The Battle of George Square

A little bit of (slightly tenuous) family history. On this day 106 years ago in 1919 a strike in Glasgow, calling for a 40 hour working-week led to  increasing tension and riots and ultimately a mass rally of 20-25000 workers in George Square in the centre of the city and the raising of the Red Flag.  Running fights broke out throughout the city.

There's my Grampa... he's the one in the bunnet!

As tensions rose troops were called in and tanks deployed across the city and machine gun posts set up.  As this was only a couple of years on from the Russian Revolution and there was still unrest in post-war Germany it's not surprising there was a concern the troubles would spread.

The stand off lasted for several days before petering out.  In Glasgow there's still a lingering pride in the Red Clydeside story and names like Mary Barbour, John Maclean and James Maxton are part of a tradition of radicalism in the city.

3 Mark C and 3 Mark V tanks from Bovington deployed in the city's cattle market 

There are a number of myths that persist... Churchill didn't send in the troops (they were requested by the Sheriff of Lanarkshire and authorised by the War Cabinet), there wasn't a howitzer deployed at the City Chambers, and the troops weren't all English.  There's also a story that one of the Scottish regiments was confined to barracks in Maryhill as there was a worry they would side with the workers... no evidence of this at all.

I remember my Grampa telling me about it and how he'd been there... mind you he reckoned there were tanks in the Square which never actually happened!  He'd have been a young man of 16, working in the steelworks at Cambuslang at this point.  I like to proudly think he's one of the men in a bunnet in the main photo!

And of course it raises some interesting ideas for a pre-VBCW setting.  What if the government had actually sent in the tanks, what if some of the Scottish regiments had joined the revolutionaries or if the unrest spread to other industrial cities like Liverpool or Newcastle...

Crusader Kings

 

A bit of a change over the last couple of weeks playing Crusader Kings at Eric the Sheds, an interesting boardgame based on the computer game.  Rather than a strategic wargame, this game.is all about building up your dynasty and ensuring your royal line lasts.  I had a look through blog posts and it looks like I last played this 6 years ago.

The game has up to 5 players taking on the ruling families of England, Germany/HRE, France, Spain and the Italian States.  Each player starts with a King and quickly needs to secure a wife from some the available nobles in the unaligned states across Europe.  Once you have a wife you can then try and acquire some kids to ensure the family survives, and then get on with the business of expanding your kingdom or developing technology or building  castles (useful for raising extra tax).

Of course it isn't quite as easy as that.  Each noble has a trait... either a positive (clever, kind, chaste, etc) or a negative (cruel, dimwitted, inbred, etc).  As you acquire children and spouses these trait counters go into a bag.  To succeed in a task you need to draw a positive counter, so the nobles with the nice green traits are in high demand but you may need to settle for someone with a negative as not having a spouse is a bad thing.  Some negative traits can occasionally be a good thing... being cruel might actually be a bonus in a military action.

My delightful family in game #1

As well as empire building and raising troops to annex territories, there's lots of scope to use skullduggery and cause unrest, manufacture a cassus belli (essential if you want to go to war), or go for straightforward assassination!  Losing your King or his heir to a well-timed knife in the back can cause devastation!  But taking an action also has an event attached which often benefits the next player so there are some tricky choices about which cards to play.

We played the game twice over a couple of weeks.  The 1st game was quite cautious with little open warfare and even less intrigue... everyone was very cautious and mostly played nice.  By week 2 the gloves were off and the knives were flying.  Germany was repeatedly hot by a series of assassinations which effectively took them out of the game, althoug they did their best to exact their revenge!  

...the family weren't much better in game #2... lots of red tokens!

It's a really interesting, fun game.  Its perfectly possible to play without fighting each other... actually, war is quite tricky to engineer.  So strategies focus more on building alliances, securing lines of succession etc.  One thing we changed was the player order... when we've played it in the past this was fixed which meant the events (good or bad) would always follow from player A to player B etc.  We mixed this up by randomising the player sequence each turn which really helped with this.  Great fun and a game which really tells a story 

Blast from the past: Congo

 Last week I dusted off a long neglected set of rules and figures for a game of Congo.  I had been about to write that I last played this a couple of years ago but when I checked I discovered it was actually waaay back in 2016... how did that happen!!?

Congo is/was a ruleset from Studio Tomahawk who also publish Muskets & Tomahawks and Saga.  When Congo was 1st published it generated a lot of interest and I had a couple of fun games but it then languished, unloved, in the loft.  I recently acquired some jungle terrain pieces at a very good price and this spurred me into digging out the rules and figures.  It's out of print now and, it seems, pretty tricky to track down.  Studio Tomahawk's other games are very successful so it's curious that this one seemed to burn brightly and then fail.  I guess it's maybe too niche a setting.

Action and Totem cards

There are some old posts about it here and here which give a bit of an explanation of the mechanics but, in a nutshell it's card activated with players selecting 3 cards from a hand of 7.  These determine initiative and actions.  You also acquire Totem cards each turn which give a range of bonuses.  Units use a range of dice to reflect quality, rolling from a D6 to D10 with 5's succeeding.  

Units acquire stress tokens which limit their actions and ultimately can cause them to flee if they acquire too many. A nice touch is that there are different types of stress token (drawn randomly) which affect melee, movement or shooting. Black powder weapons also cause a stress token even if they don't hit... all the smoke and bangs are intimidating for the natives. Units can also inflict terror attacks which cause more stress (the drums... the drums!!!)

The game is pretty fast-paced and very pulpy in it's approach to Darkest Africa... it's more "Carry on up the Jungle" than " Heart of Darkness".  As my son pointed out, no-one needs to accurately game the Belgian Congo!! The game comes with 8 pre-planned scenarios, nicely presented as newspaper articles... we played #1 which is the most straightforward.

In this scenario the evil explorers (played by Anthony) were making off with a valuable looted treasure with my African Kingdom warriors in hot pursuit.  The explorers pick up max points for escaping with the treasure and some minor VPs for wiping out units.  My objectives were the reverse but I could also pick up some points by exploring the huts where the explorers start to acquire more loot (although this never happened as I was too intent in going after the main prize.  

The huts are paper models from Peter's Paperboys

There was a frantic chase across the board with a final brave attempt by my Fanatical Warriors (who were pretty bloodthirsty) to wipe out the explorers.  Anthony played the game in true colonial style by sacrificing his natives and Askaris to protect the European explorers!  In the end the explorers were wiped out but the expedition leader slipped off table with the treasure safely tucked in his pocket.  I'm pretty sure Indiana Jones wouldn't have sacrificed his colleagues quite so ruthlessly!!

It's a fun game that neatly captures the pulpy feel of the setting.  There are quite a few 'special' rules for different units and scenarios which inevitably got forgotten although I'm not sure they would have had a huge impact on the outcome. It's also a game that relies on lots of on-table markers which isn't everyone's cup of tea. I really like the game but I suspect it's one that will only get an occasional outing... hopefully more than once every 9 years though!

A bargain at Waterstones

Popped into our local branch of Waterstones yesterday and had a quick browse of the boardgame section.  This has definitely grown in the last year or so... I know the last couple of games my son bought me (Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel, and The White Castle) came from there.  Amongst the lighter games like Catan ,Ticket to Ride etc was a copy of Mosaic

I've played a lot of this at Eric the Shed's as Mark, a Shed regular, has a fancy deluxe version with all the bells and whistles added.  It's a great game, very reminiscent of the PC game Civilisation.  It's deceptively simple but has a multitude of ways to win (or not, in my case).

The game didn't have a price and was quite badly damaged so I asked the member of staff if they'd do a discount.  

Without seeing it he said they'd usually knock off 10% but when I showed home the box he did a double-take and immediately offered 50% off!  I guess he thought no one in their right mind is going to buy this, except for the idiot standing in front of him!!

So I'm now the proud owner of a very hefty, rather bashed, boardgame.  

Holiday boardgames

 

Since we were all home for a couple of weeks over the Xmas break, we took the opportunity to fit in a few boardgames.  My wife isn't the keenest gamer but even she agreed it was nice to be doing something that all 3 of us took part in for a change.  The common theme to all of these games is that I was soundly gubbed in each one!

First up was Carcassone with the addition of the Inns and Cathedrals set which was a xmas pressie from my son.  For some reason I didn't get enough meeples out on the board which is a fairly crucial tactic (!).  My son is a bit of a master of making the most of placing farmers: these only score at the end of the game but can reap (pun intended) pretty high scores.  And I came last...

 

Next up, my son and I had another game of the rather lovely White Castle boardgame.  I posted about it recently... it's a very nice worker placement type game.  In our last game we both seemed to quickly build up an 'engine' where one action generates several follow on actions automatically, but in this game for some reason, it didn't quite gel in the same way... I guess due to dice scores which determine actions.  Still great fun and, like Carcassone,  a game with a definite end point.  And I came last...

Kingmaker... optional rule, eat a Celebration whenever plague strikes!

Last up was a game of Kingmaker (the new edition which came out in 2023 (nearly said 'last year' but managed to stop myself in time!).  We've played a lot of 'old' Kingmaker and several games of the newer version but my wife hadn't tried KMII

In KM II the game can be won by accruing Prestige points as well as the traditional "kill all the other Royals" approach and initially I'd shot into the lead by seizing Henry VI but in the space of 2 turns the Event Cards struck and, I'd lost my most powerful noble to an outbreqk of plague in Oxford, and then Henry was summoned to Ravenspur to meet an emissary from the Emperor where he was jumped by a gang of my son's nobles, plunging me back into last place.  

My wife nearly ruined my sons schemes by capturing York, crowning a Yorkist as a rival, and lowering my sons Prestige points at a stroke.  Sadly the Event Cards struck again and he seize was delayed by bad weather, allowing my son's Northern heavies to sweep down and disperse their rivals and giving him the victory.  Great fun and very dynamic.  

And I came last... 

Battlesworn

 

Last game of 2024 was a trial of these rules by Ganesha Games, designed for small fantasy skirmishes.  Although they're fantasy themed, we went with a more historical setting, with Vikings and Saxons clashing over river crossings

The figures are Anthony's excellent 54mm miniatures which are a great scale for this type of game but the rules are very scale-agnostic.

Figures can move or shoot any distance (so in theory you could move the whole length of the table in a single move) but only in a straight line.  The key feature of the game is built around a bidding system... using a dice, players bid from 1-6 points to gain initiative with the lowest going first.  The catch is that the winning low score means you can only move that number of figures.  The losing player can then react with the number they bid minus the winnining bid (so, eg if player A bids 2 and B bids 5, A can activate 2 figures and B can respond with 3) but only in response to movement or shooting.

There's a similar system for shooting and melee.  Low bids win but have fewer chances to cause damage.  As figures take damage, their status changes (described in colours for some reason... white to green to yellow to red and then dead).  As the category shifts it limits the type of bid that you can make with that figure.

There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the gist of the system.  We didn't have any magic using figures but I think the same principles apply.  It's an interesting approach, meaning there's a lot of thinking and head-scratching about what to bid when, and how to manage the movement system to get people in the right place at the right time.

Once we got our heads round the mechanics it moved a bit faster but it did feel a bit stilted at times as you pause plan your moves and then to bid for each shot or melee.  We also found that we probably only activated half of our available figures as the bidding system means you'll tend to only be moving a couple of figures at a time.

In our scenario the opposing forces were faced with a river with 2 available fords and a bridge. Both of us moved our heavier armoured troops to the central bridge where they spent the rest of the game glowering at each other but didn't move.  Most of the action took place around one of the 2 fords.  My Viking Warlord led the charge against the Saxons who had dared to cross the river... casualties were pretty even by the end of turn 10 which marked the end of the game.  I had a slight advantage in terms of damage inflicted but the Saxons had a tenuous toe-hold on my side of the river, so I think it ended honours-even.

It's an interesting system... quite simple but requiring quite a lot of thought which is always a plus.  It did feel a bit like a thought-experiment though and I'm not sure it gives the kind of free flowing game that I'd want in a skirmish game.