I voted for Kodos

I read in my local paper this week that we had 90% voter turnout in our little town on Election Day. A good day, certainly.

Race for the Bridge

I played a new wargame over the weekend -- MMP's The Devil's Cauldon. This is a operational level simulation of the northern portion of Operation Market Garden, the airborne invasion of Holland in September of 1944.

This game is a monster, 1600 counters and 4 huge maps covering the entire region from Grave to Nijmegen to Arnhem. The maps are probably the most beautiful wargame maps I've ever seen. To play the whole campaign game from the initial parachute drops to the conclusion a week later requires a lot of space and a bit of spare time.

Chris, my opponent, and myself played one small scenario of the game on Saturday using only the Arnhem map. The scenario covered the arrival of the first sticks of British airborne paratroopers and gliders west of Arnhem on the afternoon of September 17, 1944. Their goal is to secure their landing zones for the following drops and push into Arnhem to capture the key bridge over the Rhine before nightfall.

Chris took the British in our playing and I had the Germans. After five hours of play, we ended with a result that mirrored closely the actual history. The British drop went well and they quickly moved towards Arnhem meeting little German resistance. The British vanguard reached the bridge successfully, but as night closed in around them my reinforcing Germans surrounded the city and cut off the tip of his sword from the rest of his forces.

In our playing, the British achieved their operational objectives for the first day but suffered too many casualties in the process which resulted in a German victory on points.

This is a terrific game and it covers one of my favorite operations of the war. At some point in the future I will have to get the whole Campaign Game going.

Arms race

On one of the back roads near my house that I take to work every day, I’ve witnessed a recent battle of political yard signs. It started with a large cheerful hand-made “Obama” sign. Soon after, the neighbor responded with a series of four small white signs in the style of Burma Shave -- “Rezko” -- “Ayers” -- “Wright” -- and ending with a cryptic and menacing “?”.

This morning, there was a response in the same style laid out back on the Obama lawn -- “Keating” -- “Bush” -- “Palin” -- “?”.

I'll be glad when Wednesday is finally here...

Good for a few “laughs”

I find this blog “amusing.” Now we just need a blog dedicated to the misuse of ticks over quotation marks.

La Ville-Lumiere

Google continues to make me smile almost on a daily basis. They’ve now added Paris to their Google Street View feature.

I spent about a day and a half in Paris close to ten years ago. I have been wanting to go back ever since...


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Confluence

I was in Texas again last week for work. Still in the high 80s down there. Ugh.

The flight back was very pleasant however and the weather was clear the whole way. I spent the entire flight with my eyes glued to the window, enjoying the view.

I get my cheap thrills by trying to recognize and spot points of geographical interest. This is what happens to you when you are raised in a house full of maps and atlases.

Midway through the flight, we flew directly over this point shown here.


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This is Cairo, Illinois -- the point at where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers join. It is also the southernmost tippy tip of Illinois, surrounded by Missouri and Kentucky. Seeing this from my airplane seat put a big smile on my face.

But, to my great shame, I soon realized I had just missed spotting one of the great oddities of U.S. geography only a few minutes before.


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This is the little chunk of Kentucky that is cut off from the rest of the state by a severely meandering Mississippi.

I suspect I missed it because it was on the opposite side of the plane, but I can’t be sure. Sorry, Pop!

No Comment

Pat Oliphant is easily my favorite editorial cartoonist. He is sometimes crass and often resorts to ethnic stereotypes, but I find his drawing style irresistible.

All Of My Inconsequential Dreams

The Onion delivers a good chuckle as per usual.

In recent years I’ve been hesitant to tell people that I’m a Phishhead because they will usually mistakenly believe that I am a stoner.

And if I correct them on this, I’ll get even more strange looks because that means I’ve been to 78 Phish shows while sober. Weirdo.

I can’t quit you

This makes me smile. If only I could go without being surrounded by their “fans”. Shudder.

Keep looking up!

A very nice diagram can be found here.

Hero of the Soviet Union

More gaming stories to bore you with...

This weekend, I drove out to Western Mass for an annual gathering of wargaming geeks hosted by one of our local ASL clubs. There was about twenty of us there for an all day game-athon.

I participated in a four-person mini-tournament run by Tom Morin, the designer of The Valor of the Guards. Each of us played two scenarios from Valor, the winner of both taking first prize.

The first scenario I played was VotG9 - Eviction Notice. I had the Russians in this one versus Eric. My goal as the attacker was to clear a residential block of dug-in Germans. I had played this one before as the Russians and lost, but I fared a lot better this time. Through some effective encircling fire and some lucky close combat rolls, I won it this time.

In the final, I played Norm in DB055 - Sturmgeschütz Forward. I was the attacker again in this one, but with the Germans trying to run three platoons of StuGs through a Russian gauntlet of AT mines, AT rifles, an AT gun and a flamethrower. The scenario ended up being a lot closer and was a lot of fun. In the end I managed to squeak offboard enough victory points to claim the win again.

So I won first prize (yay!) which was, appropriately, a bottle of fine Russian Vodka. I won’t be drinking it, but displaying it proudly as a trophy in my game room.

Can I buy a glyph?

Today at lunch, I got around to solving last Friday’s New York Times crossword. One of the clues referenced a novel that I was not aware of; “Gadsby: Champion of Youth”. The book’s claim to fame is that it is a 50,000 word lipogram -- it only uses vocabulary that does not contain the letter ‘e’.

While reading more about this book in the Wikipedia afterwards, I slowly came to realize that the entire Wikipedia article about the book is also a lipogram in the same style! Bravo!

The End

After six months of wargaming, the battle for the Stalingrad Rail Station is over. September 18, 1942 was not a good day for the Soviets. The Germans achieved control of 75 stone hexes and thus triggered an auto-victory. I lost, but I had a lot of fun.

I pinned my hopes of staving off defeat on a aggressive last-ditch counterattack under cover of darkness. I spent my replenishment points on my last available company of elite Guards infantry and a Katyusha rocket barrage.

My goal was to punch a hole through the German line with the rocket attack, then hopefully exploit the opening with the Guards entering from off-board.

The Katyushas are very powerful but can be woefully inaccurate. This was the case here as well. The barrage overshot my intended target and caused a lot of devastastion in the vacant rail yards, but little damage to the defending Germans.

My oncoming Guards charged headlong into a German line that was not as softened as hoped for. They did not succeed in breaking through.

Meanwhile, on the south end of my shrinking perimeter, my enemy launch a counter-counter-offensive. His attack was more successful and he soon gained the necessary terrority to force my capitulation and concession. Well done, Tim!

Looking over my game plan for the campaign, I spent a lot of my purchase points on infantry, as much as I could. I would play it differently given a second chance. I think I should have spent more resources on fortifications, barbed wire, minefields, AT-ditches...anything to gum up the German advance as long as possible. I probably could have done more with less, rather than use the Stalin-esque strategy of throwing more soldiers into the cauldron.

Oh well...good game!

ADDENDUM: This weekend, I’ll be visiting the birthplace of Valor of the Guards (in Western MA, not Stalingrad!).

Science!

Caught this one on the TeeVee the other day. It’s a good one...

Just checking...

This website provides a valuable public service:

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth yet?

‘France, armée, Joséphine...’

I had another terrific game of The Napoleonic Wars over the weekend. This time it was a three-player game and I took on the role of Napoleon and France. My opponents were two local gamers of high reputation with formidable gaming chops. (Eric and Andy are past and current champions at the World Boardgaming Championships.)

My first few moves as France was into Austria in an attempt to capture Vienna and force a quick Austrian capitulation. My first few battles went well as I had moved Napoleon and his armies down from Artois to bolster Davout’s forces . Andy countered quickly with a solid Russian reinforcement.

Vienna was taken, but my opponent played a timely card that led to dysentery breaking out amongst my troops! A counterattacking Kutuzov forced a French retreat from Vienna. Austria was not conquered!

Meanwhile, Eric as the British expanded his control of the seas. His fleets destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleets off the coast of Gibraltar. He then was able to break my pact with Spain just as the Spanish were about to besiege Lisbon. I lost control of the Spanish forces to the British.

Following that, I took another stab at Vienna and recaptured it. But again due to skillful card play by my opponent, Napoleon was wounded and knocked out of action at a critical time and the French army in Austria was routed by an ascendant Kutuzov.

After the third turn, peace broke out. As Andy and I had fought ourselves to a standstill in Austria, the relatively unscathed British were ahead on points at game end and Eric claimed victory.

I am even more enthused about this game after a second playing. There is a lot of depth here in game play that may not be apparent at first glance. The use of cards to generate unexpected events makes for quite a lively and fun game.

Going to a happy place

While watching the RNC last night, I wondered aloud what it must be like to be a convention delegate. They certainly look awfully happy. How do they do it? Their world seems very far away from the reality that I perceive myself to inhabit.

Today, I see that Hodgman hits the nail on the head -- they are all LARPers! It all makes sense now.