See all of this proves that traditional wargaming as a hobby is at least as much about the collecting and curating process than about playing. When I sold my collection of maybe 400 games back in the 1990s (grad school, my second go at it, was expensive!), I realized that for the vast majority of the games I had never actually played them. I had punched, trimmed, sorted, and stored counters, maybe set up a battle to look at once or twice, read the rules, or some of them, and then bought something else to wash, rinse repeat.
Shhhhhhhh…
Heh, I think the cat is out of the bag! Same with my Lego Technic stuff, though I do usually get them built eventually. I have more fun sorting them than anything else!
Being a spectrum person does have its benefits. I can get loads of value out of staring at a box of parts for hours.
Back in Normandy…
0800 June 6, 1944 - A foothold at great cost. Command structure in place, US troops prepare to push inland. Just to the west, things have fared much worse, and all told six US infantry companies have been wiped out. We’re two shy of the catastrophic loss condition.
0945 June 6 1944 - Aerial photo of Omaha Beach at the point where Allied command abandoned the beachhead (catastrophic loss). US forces had reached the high ground but the losses were too extreme to continue.
Super fun time playing the first attempt. Now I’m trying again with the learning scenario. It’s already going worse than the first time! Good to know that I’ve learned from my first attempt.
To be fair, in my second attempt, I decided to try to rush for the shingle in groups rather than haphazardly. So I sent four units into heavy fire from one position at the same time, figuring they couldn’t hit all of us. But then the Germans drew a reinforcement event that put an extra troop right into that position. They then immediately all opened fire and pretty much wiped out that whole group in one 15-minute span. D’oh! Sorry guys!
So now I have another idea for getting to the shingle safely, that I’ve noted for attempt #3.
I like how you are trying to keep the counters lined up nicely. One of my pet peeves is playing board games against people who are MESSY. I mean, “piles of chits only vaguely aligned to the hexrows” type of messy. Drives me batty.
Thanks, I think! I’m not sure where it comes from, as I’m pretty disorganized in real life. But crooked picture frames on walls annoy me to no end; keeping wargaming counters reasonably tidy feels related to that in some genetic, ingrained, OCD way.
Thanks!
You were talking to me, right?
-Tom
(I should note that one of my Tom Chick Interface Mods ™ is to invert disrupted counters, so Baker company and that battalion HQ are upside down for a reason other than to antagonize @TheWombat’s OCD. But the positioning of everyone else, including Chesty Puller’s leftward pull, is just how war happens.)
Gar! I’m trying to rearrange them on my screen but it’s not working.
Ok I gotta say this is cool.
There is actually a method to the madness. I don’t have OCD about things being lined up neatly, but it drives me batty if I can’t at least see the number of steps on every chit. So in the process of making sure all chits on top are slightly offset to one side, everything gets all cattywumpus.
I think my brain would explode if I tried to play a wargame with a stacking limit higher than 2.
-Tom
This thread is pure chit and hex porn.
No one sneeze!
-Tom
Is there a step penalty for having five or more steps in a hex? Omaha has a two-unit limit and a 5-step penalty. So if you have 5 or more steps in a hex, it’s treated as automatically having the matching symbol of the German firing card.
Yes, Peleliu also has rules for Concentrated Targets. But the bigger issue in terms of being able to see at a glance how many steps every unit has is targeting priority. I don’t know how Omaha shakes out, but in Peleliu, you don’t have to worry about having Concentrated Targets very often, and almost never after getting off the beach.
-Tom
One of the first and very fundamental errors I committed in No Retreat! Russian Front was allowing the Russians to have a stacking limit of 2. Oh no, they don’t get that in the beginning of the campaign, the Russians have to earn even that.
I’m a proud Oregon counter-clipper owner, with both a 2 mm and a larger unit at hand, but I don’t clip every game. People here earlier mocked me for not clipping my World in Flames counters, but those counters have center-mounted sprues, not corner sprues, so the ugly chads are on the sides, not the corners. I don’t think it’s worth clipping thousands of corners that are mostly in good shape. But maybe rounded rectangles are always more aesthetically pleasing?
Also, I never realized how crooked my counters were until I started photographing them for online AARs. Looking at photos of my wargames made me feel like a teenager discovering acne in the mirror. Accordingly, I broke down and bought the sort of tweezers @Vyshka mentions. :)
Because your landing craft get blown around, I’ve ended up with three units piled up on the same low-tide hex a few times in both games now. Those are usually steady fire hexes of at least two colors, so chances are pretty good you’re going to lose troops there.
In itself it’s not a disaster, just another one of about a dozen creative ways the game kills your troops.