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 →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 →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.
I’ve been wanting to get Hornet Leader out again, having yet to finish a campaign of it. In lieu of actually, you know, playing the damn thing, I spent a few hours today coding some JQuery to generate a random squadron, as per the optional rule for doing just that sort of thing.
I have a few other thoughts on tools for DVG’s other solo wargames, so the new landing page (which links the aforementioned Hornet Leader generator) is here.
A couple of years ago, I backed the Kickstarter for Dan Verssen Games’ Spruance Leader (I’m linking to the Boardgame Geek page rather than DVG’s product page because the company… um… doesn’t have the greatest web site). We promptly adopted a pair of kittens, which are not really compatible with big boardgames that need to stay set up for days for protracted campaign play. Between that and mental health haze, the game’s been sitting around unopened for the year and a half since the Kickstarter delivered.
I’m currently living alone while the girl and the cats and I work through the phases of our cross-country move, and I had the foresight to bring my DVG solo games along with me. After watching a couple of actual-play videos, I broke out Spruance Leader this afternoon and set up a first campaign and mission.
Things were getting hot in the North Atlantic. My task force’s first assignment was to go after a Soviet ASW task force operating off the Norwegian coast between Ålesund and Bødo:
