Sekigahara, the Beauty of Simplicity

It's weird for me to reflect back to the number of times I heard people sing the praise of Sekigahara, and for me to never have been sufficiently interested in the game to actually get it, or ask someone that had the game to play it with me. Maybe it was just a lack of interest in the era/war, but I've had situations in the past where I wasn't interested in a particular conflict until I played a game centred around it.

What truly amazes me is that, even on the day that I finally tried playing it, Sekigahara had been selected as a game of last resort. My friend and I had planned to get a game of Colonial Twilight in, but realised that after setup and rule explanation, we wouldn't have enough time to complete it. So we rummaged through my friend's game collection to find a 2 player alternative. Going through the collection, it was pointed out fairly early that Sekigahara would fit, but still we continued searching, only returning to the game once we had exhausted all other options.

With hindsight, it now almost feels like destiny was conspiring against me, trying to prevent me from playing a game that could potentially become one of my favourite games ever. And strangely, I feel confident in asserting this now, even after only having played the game once and even though me and my friend got more than a couple of rules wrong. Sekigahara is truly that good.

At this point, I could almost finish this review, although this would be a disservice to the reader, since I haven't plumbed the depths of what makes the game interesting. Sekigahara has elements of one of my favourite games ever: Napoleon's Triumph. Napoleon's Triumph is a game that I have compared to playing poker with 5 hands at once, and this simile is even more apt in Sekigahara. 

To understand why, it is first of all important to understand the chief mechanisms of Sekigahara. The game resides within the category of 'block war games', a sub-genre of wargames in which usually the strength of a particular piece is kept hidden in order to create a fog of war. This can lead to interesting decisions: is that huge block of enemy units actually a threat, or are they under-strength? Can I bluff my opponent into not attacking by seeming to be strong where I'm actually weak? Although these sort of mechanisms are present even in hex'n'counter wargames through the use of the stack, they are principal within block wargames.

The main difference between Sekigahara and most other block games is the way that combat is represented within the game. Usually, in block wargames, you have simple X+ to hit systems when you are fighting. Sekigahara, instead, uses a system that is both mechanically interesting and (after a brief read of the designer commentary present within the rulebook) true to the era.

The way it works is that you have a hand of cards, with most of the cards having an emblem (called a mon in japanese) of one of the daimyo fighting on your side. During fights, you can only reveal blocks (and thus add their strength) if you play a card matching the block's mon. If you don't have a card, that block won't fight, which represents the shifting loyalties and intrigue that was a principal part of the conflict. You also get bonuses for revealing mon of the same clan during a single battle, as well as using special cards to activate the bonuses of arquebusiers or cavalry.

In essence, the game rewards you for both bringing to the fight the right army combinations as well as ensuring that you have the right cards to fight at the right time, which to me felt like a mix between Napoleon's Triumph (where army composition is the only determinant of who wins a fight) and Maria (where you are trying to exploit particular hands of cards while bluffing your opponent into not attacking areas where your hand is weak). 

Hence, Sekigahara's elements of poker shine to the fore, and your poker hands are not only the blocks and their composition within the map, but also how they interact with the hand of cards that you have, leading to endless, cascading possibilities for bluffing, double bluffing and pulling out desperate, end of game acts that somehow manage to actually work out in your favour. 

But what is truly incredible of this game is that Sekigahara is able to pack so much depth in such an easy and quick to play package. The rules, for anyone that is familiar with the depths that wargame rulebooks can plunge in, is almost an exercise in simplicity. A few neatly laid out pages are all that divide you from taking off the shrink-wrapping and actually playing the game. It is incredible that, in a 20 page rulebook, only 11 pages are reserved for the rules while the rest are left for historical analysis and designer notes.

Wargamers, depending on how far they have dived into the hobby, are used to ponderous tomes or rulebooks of truly biblical size, but sometimes there is something to be said about a game that takes 10 minutes flat to decipher. This is not to say that heavier rulebooks necessarily lead to worse games, and some of my favourite wargames have rulebooks that I have puzzled over again and again, but simplicity, especially in a hobby which has quite significant barriers to entry, can be a virtue.

With such gushing praise of the game it can't be a surprise that I would recommend anyone, even non-wargamers, to at least try the game. To me, Sekigahara, much like Napoleon's Triumph, is a true showcase of how wargames can innovate, grow and reach broader audiences, and to do it in a small, easy to digest package that is unlikely to scare off an interested party, like many other, more complex games can. To me, simplicity and efficiency of rules has as much a place in the wargaming hobby as large, complex and strategically/tactically deep games. 

"Let me just play your entire turn for you": An Alpha Gamer's Guide to Co-ops

"Hi, my name is Tekopo and I'm an Alpha Gamer"

 Slow claps from the others in the meeting.

"Sometimes I just can't help myself 'helping' other people when they perform their turns in a co-op even though I know I shouldn't. Look, I know everyone here knows those moments when one of your friends is making a move that is OBVIOUSLY less than optimal, and you feel a need to interject and tell them what to do. I know this is a bad thing and I shouldn't do it..."

General nods from the audience.

"...but I feel this isn't a problem with me. It's a problem with the game!"

Audible gasps can be heard, people start shouting.

"Now wait, let me explain! Basically, if the game is..."

Before he can finish, Tekopo is dragged away by men in black suits...

Difficult Decisions and Designing History: A Colonial Twilight Review

As shown by the very sporadic updates in this blog, my policy of reviewing games is mostly concerned with finding something interesting about a particular game, something beyond just judging the game based on its merits. Lately, the only game that has truly inspired me to write again has been Colonial Twilight, and the reasons why this game is interesting both in terms of a game and also in terms of analysis are multiple. 

First of all, an introduction: Colonial Twilight is one of the latest offerings in the long-standing GMT COIN series. COIN (standing for COunter-INsurgency) are games that mostly seek to simulate unconventional warfare, with conflicts such as the Colombian FARC insurgency in the 90s, the Cuban Revolution, the war in Afghanistan and even the American Revolution. Overall, I'm a big fan of the series and currently own all volumes apart from one. 

At first, however, I was hesitant to buy Colonial Twilight: after all, I had plenty of other volumes that dealt with 20th century insurgency, so buying another one that fit that genre seemed slightly superfluous. What partially convinced me, though, was the fact that Colonial Twilight was made as a two player, while all other volumes were created as 4 player games (some, I would argue, to the detriment of the game). The other, important factor that finally made me decide to buy the game was that, from a historical aspect, the French-Algerian war could be said to be the birthplace of COIN warfare, and thus the birthplace of the very mechanisms that populate the COIN series of games.

Much like Cold War theories such as the Domino Theory impact and inform the mechanisms within Twilight Struggle, the theories as espoused by David Galula (an officer that took part in the Algerian Insurgency, and then wrote two books about his experiences), underpin ALL of the mechanisms present within the COIN series, specifically concerning the dichotomy between controlling a population and actually having support from that population (even though the actual support could only be present in a small minority of the people in an area). 

The Colonial Twilight playbook (the historical notes and developer diaries within these books are wonderful, and I wish more games produced developer commentaries because it's an interesting insight in the design process that the designers go through) does acknowledge this, providing an entire section on the writings of David Galula and his effect on both COIN theory and the COIN series as a whole.

With the above in mind, what makes Colonial Twilight really stand out to me is its purity in terms of adhering to the historical COIN analysis. Due to the 2 player dynamic, there isn't much for the players to get sidetracked by: you have only one enemy to worry about, and the victory conditions are crafted in such a way that you will have to be pro-active in order to win the conflict. Although I do love the politics and deals involved in other COINs (A Distant Plain is especially good thanks to the Coalition/Government dynamic), there is something to be said about playing a game where the only concern is to run an insurgency or counter-insurgency operation as efficiently as possible. In this regard, Colonial Twilight truly shines.

The mechanism that turns a standard 4 player COIN into a 2 player COIN, while keeping all the flavour, is also truly innovative. Instead of the standard initiative track, you get the following:

The way that it works is that the first eligible player can play in any of the spots, while the second can only place his tracker on a space adjacent to the one that the 1st eligible player placed his. So, for example, if the 1st player places on "Execute Limited Op", the 2nd player can place on "Execute Op only", "Execute Op & Special Activity" or "Pass", but not on "Execute Event". Then, when determining initiative for the next turn, the shade of the spot determines who is first and second. 

Although weird at first, especially if you are used to the standard COIN mechanism, this mechanism is quite elegant and, coupled with the fact that you can't see one card into the future like other COINs, can make players potentially make sub-optimal decisions in order to keep the initiative one more turn. It's clear that in order to make a 2 player COIN work at all, some innovations had to be made, and Colonial Twilight does not disappoint. 

The factions within Colonial Twilight play in a pretty standard way, if you have played COIN games before. The French government has the familiar array of Train/Sweep/Assault, with the only deviation is that, because no Lines of Communication or Economic Centres are present, there is no Patrol action. Instead, Garrison is present, an action that allows you to place police pretty much anywhere. 

This, to seasoned COIN government players, might seem like an incredible ability: starting from Andean Abyss, one of the most important factors that affect government strategy and tactics is "how to place police out of the cities and into the countryside". In other COIN games, the only ways to do it are usually either placing the police there during a redeploy, or creating a base (which is a limited resource) and then training police in that area. So being able to place police in an area directly is quite a powerful tool. 

The special abilities for the Government are the standard Troop Lift (which is comparable to the Coalition's Airlift in terms of power), Deploy (which is also comparable to the Surge ability of the Coalition, although it has the extra effect of also allowing you to depopulate an area) and, finally, Neutralise, which allows the government to destroy enemy pieces even with a special action, although it does by creating opposition to the government in the area. 

One final thing that distances the COIN faction in Colonial Twilight is the fact that you have both Algerian and French troops. Algerian troops are easier to get onto the board, but are limited in number and also can be subverted by the insurgents. The French pieces can only be placed on the map through a deploy, but have the additional benefit that they cause attrition on the insurgents if attacked.

The insurgent faction, the FLN, is also very similar to other insurgents factions such as FARC, the 26th July Movement and the Taliban. They can rally, march, attack and terror, with the only major difference being that their terror can never create opposition, just remove support. For special activities, they have extort (present in many other insurgent factions), subvert (which allows them to remove/replace Algerian forces) and a slightly weaker version of ambush, which only removes a single enemy cube and doesn't create a new insurgent unit.

By this point in this large, rambling review you might be wondering how any of this applies to the title that I have given this post. The "Difficult Decisions" that I refer to (although difficult decisions are a standard in the series) refer to one of the more interesting and innovative mechanisms that are present in the game: the Pivotal Cards. 

Old COIN hands might be wondering why I would call such a mechanism "innovative". After all, Fire in the Lake had already showcased the use of pivotal event. What sets apart the pivotal events in Fire in the Lake and Colonial Twilight, however, is the number of pivotal events afforded to each side (1 per side in Fire in the Lake, 3 per side in Colonial Twilight), and, principally, the fact that a lot of the pivotal events within Colonial Twilight are not as unequivocally good for the player playing when compared to FitL pivotal events (although the Tet Offensive event for the NLF in FitL does have some downsides).

This is what truly interested me in the game after that first play: the pivotal events make for some head-achingly difficult decisions and can really change the flavour of the game if they are played or not. They also inform what kind of strategy the player is attempting. The mobilization event, for example, frees up a lot of French units essentially for free, and is potentially the start of a larger offensive from the French player, but can only be played if the victory condition of the FLN player has reached a certain threshold: does the FLN player thus attempt to slow down his own accumulation of points in order to reach that point or not? 

The Mobilization event itself provides a further interesting and difficult choice: if the card is played, it allows the FLN player to play the pivotal event that allows access to Morocco and Tunisia, areas that can potentially house up to 6 insurgent bases in relative safety. But, if the Morocco and Tunisia cards are played, the French player has the option to start building border controls, which decrease the number of resources that the FLN player receives at each propaganda phase. It's difficult decisions, nestled into difficult decisions, nestled in other, even more difficult decisions.

The Suez Crisis is more straight-forward: the FLN player can play it at any time to remove French troops (temporarily) and resources, but it also costs the FLN player resources that they only get back on the next propaganda phase. Does the FLN player slow down his tempo in order to remove some French troops momentarily? That's also not an easy choice to make.

The final three pivotal events are Coup D'Etat, Recall De Gaulle and OAS, the former both French event and the latter being an FLN event. Coup D'Etat is literally a dice-roll: it could be good or bad for the French depending on what you roll. Recall De Gaulle can only be played if at least one Coup D'Etat has been played, and allows the French player to disregard penalties for casualties substained as well as making it easier to train in the countryside, while OAS is a powerful new special ability that can only be played if Recall De Gaulle has been played, and basically allows you to perform terror anywhere on the board, while also decreasing resources for the FLN player.

Coup D'Etat is principal in showcasing that most pivotals in this game are double-edged swords. While all other pivotals can only be played once per campaign, Coup D'Etat can be played once per campaign (ie the time between one propaganda card and another). But why would you want to play it? One of the central things about pivotal events that I haven't touched upon yet is that they also gain you the imitative as well as cancelling the current card played from the deck. Is there a particularly bad event that you want to prevent your opponent from playing? Playing Coup D'Etat (or really, any pivotal event) can get you out of that pickle. You might have a negative effect from the Coup itself, but sometimes that's preferable to the previous event being played.

Recall De Gaulle, on the other hand, is probably one of the most difficult decisions in the game. Although it does make peacekeeping in the countryside a lot easier, OAS is truly one of the most game-changing abilities in the game and can quickly lead to the government losing the lead, or even the FLN running out of resources. Thankfully, Coup D'Etat can potentially be used to get rid of both Recall De Gaulle and OAS, but the difficult decision remains. Crucially, it is possible to win as both sides without playing ANY of the pivotal events, and the wonderful thing about them is that they truly change the flavour of the conflict if they are played or not, instead of just helping/hindering one side or another like the FitL pivotals.

One other aspect that ties in with the pivotals is that there are many capabilities in the game that affect both side. One of these both makes the Neutralise special ability better, but also gives a further penalty to the French player for using it. Overall, the game is absolutely swimming in these difficult "will this help or hinder me more?" decision spaces, and for that, it should be commended. 

Considering all of the above (and cutting short a too-long article), I would say that Colonial Twilight certainly has the possibility of being one of more favourite COINs, alongside A Distant Plain. From a historical perspective, it is interesting (and certainly has made me want to read more about the conflict and rewatch The Battle of Algiers, a very thought-provoking film about the French-Algerian War), and from a gameplay/mechanisms perspective, the duality of many of its events really make the game stand out. If you are looking for a COIN game that doesn't require 4 people or even if you are entering the series for the first time, I would strongly recommend this volume in the series.

Context when writing rules and why it is important

You might be aware of Age of Sigmar (AoS), the rebooted version of Warhammer by Games Workshop that has been the source of much discussion within the Warhammer community. Although I am not going to go too deep into the quagmire that is Age of Sigmar, it is a useful point of comparison for the purposes of this particular article. Be forewarned that I generally don’t have very favourable opinions of the ruleset for AoS, but the intention of this post is NOT to bash the game, or its players.

The principal comparison that I want to make is one between the mechanisms present within AoS and the Operational Combat Series (OCS). OCS is one of my first forays into the depth of what some people would call ‘proper Hex and Counter games’. So far, I’ve had the possibility to try mini-campaigns of Reluctant Enemies, Sicily II and Tunisia II, and I’ve been very pleased with my experiences so far.

For those that are not well-versed in Hex and Counter games, OCS is a series that models Operational-level battles of World War II, with an eye towards making you track the movement and use of supply. In essence, the series is more about being able to create a solid logistical backbone, with supply dumps, trucks to bring the supplies close enough so that units can use it to move or fight, and making sure that you protect your rear areas so that your logistical backbone is not broken in two. Having to track the movement of supply might sound daunting at first, and it is, but the strength of the system is the relatively simple, straightforward combat system that makes resolving  fights relatively easy.

From the above, you might ask how a comparison to AoS can be made: AoS is a relatively simple miniature skirmish game without the high level of detail and complexity present within an OCS game. Where the two games coincide, however, is how they deal with turn order. Turn order in both games is handled with a simple dice-off: who ever rolls highest, gets to choose who goes first and second. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? What I will attempt to do, though, is prove why the mechanism is good in one game, and awful in the other, and hence, why mechanisms are never bad in of themselves, but how they can be bad/good based on the context that they are being used in.

Let’s start with AoS: the standard turn structure for AoS is relatively simple: during your turn, you use the special abilities of your heroes, you can shoot with any units that have ranged weapons, you can move your troops, charge with them and then perform combat. Combat is resolved by getting the active player to pick a unit to attack with, which then rolls to see if they hit/wound, then the opponent picks a unit to attack with, and so on until all applicable units have fought: this is the only part of the round in which a passive player has any choices to make at all (since the order that you pick your units can be important, as there is no simultaneous combat in AoS).

The system for OCS is very complex, but suffice to say that the main action rounds for the system work as follow: Movement Phase for the active player, then a Reaction Phase for the passive player, followed by a Combat Phase for the active player and finally an Exploitation Phase for the active player. During the movement phase, the active player can move as many units as he wants, but performs no actions at all during the Reaction Phase. However, only units that had been previously marked as Reserve units (for OCS veterans, yes, I know this is a mode, just bear with me) can move during this phase, but they can initiate combat using overruns. Reverses are thus very important in the game: they can be used to blunt an attack, plug up gaps, chase down raiders in your rear areas, and are thus crucially important to use well while playing an OCS game.

If you read the design documents for OCS, the intended effects for rolling initiative in OCS is make the state of the board more unpredictable: will you be able to hold in time to react? Can your crumbling front-line survive an opponent’s double turn. It is also used to simulate strategic initiative: you might be in a position that forces your opponent to always take the first turn, thus setting you up for a potential double turn later on. The crucial aspect, however, is that by proper planning and good use of your Reserves, you can prevent some of the biggest disasters that could be caused by a double turn: allowing the passive player to perform decisions during the active player’s turn is what allows all the above to be true.

AoS, on the other hand, has no such safety valve: the passive player has very little to no control of his troops. As such, the double turn can be crushing within the game. The active player gets to move twice and, worse of all, to fire twice. Without the opponent being able to react in a meaningful way, the double turn is a detriment to the game in both small sized (where taking casualties that you can’t react to can be fatal) as well as large-sized games (where, if your opponent is taking a gun-line, can potentially mean entire units destroyed before they managed to do anything meaningful).

I hope that with the small example I’ve given above, I’ve shown that context in rules matters: this is still important to understand nowadays, since even in 2017 people are still discussing the use and abuse of dice within board games. In the end, it is important to understand that there are rules and mechanisms that, by themselves, might not sound like they are well constructed, but thanks to the effect that they have on the game overall, can be used as an effective tool within the broad mechanisms of the entire game.

Asymmetry: The Holy Grail

I've gone at length at some of the ways that games interest me in the past: visual storylines have always been an important consideration for me, as well as good conveyance between theme and mechanisms. Most if not all of the games I have currently fit the above two categories, (although I will make exceptions for true gems like Caylus or T&E that don't quite fit the mold of either fully), but in recent months I've realised that there is another categories that opens my wallet faster than any of the above, and that's asymmetry. 

First of all, what do I mean by asymmetry? The obvious definition is that asymmetric games are ones in which in can play different roles/sides play differently from each other. This simple definition can cause trouble, however, because I feel that it is overly broad. 

For example, let's imagine a dungeon crawling game: does the fact that you can be a healer or a tank or a damage dealer mean that there is asymmetry within the game? Depending on the game, I wouldn't say that is the case, because largely you are interacting in the game in similar ways to the rest of the team, although you are activating powers that have different effects.

For me, asymmetry not only needs to feature different roles, but different ways to play the game, different rules and different mindsets from one role/side to the other. Also, I largely define asymmetric games as ones where you are in competition with others, and not just having different roles within the same team. It is also important to note that there are degrees of asymmetry, and that 'true' asymmetry is difficult, if not impossible, to implement properly (hence the holy grail in the title of this article).

Starting from the lower end of the asymmetry scale, you have games such as Descent or Imperial Assault. "But Tekopo", I hear you cry, "you just said that team games don't fit your definition of asymmetry". That might as well be true, but those games do feature an antagonist, that often plays in very different terms than what are known as the 'player characters'. Those games, however, do feature a low level of asymmetry because, in the end, the antagonist is more or less playing the role of the game engine, albeit with smarter decision making and some choices in terms of progression.

A further step up from that, you have games such as Terra Mystica. Terra Mystica features a medium degree of asymmetry: the races within the game do play wildly different and each have different special rules, but largely they have the same menu of actions available to them: it might cost more to build houses as the swarmlings compared to the engineers, but in the end you are still building a house. The strategies between races can very quite dramatically, however. If this degree of asymmetry was not present in Terra Mystica, it is likely that I would have given up on the game as just another dry euro.

Next in line I have games like Yomi, EXCEED and BattleCON (with the latter featuring higher up on the asymmetry scale). All these games feature sets of different fighters, with each playing very different from the next. So, for example, a rushdown character plays and feels very different from a more defensive character or a grappler. This is especially true in BattleCON, where characters can have extremely intricate gimmicks that allow them to break the rules of the game. 

However, in all of these examples, all the characters still follow the same rules: in EXCEED and Yomi, you are still playing a single card in the combat phase. In BattleCON, you are still combining a base and a style to decide what to do.

Nestled within these layers are also the majority of wargames. Most wargames feature asymmetric side and this is very notable in, for example, Empire of the Sun, where the Japanese and the US play very differently due to the disposition of their forces.

The next stage in asymmetry, of course, the COIN series of wargames (which many of you probably would have guessed I would mention eventually). The difference between COINs and many of the other games I have mentioned thus far is that in COIN games, not only do different sides play/feel completely different from each other, but in many cases do not have the same actions available and sometimes do not even follow the same rules. Another important factor is that the victory conditions for each side are wildly different.

This, to me, approaches "pure" asymmetry. Once you get to this stage (or any asymmetric game in which there are more than two sides), it becomes very important to allow all the players to have tools to affect all other players and prevent them from achieving victory, which is a notable design hurdle.

The latest, probably most interesting step towards the holy grail of complete asymmetry is a new game that I haven't had the chance to try yet: Vast: The Crystal Cavern. In this newly released game which has a dungeon crawling theme, the sides can be the Paladin, the tribes of Goblins that infest the cavern, the Dragon that the Paladin wishes to slay, or even playing as the Cavern itself! Having read the rules, all the sides play wildly differently from each other, which is why this title has piqued my interest.

Although pure asymmetry is, in my opinion, a noble goal, it is also one fraught with danger. Asymmetric games can be difficult to explain and teach, especially if all the players have interlocking sets of objectives/powers that rely on understanding how all of the players at the table interact. This is true of games like Yomi, in which you only really understand how to play once you know your own character well, your opponents character, and how the match-up is played. 

It is especially true, however, of games like the COIN series and Vast. In games that have low levels of asymmetry, it is usually possible to teach all of the players the basics since most sides will have the same base rules, but for COINs/Vast, it is necessary to explain each faction in turn, which significantly adds to the teaching time required for these games. 

Asymmetric games are also difficult to balance and, if not done correctly, can be horribly broken. Although low levels of asymmetry can be added by injecting small special rules to the sides, these are usually limited and don't reach the levels of asymmetry that I enjoy.

Even regarding all of the above, why is asymmetry a good thing? It can add to the longevity of the game, it can provide a completely different playing experience based on which side you are playing, and, at least to me, it adds to the feeling that the side I am currently playing is 'mine', and not just a facsimile of another faction that another player is currently using. Arguments against asymmetry can be made as well, in that there is something to be said about a game in which the only differences between factions are not anything set out at the start of the game, but built gradually while the game is being played. 

I do, however, think that the depths of design for asymmetric games have not been plumbed as deeply or as widely as for symmetric games, and with the coming of games such as Vast, the future for asymmetric games does indeed look bright.

How I got suckered into buying plastic miniature toys (X-Wing Review)

When I first saw that the X-Wing Miniatures game came out, I was interested but there were a few things that destroyed my interest and largely prevented me from buying into a game that as a kid I would have definitely bought into. Keep in mind that I was already sold on the flightpath system and I already had more than a few Wings of Glory models that I enjoyed playing with. Since I used to be a Star Wars nerd, making the transition would have been relatively easy.

The foremost thing that kept me away from the game was the inclusion of dice. Wings of Glory (or Wings of War) uses a pretty interesting system to model damage: basically, if your opponent is in your firing arc, they draw a number of cards depending at what range you are firing at. The cards can either have a number which shows how much damage you have done, or even a critical hit symbol that shows that the pilot/engine has been hit or a fire has started. You can even draw cards that do 0 damage! It makes damage unpredictable but does make things exciting, especially since you keep the damage cards face down, meaning that you never really know how much damage you have done to the enemy.

This leads to exciting moments when you can't believe how many damage cards your opponent's ship has and it STILL WON'T GO DOWN!

FFG decided to replace the damage card system above, instead having players roll custom damage dice (red for attack and green for defence). Your attacking ship rolls dice to see how many hits he gets, and then your opponent's ship rolls dice to see how many hits they evade.

This immediately turned me off the system, because I could see it as being just a random luck-fest. I was in the 'I hate dice' stage at the time, which also didn't help. So even though I had a look at the game rules, I decided not to buy in.

This was until I saw the release of the TIE Defender. Me and that ship have a history: one of the very first PC games that I had asked my dad to buy for me had been the classic spaceship simulation game TIE Fighter and I can remember spending hours playing the game, destroying the enemies of the Empire (don't worry, I'm not one of those guys). The TIE Defender was the ultimate Imperial ship, able to turn on a dime and being almost invincible: I loved it! So when I heard that the ship was coming out for X-Wing Miniatures, I knew that I had to get a model, even if I didn't want to actually play the game.

That wasn't the only ship I liked though: I also loved the aesthetics of the A-Wing, so obviously had to get a model of that ship as well. And the TIE Interceptor is also awesome, so I needed to buy two of those. And actually, getting a classic X-Wing or TIE Fighter would also be nice: I might as well buy a core pack. And down the rabbit hole I went.

This is the state of my collection now, which includes Armada (the Star Wars capital ship game also by FFG):

Yeah, it kind of got out of hand.

The question remains: why would I collect so much stuff for a game if I didn't like the game system that it used? Well, the answer is that after collecting/buying so much stuff, I actually like the game mechanisms as well!

Although I do sometimes feel the dice can screw you, the most important thing in X-Wing is actually position and action economy. Being able to have the enemy in arc and be out of arc of the enemy ships is very important and this is what drives the game: not having to roll dice in order to defend your ship is always a winning proposition. As well as that, the dice system shows that there has been actually quite a lot of thought behind how it works from FFG's designers.

For example, the red attack dice have a higher number of hit symbols in comparison to the green defence dies and their evade symbols. This means that most of the times you are more likely to hit something than for it to evade damage, which drives the game forward and stops the game from stalling excessively.

That, of course, is changed by the action economy aspect of the game. After you move your ships, you are allowed to perform a single action, which can range from being able to reposition your ship, to boosting your defence/attack. One of the more interesting actions is 'Focus': both the attack and defence dies have 'Eye' symbols that can be turned into a hit/evade if you spend a focus token. This, of course, makes your probabilities to hit/evade higher.

This leads to a system in which if you want to insure the highest probabilities of hitting, you need to be able to modify your dice and since you have limited actions, the action becomes one of the most important decisions in the game (after choosing your maneuver, of course). Do you use your action to move your ship and potentially move out of firing arcs, or use it to boost your attack/defense? This is what truly makes the system interesting.

On top of that, the game has an incredible diversity of pilots, abilities and upgrade cards that you can use to tailor your squadron to your tastes. The game does make use of combos, but allows enough space to make your own innovations. As well as that, most of the abilities feel thematic. One of the premier pilots of the game is, for example, Soontir Fel, a TIE Interceptor pilot. His ability is simple, but makes him one of the most nimble ships in the game, with the only drawback being that the TIE Interceptor itself is an easy ship to destroy if it has too much fire going its way.

What was strange for me is that I have never before been really interested in list-building. All my attempts to play Magic, for example, stopped at the deck construction elements, but in X-Wing I am continually attempting to try new things and see if new stuff works.

Another thing that really attracts me to the game is the competitive element. I have taken part in tournaments before in other systems but I have to admit that I have never met a community as nice and welcoming as the X-Wing Miniatures community. There are bad apples everywhere, of course, but the community motto of  'Fly Casual' largely holds up, at least in my own experience.

I have also been pleased at the extent that FFG has gone in order to balance the game. Although I am a bit annoyed at some of their merchandising patterns (for example, a fix to one of the ships was included in the expensive Imperial Raider ship), they have at least managed to keep the game balanced and even when things seemed to be unbalanced, they have done steps to reduce the damage in sensible ways.

One example of this was one of the ships that launched when I initially started to play the game, the TIE Phantom. The TIE Phantom basically dominated the meta when it came out and eventually FFG did a relatively easy fix: now the ship is still used, but isn't as meta-wrecking as it used to be. This is in direct contrast with the way that Wizkids balanced Star Trek: Attack Wing, a game that probably deserves a whole new article on its own right.

Star Trek: Attack Wing licensed the flightpath system in order to have a miniature game based on the Star Trek license. Unfortunately, Wizkids fucked it up with incredibly unbalanced, unplaytested releases that eventually wrecked the competitive community. Comparing STAW with X-Wing, it is clear that the latter has a much more sensible release schedule and that FFG actually cares about balance in their game.

In conclusion, it is sometimes hard to judge a game by its cover. Although the randomness in X-Wing can sometimes be a bit too much for me, I find the game very compelling, especially when I entered the competitive aspect of it. If you are even remotely interested in the game, I would suggest giving it a go (and avoiding STAW completely): even just the core pack (including the new Force Awakens one) can produce a pretty interesting game, which only gets better when you add more expansions. Just be careful, because once X-Wing has its grip on you, it is a difficult game to escape!

Empire of the Sun: A Study of Getting Things Wrong

My first opinion of Empire of the Sun was that the game was completely, irreversibly broken. Me and my opponent (Panzeh, a fellow Something Awful goon) played the first turn and to me, as the Japanese, the game seemed hopeless: the invasion of Malaya and the Philippines seemed impossible, the DEI was a distant, impossible dream and the entire game consisted of me sending my Japanese Fleets again and again against the Allied fleets, with both good and bad results. How could the game be so broken?

The answer, of course, was that we had been playing wrong all along. We had missed the rule concerning how delayed reinforcements work and hence the Japanese faced Allied reinforcements in turn 2 that they should only ever have to face in turn 3. It might sound silly now but in retrospect this was a pattern that was to be repeated several times afterwards and each time it occurred, my estimation of the game increased.

Throughout my time playing Empire of the Sun (EotS from now on) there had always been doubts about how historical the game was. One of the major features of the game, for example, is that reinforcements aren't restricted to any one area.

You could potentially send MacArthur to Burma if you wanted and have him march through Thailand, French Indochina and then up the Chinese Coast. Maybe you concentrate the Commonwealth fleet in Australia/Solomons and use it to complement the US fleet. Or maybe you manage to hold on to a corner of the DEI (although this latter one can be negated by a Japanese player that knows what he is doing).

So you would think that leaving such decisions up to the layer would completely prevent the game from developing in an historical way: there are two many permutations, too many variables to consider and it would be impossible for the rules to cover them all.

But you would be wrong: EotS doesn't attempt you to hand-hold you into making historical choices, it doesn't structure the game in such a strict way that any deviation means an instant loss. Instead, it uses subtle mechanisms in order to make the players naturally arrive to the answers of 'why did the Japanese/Allies did this particular operation'.

Another example of something that I originally got wrong was the importance of New Guinea within the game. When playing as a Japanese player, most of the early war objectives are pretty clear: you want the DEI/Philippines/Malaya in order to gain resource hexes and prevent the Allied player from reinforcing them too much. You want to pressure Burma in order to keep the Allies busy there and potentially make Burma surrender (which makes the Allied player lose Political Will, one of the major ways in which the Japanese player can win).

On the other hand, the Solomons and New Guinea seem like targets that you wouldn't necessarily want to take: they stretch your resources, they don't make the Allied player lose Political Will, they can be counter-attacked fairly easily and provide easy Progress of War to the Allied player (more on Progress of War later). So why on earth would you ever want to take them?

It took me a long time to work out the answer to this question, but it was a similar epiphany to the one I explained in the first paragraph of this post. The answer to why New Guinea is important is 'pinning'.

'Pinning' is a mechanism that a first does not seem to much sense in terms of historicity, and there have been quite a few people on the internet that decry it as 'gamey'. Without going too much into the rules of the game, it is possible to use a single unit of Long Range Bombers to prevent the entire Kido Butai to react to another threat. This, as mentioned, seems to be nonsensical since how could a single Air Force with 4 combat factors prevent an entire fleet of 100+ combat factors from operating.

Mark Herman wrote a small article refuting the 'gameyness' of this tactic and how it actually does increase the historicity of the game, but my main interest is on the effect of the game and the effect is this: if the Japanese player stations his fleet too close to an allied airfield, he will get continually bombarded with these 'pinning' units and be unable to react.

This both reflects something that happened in real life (the Japanese pulling their fleet out of ports in range of land based air forces) as well as providing a crucial reason why New Guinea (an island absolutely littered with airfields in range of Truk, the main Japanese fleet anchorage) is important.

Another example is Progress of War, a rule that I previously mentioned. Progress of War basically requires the Allied player to continually re-capture Japanese spaces or lose Political Will: this is largely represented as the American public being angry at the slow process of the war. Although this mechanism influences the decisions of the Allied player (and leads to the island-hopping campaign of fame), my main interest is how it actually influences the strategic thought of the Japanese: it forces them into a 'hold everything you have captured' mindset.

Without it, you could just retreat to a more defensive position once you have reached your maximum extent. With it, you try to hold on to every single island, forcing the Allied player to pay for every single one of his gains, pulling out only when the situation is truly hopeless. This was another rule that at first didn't seem to really help the historicity of the game but that, in second reflection, greatly helps the game to retain its flavour of Pacific Theater operations.

I think this is why I love the game so much: it highly reminds me of Napoleon's Triumph, another game I love because it doesn't attempt to recreate the battle of Austerlitz exactly, but gives you rules that motivate you to act like the generals that actually fought in the battle. And this is truly present in Empire of the Sun. The game doesn't restrict you in order to conform to what the game expects the PTO to be like: it gives you pointers and requires you to work it out. And it is all better for it. I truly hope to find other items concerning EotS that I am wrong about, only just so that my estimation of this wonderful game continues to grow even further.