Risk: Europe Playtest

Was happy to get Risk:  Europe for my boys this Christmas, and we broke it out and kicked the proverbial tires.

This guy looks ready to invade.

My boys have played Medieval:  Total War II a fair amount, so this was historically familiar to them.  There's already an excellent write-up over at The Stronghold Rebuilt on the miniatures, so if you want to use the included four factions of medieval miniatures in about 1/72 or 20mm, go check that out.

The basics:  Four factions fight for control of a map of Europe with major cities giving certain advantages in income when taxed, levying troops, or other resource management buffs.  The game runs until one player gets the requisite number of crowns for owning capital cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, etc.

The game incorporates four troop types - infantry, archers, cavalry, and siege machines.  The latter three go earlier in sequence during a combat and can whittle away your foes' troops before the infantry combat takes place along familiar Risk 3 attackers versus 2 defender dice rolls, with ties going to the defender.  Provinces with castles can only be attacked by armies that contain a siege machine, and siege machines are of course the most expensive troop type to stand up.

We played with three players, and the rules tell you that in such instances the fourth army must be fielded, but as a mercenary faction.  Players bid to control the mercenary faction, forcing them to balance their own force requirements versus the advantage of controlling an x-factor ally.

I recommend following this rule.  We didn't field the mercenary faction, just so we could learn the rules, and quickly saw that the board really does need all four factions for the game to balance correctly.

Game in progress.  At left is the ladder of crowns that players climb in terms of crowns that they've won.  I'm playing Orange, Son 1 is Purple, and Son 2 is Green.  You can see that by now players have bought siege machines and are lining up to invade provinces with castles.

We played for several hours in some back-and-forth exchanges over contested provinces.  We all had fun and want to dive back into the game.

Impressions:
- If you ever wanted an analog version of Medieval:  Total War, this is your game.
- The rules are great.  The crown cities all add buffs that facilitate resource management decisions and sharp competition between players.  The combat rules provide a stripped-down yet elegant medieval combat system.  With some command rules or activation mechanics added on, this could seriously be the basis of a wargame not on a Risk board but on a large gaming table.
- This is a gateway drug for getting your friends into wargaming.  A nuanced version of a game that they already know that could definitely lead them into other tabletop strategy games.

40k with the Family

Made a family trip back home, which gave my boys a chance to play some Warhammer 40k with their cousins, my brother's boys.  My boys have slowly developing Black Templar and Ultramarine 40k armies, while their oldest cousin has a large collection of Eldar and Harlequin forces.  The boys also used this opportunity to exchange gifts with their cousins, which of course included 40k units for each other.

So we all journeyed down to my nephews' friendly local gaming store for a battle.  My boys don't have enough for either of them to field a full army, so they combined their chapters' forces into what I'll call Task Force Black and Blue.  Their cousin fielded a mass of very well-painted Harlequins.  TF Black and Blue hoped to shoot down the Harlequins before they could close the distance and tear marines limb from limb.

The only slightly unfortunate part about this was the table.  We ended up on a large table with a painted background, so please excuse the surface in the shots below.

Overhead view - TF Black and Blue at near end, Harlequins at far end of table.

Harlequins advancing on hover bikes.

More hover riders, with a small horde of foot troops behind.

TF Black and Blue takes defensive positions.

Boy 1's new Redemptor Dreadnought lines up to take a shot.  He proved somewhat effective, but some bad dice plagued his employment of his Heavy Onslaught Gatling Gun.

Ultramarines disembark from their Rhino and prepare to engage the onrushing Harlequin menace.

Black Templar dreadnoughts and Primaris forces form a firing line to hope to reduce the Harlequin skimmers at top end of frame.

Things get nasty in the middle as  large scrum develops, drawing in about a third of each side.  Plenty of casualties.  Note the magnificent Harlequin minis, with swirls of cards around them. 

The Harlequins advance in and wrap around both the Ultramarine tactical squad and their Rhino.  The tactical squad would ultimately get wiped out.  The Primaris Aggressors at top of frame proved highly effective, wiping out some Harlequin units that charged them.  If playing against a melee-heavy force, the Flamestorm Gauntlets work well - they hit automatically as the enemy charges.

On the Marine left, the weight of fire ultimately destroyed the advancing Harlequin skimmer fleet.

The Marines held their ground, albeit with some substantial casualties on their right flank.  All in all, a good game and certainly one that will help keep the next generation of wargamers excited about painting and playing in the future.

Sadr City Showdown

Baghdad, 2005.  The occupation of Iraq has soured and Sadr City has fallen under control of the Mahdi Militia and the political machinations of Muqtada al-Sadr.  A slightly understrength US infantry platoon is attempting to retake some lost ground from the militia forces and kill or capture this vaguely Usama-looking fellow:

He's in the compound at top right of the map below, and the US forces start at the bottom.  Militia cells stand between the US forces and victory.

The view from the US staging area.

US troops secure a building in anticipation of the advance.

The militia headquarters compound.

A militia cell got spotted by US troops on a rooftop, and promptly dropped to American fire.

An insurgent cell lays shot up in the foreground after losing an initiative roll and getting pasted by the Americans.

Another insurgent cell bites the dust.

The two Humvees reinforcing the US troops rush forward, perhaps recklessly, to engage a courtyard full of insurgents in a courtyard.

The Humvee gambit works, but one is at half mobility and the other at half firepower.

The Americans, having run out of people to shoot for now, rush toward their objective. 

Aerial view of the American advance.

Insurgents rush from their headquarters to take up a better defensive position, but there's a US Humvee at the far end of the street...

The insurgents lose initiative, and are lucky to lose only one man to the .50 caliber fire.

The insurgents completed their run across the street, but they roll some ones on their morale check - this causes additional shrinkage of two more insurgents who decide they have a better place to be and are taken off the board.  The cell is also frozen due to a failed morale check.  Did I mention that the insurgents have failed pretty much every roll this game?

Collateral damage.  A pickup truck goes up in the exchange of fire.

The Americans set up the Humvees in overwatch on their leftmost axis of advance and start to push to their objective.

The building at left of shot fills up with newly arrived insurgents...

...who fail an initiative roll against the Americans and are promptly gunned down.

On the American right, a fire team mounts the roof of a building and goes into overwatch to cover the fire team advancing to the objective building at the rear of the shot.

Another insurgent cell spawns behind the building on the left flank, the same building where their comrades were just shot to pieces...

...and they also fail an initiative roll and get wiped out by point blank .50 caliber fire and a fire team  of Americans.

Then the Americans pull a Fog of War card that gives them a reinforcing special ops team, which they place on the roof where a fire team is already providing overwatch.

The overwatch position gets line of sight on the leadership cell in the objective building, and with the additional firepower of the Troop Quality d10 special ops team, promptly wipes out the Mahdi militia leadership cell.

Well, I've never seen so one-sided a game.  Every die roll, from reinforcements to initiative to shooting, went the Americans' way.  The boys playing had a good time, but I'll have to recalibrate this scenario if we play it again.

If you want to see a library of other games set in Iraq that aren't so one-sided, check out my Force on Force:  Iraq page, where I've already added this game.

Christmas Savage Worlds Showdown Game

Bit of a belated Christmas game post here.  This game pits the followers of Krampus, the Christmas beastman/demon that enjoys popularity in Germany, against Santa Claus and his Elves, with some raiding Dwarves that are hoping to loot Santa's workshop.  Krampus is tired of playing second fiddle to the jolly old elf, and it's time to settle the score.  This was also an excellent opportunity to use our newly assembled gingerbread houses for terrain.

The Elves got victory points for keeping Santa out of Beastman hands and protecting their packages.  The Beastmen got points for getting Santa - more alive for public humiliation, dead is okay as well - and for killing both elves and dwarves.  The dwarves got more points for gathering presents, but some smaller amounts for enemy casualties.  I had the dwarves, my oldest boy had the elves, and the younger son the beastmen.

Rules (skip if you don't care about mechanics and just want to see the action):  In my test games with Fistful of Lead:  Galactic Heroes - Game 1 and Game 2 - the action devolved into a bloody mess, and the mostly identical stats for each mini contributed to this dynamic.

For our first Christmas-themed game, I wanted to do something different.  Building off of the existing setting for the Campaign for the Darkened Wood, my fantasy Savage Worlds Showdown setting, I decided to use the stats from Savage Worlds with the activation cards from Fistful of Lead:  Galactic Heroes.  This fixed what I perceived as a weak point for the FFoL rules, the amount of differentiation between minis. Dwarves are stout and good in melee, Elves are good with a bow but weak in melee, and the followers of Krampus (beastmen) are fast and tough to kill. I know there are ways to make the FFoL rules provide some of this crunch, but it’s already been done in Savage Worlds and I didn’t see a need to reinvent the wheel.

Here's the table - Dwarves at top left, Beastmen at bottom right, Santa's village in the middle. 

Tranquil morning in Santa's village.

The dwarves approach from the woods, hoping to get in and out with a minimum of conflict.

Krampus sounds the charge with his horn.  It's on!

The dwarves rush in toward the elves.

The elves have dropped one beastman with a well-placed arrow.  The elven swordmaster rushes forward to confront the beastmen. He leaves one beastman shaken, but there's a lot of mad fur around him.

A scrum breaks out between the dwarves and elves.

The elven swordmaster gets brutally killed by the beastmen.

The beastmen rush forward into the village square.  Santa's at top right, and needs to get moving.

The beastmen look ready to dish out some pain.

The elves fare poorly once in close combat with the dwarves.

The dwarves advance into the village square, rushing to get the presents.

Santa, foreground, takes to flight and depends on his elves to create time for him to escape.

Beastmen continue forward.

The beastmen rush forward over fallen elves.

Aerial view of the battle.

The elven chieftain confronts one of the beastmen, and gets a helping hand from one of the dwarves.

Another dwarf joins in to help take down the beastman.

A beastman, top left, falls to elven arrows.

Santa continues his run for the edge of the field.

The elven chief is shaken, but a Remove Shock card puts him back into the fight.

Lots of corpses littering the ground, chaos in the village.

Dwarves making off with wrapped presents.

The dwarves who were helping the elven chieftain abandoned him, and now Krampus wounds him and knocks him down.

The dwarven wizard blasted the elf above and to the right of him with a magic missile.  In retaliation, the elf at top center of the photo fired an arrow that dropped the dwarf wizard.  A second elf then followed up with another arrow, a coup de grace that ended Stumpy Gandalf's run of good luck.  Dastardly!

Enraged the dwarves seek vengeance for Stumpy Gandalf.  Freya rushes forward to exact revenge against an elf.

Freya lays her dwarf low as other elves are tied up with a beastman.

Erik the Berserker downs another elf.

Krampus ends the elven chieftain's life.

Erik, having finished his business in the village, departs before the beastmen run out of elves to kill and turn on him.

The village falls to Krampus and his warband.

Santa made it to the woodline, escaping to live another day.  The dwarves ran away with the game both on points and in loot from Santa's village.  If you received your Christmas presents, don't thank the dwarves.  They didn't get a chance to take yours before the beastmen ran them off.

Rules feedback:

1.  I may never play Savage Worlds Showdown by the written rules again.  As written, cards are drawn for each unit instead of dealt to a player who gets to choose which mini or unit gets activated by a particular card.  Dealing hands to each player and allowing them to activate minis in turn both allowed the sequencing of actions and let the special card properties play out.  It lets players make choices that make the game exciting, which is what it's all about.

2.  I like the crunch of the Savage Worlds stats.  The troop strengths and weaknesses and exploding dice made for an exciting game.

3.  We had a great time with our Christmas game.  Definitely a new family tradition.