In the last article, we explored the Victory track and how factions score VP. This time, we’ll cover the cards players use to achieve their goals through concrete actions.
You can’t make soup out of promises. – Francis Spufford
During a game of Napoleon in Egypt, the French Player has the opportunity, through scientific research, to build a “military hospital”. This precious asset will greatly increase the durability of the French troops. In this article, we’ll look at the historical aspect of this element, before considering the game mechanics around it in a follow-up article.
Desgenettes and Larrey were two French military physicians who followed Bonaparte from the Italian campaign (1796) to Waterloo (1815). The medical breakthroughs of the Egyptian expedition are largely thanks to these two dominating figures. René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes was chief physician, and Dominique-Jean Larrey was chief surgeon. Both displayed remarkable skills in organizing the Medical Corps in Egypt. In a difficult geographical, climatic and epidemiological context, they were crucial in the emergence of modern military medicine and played a full part in the expedition’s scientific achievements.
In the first article on the Enemy of My Enemy expansion, I covered the new Arab Revolt game that uses the Palestine map. In this article, I’ll pivot to the other new game included in the expansion, The British Way: Japanese Occupation. In a first for The British Way, the British faction, Force 136, acts as the insurgent player and their Japanese opponents the counterinsurgent. After the fall of Malaya and Singapore in early 1942, the entire Malayan peninsula was under Japanese occupation with only a fledgling resistance led by stay-behind British officers, such as Spencer Chapman of the famous book The Jungle is Neutral, and members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The British officers and MCP worked together to organize armed resistance against Japan. As the name of the expansion itself already suggests, the two opposing factions from The British Way: Malaya are now roughly on the same side in the prequel game. However, as I’ll expand upon below, to capture the uneasy alliance between the British and MCP and the lack of complete British control over the MCP’s units, the MCP operates in the game as a simplified non-player actor who may even win the game!
Leaders came and went with fair frequency in the Civil war, removed from command by relief from above or sometimes an enemy bullet. How does the game handle that?
Some leaders start the game in play, and a few of them appear on schedule during the first year of the war. After that, they are replaced with other leaders based on Event Card draws.
As shared by 9/19/24’s GMT Update (September 19 Update from GMT: New P500s, Many Game Updates, Art Samples, and More! (mailchi.mp)), Hannibal’s Revenge: A Card Conquest Series Game, received a status update and something of a “teaser”. That teaser was a promise for an After-Action Report of Hannibal’s Revenge playing when my two buddies, George and Perry, from our youthful New York City wargaming days, arrived at my North Carolina home for an annual gaming get-together. Ah, a happy multi-day escape from our normal routines!
I hope that many of you are aware that a reprint for Next War: India-Pakistan is up for pre-order. This particular game in the series has long been touted as a good entry point into the system as it concentrates solely on the ground and air war and doesn’t have those pesky naval rules. This will be a second printing with a few updates. To keep it simple, I wanted to give you a brief outline of the following changes, i.e., it’s not a new edition with a bunch of changes.
We will, of course, be correcting the two errata counters (PRC J-31 and Pakistani JF-17). In addition, we’ll provide the counters presented in Supplement #2 including the Pakistani T-129 Attack Helicopter and the new PRC Group Army (the 77th) as well as some independent units. The ROI Tejas will be upgraded to the Tejas Mk2 (which will also be available in Supplement #4 when it’s published). There will also be a host of other changes to bring the game up to the current standards for the Russian, US, and CW units.
In the last article, we explored the four factions of Hammer and Sickle and their unique asymmetries. This time, we’ll cover how these factions relate to one another, and how victory is achieved.
Revolution and war are two different things. For someone who is not only trying to defeat a military opponent but also radically change the society in which they live, there is no clear-cut front line visibly separating friend from enemy. – Hans Magnus Enzensberger
In order to show how leaders work in this new edition of A HOUSE DIVIDED, I’m going to look at a historical battle as it would play out in the game. In this case, let’s look at Chancellorsville, in April and early May of 1863. As it happens this is also the turn when the 1863 historical scenario starts, so we know the game position of the relevant units.
The accompanying map is a piece of the playtest (not final art) map showing the key terrain of the Eastern Theater at that time.
Let us set the Wayback Machine to review Frank Chadwick’s ETO’s past year of development and bring you up to the present with a look into this project’s future.
The multiple volumes of ETO have seen the “completion” (always subject to further playtesting, but there have been very few changes to the rules .docs as things have come together very nicely, greatly assisted by the regular examples of a rule or system, and the extended examples of turns of play which illustrate important system interactions) of their counters, maps, rules, and player aids. The research is done for most of the scenario OOBs (except some “what if” Spain and Mid-East scenarios we would like to include), and the main corpus of the core rules has barely changed over the past year, meaning the core systems and mechanics are very stable. The development team has been piling up accomplishments as we work on completing every volume concurrently (to ensure that when a new volume is published, you will not need a bunch of errata to fix the previous volumes).
Seas of Thunder is one of my favorite games that I had a hand in designing. It covers a topic that I find fascinating. And it does it in a way that I find satisfying. It is easy to teach and learn. It has a fun factor with a lot of dice rolling. It also requires some thoughtful approaches to it if you want to do well. There are some mistakes that I have owned up to, but in the end the mistakes you think are there really play no part in the play, fun, or strategy of the game. I will not be addressing those so-called errors here. But what we did have to do to get the game to a point where it was feasible to print was to cut out a lot of extras. Now I appreciate the folks here at GMT and they make my games better by giving me a deadline or a component limit and those not only help make the game better but help me to be a better designer. But in the case of this particular game there were a few things that were dropped on the cutting room floor that I am interested in returning to the game and that I think make an even better experience. Unfortunately, low sales and low interest have ensured that Seas of Thunder remains a one-box game with no official GMT expansions on the horizon. That is their choice, and I respect that, but I have so much more that was prepared and ready to go. I have no intention of scrapping it completely.
Today I am happy to announce that Laboratory H has released the first expansion for Seas of Thunder, Blueprints. This 207-piece add-on covers a multitude of “what-if” ships from World War 2 and the eras leading up to it. The expansion includes the giant ships that would have been built except for the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty that reigned in the massive shipbuilding projects after World War I. There are a handful of mothballed ships that could have seen action. Some of the minor navies that were not included in Seas of Thunder like the Danish and Polish are added. And finally, there are two classes of speculative ships; the ones that were started and never finished like the Graf Zeppelin, and the drawing board-only ships that could have been built but were scrapped by circumstances or the end of the war.
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/seas-of-thunder-blueprints1
All these ships can be used to suit your own taste in play. We have included rules for adding the ships in, but you can also just add them in as you see fit, or to test a theory. Whatever you want to do with them you can. We finished this expansion first because it is just data that can be plugged into a formula and the pieces then quickly extracted. I think you’ll see that the other expansions all have more test work to do on them and will be much more impactful to the game.
Future expansions will include Operations, where players will have missions that they will need to assign ships to execute and defend against. This will become a drain on the ships available for standard play and make things more challenging. Auxiliaries will add small ships, more areas to cover, and thirteen new two-turn scenarios. Admirals will add in strategy cards (these were originally in the game for quite a while before they were removed near the end) to allow for more technology, weather, and human elements in the game. Treaties will be a small expansion to mix up some of the minors and neutrals from game to game. And finally, Fleets which will allow for the same game to be played but with many fewer “fleet” pieces as opposed to individual ships. As you can see, it was always obvious that something as straight-forward as Blueprints was destined to be the first expansion to cross the finish line. The others will actually require some time and work to complete.
I hope if you are interested in following not only Seas of Thunder, but Carla & I in general that you will join our Patreon page. Membership is free and we will be using it as an online headquarters and communication hub from now on. One thing we will be doing is allowing patrons to vote on what comes next in not only this series, but all our projects. We hope to see you there.
We are trying to make the page interesting for everyone that enjoys our racing games, to the war games, to Dark Domains, to our sports-themed games and lighter fare. We will organize fantasy sports leagues, brackets, voting, and special gifts for Lab Rats. Everyone is welcome and this will be our community moving forward. Now that it is just Carla & myself making the decisions, look for a lot more interactivity with the fans and consumers.
