Battleship Galaxies

The next random game in my journey through my game collection is a rather recent one, Battleship Galaxies.  This is a recent Hasbro game of space combat featuring plastic spaceships.  As some of you may know, for decades there has been a game called Battleship.  You might think that there is something tying these two games together, and you would be right to think so.  We will get to that in a minute.  First, let me explain the basics of the game.

There are two sides, the ISN (humans and friendly aliens) and the Wretcheridians (unfriendly aliens).  Each side has a total of 10 ship pieces available (three capital ships and seven fighter craft).  Each ship or fighter squadron has a card that describes its capabilities, of which there are three variants (standard, experienced, veteran).  The more experienced a ship is, the more special abilities it picks up.  The base game comes with five missions, and each mission explains which ships are involved.  Alternately, some missions instead give you a certain amount of points to use to purchase your ships, so this came can be played with lots of different combinations of ships.  There are also cards that you use to change things during the game, such as adding special crew to your ships, or adding extra weapons or systems, or special tactics (like re-rolling a miss or ignoring a hit).

Everything in the game is ruled by energy.  Each turn you get 10 energy points to use however you wish.  It takes energy to "launch" a ship onto the board, it takes energy to activate a ship or fighter squadron already on the board, and it takes energy to play cards.  Some weapons even require energy to fire.  That 10 energy you get a turn is rarely enough to do everything you would like, so there are times when you have to not activate ships or play cards and instead save your energy for use in a later turn.

Combat is pretty simple but surprisingly effective.  Each weapon has a stated range and damage capacity.  If an enemy ship is within range, you can make an attack.  Here is where the tie-in to the original Battleship game comes in.  Each ship card has a grid of 80 spaces, with columns A through J and rows 1 through 8.  There are two dice in the game, a 10-sided die with letters and an 8-sided die with numbers.  The attacker rolls the two dice and calls out the attack coordinates, and then the defender looks at the target's ship grid and determines whether the attack hits the ship or misses.  Large capital ships take up many boxes on the grid, and fighters take up less, so they are harder to hit (which makes sense).  If the attack hits, the defender takes as many points of damage as the weapon does.  For each hit, you put a red damage peg onto the base of the ship, and once it reaches its hull rating the ship is destroyed.  Many ships also start the game with shields, which are (usually) removed before taking any hull damage.  Interestingly, each ship also has a critical damage space, and any hull damage to that space automatically destroys the ship.

This game is pretty fun.  It doesn't take that long to play, and the players have many choices to make as they try to make the best use of their energy to take actions to defeat the other player.  The only downside to this game is that it could really use more:  more ships, more cards, more scenarios.  The rulebook references expansions to the game, though as of the date of this blog entry I am unaware of there being any expansions, or even plans for expansions.  So while the game is perfectly playable on its own, it could use a little more love and attention from Hasbro.  Still, what is here is a good, fun game that I can see myself playing a lot more of in the future.

History is Fun

The only thing that I knew I wanted to do today was go to Monticello.  I hadn't been there in at least four years, so I wasn't sure what would be different.  As it would turn out, more than I thought.  First, there is a nice little exhibit hall attached to the visitor's center complex with some interesting interactive exhibits.  My favorite part was the word tile thing on the floor, where a projector would slap a bunch of moving letters on the word, which would then move to the wall to make a quote from somebody relevant to that word.  Pretty interesting.

Also, I was sad to learn that the two huge trees flanking the rear of the house are both gone, victims of disease and storms.  As is my wont, I got there before 10AM and didn't leave until after 3:30PM.  I then visited a mountain-top orchard selling their own cider and apple butter.  After that I had to visit multiple grocery stores before I could successfully find some Dominion root beer.  I drank a bit of that stuff when I lived in Arlington.  Then I lucked into a really authentic Chinese restaurant, where I got a mix of really and really not healthy foods, and now to watch some playoff hockey.

Hold Your Horses

Greetings from Charlottesville, VA!  I am here for a long weekend away from work.  When I mentioned to one of my colleagues (who used to live in Virginia) that I was coming to Charlottesville he asked if I was here for the races.  Alas, I am not, but there are a LOT of fairly fancy people at the hotel, so that is probably what they are here for.  Instead, I am going to Monticello tomorrow, and will probably hit the walking mall downtown in the evening.  I am unsure if I'll be able to find someplace with the Blues game playing, but I'll give it my best shot.  Sunday is a wildcard, as of yet unplanned.  I'm sure I can come up with something to do, though.

Panzer Blitz

A year ago I wrote about the board game Panzer Leader.  The next game up in my random walk through my board game collection is Panzer Blitz, the predecessor game to Panzer Leader, being published first, in 1970.  While the games are quite similar, in some ways I like Panzer Blitz better, probably because the rules are even simpler and artillery don't have a completely different set of rules to resolve fire.  The main differences are thematic, with Panzer Blitz's situations covering action on the Eastern Front (German vs. Soviet).  There are some different unit types in this, including Russian cavalry, which are way more fun than they should be, but otherwise it is feels very familiar.  Panzer Blitz uses the same style of modular boards as Panzer Leader, so it is possible to combine the games together and have really huge battles if you want.  So if you want to know my opinion of Panzer Blitz, just take what I wrote about Panzer Leader and put it in a slightly more favorable light.

Fields of Fire

Fields of Fire is a solitaire game focusing on the 9th U.S. Infantry.  I have the first edition of the game (from 2008), which includes three campaigns, one each from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.  The second edition of the game includes a second Korean campaign.  Each campaign consists of a series of linked missions.  At the beginning of each campaign you start out with a set number of forces.  As each mission is played, your units take casualties which degrades their combat effectiveness.  At the end of each mission, you can spend experience points earned in the mission to upgrade the quality of your surviving soldiers, and at set points in each campaign you get new recruits to fill in open spots due to casualties.  Thus, the focus of the game really is on managing your forces throughout an entire campaign.  Throwing your soldiers into the teeth of enemy fire in order to capture an objective might look like a good idea in the short term, but if you take too many casualties in one mission you won't have enough forces to succeed in the remaining missions.  So, unit management is the name of the game.

There are three overall types of missions: attack (seize an objective), defend (protect an objective), and patrol (move through the patrol area to see what is there).  All missions take place on a randomly-assigned play area, which is created using the terrain deck.  While this is technically a board game, there isn't an actual board.  Instead, each war period has a separate terrain deck, and you deal out a number of terrain cards onto the table as indicated in the mission setup.  For example, I played the first mission of the Korean campaign, which had me lay out 25 cards, face down, in a 5x5 grid.  This was an attack mission with unknown terrain, so I could only turn a terrain card face-up when I had units in line of sight of that card.  Some terrain cards block line of sight, and some don't, so you don't know what you are dealing with until you are looking at it.

Enemy units are generated dynamically, but there are no dice involved.  Instead, there is a separate deck of cards used for all campaigns called the command deck.  This deck will be shuffled A LOT during the course of the game, because you draw cards to determine everything: random numbers, whether actions succeed, combat results, whether random events occur, etc.  If I am going to play this game much, I am going to need to sleeve the command cards.  I must admit that I found the frequent shuffling of the command deck to be annoying; even more annoying is the fact that one of the command cards says to reshuffle the command deck, and you are supposed to put that halfway into the deck each time you shuffle, so you really are only going to get halfway through before you have to shuffle for the umpteenth time.

But back to enemy units.  In most missions, certain actions or events instruct you to check for potential enemy contact (yes, you use the command deck for this, as well).  If there is contact, then you draw a random number and compare it to the encounter table for your mission, indicating what happens (enemy units are spotted, unspotted enemy units fire on you, artillery or mortar attack happens on a specific terrain card, etc.).  You can not really plan for what happens, but careful inspection of the possibilities before the game can at least help you figure out what appropriate reactions should be in certain situations.  I should also mention one aspect of this game that caught me off guard the first time I played it: attacks are made against all units in a specific terrain card.  For this reason, moving your units in bunches is asking for them to get shot.  You need to carefully move squads up to clear terrain, and only then do you move in your heavy support weapons.  Don't bunch them up, though, as large clumps of units draw enemy fire like moths to a flame.

This game is pretty intimidating.  Because it is so unlike any other game I have played, it took a lot of time to really understand it.  The first edition rulebook is pretty poorly organized, too, which made it harder to understand.  For example, at the beginning of a mission you assign pyrotechnics to your commands (colored flares, colored smoke grenades, etc.).  The rules indicate that you use these to automatically get units to take specific actions, but exactly HOW this is supposed to work is not mentioned.  What types of actions should I assign my pyrotechnics to?  I have no idea.  This is the kind of oversight that should not happen.  I guess I'll have to find a 9th infantry veteran and ask him what pyrotechnics were used for back in Korea, which isn't going to happen just so I can use them in a board game.  On the plus side, the publisher has done a good job of posting videos on the game's website, so you can watch other people play the game and explain it to you.  It sure feels like taking distance learning classes, though, which is more work than I want to put into a board game.  At this point I am undecided whether I will keep this game in my collection or not.  It promises to be fun, but there is a LOT of work involved to achieve a tenuous payoff.