An evening at Kurt's

A couple times lately, when games have been brought up in conversation - namely Commands and Colors Ancients and Nexus Ops - Kurt has said "I'll play that with you." After Shogun on Saturday, we finally had a chat about setting down a time to get together, and after some BGG messages, we were scheduled to go for tonight at six.

I grabbed a quick bite to eat and pulled up just in time. Kurt had the C&C scenario we were going to play about half set up. We finished the set up, Kurt went over the rules for me, and we got going. C&C is a wargame that uses little wooden blocks with stickers to represent the units. It takes a second to get familiar with which units the pictures correspond to, but once you get it down you're good to go. There are simple movement rules that revolve around drawing cards that allow you to move different numbers of troops in different areas. Combat revolves around rolling dice, a differing number depending on whether the unit is light, medium, or heavy, and trying to roll the color of the unit you are attacking. Leaders make a big difference, too, helping the units to hit and giving them resistance from being forced to retreat (which can actually be bad).

We played the Crimissos River, 341 BC, with Kurt lining up the Carthaginians, and myself the Syracusans. His side had a numerical unit advantage of 13-9, but several (I think six) of his units were stuck on his left flank on the wrong side of a river. My advantage was more heavy infantry units, an additional leader, and starting with a united line in the center, facing off against his light infantry.

I started out, moving my troops forward, trying to get my heavies engaged. I also had only one card to move units on the right, so I felt I needed to move them over to the center. This went in with my overall strategy, though, as I wanted to move over to the left a little, and then around, pushing him back and toward the river. I pulled a couple lucky cards to start, letting me move four units each time, helping me to bring my heavies up. as I closed, though, his light troops just kept evading and falling back, taking casualties along the way, but surviving. I whittled away at them, while Kurt tried to bring his medium infantry on his left into play. I drew three cards that let me move on the left flank, which let me pull my cavalry and my leader units up and around, pinning his units back against the board edge and the river, and finishing them off for the victory. It ended up with me winning five banners and Kurt two.

The first game went pretty quick, and we both enjoyed it, so we tried another. This time, it was the Ticinus River, 218 BC. Kurt was Carthaginians again, and I was Romans this time. His side had the advantage of being all cavalry, having lots of heavy units (to my none), two more leaders, and an extra command (card). One thing I actually liked a lot about this game is that the scenarios seem fairly asymmetrical, and you have to spend some time coming up with a strategy that will give you the best chance, and then hope for good cards. This time, I thought, for some reason, that I needed to open up the line of light infantry in the center to get the medium cavalry through. This was a total mistake, though, as there's no way that the Romans should want to throw their light cav against the Carthaginians heavies. I think what you want to do is to evaluate your cards, pick a side, and try to swing you cav around to challeng his lights on one flank, avoiding his heavy cav in the center if at all possible, perhaps trying to slow him down by cutting off his corners with your infantry units, which have four blocks. I did not figure this out quick enough, though, and suffered for it. Once I managed to half-reset myself and get my cavalry and leader around on my right, I did OK, taking a couple banners and damaging a few more units. While I was doing that, Kurt's Heavies and lights with leaders were chopping up my other troops, and he won 6-2.

This was another quick game, so we decided to play a third, but something different this time. We thought about Nexus Ops, but then decided to play something quick and light, and Kurt pulled out Attika, which I hadn't played.

This game was pretty fast and simple. It's a little game about building stuff in the ancient world, that has a real simple "tech tree," and rewards you for building in groups. You draw cards for resources and build chains of buildings that benefit from being down the line from eachother on the tree. You try to be the first to either connect the temples together with your buildings, or build all the buildings. We both started off fairly well, cutting each other off from being able to connect to the temples. I had a bit of an advantage on buildings, as I was able to draw more in sequence, I think. I also just drew more of them. I had a total brainfart about two thirds of the way through the game, and just started drawing buildings when I absolutely needed to (and could) block Kurt off on a new tile he had placed. After I drew and placed, Kurt just kind of looked at me and said "what are you doing?" and then, very politely, allowed me to shuffle the buildings back in and build the stuff I had. At this point, I was spread to wide to win by connecting, but I had a big lead on buildings. I ended up drawing and playing out far quicker than Kurt, even though I drew seven mountain resources in a row... The victory really belongs to him, since I wasn't paying attention, but we wanted to see how it would play out. One thing I didn't do at all in this game was pay attention to what was on his card that he had available to build - I pretty much just played solitaire, trying to pick actions that would let me build efficiently. There's not a lot of player interaction in this game, but you definitely have to pay attention to what the other person is doing (at least more than I did tonight).

After Attika, it was getting kind of late, and so we called it a night. I really had a nice time, and I'm very happy to have had a chance to play these two games. It really reinforced my desire to pick up a copy of C&C, as it was a fun, quick wargame with a lot of replayability that could satisfy a gaming niche that I really don't have anything for right now. On the other hand, Attika doesn't make it onto the buy que, as it was just a little too light, and short of interaction. I think it's a fun game for a random play, and it might be worth a try for more players, but it doesn't seem to do anything that games I have already don't. Hopefully, I'll have more chances to help Kurt explore his substantial game collection in the weeks to come. I wonder if he owns Hammer of the Scotts?

GG, GL