had such an interesting history?
I haven’t played Monopoly–or any other “normal” boardgames–in a long while. (“Normal” here meaning “can be purchased in a mainstream toy store.”) I do believe, however, that there is a copy of Star Wars Monopoly in the closet (next to Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, of course). Suddenly I’m in the mood for some capitalistic excess.
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Last week I had the chance to play Federation and Empire, a wargame set in ADB’s Star Fleet Universe. Whereas Star Fleet Battles depicts battles between individual starships, F&E depicts strategic-scale conflict between warring star empires. Each player controls one or more empires (the Federation, the Romulans, the Klingons, etc.); during your own turn, you allocate your empire’s economic resources to build up (or repair) fleets of starships, and then you send those fleets out to capture your opponent’s star systems, destroy his fleets, and (hopefully) drive his economy into the ground.
I won’t attempt a thorough review of the game here; I only played through a single turn, and am still fuzzy on a lot of the rules. But in short, it’s a very fun, and very demanding, game. It’s demanding both in that it has a lot of rules which must be learned, and also in that it would take a very long time to play through most of the game’s scenarios. (A skilled group of players might be able to get through one of the shorter scenarios in a day or two, but playing through the biggest scenario could easily take months.)
For my first game, I played the Kzinti empire and my opponent played the Lyrans. In the Star Fleet Universe official history, the Lyrans attack the Kzinti, which sparks a World War I-style cascade of alliances and treaties, with the end result of dragging the entire galaxy into war. That sounds fun, but we decided to start small, playing out just the initial Lyran attack and the Kzinti response.
When your turn begins, you fill out an “economic worksheet” for your empire, much like the Energy Allocation stage in Star Fleet Battles. (There’s a joke about tax forms in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it to you to find it.) This is where you spend money to construct military units, and depending on how much tinkering you want to do with your construction schedule, this can take a few minutes or much, much longer. In addition to building new ships, you can repair old ones, or–interestingly–you can “convert” existing ships into other types of ship. (For instance, you might convert an existing cruiser into a carrier.) All of this costs money, of course; at the beginning of the game, I had more money than I could use, but apparently as the game progresses (and your enemies steal territory from you) your empire becomes increasingly low on cash. (After a certain number of turns, for example, your empire’s economy becomes “exhausted” by wartime demand–a clever rule, I thought.)
After completing the economic worksheet, you proceed to the heart of the game: moving vast fleets of starships across a giant map of the galaxy. And by “giant map,” I really mean it–my opponent owned a glorious 30×70″ full-color map that was so cool, I can’t imagine playing F&E without it. (The map that comes in the basic game box is puny in comparison.) You move your fleets into position; your opponent then moves (with some restrictions) his fleets in response, and then battle is joined.
Fleet battles were the most fun part of the game I played. A fleet might have a few or several dozen ships in it, and part of the strategy of doing battle in F&E involves assembling the most effective “battle line.” You can place a certain number of ships from your fleet into the front battle line; there’s also a “second line” where you can place support ships, or ships that for whatever reason you don’t want exposed out on the frontline. Your other ships are kept in reserve, and can be brought up to the battle line later to replace losses.
One interesting aspect of F&E combat is that before battle begins, you and your opponent each choose the “intensity” level with which you want to fight. This basically represents the degree of caution (or recklessness) you want your ships to use in combat. Choosing a low intensity level lowers the amount of damage you can do to the enemy, but also lowers the damage you’ll receive. A high intensity level increases the amount of damage you can inflict, but also increases the risk of suffering massive casualties yourself. If you are greatly outnumbered by your enemy and just want to survive long enough to retreat, you’d probably choose a low intensity; whereas if the situation were reversed and you were trying to wipe out a smaller enemy force, you’d go for a higher intensity.
After that comes the dice-rolling, damage-allocating part of combat. You tally up your total firepower, roll some dice (simultaneously with your opponent), and inflict a certain amount of damage on your enemy. You can choose to target specific ships with your attack (maybe you really, really want to take down a pesky enemy dreadnought), or you can just let your opponent distribute the damage however he likes. (There are advantages and drawbacks to each.) After you’ve taken damage, you can try to withdraw, or proceed to the next round, where you bring up replacements from your reserves and repeat the process.
After combat, some housekeeping and final movement is done, and you wrap up your turn.
That’s F&E from the perspective of a total newbie who played for a grand total of one turn. I found it to be very fun, but also very overwhelming; as with SFB and many other wargames, the basic concepts are not terribly complicated, but there are vast layers of nuance and additional rules you need to master in order to play effectively. And then there’s the time commitment thing. It took most of an afternoon to play through one round of the game, using only two empires. I cannot imagine the amount of time you’d need to play through a full-blown galactic war scenario with all of the major empires in play.
Still, it’s a fun one, and I think I’d like to add it to my game library at some point. I would like to be competent enough with it to play in a game of F&E at Origins later this year. Maybe by the time Origins rolls around, we’ll be up to turn #3…
by Real Life Excitement(tm) has been forcing games to take the backseat over the last few weeks, but rest assured that my twenty-sided die is never far from my thoughts.
The main thing currently distracting me from the wonderful world of games is the fact that my wife, it turns out, is newly pregnant with our first child (and future gamer)! I’m already giving some thought as to when it will be appropriate to introduce said child to the joys of roleplaying–I was playing Rolemaster with my friends by late junior high and high school, but I’m not sure if I want to saddle any child with that social-life-killing burden at such a young and delicate age. On the other hand, Rolemaster kept me far away from the ever-present perils of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, none of which were present my parents’ basement where we played… so maybe it’s a useful tool in the parental arsenal after all. Ah well, I’ve got several years to ponder how and when to introduce Baby to daddy’s well-worn copy of Arms Law.
For Valentine’s Day, my wife even crafted me a hand-made Valentine card written up to look like a D&D character sheet. I’m sorely tempted to scan it and present it here, but it’s sort of mushy in a very geeky way, and I don’t want things to get too awkward for you, my dear readers.
To sum up: thanks for your patience, and I’ll be back shortly with some initial thoughts about the epic wargame Federation & Empire, to which I was introduced earlier this week.
by I confess: I chickened out a bit on my weekend pledge to start Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Upon digging out the BtMoM book, I was reminded of that campaign’s sanity-shattering complexity and extremely large cast of NPCs, and so I decided to lead into it gradually. I ran the first part of The Trail of Tsathoggua instead (Tsathoggua being one of the better Cthulhu mythos names, in my opinion). It features a hazardous journey across glacier-covered wastes in search of a long-lost city (in other words, it shares much of BtMoM‘s plot, but in much more compact form). The plan is to give my wife’s investigator characters a chance to acquire some glacier-exploring skills, then toss them to the wolves of BtMoM.
I will say this: I don’t think I’ve ever played in an RPG scenario where the Climb skill was the most critical one on the character sheet. So far, there’s an awful lot of “if the investigators fail their Climb skill check while on the glacier, they die”–not a lot of room for the GM to step in and handwave away something like that. I assume this will only get worse once we get to BtMoM. Usually, it’s the combat and weapon skills that get maxed out upon character creation. Part of the charm of Call of Cthulhu, I suppose.
by I woke up this morning and looked out the window to see this:
It’s really cold and snowy here today–there’s a blizzard warning in effect, and just about every church and school event in the state is cancelled. Heck, even the mall is closed today. You know it’s serious when that happens.
So how to while away the hours? My wife and I were originally planning to play the Call of Cthulhu RPG this evening (we’re romantic like that). The plan was to start the famous Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. But with the wind howling outside, and the snow blowing so fiercely that you can hardly see anything out the window, and our apartment heater struggling to counter the deathly chill… I can’t think of anything more appropriate than breaking out the Antarctic Lovecraftian horror epic Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
I’m finally doing it–I’m actually going to run this monster of a campaign. I’ll post again… if I make it through the weekend with my sanity intact.
by Well, I’ve gone and done it: I signed up to attend the Origins convention this year. I had a lot of fun last year, even if I did lose almost every single Advanced Squad Leader game that I played.
I haven’t decided exactly how my time at Origins will be divided up this year, but I do have one specific goal: I want to play a Monster Wargame of some sort. By “Monster Wargame,” I’m referring to a wargame of that a) has a mapboard so big that it must be spread across several game tables; b) makes use of more tiny cardboard counters than there are stars in the sky; and c) normally requires several years of regular play to complete.
This is an experience I’ve not yet been able to enjoy–I live in an apartment that lacks the prerequisite Gaming Basement, and if I left a complex wargame set up overnight our cats would almost certainly scatter it to the four winds.
So what are my options? Here’s what springs to mind:
In short, there’s lots of options. Whatever I play, as long as it features a gi-normous mapboard, I’ll have fun. And as long as there’s a steady supply of Mt. Dew within easy reach.
by Looks like the game is up for the short-lived Gen Con Southern California convention. That’s too bad–I hate to see California, land of my birth, deprived of such a cool geek event. Fortunately, from Peter Adkison’s letter, it seems that the Indianapolis Gen Con is still thriving. (Hat tip: Matt Forbeck.)
by As you can see, I’m still learning the ropes. But here’s a front and back picture of Battletech miniature painting attempt #2, an Exterminator:
The lighting in the photos is not the greatest; in real life, there’s a slightly more prominent metallic sheen, and there’s some dark-brown undercarriage coloring visible. (You’ll just have to take my word for it.) I like this paint job a bit better than my previous effort, and I learned a few more things about miniature painting in the process.
As for the Exterminator itself, I’ve always thought its oddly bulky torso and shambling gait looked kinda cool. Reading around on the web revealed that it’s usually painted a shiny silver; the body here is silver in color, but I wanted its sparkly shine to be peeking out from beneath a heavy layer of battlefield smoke and grime.
Next up for painting is, I think, a Zeus, another iconic Battlemech. I think I’ll go with some brighter and cleaner colors this time; both the Dragon and the Exterminator are pretty grungy and washed-out looking, and I’m ready for a change of pace. Practice makes perfect, or so they say….
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Ever heard of Dwarfstar Games? I hadn’t either, but it turns out they released eight rather quirky little strategy games in the early 1980s, all most of which are now available for free download. Most of them look like fairly short and straightforward strategy games, with an obvious wargame influence–the hexgrid maps and cardboard chits are a dead giveaway.
Downloading digital scans of the game maps and playing pieces isn’t quite as cool as actually owning the physical thing, of course, but for $10 or so at your local copy shop, you could probably recreate a fashionably old-school physical copy of the games. Might be a fun change of pace from all those new-fangled, high-production-quality games you kids are playing these days.
(More info and reviews of each game are available here. Spotted at Game It Yourself, which lists many, many other freely downloadable games.)
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