Soldiering On

By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
April 8, 2005

The crew here sometimes parties together, although sometimes I wonder why. Last year, during the annual reminder of my mortality, Becky’s oldest, Sabrina, then aged three, made me a tiny birthday cake with gallons of icing (see Publisher’s Corner “A Little of This and A Little of That” ). In an attempt to avoid the repetition of an icing sugar coma, I brought my own, large, cake, which had been sent to me by the fine people at Omaha Steaks at the instigation of my sainted mother and on her nickel. Sabrina took one look at the cake and decided it needed something and that something was candles. Now, when you are four, someone my age must seem to be the same age as rocks, so she added as many candles as there are grains of sand on the beach. It took a good ten minutes for everyone to get all of them lit and there were a number of burned fingers. By then, there was a danger of setting off the sprinkler system and the air in the room was systematically being sucked towards the cake like light towards a black hole. The heat was too intense to get real close and these aged lungs failed in my first attempt to blow out the candles but, with help from everybody else, by the third attempt the conflagration had been reduced to the proportions of a burning Viking funeral ship. The melted wax took off the whole top of the cake when the candle array was pried off but what was left was pretty good!

As I write this, I am waiting for my singed eyebrows and mustache to grow back in and we are preparing for our yearly trip to COLD WARS up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Lancaster Host Inn has long been an excellent venue for gaming conventions and we will be traveling up there two more times this year, for HISTORICON in July and the WORLD BOARD GAMING CHAMPIONSHIPS in August. As usual we look forward to seeing many of our friends among the other dealers, meeting and talking with many of you and eating some of Bob Liebl’s excellent cookies. One sad note this year is that George Weiss, who with his wife, Linda, handled the dealer’s area for all three HMGS conventions for several years, died after unsuccessful heart surgery. He will be missed and our condolences go out to Linda.

There are some changes in our game lineup that will impact on how we conduct our usual game demonstrations. In the first change, we decided that SERGEANTS! games are too small to demonstrate properly at our usual demonstration tables, so we have put together a larger and easier-to-see SERGEANTS! miniatures game with four-inch hexes, miniatures terrain and MiniFigs 12mm figures. We’ll be running this as a regular miniatures event five times during the convention and each game can handle up to six players. Because of this, we will not be demonstrating SERGEANTS! except in this miniatures version but drop by and we’ll be happy to teach the game before and during play of these five events. Jeff ran amok with this concept and has manufactured packages of the two-sided, full-color, die-cut Lost Battalion Games Terrain Tiles and we have acquired specially-sorted packages of miniatures from MiniFigs that will be on sale to any of you who are interested. The tiles are two-sided, with all standard European green on one side with various geomorphic roads, rivers, ponds and gullies on the other side. Place your own hills, buildings and vegetation on top of the hex grid and you have an attractive miniatures Mapboard with a hex grid. Although the Terrain Tiles can be used with any miniatures game that uses a hex grid, a package of them has 132 hexagonal tiles, enough to assemble a standard-size SERGEANTS! Mapboard with some to spare and sells for $39.95. With MiniFigs, we have assembled four different miniatures sets that include 56 or 57 figures and four or five heavy weapons to match the orders of battle for a nationality (British, German, Italian and Soviet) in SERGEANTS! Also included are oversize three-quarter inch die-cut counters with printed game information to use as figure bases to exactly duplicate a SERGEANT! order-of-battle (plus a few spares). These miniatures packages sell for $16.95 each.

Another change concerns BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS. We had an amazing run on this game in the last month and have sold out of the current game and the Expansion Deck. A new replacement game will not be ready to ship before April 22. The replacement (second edition) game, BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS STEEL, will include the original game, the Expansion Deck, some new playing cards, higher quality cards (due to a change in our manufacturing process—these new cards will not match earlier ones perfectly and are a big reason we need a second edition), a revised rulebook (don’t worry, the game is not drastically changed, just explained in more detail with more pictures) with the addition of optional rules and a new box (we don’t know how much longer our old plastic boxes will be available). Since we have nothing to show, we will not be demonstrating any version of the game at the convention. However, Lost Battalion is featuring a special COLD WARS pre-publication offer for BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS STEEL at $34.95 (its regular price) but with no shipping charge when we ship it to pre-publication buyers on April 22. If you need a copy, this is a good opportunity with only a two week wait.

Our newborn at the convention will be SERGEANTS! - In the Sand, which will not be demonstrated individually, although the game system will be on display in the miniatures version and any one familiar with the previous release will find nothing confusing here. The game mechanics are identical to SERGEANTS!—On the Eastern Front but we include a desert Mapboard with an oasis, British and Italian units and a scenario with (what else?) demoralized Italians and an attempted escape by the wily General “Electric Whiskers”. With this game system, many of the unique characteristics of a nation’s forces are brought out by their weapon characteristics and their possible unit mixes. The British are as good as you might expect but you may be surprised at the Italians counter mix. The Italian army in World War Two had the worst private to NCO ratio (about 37:1) of any army and their officers didn’t much like mingling with the great unwashed, so the troops, who were quite capable of individual heroism, were very poorly led. By allowing three NCOs for over 50 men, the Italians in the game are potentially better-led than they were in reality and they are still far worse in this respect than any other army. This presents some real challenges when commanding the Italians in combat, although they won their share of play test victories.

Not quite new, but still a bawling infant only a few weeks old is BATTLEGROUP, our World War II action card game, which I covered in great detail in my last column (see Publisher’s Corner “Busy, Busy, Busy” ). This is a great game that should move well at the convention and will undoubtedly get lots of play at our demonstration table and, of course, an opened version will be available for inspection at our booth.

After missing FALL IN back in November, master scenarist Bill Frye, assisted by designer Jim Day, will be running several games using the PANZER Miniatures Rules during the convention. We are providing some of our ever-spiffy t-shirts as prizes. As usual, our demonstration table will be available for teaching and/or playing friendly games of our older titles such as BATTLELINES, COMBAT SOLDIERS or BATTLESHIPS IN ACTION, as well as the new BATTLEGROUP .