A House Divided

Whilst I was away I started rereading Shelby Foote's 'The Civil War: A Narrative', which is a thoroughly sensible book to pack when you have airline weight limits to consider. To be fair I only took the first volume; I reasoned that I wouldn't finish it before we came .

Anyway, it gave me a bit of an urge to do some ACW gaming when I got home. But rather than individual battles I fancied something with a broader sweep, so I got out my copy of GDW's 'A House Divided' to see if I could remember how to play it.

I worked my way slowly through a game during the course of Saturday, and gradually picked up the rules again. They aren't too complicated, although the game plays best with at least some of the optional and advanced rules applied (I'd marked the ones I'd used in the past with a pencil tick, so that was helpful - thanks Past Me). Here's the setup:

I wish I'd taken notes rather than just photos though, as I now have a collection of pictures of the board and only a dim memory of the course of events.

Here's the Union making a descent of the Mississippi River.

And the first battle of the game, fought in the Fort Donelson/Henry box.

In the east the Confederates attacked Harpers Ferry and were defeated.

The Union seized the initiative, and landed on the Peninsula.

The Confederates fell back to cover Richmond and Petersburg, but a furious assault in late 1861 saw both places fall.

Surprisingly despite this grievous loss so early in the game the Confederacy rallied, and led the Union a merry dance around Kentucky.

In the east the Union pushed into the Carolinas. There was much fighting around Wilmington and Charleston, with the Union making use of naval movement to give them an edge, but after over-stretching their lines the Confederacy rallied and drove them back. 

The west was, quite simply, a mess, with armies marching around each other and grabbing what prizes they could. This was partially due to bad command rolls for both sides which saw most of the limited actions available being used in the Carolinas.

I abandoned the game midway through 1863. The Union had had a bit of a surge and captured a number of key cities, leaving the Confederates with just New Orleans, Memphis and Charleston as I recall. I decided that whilst a long delaying action could still give them a win it was unlikely and would just take time; I'd been playing for several hours already and my brain was tired.

As it was I found out afterwards I'd missed a key rule that allows units to participate in two moves per turn, which would have affected everything from the start. So the game was fun, but maybe would have played out a lot differently.

I have set up another game, which I am playing more slowly over several days. I have reached mid-1863. Richmond is under pressure from all sides, but holding, but obviously both sides have a lot of resources committed to the area. The Confederates came within a hairsbreadth of a win in 1862 when they pushed an elite cavalry unit into the north-east and threatened New York City itself. The plan was to grab a few resource centres in the west to even up the relative supply values, then grab New York with the cavalry to give the Confederacy a win by having their supply total exceed that of the Union's. It was foiled by the Union holding Memphis against all-comers, and eventually cornering and eliminating the rogue cavalry unit, but it was a tense few months. Elsewhere there is a lot of fighting in Kentucky, and up and down the Mississippi, but the Union have now gained an edge after taking Mobile and using it as a base from which to launch a massed cavalry sortie into Alabama and Mississippi, cutting supply lines and preparing for a second invasion of infantry to consolidate their gains. So a Confederate collapse might yet come.

'A House Divided' is a great game - very simple to play, but tactically quite complicated if you use the supply rules, as both sides are constantly forced to consolidate and protect their gains whilst hoping their opponent doesn't get time to build up strength to take them away. It certainly captures the feel of the conflict as I understand it. It's one downside is that it takes forever to play.

52 Games - Game 64

Frocktober 2022 - Part 3

I wasn't going to let the small detail of being on holiday stop me from completing Frocktober this year, so I packed all of the necessaries and did what I could.

Frock Nine was this light summery number I wore in the tropical heat of Darwin. A note to aspiring crossdressers who may be reading this; do not crossdress in Darwin in later October. You will melt.

Anyway, we managed a visit to the botanic gardens, and here I am on the back lawn of the Northern Territory Parliament building. This has a very nice, air-conditioned, library in which we spent a relaxing afternoon.

I had considered leaving my Frocktober there, and stopping at nine frocks. It's not an easy thing to do on a camping holiday when you're living out of a van in various caravan parks. But when we finally got to Uluru - our destination - on the last day of October I decided that I'd squeeze in that tenth frock. And here it is; my cute constellation print dress. 

We visited the beautiful Kata Tjuta ...

... walked a couple of the gorges ...

 

... and did Uluru itself.

A perfect end to this year's Frocktober!

(I actually fitted in one more frock the next day, but that was outside of Frocktober. However we were in Alice Springs and visited one of the locations from 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' and it would have been rude not to have dressed up for it).

You can still donate - for the next week or so I think - here: IT HAS POCKETS

Holiday Games

So here I am, back after a two-week holiday road-tripping through the Northern Territory. 

Actually we hired a camper-van in Darwin and just drove down to Uluru, but that's road-tripping in my book.

Anyway, I always try to post a run-down of any games we played whilst we were away, but this time the pool is rather small. With one thing and another we didn't find a lot of time to sit and just play; that's not to say that we didn't have an interesting (and mostly good) holiday; we just didn't manage much in the way of gaming time.

So let's get started. An evening in a pub is always a good place for games. We actually spent a lot of it playing pool and darts, and technically since I counted the latter as one of my 52 Games I should count the former as well. But I didn't take any pictures and I'm not sure it really counts anyway, so I'll be leaving it. However we did break out Fluxx, and that is a new addition to my 52 Games list. We played several games with just the four of us - Catherine, Maya, myself and our travelling companion Rafaela, who used to live with us whilst she was at university in Wollongong and who now lives in Darwin. Raf finds some of the games we play confusing at first; here she is wondering how Fluxx works.

And here's one of my winning positions. I think we all won at least one game.

Afterwards we had a go at A Walk In The Park, which seemed to confuse Raf a lot and baffled Maya and Catherine for a bit as well, but we were all quite tired (we were doing a lot of travelling and driving), so that's understandable. We also played Skull, which is far less confusing. In fact, aside from one more game of A Walk In The Park in Alice Springs, Skull became the go-to game for the rest of the holiday.

Owing to an incident with our camper-van we found ourselves stuck at the pub for the whole of the following day. However it's the Daly Waters Pub on the Stuart Highway, and there are far worse places you could be stuck for a day whilst waiting for a mechanic to turn up. We played more pool, lounged about in the pool and, in the case of Catherine and myself, played some Blood, Sweat & Cheers, mostly to justify my carting a box of 25mm gladiators across the country. I made a small travel arena as well, using the underside of an old table-mat.

The main bar of the Daly Waters Pub at 10am on a Thursday in the off-season.

Rufina the thraex fights a murmillo.

Rufina is one of my unlucky models, and even Catherine couldn't prevent her defeat.

The whip-wielding Rodan fell to Cygnus the hoplomachus almost immediately, after being impaled by a thrown spear.

Catherine finally scored a win in the next game, with Rodan (or his twin brother), taking on the armoured scissor Syphax ...

... and defeating him

One thing we did try was to not only treat the Imperial Favour card as a Glory card, but have it such that if it had been played during a turn it caused the entire discard pile and deck to be reshuffled. 

So, in summary, it was a good holiday (aside from the mechanical difficulties, the ridiculous heat and the radioactive material incident) but we didn't play many games.

 52 Games - Game 63

52 Games - Update 5

It's nearly the end of October, so it's time for another update on my 52 Games project.

In the last update I announced that I'd finished the project, having just played my 52nd distinct game of the year. So anything from then on was a bonus. And there's been plenty of bonus content.

In September and October I have added ten new games, bringing my total to 62. Three of those were miniatures games; I played Black Seas, a Portable ACW Wargame and some WWII naval. The rest have been board- and card-games, thanks to MOAB, an unexpected Father's Day gift and the arrival of my kickstarter-backed games about the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden.

With our holiday coming up there's the possibility of maybe one or two more new games squeaking into the end of October as well. I don't think I'll make the magical 100 by the end of the year (and neither had I planned to) but I will certainly have a higher total than I expected back when I started this whole thing.

The Gardens

I finally got to play The Gardens yesterday. This is a boardgame set within the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden, so has a fun (relatively) local angle for me.

The aim is to take cards from a pool in the centre, and lay them on your board to build up a garden. Each time you lay a card, the meeple on that row moves from the position it's currently at to the new card. You then collect a score for the walk, which is based on what's on the card you laid and what cards the meeple passed over during its walk.

Here's the setup, before any cards have been played.

And meeples on the attractive scoreboard.

A turn in, and our gardens are starting to take shape. The cards feature items such as paths, streams, fountains, benches, trees and statues, and each item scores differently. Some, such as benches, score during the turn only, some, such as statues, only score at the end of the game and some things - trees and streams - score both during and at the end of the game.

After three turns I have a stream to the right of my board and a nice network of paths to the left.

The game ends when the players fill up their board. Here's our completed gardens; I won this game due to some strong statue placement and an extensive network of paths.

My one niggle with the game. One of the stretch goals was this wooden ibis which is given to the person who goes first in each turn. But try as we might we couldn't get it to stand up. It makes no difference to the game, but we were slightly disappointed.

Catherine and I played a second game after Maya dropped out. There's a small change to the way cards are placed in teh centre for two players, which makes for some interesting choices, but otherwise it's identical. Catherine's tree-based strategy gave her a big win over my streams in this game.

I don't know if The Gardens will set the world on fire in terms of gameplay or mechanisms, but it is nice to have an Australian-designed game with an Australian theme in the collection, and it was certainly fun to play and attractive to look at. There are advanced options for different scoring, as well as one featuring landmarks that are visible from the Botanic Gardens, such as the Bridge, Opera House, State Library, Art Gallery and so forth. These can be collected by players and it gives them additional scoring opportunities. The rules-book has information on the various plants, locations and birds featured in the game.

All in all, I'm glad I backed this.

(Note - my copy of the game has a few bits that were only available for backers of the kickstarter, so the off-the -shelf version might look a little different.)

52 Games - Game 62