Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

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The internet has had a huge impact on game development. Nowadays, playtesters and designers from all over the world can collaborate via the magic of online forums. Fans can keep their fingers on the pulse of every product they care about– and can even get questions answered within hours from the masterminds behind it all. However these message boards do have a down side as Michael Brown has noted on the Steve Jackson site:

“It seems that Traveller has gotten to the point where you have to have several advanced degrees to even be able to play or join the discussions, and if you lack these, you’re looked down upon somehow. I miss the heady days in the early 80s — when I discovered Traveller — when it was a raucously fun pastime, not an exercise in smarter-than-thou.”

Yes… on many gaming message boards a new wargame has supplanted the games we all supposedly love. It’s a wargame called “I’m the Smartest Gamer on the Internet.” Sure, some really nice results can come from all of these battles over canon and ship designs. But the downside is that new players and casual players are often alienated.

I guess these people existed even in the eighties, but most of us didn’t know they existed. We just buckled down and played our games. Somehow we managed to have fun even if we didn’t know what we were doing. And there is a lot of fun to be had as you gradually learn the killer rules and tactics over several games. But I have to wonder how many of us would have continued buying games if we had come into contact with a bunch of know-it-alls that really went out of their way to make us feel like “newbies.” (Ak! I hate that word. I hate it even more when people apply it to themselves as if they have to bow and scrape before the grand expert brainiacs….)

A seperate but related issue is the case where a new player dislikes a certain aspect of a product or maybe even be completely unable to get the hang of it. When he goes onto a message board for help… he’s liable to get advice back from the guy who made the thing to begin with! This is pretty daunting in and of itself– especially if the player was expecting to get advice from other “mere mortals”– but it can get sticky if the designer gets frustrated by the new players inability to “get it.”

In the final analysis, games should be about having fun, but new technologies have subtly influenced the focus of our hobby. The internet has done a great deal for all the gaming gear heads out there– we have a constant opportunity to geek it up with our obscure tidbits of gaming knowledge– but I don’t know if it’s been a good thing overall for creating a new generation of wargamers. New players have opportunities to embarrass themselves in front of the entire online community. They even have a greater opportunity to offend the creators of their games. Please folks… if you’re a big wheel in the gaming world– or even if you’ve just got a lot of gaming experience– please be nice to the new guys. At the very least, they might introduce the hobby to their friends and help make new products financially viable– and they may even be the only players for “Game X” in somebody’s neighborhod.

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I’ve found the Wargaming goldmine link:

http://members.tripod.com/stromata/id21.htm

This guy covers just about everything going in historical gaming.

I’m sort of at a gaming mid-life crisis. I’m trying to decide what’s good, what’s worth playing, and what direction I should go with my purchases over the next couple of years. Historical games are tempting in that they are more respectable than the sci-fi favorites from my teen years. You even learn a lot historical facts through them.

On the other hand… Ogre/G.E.V. plays in an hour or less. Car Wars is a great 6 player game that can be played in an hour or two. Star Fleet Battles has a huge range of tactical options and can still be played in good short tournament style games.

My sci-fi games have been rigged from the ground up for playablity and fun. On the other hand, some historical games are catching up in that area as designers gain in their artistry. It’s a toss up, but unless the historical games can be played in less than three hours, they simply aren’t an option for me now that I’m a grown up.

Anyways, here’s some reviews I’ve been perusing along with my comments in parentheses:

War Between The States

“The game can be played as a huge campaign using all three maps and simulating the entire war from beginning to end. That requires hundreds of man-hours.”

http://www.decisiongames.com/html/war_between_states.html

(Note the link to the complete rules of the game!)

Guilford Courthouse

“Given that GMT’s Revoluntionary series is already aimed more at playability than simulation, the low counter density of the battles in Guilford Courthouse — plus an abbreviated scenario for each battle, based on historical unit positions after their approach marches — makes for genuinely quick playing games that can be completed in an evening’s play (perhaps just a few hours for experienced players).”

(Uh oh… my #1 gaming pet peeve is present! I always loose on initiative rolls! That’s the main reason I haven’t gotten around to playing Battletech again!)

“At the start of each turn, both sides roll a 10-sided die to see who gets initiative and goes first, so you may be able to move twice in a row, giving you a chance to mess up your opponent or escape from a bad situation.”

(And we also have paper/rock/scissors!!)

“Other modifiers can come from what is one of the more interesting parts of combat, in which each side secretly picks an offensive or defensive tactics chit, such as ‘frontal assault,’ ’stand fast,’ or ‘turn flank,’ and the results are compared on a tactical matrix.”

http://www.bouldergames.com/gamenotes/gamenotes_19.asp#4

GMT’s Ardennes ‘44

(This sounds much better than the above guessing game approach.)

“The CRT conveys a bit of tactical flavor, as some results allow the attacker to roll on a ‘Firefight’ table on which you can try and press home an attack at the risk of higher losses; similarly, the defender can sometimes try to hold a critical hex by rolling on a ‘Determined Defense’ table that may give the defender higher losses.”

http://www.bouldergames.com/gamenotes/gamenotes_16.asp#5

Axis & Allies: D-Day

“As is, the game takes about two hours, and that’s an impressive achievement as it really does pack a lot into that time.”

http://www.bouldergames.com/gamenotes/gamenotes_19.asp#1

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So I’d gotten off to a rocky start with my new Car Wars game. I’d designed cars and made up a corporation, but hadn’t really played much.

All of my friends liked the game and had bought stuff for it. Dueltrack was out– as was the lime green Uncle Albert’s. Too cool! One of my friends had bought Muskogee Fairgrounds and another had all of the full color off-road supplements.

So my two friends had both made up Corporations, too. And they wanted to have a big fight. It was agreed that they’d meet on a stretch of road. I remember just before we staged it, one of my buddies was marking up his character sheets with extra experience points. Of course, he used different pens to make it look like he’d been playing tons of duels!!

Finally the day arrived. Several 18-wheelers rolled down the highway towards each other. A detachment of gas powered pickups broke away from the formation and zoomed ahead. As the forces clashed, the pickups jumped over their enemy’s 18-wheelers. While they were directly overhead, tons of grenades began rolling out of their beds!

Then the arguments ensued. “There’s no way that can work!!” As referee I ruled a compromise decision and stated that the grenades only did a small amount of damage. (We were using a lot of pretend rules and hand-waving still.)

So the shooting continued and when the dust settled, the guy with the gas pickups had lost.

Funny… he and I didn’t play much after that….

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I finally made it to The Compleat Strategiststore. Very nice! The had a yard or so of Star Fleet Battles material– they even had the latest module displayed out front– but I didn’t see any Car Wars or Battletech stuff.

They also had two huge shelves full of wargames. They all ran from 30 to 50 dollars or so, and not knowing the duds from the good ones, I didn’t buy any of them. The clerk was polite, but not very helpful– he was a “new breed” gamer that only knew about goofy rpg type stuff. Oh well. I was hoping to meet a Games Guru there….

I did pick up the latest issue of Strategy and Tactics. Great magazine!! The current issue covers German tactics at the end of WW1, Egypt after Napoleon left, and Japan’s invasion of Korea in the 1590’s. It came with a complete game, 1918, which covers Germany’s last push into France and Belgium in WWI. The rules are very interesting. They are only slightly more complex than Steve Jackson’s G.E.V., but they address things that aren’t often covered in the sci-fi games I’ve played.

Here’s their site.

[Update on 2/2/07: I did get around to playing the game in this magazine once and I blogged about it here.  The time commitment required for this game and the lack of a local historical wargaming network have led me to play shorter games like Ogre or simple games with a broader appeal like the new Axis and Allies.  I probably won't be buying the magazine in the future unless I can somehow connect with a decent group of historical gamers.]

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I played a game of Star Fleet Battles this weekend: Federation CA vs Klingon D7 (no refits) on a floating map. I played the Klingon.

The first turn I pulled in at about range 14 and fired my disrupters. 3 hit and I maybe did 5 points of shield damage after blowing through the reinforcement.

The second turn I did it again. Strangely, the Fed ship was not firing any weapons.

The third turn I got ready to try it again. The Fed seemed to have dropped reinforcement and invested in speed this time. I couldn’t manage to get a shot at him without heading into range 8 territory. I didn’t want to waste the energy I had in my disrupters, so I pulled on in and fired away. I didn’t do a whole lot of damage, but the shield had a good solid dent in it.

One impulse later, the Fed turns towards me and unloads. All four overloaded photons hit. Over fifty points of damage came through my shields. I was toast.

This was a disaster, but better than the games I played of this when I was a kid. Back then we’d overload weapons and move to range 1 on the first turn to unload. This time around I actually managed to pull off two turns of “saber dancing.” I of course should have given the Fed wider berth– so what if I waste a bit of energy and miss a chance to fire disruptors! Don’t close range unless you’ve stacked everything in your favor. If things don’t turn out the way you want, turn away and try something else! The next game will be much better, I’m sure….

I would like to be good enough that I could force the Fed player to eject his overloaded photons and switch to standard loads– or even proximities. If that were possible, the Klingon could whittle his opponent away for a few turns and tally up a sizeable advantage. If the Klingon can close to overload range while the Fed isn’t overloading– or better yet, while he’s reloading– so much the better!