Assimilated

I won’t be doing my end-of-year game report for several days, but the story of the year is already clear – I have been assimilated by (Richard) Borg. His Commands & Colors games (Battle Cry, Memoir ’44, Battlelore, and especially Commands & Colors: Ancients) were my most-played game by a comfortable margin.

It was Commands & Colors: Ancients (CCA) that really won me over to this system. My previous experience with Battle Cry (BC) and Memoir ’44 (M44) had been mixed. I enjoyed both games for their components and ease-of-play, but my inner grognard couldn’t unreservedly embrace either system. The BC unit interactions (particularly the use of infantry) felt too inauthentic to me, and while M44 was a step-up, the absence of overt overwatch (defensive) fire made the game too chaotic and flighty to feel like WWII company-level command (not that this deficiency prevented me from buying all the M44 expansions anyway).

I resisted CCA. It was yet another iteration of a system that had under whelmed me in the past; it didn’t have cool little figures (employing wooden blocks instead); and the subject (Rome vs. Carthage) was only mildly intriguing. BUT … I did like some of the core things the system was trying to do, and I’d previously read that CCA was the Ur-Game for this system, from which all the other games in this system were derived, so my antenna was up. When favorable word came in from trusted wargame net sources (particularly Charles Vassey), I decided I wanted this game.

After several weeks of hunting around, I scared up a copy in trade with a private owner on Boardgamegeek. After a tedious block-stickering session I got it on the table with Matt Tieger about a week before the first MANCON (an event I’ll have to write about someday). Tiege had taken a shine to Battle Cry and had become my primary lunch game opponent, so I had high hopes he’d take a shine to CCA.

But he didn’t. Tiege didn’t care for the multiple (and subtly different) unit classes; he thought the blocks were inferior to figures; he thought the battle-back mechanic made an already-dicey game too luck-dependant; and he didn’t think the additional rules load versus Battle Cry added enough to the game. But I loved it. For the first time, I felt like the mechanics of this system weren’t fighting the theme. And as someone who had tried to get into ancients through other game systems (primarily GMT’s Great Battles of History series, and the DBA/DBM miniatures rules), I had a better idea than Tiege of what the game was trying to simulate under-the-hood.

And here is where I found the game especially brilliant. BC and M44 had entirely too much “boom and zoom” for my taste – individual units vaulting across the battlefield, easily crossing the killing ground of open terrain, and blowing their targets away at point-blank range with little fear of reprisal. The line command, support, leadership, and battle back mechanics of CCA forced me for the first time in this series to really keep an eye on unit cohesion, and to pick my targets with an eye toward hitting my opponent in the flanks.

I also really appreciated the “grit” that turned off Tiege from the game. After a couple scenarios, the seemingly useless “light” troop class became my favorite. I valued them for their speed and flexibility … I liked how they could soften up distant units with missile fire, how they could sometimes move rapidly enough to cut off enemy retreats (a vital tactic in CCA), I liked their ability to act as skirmishers to screen my main battle line (while evading the attacks of heavier troops), and I liked how they could be empowered by special command cards like “Move-Fight-Move” and “Darken the Skies” to execute game changing maneuvers under the right circumstances. It did take me a couple games to become comfortable with the difference between light infantry and auxiliaries (and in this area I agree with Tiege that the fine slicing of unit abilities presents an obstacle to beginning players), but this was the kind of learning curve I was willing to endure because the game was proving to be so rewarding.

But how was I mounting this curve without a ready opponent? Here’s where the other seismic shift in my gaming came in – I committed to learning VASSAL to play CCA virtually, and on-line. VASSAL is a Java-based program allowing users to play wargames live over the net (or alternately play-by-email style, with alternating turns recorded in log files). The program is a free labor of love originally designed to enable play of Advanced Squad Leader. It was just coming on-line when I was laboriously playing ASL by hand over email in the early 1990s, but without broadband and without the technical chops to get the program downloaded and properly installed, I never learned how to use the system.

Flash-forward a decade and change and VASSAL has evolved into a considerably easier-to-install (and use) system that supports not just ASL, but dozens of games. The modules look virtually identical to their corresponding games, so it really is like playing a boardgame on your computer. CCA seemed about the right complexity for a game to learn the VASSAL interface, and I loved the game enough that I was genuinely despairing that it was failing to get traction as a face-to-face game. And I finally had broadband so the system promised to run at an acceptable speed.

So after a couple false starts getting the game installed, I hooked up with Don Clarke over the yahoogroups list supporting CCA for a learning game. It was the 4th of July, and my family was out at the neighborhood park having a fine time in the sun, but I was inside hunched over the computer having a revelatory wargame experience. Don was gracious both in explaining the protocols off the VASSAL interface and the finer points of CCA (many of the subtle interactions involving retreats and leaders had eluded me). The game took a bit longer than I expected it was it was a terrific experience, and I came out of it hooked not just on CCA but also very intrigued with VASSAL as a means of playing my vast an neglected library of wargames.

After that I dove into CCA pretty deep, playing a dozen on-line games, and getting the rules down pat. The more I got into the system, the more rewarding I found it to be … the common complaints that the game was too driven by the luck of the dice or cards were things I found could (usually) be managed by careful play, while the history present in the game inspired me to read in the subject and reconsider “Ancients” as a wargame genre. By Fall I’d started to burn out on the game just a little, but I still joined an on-line tournament through yahoogroups, where I got my hide tanned but (most importantly) met a very compatible opponent in Ed Wehrenberg. I’d even started to get a little traction with the game with other local face-to-face opponents …

… but by that time Days of Wonder had announced Battlelore, and I sensed CCA might be riding into the sunset. And that was all right. At twenty plays CCA had more than given me my money’s worth, and I wasn’t looking forward to trying to scare up the expansion sets on the trade market. With Battlelore, I could have my cake an eat it too … the medieval engine of Battlelore promised to include many of the things I appreciated about CCA, while proving more accessible thanks to it’s fantasy theme and buckets of little toy soldiers.

So I eased out of the larger on-line CCA community and didn’t sweat trying to play the game with face-to-face opponents, and figured to get into Battlelore when it came out at the end of the year. But then a funny thing happened … my on-line buddy Ed W. suggested that we play Memoir-44 on VASSAL. With my interest in Borg’s system reinvigorated by CCA, and with M44 being a game that I’d invested in and always regretted having not played more, I was happy to give it a shot.

And I found that I enjoyed M44 a lot more for having experienced CCA. It’s still not a great WWII game for me, but now that I more fully appreciated the mechanics of the Borg system as a whole, I could see how the terrain effects in M44 were at least trying to depict WWII combined arms. I also found that the scenarios in the Russian expansion were a bit more flavorful than those in the base game (something I suspected after a single play of the Stalingrad scenario face-to-face several months earlier). I liked the game enough to break down and order the Pacific expansion, and I played several games face-to-face at the second MANCON and with my nephew during my Christmas Colorado Springs visit. I still like this game a bit less than CCA but I enjoy WWII more than Ancients, and I look forward to playing several more games on-line next year.

I might even go back to Battle Cry. I played BC twice this past year with Tiege, both times with some house rules we cribbed up to make things feel more like the Civil War (to me, at least), but I wouldn’t mind playing it by-the-book again, now that I better appreciate the subtleties of this system. Maybe I’ll try to get this one going with my boys.

And so the end of the year arrived and with it came Battlelore. I’d pre-ordered two copies from Days of Wonder (one for me, and one as a Christmas gift for my nephew Scott), and of course they showed up during the busiest time of the year, when I was trying to wrap things up at work, get Christmas shopping done, and get my family out of town for our holiday trip to Colorado Springs. I barely had time to open the box and flip through the rules. I joked that my copy came with pre-painted figures … because Tiege had ordered his own copy, and was painting his figures, and it was unlikely I would find time to play the game before Tiege finished his painting project. With two or three other guys in the local group also purchasing copies of the game the prospects were positive for getting plenty of face-to-face play of Battlelore … but it didn’t look like that would happen before the New Year.

But Battlelore (BL) has proven to be a hit with Scott here in Colorado Springs, and I have unexpectedly managed half-dozen games with him. I’d planted seeds with Scott a couple years ago by giving him a copy of M44, and it turns out he and his friends were enthusiastic players of that game, so he hit the ground running with BL, genuinely enjoying the game and not seeming to mind (so much) that it took him away from World of Warcraft.

Battlelore appears to be the real deal. I think it will be a solid hit with the guys back home, although I think the components will need some pimping (the scheme of generic troop figures distinguished by banner shape and color wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped). The game is similar enough to CCA that I quickly picked it up, but different enough in critical areas that it feels fresh again (maybe I’ll write about the differences between the systems another time). I don’t think I’ll play this one on-line, as I’d like to keep it fresh for face-to-face play. I’m interested to see where Days of Wonder’s ambitious expansion plans lead with this title – there’s already been some small backlash that the GMT expansion for CCA just added new blocks that largely reproduced what was available in the base game. Because of the novelty of the figures, DoW might be able to get away with the same thing for Battlelore, but I hope they really take advantage of the fantasy theme to add truly different creatures, terrain, and magical effects, while also finding an opportunity to reintroduce CCA concepts absent from BL (primarily the leader effects, and evasion).

So count me a raving fan of Borg’s games now, well and truly assimilated, thanks to the very intriguing design of CCA, and the positive experience that game drove through VASSAL. It really is amazing how many times Mr. Borg’s games hit the table for me in 2006 (virtually or otherwise). Beyond the Commands & Colors system we even played Liar’s Dice a half-dozen times, so the guy has me coming and going. In the year ahead I hope to play M44 frequently on-line, maybe participate in another CCA tournament, get my Battlelore guys painted and based and play that game a bit, maybe play Battle Cry with the kids, keep an eye out for the development of the Battlelore expansions, and cross my fingers that Commands & Colors Napoleonics will be announced.

And maybe I’ll finally try ASL over VASSAL, too.