Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Steve Jackson is pretty impressed with the latest edition of Traveller:

“I had the great pleasure of reading the first draft for the Fourth Edition book GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars by Jon Zeigler (with Paul Drye and Loren Wiseman). And it was simply excellent. Best first draft I’ve seen in a long time, better than some FINAL drafts, and a huge morale boost for Stevie.”

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archives.html?m=September&y=2004

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Shannon Ward is recording his experiences playing the Star Fleet Battles Admiral’s game from Advanced Missions:

http://www.delcarsdungeon.com/SFB/star_fleet_battles.htm

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Peter Boddy has begun developing robot rules for Star Fleet Battles.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before he has a playable robot for the Federation Heavy Cruiser.

http://www.geocities.com/pdboddy

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Max Rem has done some excellent CGI work.  There’s a couple of nice original series Klingon ships pictured on this page.

http://www.newvoyages.com/ships.htm

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Ken Burnside has gotten a positive review for his latest effort, Attack Vector.  Note the unusual tilt blocks and the really cool “turning key.”  Very innovative!

http://www.wargamer.com/reviews/attack_vector/

I’m sure these games fail my “two hour” rule for game purchases, but I’d really like to see these anyway.  It doesn’t sound good when Red Badge has scenarios that are advertised as being playable “in a day!!”  Pacific doesn’t at all try to gloss over it’s monster status.  I wonder if the solitaire side of the GMT games compensates for their overall unweildlyness?

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Red Badge of Courage
 
“And the game not only includes the two complete battles, but it has a half dozen smaller scenarios that enable you to play various aspects of the battle in detail, many in a day.”

http://www.gmtgames.com/cwrb/main.html
War in the Pacific

“On the same scale as the original, War in the Pacific remains a monster game, and is not for the faint of heart. But for devotees of the original game, or those who have always had a desire to explore the campaign in the pacific theater on a scale they’ve never before attempted, neither your money nor your time will have gone to waste.”

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

Looks like a big year for ADB. They’ve gotten the honors of being able to publish the first supplement for GURPS 4th Edition– a complete book on the Original Series Romulans!

Also, it appears they’ve taken criticism of SFB’s complexity seriously and are coming out with a completely new streamlined game. SFB will still continue development, so the new game won’t replace SFB the way Car War’s 5th edition was meant to replace its forbears. It sounds like they are doing everything they can to retain the depth and flavor of SFB and combine that with a very playable set of rules that minimize the amount of accounting there is to do. (I do know they are dropping from 32 “phases” to 8– just as Car Wars evolved from 10 phases to 5 and then down to just 3.)

There are several other undisclosed games on the plate as well. I imagine one of those will be a sort of “Axis and Allies” version of Federation and Empire. SFB, F&E, and their card games will all be getting several supplements each over the next several months.

Woo-hoo!

Wow, it’s great out here! Car pool lanes, sea food, great Chinese restraunts– and cars even stop for pedestrians. The weather’s great and there’s lots to see.

I got in one game of SFB at Gary’s Games. It’s a pretty nice store– a bit dumpier than The Compleat Strategist, though they did have a pretty good selection: a yard of SFB stuff and a good stock of Ogre material. The clerk was a little eccentric and didn’t seem to be a fount of knowledge when it came to historical wargames, but he was friendly and let us use the tables in the side room to play our games. (He didn’t allow us to eat or drink back there– and even though it was understandable, it still was inconvenient!)

The guy I played against was a pretty nice fellow. He was a programmer that worked with the same stuff that I do and probably the same age as me. He’d owned SFB and F&E type stuff all the way back to the Commander’s edition days of the mid 80’s. He’d never played much though, so he was excited to finally get down to business.

We broke out the Federation heavy cruiser and the Klingon D7 battlecruiser. I took the Klingons again, and we agreed to have a “plan vanilla” game of no refits, a floating map, and no Commander’s level rules such as mid turn speed changes.

After a few turns a few other SFB players showed up. One was an ADB contact that owned everything that had ever been published for the game. The other was a very competent player that happened to not frequent the message boards too much. Another slightly older fellow showed up, too. They were all on the whole a clean cut crowd, intelligent, and not too obnoxious (not like the creepy dudes playing Magic out front, anyway!!) I was glad to see them all together planning their next big get together. Hopefully a new gaming group will form out here….

My opponent didn’t overload his torps and really chewed me up in my attempts to “Sabre Dance.” His phaser-1’s cut down my rear shields and every time I turned away after firing my disruptors, he still managed to pull into range 8 and ruin my day. I came to the conclusion that I really don’t know beans about flying the Klinks– turning toward the Fed like I was doing was suicide!! I got some tips from the more experienced players there, so maybe next time….

(I conceded after 7 turns….)

I figure it takes at least 4 games to master the rules and tactics of a new game, so hopefully I’m half way there on getting the hang of that D7. We’ll see. The Fed ended up right on the corner of two shields several times, so the importance of that particular rule was drilled into me. Also, I didn’t fire my drone rack again in this game. I really ought to do that. I felt it was pointless because it was only speed 8 drones. Still, if the Fed flys around them, that still means he’s not closing the distance so much– and even if he shoots it, that’s one phaser shot I don’t have to eat!

Ah well…. The next game will be better, I promise!