Pax Britannica...but not for long!

 

A couple of months ago I dug out my copy of Victory Games' Pax Britannica.  This last saw the light of day as recently as 2002(!) so another game was rather overdue.  An elite team of players was assembled - several of whom admitted to having played it before, though none as recently as me!

(most of) the assembled players.  From left: Italy (your humble correspondent), Britain (Martin), USA (John), Japan (Jerry), Germany (Lloyd) and Russian (Andrew).  Behind the camera is France (Russell).

The map.  Many years ago I pasted them onto mounting board - this made the game a lot easier to set up.

Hat wearing opportunities aplenty.  Near the camera lurks Russell's French kepi.

Egged on by the Kaiser, the Austrians were soon being a damn nuisance in the Balkans.

The French were very active in west Africa, the Brits were seemingly everywhere!

Not to be outdone, us plucky Italians soon built a trading network in Africa.

There were some tensions in the Far East - watch out for those Japs!

I was amazed to be left alone to pick away at the crumbling Ottoman Empire and was enjoying a costly little war when the French plunged us all into a wider conflagration.  So the Great War broke out in 1896...

It was certainly interesting to revisit this game and we'll probably give it another go in a few months.

Origins of World War 2

 

This week’s game was Jim Dunnigan’s Origins of WW2 as published by Avalon Hill. As with the earlier Origins of World War One, Russell had adapted it to play over Zoom.  It has similarities with the earlier game but there is a lot more going on. And it moves far more quickly!  Tonight’s game with a full five players took only 75 minutes - impressive especially considering that none of us had played it previously!  

As you can probably tell from the photo, I played the Soviet Union and managed third place behind the perfidious British and the decadent Americans. We’re playing it again tomorrow when I’ll be recast as that great enthusiast for liberal democracy, Ribbentrop.  Anyone want to buy some champagne?

Dodgy doings on D-Day

A few weeks ago Russell and I had a go at the old Avalon Hill D-Day game. This is the later edition with a very pretty map and counters. The photos are a mix of my own and Russell’s, and appear in no particular order. 

It’s quite a simple game, though I’m sure we managed to get at least some of the rules wrong!  It looks quite a challenge for the Allied player - in our game the Germans largely held the Allies at the border of the Reich. Though I guess that means postwar West Germany is only three hexes in size!  

 

Interestingly on BoardGameGeek it rates only 5.9 which seems a bit mean. We’d give it an 8. 

MiG Alley

I have a few of these mini games from Decision Game and can happily recommend them. Under £15 for a quick to play but challenging and clever game seems like pretty good value to me. 

The air war in Korea is one of these things which interests me so it’s nice to have a compact simulation of it. 

Usual nice map and counters. 

It’s a two-player game but I played it through solo.  My initial UN offensives may have rather lacked subtlety and soon the broken aeroplanes were piling up.  

There seemed to be thousands of those bloody MiGs!

I then tried fighter sweeps…

…which soon created a few broken MiGs. 

The cards which partly drive the game are an interesting lot. This one was a nasty shock for the UN. 

My first effort resulted in a win for the Commies. This is a tough game for the UN!  Like I said, simple mechanisms but LOTS to think about!

A year of living dangerously - Montrose’s Scottish Campaign of 1644-1645

I picked this up recently following an always dangerous recommendation from a friend (thanks Matthew!). It’s a campaign I’ve long been interested in, not least because a fair bit of the action is ‘local’ to where I grew up. 

It costs about £15 and the first (solo) play took just over an hour.

Lovely map and counters. 

Montrose nearly did it!

The game set up to play. 

Detail of the map. My part of the world!

I’ll no doubt have more to say when I’ve played it more.  In this first outing, Montrose came close to victory but basically ran out of troops. He did, however, manage the all-important sack of Dundee!  

Gettysburg - the Avalon Hill boardgame

Having been invited to help run a 54mm Gettysburg game later this month I’ve been doing a little reading up.  I have long been a fan of board games as a source of maps and research, even if I don’t often play such things.  However, I chanced upon a temptingly priced copy of this old AH game which has the right sort of complexity for me - not much!  

Last weekend I set the thing up to play through the Day Two (2 July) scenario. The board is undeniably pretty and the counters clearly printed.  I mostly took photos at the end of each pair of turns (CS then US) and shared them as I went along on a couple of WhatsApp groups. 

0600-0800.  The Rebs take Cemetery Hill….

…and fend off Yankee counterattacks. 

0800-1000.  More carnage on the hills, with the Rebs trying to maintain their foothold and fragment the US line. 

1000-1200.  The Feds looking a bit shaky but there are loads of the sods. 

1200-1400.  More carnage and a possible US comeback. 

1400-1600.  The font lines fragment. The white stripes on some units indicate that they’ve been flipped to their weaker side. 

1600-1800.  This is now a real slogging match with US reinforcements still arriving. 

1800-2000.  As night finally falls, some Confederate units go under. 

The final result was - on points at least - a clear win for Lee and his chums but it felt a lot closer during play. Really quite a nice game.  I particularly like the combat system where if you lose you retreat.  If you lose by quite a margin you take a step loss and by a large margin two step losses. 

And yes, I know I got some rules wrong (this is me remember!). 

My thanks to all those who gave virtual shouts of encouragement on WhatsApp - Paul, Mike, Diego and Russell. 

And finally, I’d be remiss in failing to mention Tim C’s impressive 6mm Gettysburg game he ran at the Joy Of Six show on the same day: