Friendly forces pull out of Eisenbach

When I wrote about World at War:  Eisenbach Gap last month, I said I wasn't ready to put it up for trade just then.  Well, I'm somewhat sad to report that I did give up on it.  I put it in the mail today.  I never could get past the issues that put me off from the very beginning.

I really did want to like it.

World at War: Eisenbach Gap -- can't miss, right?

I've been messing around a little bit over the last few days with Eisenbach Gap from Lock 'n Load Publishing (LOCK 'N LOAD!!!).  World at War is a platoon-level game system covering a (thankfully) fictional invasion of West Germany by the Warsaw Pact in 1985.  Eisenbach Gap is the first game in the system, and focuses exclusively on clashes between US and USSR forces.

WaW:EG is one of those games that I'd wanted for a long time before I actually got around to getting it.  I always figured it would be a "can't miss" buy for me.  I'm a child of the Cold War.  Red Storm Rising is probably my favorite piece of military fiction.  The game itself is very highly regarded and extremely well produced (i.e., pretty!).  Frankly, everything about it points to me loving it.  I want to love it.  The bottom line, though, is that I'm having a very hard time warming up to it.

I'm not up for doing a full-scale review because, for one thing, I'm still getting to grips with it.  Instead, I'm going to do a bullet-pointed snapshot of some of the things that I find aggravating (or at least distracting) at this early point in my experience with the system.

• As I mentioned when I described getting the game, I'm really not crazy about the rule book.  Some of that may be subjective on my part. Maybe the author simply didn't organize and word things the way my brain idiosyncratically wants to see them. (How about a nice table concisely showing me exactly how the different weapon types interact with the different target types?)  Be that as it may, there are some objective problems there as well.  Probably the worst example is Rule 7.0, covering Line of Sight (hello, fundamental wargaming concept!).  It's just a mess -- and I think LoS is actually intended to be quite simple in this game.

• I'm not crazy about this word, but it's a very fiddly game.  Every counter gets an "Ops Complete" counter put on top of it when it finishes its activation, then taken back off when it next activates (or at the beginning of a new turn).  "Disrupted" counters live under an appropriate marker until they rally.  Less commonly, units might be under "Out of Command" and/or (depleted) "Ammo" markers.  And though the stacking limit is two units, some things (like HQs and support weapons, all of which have their own counters) don't count against that limit.  So, it's not hard at all to accumulate a real menagerie of cardboard crammed into one hex.  And, since some of the counters are units and some are markers which apply only to specific units in a stack, you have to be pretty careful about the order you arrange them in.  That's obviously an issue when you have to go digging through the stack -- which you have to do in order to do basically anything.  Now, lots of war games use lots of counters -- I'm certainly not unused to that fact.  It wasn't until I started working on this post that I realized why this issue bothers me particularly with WaW.  The game is supposed to be relatively light, and it plays quite fast.  Combine that with the fact that units' statuses are changing constantly, and that amounts to a lot of counter shuffling.  It's aggravating.

• This one is completely subjective, but there's something about the scale of the game that puts me off a little bit.  The counters represent platoons, rather than individual vehicles.  I guess I just have conceptual difficulties with tactical games (i.e., where things like elevation and terrain effects on LoS are considerations) that don't use individual vehicles as the maneuver elements.  It's an abstraction that I'm simply uncomfortable with.  (All of the tanks in the platoon are behind the hill, or none of the tanks in the platoon are behind the hill.)  Plus, in this specific case, the platoons aren't the same size.  The Soviets organized their tank companies into three vehicle platoons, while (at the time) the US Army used four tank platoons.  (At least I'm about 80% sure it was four.  I'm no expert on the Army's organizational practices, and I believe the mid-'80's was a weird period for them anyway.)  This has zero impact on gameplay, of course, but it does add a tiny bit to the cognitive dissonance I feel every time I move a unit.

Now, on the positive side, none of these things are inherent insoluble problems with the game system itself.  So I'm not planning on putting the thing up for trade just yet.  But I'm not immediately interested in getting any of the other games in the series, either.  I will, however, give this one a little more effort before I give up on it.  I really do want to like it.

New acquisitions since the WoWpocalypse

One of the things I'd been doing in this space was running down my new game acquisitions.  While I was obsessively playing the WoW, I still managed to pick up a handful of new things -- I just didn't write about them.  That lapse has been a thorn in the side of my sense of order, a thorn whose pricking I will suffer no longer!

First, a quick thought on "collecting," since this is, plain and simple, a post describing my collection.  I actually don't think of myself as a "collector," really, but:  the facts are the facts.  I buy a lot of games that, on some level, I know I probably won't actually play (or at least, play much).  I derive pleasure from the actual owning of the things, apart from and in addition to the pleasure that comes from their use.  I guess that's a pretty reasonable definition of "collector," whether I like it or not.  So there.  I guess I'm a collector, but a half-assed collector, to be sure.

Anyway:  here, in no particular order, are the things that I've picked up but not mentioned previously.

World at War:  Eisenbach Gap.  The Cold War era is a little under represented in my collection (there's that word again!) and that's a little surprising to me.  It's the era during which I grew up, and I find the potential military conflicts of the age absolutely fascinating.  Accordingly, WaW is a title I've always intended to pick up at some point.  I finally put in a request for it as one of the two games I asked for at Christmas.  The game covers a fictional invasion of the West by the USSR in the mid-80's. It's a tactical-level game, but at 1 counter = 1 platoon (rather than 1 counter = 1 vehicle).  It has had a lot of positive buzz, and I definitely see the appeal -- it's a very nice looking game, among other things.  It hasn't exactly grabbed me yet, though.  I've been through the rules pretty thoroughly, and they could be tighter, frankly.  Still, I'm looking forward to getting into this.

Fields of Fire. This was my other (gaming) Christmas present.  Its reputation is that it is a highly complex, highly innovative solitaire infantry/tactical game.  It spans three eras, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.  It also has the reputation of having an extremely difficult-to-grasp rule book.  I've done little more than take the shrink off this one at this point.  I'm not going to dig into it until I am in the mood for a major project.

Lock 'n Load:  Band of Heroes.  (Note well:  not "Lock and Load," lordy no; one presumes that wouldn't be "keepin' it real."  Or whatever.  And I would love to have sat in on the production meeting wherein it was decided that the omission of the "a" in "and" was worthy of denoting with an apostrophe, but the "d"--well, the "d" can just hit the damned road.)  I got a used copy of this game in a BGG math trade.  I gave up my copy of the WWII version of Wings of War--a game which I'd also gotten in a math trade.  (Hello, my name is Greywing, and I have a problem.)  I apparently have embarked upon a mission to own every WWII tactical board game except Advanced Squad Leader, and this acquisition fits into that plan (?) nicely.  Nothing really to say about this one beyond that; I've done barely more than open the box.

Patton's Best.  This is another game I got second-hand in a BGG math trade.  I traded away my copy of the Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition Player's Handbook for it.  (Have I mentioned that I wasn't crazy about 4E?) It's a solitaire game that I've sort of been looking for for a while now.  I really like the look of this one -- it's a detailed simulation of the experiences of a tank crew in WWII Europe, down to the level that each individual crew member is represented.  I have every intention of learning this one in the near term.  This was an excellent trade for me, which broke a streak of less-than-great luck.  My copy is complete and in really good shape for a game first published over 20 years ago.

Midway.  I won an auction for this one for a pretty low price (under $20 including shipping).  I bid on this as kind of a lark, actually.  I thought I'd take a flyer on trying to get one of the real classics of the genre, and it worked out.  This is, right now, definitely in the "have it just to have it" category, but who knows?  I might actually set it up at some point, since the subject matter is the most interesting (to me) single battle in history.  Read Shattered Sword!

So, there you go.  I've got one order in right now, for the deluxe reprint of Twilight Stuggle, and after that -- scout's honor! -- I'm cutting back on new purchases.  Seriously.  The goal for the year is to get my Warmachine on.  Beyond that, I need to seriously cut into the my number of owned-but-unplayed games, and cut down on the new acquisitions!