Double Starring

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Jul 032014
 

There is nothing as fun and nostalgic as bringing out an older game and gazing upon it with fresh eyes. Recently, I had such opportunity, and not only to bring it out for play, but to play it with the same opponent I faced off against thirtysome years ago. It’s an interesting experience opening up the rules after so long, looking back on what we could remember and comparing those shadows of memory to the text before us.

The game summoned from its long slumber is the GDW classic Double Star, designed by the master of Sci-Fi gaming Marc W. Miller. When a gamer in the late seventies and early eighties wanted to get into Sci-Fi, a reliable source was GDW and one of Marc’s designs. Imperium, Triplanetary, and Belter are among some of the solid and fun games produced by GDW in those early days that reflect Marc’s approach: an interesting story to tell, a fantastic situation to be placed in, and interesting mechanics to resolve it all.

While I still have a copy of Imperium, we had long ago lost my friends original Double Star. Recently, in a determined and emphatic attempt to restore our originals, we’ve gone on a bit of a hunt to recover some of our lost treasures. Double Star was one of our first recoveries and thus one of our first old-schools to be played.

The premise of the game is intriguing. Two earth cultures, the Chinese and Islamic, have ventured to the stars and colonized two adjacent star systems: Chin and An-Nur respectively. These nova-humanitas, are now in conflict and have launched their armadas into space. Major worlds contain population (in millions), factories, bases, and defense systems. Fleets are composed of transports, destroyers, cruisers and battleships. An interesting concept revolves around the use of command cruisers, which permit the creation of fleets. These fleets have the inherent ability to train new formations which are then selected during inter-ship combat to enhance attack and defense power.

Destroying the opposing civilizations ability to fight includes devastating their production capability and annihilating the non-combatant population. If that sounds like the classical warfare of a bygone era then the classification is right-on; Miller strove for a feeling of barbarism and genocide with this title. One of the novel aspects of the game is the ability to break moons and smaller planetoids out of their orbits and send them hurtling towards your opponents planets. Needless to say these can cause devastating damage if they achieve a strike.

We played the short “raid” scenario just to get our feel for the game back. Next play will be the full game and the interstellar struggle for ruination or survival will be rendered to conclusion. Look for a piece on that experience in a future installment.


Two Islamic Cruisers have broken off the main fleet action for a raid while the planetoid Al-Akhir hurtles towards Chien.

Counter Productive

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Mar 152014
 

The art of wargaming has evolved over the past fifty years and that is a good thing. I don’t mean to take away from the wonderful designs of the past, I myself am an avid collector and player of classic wargames. Designers have introduced new mechanics and modern elements to wargames; and I speak not just of Card Driven Games (CDG), Point to Point movement (P2P), or Area Control; but of the way rules are written. Modern, well-written rulebooks are clear and precise when compared to earlier efforts. Also, in terms of components we now have excellent map artwork, accessories, and storage.

Yet with all of this evolutionary glow we still suffer from the pox of 1/2” punched counters.

There is no single element that has caused me more consternation than 1/2” counters. Hard to place, difficult to pick up, and lo-the-chaos caused when tightly stacked on small hexagons in a line or formation. It’s as if the original intent of these micro-cardboard chits were to unhinge the gamer who naively believed he could keep his French grenadier lines straight in his Waterloo game.

I can just hear the Sergeant of the Grande Armee saying from under his bearskin hat, “Do you know how hard it was to keep a formation orderly?” I am sure they took quite a bit of discipline and drilling to achieve, but must we suffer this while playing a simulation of the battle?

I have this vision of Charles Roberts, the founding father of modern wargaming, setting upon the task of representing units in his watershed title Tactics in 1954 and reaching for what was handy and available: a 1/2” die cutter. For decades afterward the 1/2” counter and hex grid continued to appear. Yes, there were a few titles that deviated from this as time went on and gamers were grateful, but the mini-counter reigned supreme.

To compensate for the difficulty of using 1/2” counters, gamers have invented various techniques of coping. The most well known of these is “clipping”, where a diagonal cut is made at each corner of the counter. One step up from that for those who can make the investment is rounder tools; I personally use a 2mm rounder tool on my sets. Both clipping and rounding permit for easier handling of the counters by offering more grip on the corners. The most extreme mitigation I’ve seen is reproducing the counters in a larger size and remounting them at the gamers own cost.

It is 2014, and last month I received a copy of Blood & Roses from GMT. There in the box, 60 years after Mr. Roberts first took hammer to punch, were sheets of 1/2” counters.

Attention game publishers! It is time to move beyond 1/2” counters. With modern production methods we can do better. Make them 3/4”, set that as a new standard, and your customers will be happy. You will have support for the very modest increase in cost for this. The economic environment of the 1970’s no longer applies, and we, your struggling, grasping, pinching, tweezing customers, would be forever grateful.

A World At War

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Sep 152013
 

This week one of my long sought after games finally arrived at my doorstep. A World At War is one of those monster war games that requires loads of time to play and a likeminded opponent to play it with. I am not sure what is rarer these days, the time or the person; and that person would be fellow a grognard. Not exactly someone you will find without a bit of searching.

But even knowing this I put myself on the GMT Games P500 list for a reprint of this 2003 title. That was five years ago.

Yes, I’ve been waiting that long for the number of pre-orders for this behemoth to reach five hundred, which it actually didn’t reach. I think GMT felt everyone had waited long enough and showed great mercy in setting up a print run with almost one hundred fewer orders than the minimum. I don’t know if it was sympathy or not, but regardless of the reason I am thrilled to finally have my copy.

A World At War has a line of progenitors that led to its current incarnation. The game is actually the ultimate revision of the original Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, a European theater World War II simulation published by Avalon Hill in 1974. The original Third Reich was one of my first war games and has always remained one of my favorite gaming memories. In 1992 Avalon Hill released the next stage in the games evolution with Advanced Third Reich, followed in 1995 by a sister game set in the Pacific theater, Empire of the Rising Sun. These releases really extended the game rules into a rules system.

Here we are in 2013, and this second edition of A World At War (or AWAW as its fans call it) contains the most mature version of the system. If you have ever wanted to get your hands on one of the hobbies most enigmatic titles, your chance is now. If you are brave (foolhardy?) enough, you may even experience a life-altering journey and write a manifesto describing your pilgrimage to one of wargaming’s most sacred mountain tops.

I don’t know when I’ll have an opportunity to play. If the space was available I would lay it out and play through some turns solo but alas, I don’t have a good spot where a game of this size and magnitude could lie undisturbed long enough. Well, there’s always the next consimworld!

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