As I continue to amuse myself with Eagle Leader, I’ve been tinkering with a few house rules. This one is intended to reflect (in more narrative than simulationist tones) the advantages and risks of terrain-following flight. Aircraft eligible to use this rule are the F-111, A-7, and Tornado families (and, in Fulcrum Leader, the Su-24).
Continue reading →The Appeal* of Solo Wargames
(* for me)
The Girl and I took the past week off work for our anniversary. We did some old married couple stuff and some maintenance, but a lot of the week was spent in our respective monotropic foci. For her, that was a lot of editing and gap-filling on her current fiction project. For me, it was entirely too much time spent playing, deconstructing, and sketching out house rules for Eagle Leader.
I’ve spent the past few posts braindumping on that game, and as I was wandering around the house today, I found myself considering just why it’s so compelling. It’s easy for me to lose myself in PC games, particularly turn-based tactical stuff (looking at you, X-Com and Doorkickers series), but what’s so fascinating about analog solo wargames? They’re not nearly as cost-effective or space-efficient – for what I’ve spent on Eagle Leader, I could make an immense dent in my Steam wishlist, and that wouldn’t require any shelf space.
Continue reading →Jagdbombergeschwader
Yesterday, I had some generally positive things to say about Eagle Leader, Dan Verssen Games’ take on NATO air operations in the latter half of the Cold War. Today’s post will be less positive than pensive, as I complain about a missed opportunity and contemplate some possible solutions.
The missed opportunity is the Luftwaffe. Yes, all of it. Except for six dudes.
Continue reading →In Which I Wax Rhapsodic About Eagle Leader
Because of poor impulse control and a strong interest in late Cold War (i.e., my formative years) NATO air operations, I wound up snagging the full run of Eagle Leader from Atomic Empire and The Tabletop Strategist (good vendors, BTW; will doubtless give both them more money soon, especially before TTS’ current moving sale ends on Friday). Despite Dan Verssen Games’ long-standing and justly-deserved rep for crappy editing and questionable playtesting being fully borne out with this product, I have been having a ridiculous amount of fun.
A small amount of that is the fact that this is a physical product. Analog gaming feels innately healthier than my default mode of digitally-mediated work and play. It gets me away from screens and requires my brain to manipulate things in meatspace, something I’m realizing I need badly. With our recent rearrangement of furniture, it also gives me another reason to spend time in our now-much-more-welcoming library – either alone, or engaged in parallel play while The Girl is working on Lego kits or writing on her laptop.
The greater part of Eagle Leader‘s appeal, though, is its existence in my sweet spot of complexity (fiddly bits! options!) and speed of play, combined with the sort of emergent narrative I first encountered – and latched onto – in the original X-Com. This extends to the other Leader-series games in my library (currently more Cold War – Thunderbolt/Apache Leader, Spruance Leader, and Hornet Leader, with the Vietnam-era Huey Leader in my Kickstarter fulfillment queue). When my little dudes are individual pilots with names and callsigns, or named warships, with varying stress levels and damage and experience and improvement over time, it’s easy to get attached, and to start writing stories in my head.
Continue reading →Composite Squadron
I recently acquired a copy of Dan Verssen Games’ long-delayed Eagle Leader solo wargame. I am trying to remain firm in my resolve to not play it until I finish my current North Atlantic WWIII grand campaign of Spruance Leader. However, a four-hour power outage on Saturday did give me some enforced tech-free time, part of which I used to punch out and sort the absolutely ridiculous amount of counters that are typical of DVG Leader-series games.
That, predictably, got me engaged in thinking about the game more, so I sat down that night and spent another three hours branching the code and data set of my earlier Hornet Leader random squadron generator to build one for Eagle Leader. Both are linked from the DVG games landing page of the main site.
Guest Post: Alexei
Now that we’re back in Ponikla, my players’ thoughts are turning to infrastructure and character development. The friend who runs Alexei Brandt, the less-unhinged of our teenage PCs, sent me this look into Alexei’s motivations and downtime activities. (The same player runs Pettimore.)
Continue reading →The Mirrors and Masks of Mikolaj Krol
It’s time for another GM interjection regarding Kaserne on the Borderlands.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noted that the past couple of real-world years of gameplay have focused on the campaign’s expedition team, of which Miko was a part – but when the focus shifted back to the Ponikla team, Miko was also present. This is intentional.
In the lead-up to the Battle of Radom arc, most of my players created secondary PCs (or adopted recently-introduced NPCs, promoting them to PC status). This was to ensure everyone had someone to play in most scenes and to provide bench depth when primary PCs were down with injuries. By the time the expedition team headed south from Ponikla to validate the Broadstreet Dossier’s contents and Pettimore’s time-displaced memories, Miko’s player was the only one without a second character.
In the short term, this wasn’t an issue because we were focused exclusively on the expedition team. Whatever was happening back in Ponikla was irrelevant. However, as I started bringing the campaign closer to Czestochowa and a (partial) resolution of those questions, I knew I was going to have to address the second PC issue sooner or later, or I would have a player without a character to run when the focus returned to Ponikla.
(Among other issues, I’d inadvertently created a Miko power creep problem. To allow my players to develop their PCs as they see fit, my rule for this campaign is that XP accrues to the player, not the PC. Everyone else was spending XP on two PCs, but Miko was getting all the XP from that player. It’s not insurmountable, but it is noticeable.)
This post brings my hypothetical readers up to speed on an agreement that our table reached before we shifted back to Ponikla. For narrative purposes, the Miko with the expedition is separate from the Miko in Ponikla. As far as the other expedition members are concerned, Miko has always been with them. As far as the other Ponikla residents are concerned, Miko never left. The players, of course, are wholly cognizant of this artificiality – but the characters have no clue (and I have very good players).
I do, in fact, have a pretty good idea of what’s actually going on, but that will have to play out.
End of Summer Update
Happy equinox, everyone.
Posting frequency is likely to slow down for the next few months. Work has entered one of our busier seasons, so I’m not going to be running many game sessions in the autumn. I’ve also all but exhausted my backlog of pre-written and re-posted material, which has been a majority of the content here when I haven’t been actively blogging Kaserne on the Borderlands session reports.
Cauterization (10-13 October 2000)
It’s a long night on Horse Eater Hill. Around 0200, Red finally admits he’s done all he can for Magda. Her survival is now up to her constitution – and the microscopic geometric shapes in her bloodstream. He arranges a rotation for monitoring her condition and collapses on a clear patch of ground.
No one really rests. Miko has managed to get a campfire going, but it’s just enough to turn the fog from grey-opaque to silvery-opaque. It muffles sound, but that just means the noises that are audible are that much more jarring. Leks keeps shifting behind his gun, using the pain of his knee to stay awake through the night.
Continue reading →On Horse Eater Hill (09 October 2000)
Red drops his axe and allows himself a moment to sag in exhaustion before he starts triaging. Magda’s injury is clearly the worst – a deep, ragged wound that’s pulsing blood from a nick in her brachial artery. The physician gently takes the empty P7 from her good hand and starts tourniqueting.
Leks organizes some help and manages to get Minka back on her feet. She’s hobbling on a crushed foot, but it’s not life-threatening. She checks Alexei as he stirs and moans. The East German has a few broken ribs, but he, too, appears likely to live.
Minka looks around. Red seems to have the Magda situation in hand. Her eyes fix on Miko as he saunters up, wiping blood off his recently-acquired szabla. “Miko. Help me over there.” She points.
Miko looks at Minka. Looks where she’s pointing. Looks back at her. “Are you sure you want to get close to that?”
Minka grabs his collar and pulls him in. “He’s. Still. My. Horse,” she snarls.
Continue reading →