Grognard Wargamer Thread!

Thanks for the suggestion. The magnets in question are 8mm x 2.5mm which seems to be slightly nonstandard. (I’m finding 2mm and 3mm thickness but not 2.5.) I’ll keep looking.

I’ll see if I can find links to some of the magnet stores I bought from. They had a gazillion sizes IIRC.

EDIT:
I don’t think I ever used UMagnets, but they have 8mm x 2.5mm magnets at a more reasonable price.

DOUBLE EDIT:
Hmmm. UMagnets reviews aren’t good.

Hmmm. Seems best to avoid. Thanks.

Funny that 100% of their reviews are 1 star but their average is still 2 stars. Reviewer’s Tilt!

Magnets are notorious for their high Fun Factor.

-Tom

I stumbled onto Command Ops 2 while checking out the Steam sale today. I’m curious if anyone has spent much time with it.

The Foothills of the Gods (Greece invasion) pack came recommended as a good starting point so I’ve picked that up to take a looksee.

You’re in for a good time! I’d put CO2 up there as one of the best wargames ever made.

Oh, well, that’s a good start, thanks! It looks quite well done. And there are 7 DLC packs if I like the first one.

I had the original, and the expansions that came out for that version. I can’t recall all the stuff it covered, but I did like it. Then they went and did CO2, and wanted me to buy it all all over again. I said nope. And now it’s over 200 smackers for the whole set of scenarios, so double no.

Very cool addition to the Armored Brigade AB1943 mod - now has Imperial Japan, the USMC and 2 Iwo Jima scenarios in the Steam Workshop. Very well done!

This arrived today. Attn: @tomchick this is a cooperative = SOLO game.

That is where I ended up as well. Some of those it would be almost the 3rd time since it was material for some of their games before they did command ops 1.

Not much to report yet with my D-Day at Peleliu playthroughs. I’m pretty comfortable with the rules at this point and have played through a few times. At this point, the main challenge is keeping enough of the Marines alive to avoid a “catastrophic loss” before the end of the first day. There are casualty thresholds, and the moment you exceed them, it’s game over. I’ve made it to 2pm! So the challenge for me now is to pick my fights more carefully.

But I am absolutely loving this solitaire system. The AI is a real joy to see in action for how it does unexpected things, but not randomly or stupidly. And the weapons system – certain units have certain weapons and certain enemies need to be fought with certain weapons – gives everything a dash of personality by setting up constant “tactical” challenges.

The thing that bothered me still bothers me a bit, but I’ll get into that later. I had a great email exchange with @Brooski about it, and it’s bigger than any single game, so it’s not necessarily a Peleliu-specific gripe.

Hey, do y’all ever make your own player aids? I do this all the time for regular boardgames, but it’s much more involved with wargames and all their CRTs and terrain costs and OOBs and reinforcement schedules and so on. And that’s where I am now with D-Day at Peleliu. It takes a loooong time to get through a game because I spend so much time futzing around to look up stuff. I know exactly where the information is, but it’s not arranged and presented the way I’d like. I can’t be the only one who wishes wargames would just put the damn charts in the manual so I don’t have to pick up and put down four separate cards to figure out which one has the chart I want and on which side. So to speed up playing time, I’m basically reworking and rewriting the player aids.

I remember doing this for Navajo Wars and Comancheria, which were probably the last hardcore wargames I played. On tabletop, at any rate. Having my own players aids works wonders for pacing, and it lets me spend more time actually playing, which eventually gets me through more games played. And I’m thinking now that surely all grognards do this, right? Work from their own notes, make their own charts?

But I’ve peeked around in some of grognard @Brooski’s wargame boxes and I don’t recall seeing sheets of paper with reworked charts or even notes. So is that not a grognard thing? To make your own more convenient player aids and charts? Or do grognards just ram info into their brains in whatever format they’re given? I’m good at retaining rules; but I’m not good at retaining charts.

I started to watch a Youtube playthrough of Peleliu in which the guy had completely rewritten the rules for himself. He had made a “flipbook” that would supposedly walk him through all the steps of the different phases. He called it a flipbook, but it looked like a mess to me, like a sloppily re-written and unorganized iteration of the rules book. It was basically his typewritten notes, stapled together in an order that was supposed to go alongside the phases of each turn. But the playthrough was an absolute disaster because he kept having to interpret his own notes!

It was amazing watching him do something completely wrong because of the way he’d read his own once-removed interpretation of the actual rules. And he almost completely ignored the actual rules book in favor of his flipbook. The result was a loosely improvised version of the game John Butterfield had designed. It was basically a guy pushing chits around a map according to a patchwork of inferred rules, assumptions, and shrugs. I actually felt sorry for the poor fellow, because he clearly wanted to play the game, but it was like watching someone at an arcade machine jiggling the controls and not knowing you have to put a quarter in to make it work.

-Tom

Oh, shiny! You enjoying it?

I feel like cooperative wargames are a glaring gap in the wargaming world. General board gaming has had some brilliant successes (Gloomhaven, Arkham Horror, Spirit Island) but I’ve been struggling to find some really good cooperative wargames. I think this sort of game is ideal for introducing others to the genre as well.

I’m glad you’re liking Peleliu. I have D-Day at Omaha in my backlog, and I’ve heard very good things about it.

Support for learning wargames (rules, player aids, design, organization) feels lacking to me. It’s better than it was 20 years ago, for sure, but it’s a fraction of what it could be. It needs more joy, creativity, and structure based on good pedagogy.

And yeah, I just made a sequence of play sheet for a game where I was constantly bouncing in and out of the rules. It’s the first time I’ve done something like that, and it’s been so helpful. So maybe I just leveled up as a grognard? Level 2 here I come!

Is there anything in the BGG files section that would help with the charts: D-Day at Peleliu | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

I hate to say it, but it’s not a thing with me. I do put the charts on double-sided T-shaped sign displays so that I can see at least one side without picking it up. E.g., for World in Flames I have the combat results table on one side, and the weather chart on the other. For a smaller game, I might use just one side of the display holder for multiple charts.

I like having separate charts. I don’t want them in the manual. The manual for WiF is too long as it is!

Edit: I loved D-Day at Omaha Beach. I suppose Pelelieu refines the original system somewhat? Is it a better game?

1 - it’s newer.
2 - you don’t have it yet.

Of course it’s better! 😁

lol. Okay, okay, OF COURSE IT’S BETTER! But it’s also $100 on Amazon - gulp!

I haven’t played any of the other D-Days, but I have watched playthroughs of Omaha and Tarawa, both of which are earlier iterations. Weirdly, it looks like Omaha is a better showcase for modeling an amphibious landing onto fortified beaches. Or perhaps it’s just a closer scale that fits some of the tactical elements better? But the Peleliu landing has very little of Omaha’s careful navigation of fields of fire, cleared defenses, and difficult terrain. Instead, the Marines in the Pacific just have to roll over everything and take their licks. It seems to me Omaha is about avoiding damage and Peleliu is about having to soak it up, with tons of interesting ways for your chits to suffer step losses: ambushes, patrols, counter-attacks, melee charges gone horribly wrong, artillery fire, mortar fire, even getting lost in the jungle.

One of the prolific posters on BGG named Martin Akerlund has written a fair bit over there about the various D-Day titles, and his takeaway is that Peleliu is the D-Day game with the least randomness and therefore it’s the D-Day game with the most player agency. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree, but he seems to know the games inside and out, so his comment made me glad I ended up with Peleliu instead of Omaha, Tarawa, or – ugh – the Iwo Jima game, which was designed by someone other than Butterfield and apparently suffered mightily for it.

-Tom