Two, and three.

The following slides are from my Battle Analysis this semester.  The picture in the first slide is from the cover of the game " A Frozen Hell " and the black and white maps are modified from the book " The Winter War:  Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-1940 "  by Robert Edwards.  The terrain map is also from the war game.  A great deal of the statistics are quotes from his book.  The only material that is mine is the analysis and the slide arrangement.  This paragraph is only to explain up front which material is mine and which isn't.  "Irg" pretty much was the same as National Guard or Militia Units.  They had almost no combat experience before this war and were drawn up only as Finland slowly realized how screwed they were.  The Russian advance seemed at this point to be completely unstoppable.  There was simply too many men, too little supplies and no fortifications to stop them.  This is NASTY terrai...

 So if you haven't been able to tell I've been posting over the past week/weekend about war games I played over the past year.  This was the second TCS game that me and Wulfa's dad played and I have here two photos from the two games we played.  Unlike Bloody Ridge(48 hrs), and Korellia(10 hours) this game is massive.  Absolutely massive.  I felt like we clocked around 120 hours each time we played it. Just like Bloody Ridge this game requires you to write orders and abide by them.  And like bloody ridge one side is very good at implementing(the Finns) and the other sucks at it(the Russians). In both games I played the Russians.  In the first one(seen above) I absolutely dominated.  Unfortunately this was because I was reading the rules exactly as written and was abusing a key watch tower to use my artillery to demolish the Finns. The second game, seen below went a lot slower as we(after a short chat with the designers) adjusted that rule ...

Over winter break it snowed.  Which is a pretty rare thing around here. The munchkins wanted to play in it so during the night they placed plastic buckets outside to try and capture enough for playing snowball fights. It worked out pretty well for them and resulted in about an hours worth of outside snow fun before the cold and wet got to them and forced a retreat inside for coco and cartoons.

This is a picture of the much more complicated Tactial Combat Series(TCS) game system from multi-man publishing.  This is the smallest TCS map and resulted in a game that took approximately 48 hours worth of game play(split up into about 8 six hour sessions). In this game system you have to write orders in advance and then roll to see if you can implement them and your tactical moves have to follow and abide by your strategical written and implemented orders.  Which leads to the occasional fits of frustration when your opponent has done something clever and you keep failing the implementation to counter it and he is free to exploit the hell outa you. In this particular game the Japanese Player(yellow tokens) must be aggressive and plan way way in advance.  If you do not attack from as many angles as possible as the Japanese(they start on the far left of the picture) you will find yourself where the player in the picture is....with far too few troops to take the rid...

I got this game for my birthday/Christmas present from the in-laws.  We played it two times over Christmas and a third time over new years.  In terms of game play each game seems to run about 30-40 min a turn with a full game on average lasting 14 turns. "On Average" is easily calculated thanks to the type of game that this is.  You see unlike every other war game I've played with Wulfa's dad this one has a variable number of turns.  To the right bottom you see a small box with numbers and a marker.  This represents Stalin's patience.  Each game turn the Russian player rolls 1d6 and on a 3 or lower Stalin loses one point of patience.  At zero patience the game is over and you count victory points(The red hexes). Without that randomness this game is a walk for the Russian player... you just meander forwards slowly and your troops out number and overwhelm the Finnish(who the entire game will have meager resources and be running around sniping at t...

The weather is bleak wintry fog soup with a side of nasty.  US air is grounded and no one is expecting any movement.  Then the guns begin drumming from across the river and suddenly nightmare weather gives way to nightmarish numbers of German troops on a counterattack. The US forces near the Our River just a day's march north east of Bastogne are overwhelmed as 8 infantry divisions and 5 armored divisions come pouring across the river. Four brigades of artillery are dissected like dead frogs due to lack of infantry screens and the middle of the front collapses.  The 106th is quickly pushed to the river and only about half its strength makes it across.  The 14th Cav brigade that was acting as advance scouts is lost, presumed dead. To the north near Eisenborn and Kalterharberg the 99th and 2nd infantry divisions begin a careful retreat hoping to hold on until the 5th and 7th Armor Divisions and 1st ID can arrive. ...

What I should be doing right now: Rewriting/building my engineering capstone project's code from the ground up in order to make it more organized and clean. What I'd rather be doing right now: Cheerfully finishing up the last pages of an amazing novel that I just wrote*. What I am doing: Writing a blog post. Saturday went splendidly in the manner that I overslept, but still went to work.  When I got to work I became very grouchy for being at work and not getting work done fast enough.  Then I came home to my house where everything is dirty. So now I'm in the garage trying my best to ignore Matilda from the living room and trying not to be a complete #($* about how much I don't like this house or the stuff in it or my weekly schedule(lack there of). I tried to look back at the early portions of this blog to see if I had always been as downer as I have been recently and I can't really tell because this blog was originally a game based blog it is really...