Vijayanagara: First Play in India’s Rough-and-Tumble 14th Century

This is adapted from the script of Episode 95: Vijayanagara Review or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bahmani.

So as it turns out, when you’re playing as the Sultanate in Vijayanagara: Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398 from GMT Games, your enemies, the Bahmani and the Vijayanagara kingdoms, will not sit and behave while you try to beat back Tamerlane and his Mongol horsemen, who show up a few times during the game to wreck your shit.

Vijayanagara Game 2: Did I learn my lesson from Game 1? Playing again as the Sultanate, I open by dispatching ruthless Governors far and wide.

The challenger Bhamani and Vijayanagara forces start out the game like small rashes you notice on your arm before you go to bed. Then the iron-fisted bastards who were running Delhi during the opening game give way to a new dynasty, the Rebel command becomes available, and you wake up covered in them.

By midgame, regions that were firmly loyal are answering to new Rajas and Amirs as they build their power bases, pushing north, turning your vassals into theirs, and hollowing out your tax base. Your dreamy days of commissioning lavish minarets and creating fountains of cash from whichever tributary you squeeze are coming to an end.

Vijayanagara is built on a game system called the Irregular Conflicts Series, which is in turn the child of an older system called the CounterInsurgency, or COIN, series. These game systems let you step into a given era of historical conflict and take the part of a major faction or nation in one of these struggles. The game arc can span decades or even centuries in an afternoon.

You will be subject to the major economic, cultural and military inflection points of the time: succession crises, invasions, new technology, and more reel off the event deck every turn: Can you ride the turmoil or be engulfed by it when, for example, the Diamond Mines of Golconda start kicking out loot or when a Sultanate army wanders off into the Hindu Kush Mountains and vanishes? Each of these let opportunists destabilize your position or vice versa.

The event cards, during which each of the three factions usually gets a chance to capitalize, kick off the excitingly stingy ration of actions, along with the opportunity cost anxiety of the game’s action selections: Each faction has its own powerful commands that it can activate to take territory or secure a sphere of influence on the beautiful map, but taking the most powerful options means you’re sitting out the next turn. Do you take a less powerful action in order to stay in the flow or accept the forced cooldown so you can make a bigger dent in the board? It’s not easy. While the Sultanate has a pretty firm grip up north, you share lots of borders with your hungry upstarts down south, and they’re gonna eat.

Plus, there’s the Mongols to think about: the Timurid empire was routinely stomping through northern India and I know they’re going to launch a big assault for the game finale. I have more than 200,000 troops in Delhi and I’m dying to head South into the Malwa District and stomp out the Bahmanis and tear down every brick of the annoying fort they built there, but I feel handcuffed because it’s the home stretch and Tamerlane could pull up on me any minute along with his many, many eager riders. 

GMT Games’ Vijayanagara: That’s an awful lot of Mongols you’ve got up there. Got something planned, Timur?

Unless I catch a lucky event, it would take me a whole turn to march down to Malwa, and another one to attack. I already spent a turn there executing some sassy Rajas and turning Malwa back into a tributary, but now they’ve booted out by governors in the Rajput kingdoms.

The array of forces in Vijayanagara are never clean. Pieces from multiple factions can co-comingle in a region for several turns, vibrating with menace and potential chaos. More than once I’d log on to take a turn and see that previously compliant regions had erupted into full-scale naughtiness and the game had a whole new face. Imagine a busy lunch spot with one of those big communal tables, except everybody at the table has a gun next to their plate and they’re staring you down while you try to read the menu.

The game is full of moments like this and they get brighter and bloodier down the home stretch: As I write this, the Vijayanagara have 10 victory points, and the Bahmani and my Sultanate are tied at 9. In one sense, I’m on pins and needles; on the other hand, I’m just happy to still be in it, even with my dynasty’s best days, by design, far behind it.

On a wider note: This experience is giving me a taste of those glorious “knife fight in a phone booth” nights I haven’t had since my last games of Chaos in the Old World, Game of Thrones 2nd Edition and Cyclades, when we made that first big leap from Risk’s modeling of “dudes on a map” to see just how deliciously fraught a territory control game could be. 

There are some things that solo play cannot duplicate: That feeling of peril and of people pushing against you, triggering three setbacks on any given day when you’ve got the resources to stop one. That sick feeling of watching yourself dip on the victory point track, seeing your opponents openly conspire to clip your wings, and realizing the best you can do is lash out because you wrong-footed yourself two turns ago. 

Because we’re playing online via RallyTheTroops.com and our players are in the U.S., Canada and Poland, it can be quite a bit of time between turns. But that’s OK, because being able to pop up the rules and reference cards from my RtT room and do some patient reading is a big plus.

The implementation of the game is lovely. The prompts and highlights the game feeds you on your turn, the game log that shows what just happened, all feels very tight and helps you quickly understand the “what” and “how” of executing a turn, even if strategy comes slowly. I highly recommend taking a look at the collection of games there.

So laurels for Rally the Troops and thanks to my patient opponents, Dave of Dude! Take Your Turn and Michal of The Boardgame Chronicles, who have been merrily carving off chunks of my Sultanate for 10+ days now. Best hazing ritual ever. I’m eager for the chance to apply what I’ve learned to a second try at running the Sultanate.

I also want the physical copy of this one because it plays solo, too,  but last I looked, the first printing was a hit and I saw one copy being offered for $300. GMT Games, the publisher, has their own in-house crowdfunding mechanism with its P500 series.

If 500 people pledge — at a price well below retail — it gets a second printing. Right now it’s just over 200, so if a couple of my listeners could just head over to the GMT website and pledge a few hundred copies, that would really speed things along, thanks.

Dwelling Solo RPG Session 2: Come Sit By Me

This is the living room scene generated from the prompts on pages 28-29 of Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. You can read the first installment here. In this passage, the narrator has just descended a staircase into the living room…read or listen below!

LIVING ROOM

Scene-Setting: “The living room is dimly lit by the glow from the streetlights and moon filtering into the room. I start to walk through the room, but with each step, my legs feel shaky, like they’re no longer as sure in the knees as they usually are.”

The shift in scent is utter, it’s her curated mix of all the bright and fussy cans and bottles you’d see in advertisements with white backgrounds like rock videos, plus the sum of her mom’s house dust and what she cooked. It is like a cannonball of beach coconut, steam and gravies, candy-flower room deodorizers. I am felled.

I am still on the floor when an arm reaches out from the shadows on the couch end and pats the middle cushion: Come sit by me. I go where I am bidden. I gape at her as she forms, legs tucked in at the end of the couch, hair bound in back, working her cuticles. She could vanish into those for an afternoon, so absolute that I wasn’t sure which one of us had disappeared.

The scent-envelope lasts about as long as an FM summer hit. The harder I peer, the quicker the scent weakens, and her outline with it. There’s just a small depression in the cushion left when the TV comes on. The chunky green numbers don’t match the style of what I know J’s TV to display. His TV is old, but not as old as these green numbers.

Channel 84: The blond wood coffee table with the oval frame that had a hollow for magazines that you could see through the inline glass panels at either end. That should have tipped me off.

Skinny kid with brown eyes and cropped hair, underweight at about six feet, cap with some kind of golf resort logo parked on the back of his head. He’s side-lit from the sliding glass door by a summer sun’s mid-afternoon arson, its smoke a colossal column of boredom that breeds the legion of usual aches. You can beat the first ache with lunch, the second with masturbation, but they multiply regardless. He lifts the needle on a record player on a shelf behind him. The bookshelf matches the coffee table.

It’s “Trust” by 7 Seconds, their love song, last track on The Crew from 1984. He can never pick which part he’s air banding, he switches between bass, guitar, drums and vocals several times. It’s just 2:17 long.

He cues it up again. This mope is tireless. On the third play I recognize it’s me and I watch the fourth and fifth play through my fingers, sick with shame. The scene isn’t supposed to be lit like this, the world outside so bleached with light that dusk doesn’t seem possible even though there was one just the day before. It was lit by footlights in a small music club. When the chorus hit I’d look down — I’d have to be on bass or guitar for this one — and see her in the front row. Somehow it mattered that my band had booked the gig and I hadn’t known she’d be there.

That poor over-freighted melody. The sentiment of the lyrics was all stolen, they were show-home staging tricks. The idea was always the melody that would corkscrew us inside each other. It’s always the melody. Hijacking that was the false voice that you think will make you understood at 17. Because you still wouldn’t know what to say to her or do with her before or after the song.

I just wanted her to call me once that summer, I wasn’t even excited about going to college.

Channel 130-142: I recognize myself immediately this time.

Good God Almighty, I even dreamed myself up an eye patch in this one, pulling up next to her at a stoplight on one of those night-cooled four-laners with landscaped medians that connect master-planned stretches of this and that. What would be playing. Maybe Funkdoobiest if I wanted it dangerous and cavalier, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin if I wanted to instill uptempo regret in her. In Version One I’d turn slowly from behind the wheel of my astonishing vehicle and regard her with dead eyes, because what do you do for vindication except stare at them from a distance greater than the span of their retreat, one-up them for scars, accomplishments and mystery? Streak like metal and liquid across the dome of their dream world like they did yours.

In Version Two on Channel 131 she has girlfriends in the car to witness what a dreary plane she’d confined herself to when she let me go; they gawk as I light a cigarette just before the green light and the hookiest part of the sample hits and vroom, that’s that. The channels advance faster. Apparently I devised a whole career’s worth of these.

Oh look, now I’m in a track suit with bodyguards in a resort town where she happens to be staying with her family, again with the eye patch, not very imaginative to keep replicating that touch. The channels keep flipping through one tawdry coup de théâtre after another, all shows of strength and indifference, you’d think this I could have worked a rescue or two in there. I feel sick, but I stay on the couch.

Channel 187: I look like I’m in my late 20s now in the pool hall. It’s a well-appointed one: The regulation tables have beautiful felt, the rails are lustrous, the lights are even and the rafters high. I’m overdressed for Denver as usual.

Her cousin is there with her boyfriend and there is a lot of laughter. Nobody besides me gets too invested in their turn during our doubles game. Those couples’ games would stretch, the last seven balls invincible. We’d try to coach, but it would be seven balls perpetually because the girls weren’t that interested and the boys were too drunk.

The pool hall is crowded, young professional kids on a Friday night and there seems to be a lot of people we don’t know forming a gallery around our table. What is it with these onlookers? They’re almost all men, a cluster of ectomorphs.

Then I notice Bryce is there, looking at ease, he’ll be the one on her arm at her little sister’s wedding, ropy and tan as a lifeguard. There’s Andrew, for whom she jilted me before Bryce. Gentle Karl is there in a tartan driving cap and his long, brown hair.

I sink the 10 ball with a beautiful cut that rockets it neatly to a corner, magnetized to the cushion for what looks like a gymnasium’s length. I leave the 20 oz. cue on the table and walk away unnoticed.

Channel 102: That same pulverizing sun except it lights the respiratory junk of the desert gambling tower roofs and the awful concrete that boils and the cars are its lava. Drawing the thick inner shades, it’s 10 a.m. At some point the rolling chatter of the machines turned into the choir of Mammon as the night we had T-boned the oncoming morning.

Please stay here with me.

What is sold to you as fun under the dead sun and the concrete. She is as calm as a cultist. There’s no need for a fight because there’s nothing to fight about, she is going to walk right back into the heart of that thing that whispers in the spaces between $1 coins hitting the metal troughs; throbs behind the lit ad panels, their jumbo lobsters and necropolis summers; gurgles beneath the green water that conjures the free 11:15 show up out of the synthetic lagoon.

Please stay here with me. It’s been all night, I just want to clasp her under the sheets and drift off together. It’s very important, but her smile is fixed for sacrifice.

She goes out the door and into the hall of the 15th floor to find the elevator down.

I can’t leave the room. I should be hungry. I’m not looking out the window or watching TV, that’s just another window, except worse.

The TV turns off. There’s a trace of artificial berry lip balm and cigarette smoke on my mouth.

Learning Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader, Which I Put Off for 40 Years

This is adapted from the script of Episode 94: Avalon Hill Squad Leader - Shots Fired After Owning This for 40 Years.

It looks like the opening exchanges of building-to-building fire wobbled the German squads across the lane. Can I take these fuckers in a rush with the rugged elements of the 37th Guards?

Turns out I can, but they dart through an alert German MG team’s field of fire on the way. This was the cost of that little sprint:

First blood: I lost six squads in my first-ever charge. Gotta learn somehow.

Their sprint crossed the merest sliver of an alert German machine gun squads’ field of fire. An expensive jog, but what the Russians lack in command acumen and support weapons in Scenario 1: The Guards Counterattack, they make up for in numbers. The survivors enter the building and stomp out the remaining Germans there in both hand-to-hand fighting and a short, lethal exchange of fire down hallways and staircases.

This old hex map and its tiny counters now seem lit from within. Getting to finally play this game feels like finding an old roadster in a barn and getting it on the road — a model still driven today by a dedicated subset of wargame lovers because they love this legendary system and its successor — Advanced Squad Leader — so much. I’m starting to see why.

A Bit of Background for Our Readers Who Either Don’t Know Anything About Wargames or Who Think They Don’t Like Them, But Who Are Wrong

Squad Leader was released in the 1970s by Avalon Hill publishing, one of the two big strategy publishers of the time, the other being rival SPI.

A whole generation of military history nuts who wanted to fight the big battles out for themselves with historically accurate units and conditions were relitigating the Eastern Front, the great 19th Century wars of the Continent, the U.S. Civil War and more. There was a race to put out creative and rigorous designs that fed these subterranean armchair generals the right balance of scale, realism, and strategy vs. the chaotic fates of the battlefield.

Squad Leader entered as a full-on squad-level simulation exercise. The main categories of action are just firing and moving. But almost every real-world consideration of those fundamental activities are governed by formal metrics: Did you move before you fired? What’s your terrain in relation to your target’s? How much stuff are you hauling when you move, and across what? How’s your morale? What’s the skill level of your officers? When your rifle squad freaked out and ran — which happens in this game because sustained machine gun fire can riffle-shuffle anybody’s nervous system — do they have to hide in hex K5 or L4?  

Every consideration is codified in a rulebook and reference cards whose tables look like they might have been purloined from the working real-life command HQ: Infantry Fire Tables, Close Combat Tables, Support Weapons Charts, Movement, Terrain, and even a droll little chart for what happens if you try to sneak around in a sewer. Roll a die! 1-4, successful. 5-6, lost. Think of the granular combat considerations of, say, older versions of Dungeons and Dragons pointed at their operational essence, except you don’t have to think up what your characters say around the campfire. The action is the story. And it’s a vivid one.

Ain’t she purty

But I don’t have to think about sewers yet, thankfully. In addition to its dense but well-written rules and the cohesion of its modeling, Squad Leader’s designers also rolled out a tool they called Programmed Instruction: a series of 12 scenarios — six from the Eastern Front with Russians vs Germans, another six from Western Europe late in the war with Germans vs. the U.S. — that feed the complexity to you in chunks. 

Section 1 is a firefight in Stalingrad that only puts you in charge of men and machine guns. Scenario 2 lets you play around with flamethrowers for the first time, use demo charges, smoke cover, concealed units, and learn the quantitative joys of individual unit fanaticism. And so on, until you’re finally able to graduate yourself to even more complicated stuff like vehicles and artillery.

But even Scenario 1 is a beast if you come at it cold. A bigger beast if you have nobody who will attempt it with you.

While simultaneously exploring my seasonal affective disorder (amateur prognosis) and GMT’s Storm Above the Reich over the winter, I sang this jeremiad:

I was talking to dudes on BGG’s Squad Leader forum about the copy of the game that The Moms got me for Christmas in 1979. She knew I was into WWII history and war movies, because weren’t we all? 

I was 10. I opened it, gawped at each bit of it, and put it away. Some of the dudes on the BGG forum mentioned a common denominator: “My big brother and his friends…” They got to learn it under the wing of some adolescents.

And I realize it doesn’t matter how cool these games are unless somebody is there with you, moored at the point of fascination and raised on the broth of brotherhood. And I stopped shopping a bunch of wargames I liked that YouTubers were talking about when I realized I wasn’t shopping for a game. I was shopping for a big brother I never had, or friends I had and don’t have anymore.

As it turns out, I did have a big bro to teach me. When I repeated this complaint on Discord to longtime friend of the show Noisy Andrew, he made this thrilling claim: He knows all the rules for Scenario 1 (The Guards Counterattack) by heart, notching a 100% accuracy rate when his last opponent looked up his rule citations. Now this was a lantern I could follow into this impenetrable cardboard Shangri-La.

We downloaded the Vassal tabletop emulator. He even did the heavy lifting of figuring out the software and Squad Leader module. We are now in our third week of successfully straddling the Perth-Starkville time zones for one-turn sessions and I’m having the time of my life.

We are in Scenario 1 for a second time and now I’m learning to look for that one early exchange of fire that tells me I have to shore up a flank and keep my head down…or follow that wisp of blood in the water to a weak spot that’s ripe for the chomping. I go to bed with the footage drawing itself in my head; even misfortunes that happened on my side of the ledger are vivid and satisfying.

Now that Noisy has given me a working frame of the action sequence, I now have occasion to set up my physical copy so I can retrace the finer points of the rules. They’re a lot easier to read once you’ve seen some action. My general experience with crunchy games is that digesting the crunch is not only a minor thrill of achievement, it delivers a richer experience.

Which is why what’s happening here is way beyond a thumbs-up or thumbs-down proposition. Hex-and-counter wargames are a subset of a subset. On sight, these creations are either hilariously off-putting or they’re as irresistible as the deep-memory drumbeat of the sun that lures the characters of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World south to vanish into the book’s florid, mutated Triassic swamps.

The fellas are gonna laugh when they find out I didn’t use proper clippers.

While I cover newer games—the level of passion and creativity in tabletop design is boggling—I have been digging backwards more in all my media consumption, as things redolent with real human work are more and more appealing as the automated, the synthetic, the simulated engulfs everything. 

Why fret about whether the sludge I'm looking at everywhere is human or bot when I can pick up, say, the Joseph Conrad book on my furnace cabinet and know a human made it? No guessing. No looking down the mirror hall. Regular consciousness and representing it with language, as we'll find in the wrestling matches of the great artists, is complicated enough! Why the hell do I need profit-motivated Silicon Valley mutants posing profit-driven additional conversations on top? The inexhaustible riches of the near past are there for the taking.

Squad Leader is categorically beautiful for this reason: Looking at the hundreds of tiny cardboard counters, you can hear the chug of an offset press as the Avalon Hill team — probably wild with sleeplessness — watches the first proof run emerge.

Reading the steps for managing a unit that’s crumpled under fire, you can feel the long hours alone and the waypoints of fierce crosstalk as assumptions are playtested.

Right as I finish this section of the script, I see the mail gal put a white package at the door of my addition: That would be the specialized Squad Leader counter trays I ordered. That means I’ll be spending some time this weekend with a cold one on the table, happily clipping and sorting every single piece, fully immersed in the small and happy ministrations of one of the many small pockets of the world that VCs and private equity haven’t figured out how to ruin.

You’ll never find me today, you bastards.

Today I am unprofitable, and therefore, if just for a few hours, free.

Dwelling Solo RPG Session and Review: My Ghost Story So Far

This is excerpted from the script of “Episode 93: Dwelling Solo Journaling RPG aka The Human Heart is Spooky AF” if you’d rather hear this than read it.

I have to tell you about a dream I had.

My lifelong heartache and love — to the degree which I ever experienced love — was in an out of my life for 20 years. Nobody else has been in my life that long or in so many forms: high school prom date and heartbreak, occasional lover and then girlfriend again (and heartbreak again) and a few sad richochets of each other in our in 30s.

In the dream, I was in one of those very bright corporate office building lobbies, overbright really, that also housed an art gallery. I saw her crossing it 20 feet from me. I knew she wouldn’t turn her head unless I hailed her. The sighting brought the same where-did-she-go-and-why-doesn’t-she-want-me-anymore ache.

In the next scene we were at a small, circular table in the lobby. We had already talked for a time. I was entreating her. It became clear that the only love I would be getting was a universal one — one of her best qualities was a general deep tenderness and empathy for others — not the kind I wanted.

The explanation didn’t gel into words or none I can remember; I only remember the knock-you-over sun of her smile, her dimples forming…and becoming aware of a document on the table before me, upon which sat one of those crappy Bics with a blue cap.

I knew at once that I was to sign this document, which would not only surrender the addictive, selfish, and transactional “love” I demanded, but release me from everything I’ve hauled around over the decades. All of it, down to the clutching at life itself. 

I did not sign. I slammed the pen on the table, raised my voice.

I don’t remember her at the end because I’d attracted the attention of a security guard, a husky dude with a mustache, a shoulder-length haircut that suggested he was in a band that played taverns on the unfashionable strip of South Broadway in Denver, white shirt and gray slacks, explaining that I would indeed have to go, gracefully or not, ready or not.

It was the kind of dream to which you want to remain in service for the entirety of the day after it occurs. She had appeared to me as a psychopomp, a figure that offers a mortal soul transport to the afterlife, and she had tried to be nice about it, transcending my wants and becoming a passing teacher, a door to something else. It riveted me for days.

I was sad, but also felt like I my time in the country had given me a signpost in the gallery of lost faces that I recall and query too often. There’s so many of them, they blot out the stars.

I also felt like it’s been too long since Breakup Gaming Society featured an indie creation. The past year has featured mostly popular titles from widely known publishers. So when I stumbled across Tabletop Tokki — check her out on YouTube, she’s an underrated creator, IMO — talking about Dwelling, a solo game for ghosts, created by Seb Pines and published by Good Luck Press, I ordered a copy immediately. I was overdue for this.

What follows is the the first few rooms of my encounters from Dwelling’s prompts. The backstory: Your character in this solo journaling RPG is somebody who has just inherited a house from an uncle.

Unsettled, you move room to room on a restless night and are fed prompts to describe the nature of the many spirits you find there as you track down sounds or oblique forms in shadow: What they look like, even. You can draw them in the book if you want, but I skipped that part because I wanted to focus on the writing. What memories do they dredge up? What marks do their appearance leave on you?

What follows is my ghost story so far. I’ve had an encounters in the bedroom, the guest room, the staircase to downstairs, and the living room. For each room I’m going to set you up with a bit of the prompt for book, then what I wrote for the encounter. 

Dwelling Solo Journaling Game: The first prompt happens in a nearly bare bedroom in a house recently acquired by the narrator from an uncle.

BEDROOM

The first spectral appearance is cued up like this: “I let my eyes languidly take in the walls and make sense of the still-unfamiliar shadows, tracing the shapes with my unfocused eyes and still hazy from sleep. In my sleep-addled imagination, my mind conjures a shape in the shadows, the way the darkness piles at the end of my bed, making the dark shapes against the wall look as if something is peering over the edge of my bed, looking up at me.”

Here’s how I managed that prompt: Just off my left foot, something with eyes on stalks, a repulsive density in the folds of the summer-weight comforter that carries over from the dream. Its unverifiable teeth and opacity of intent…was it jostling for its corner of the bed or working its way up my leg? I was unable to move in the dream, but I manage a kick. The dune-folds of the comforter returned now, innocuous.

Throwing the comforter off me, there’s the high contrast of cooling moisture on my left pec. I test it with my fingers — it’s a small puddle — then my armpits with my other hand and find them more or less dry. 

I lay there with my forearms pointed up for the better part of a minute, rubbing either thumb against index and middle, in the wonder of a backslide. TDF would not permit herself to fall asleep on me because she was mortified at the thought of being observed while drooling.

Such was my wonder on the day she did, I stayed awake to bear witness as she slipped into her noiseless slumber, black hair splayed out, for a full hour, drooling slightly.

It felt like the most important thing she’d ever told me, but I’ve always had a bad habit of assuming that more was exchanged in shared silence than had actually changed hands.

GUEST ROOM

The story next takes our narrator back off the lip of sleep to investigate a sound in the hallway. We locate the guest room as the source, which was the primary bedroom of the uncle who left you the house.

It is still furnished with many of his things, and the book feeds us another encounter with this cue: “Uneasy in this space so personal to someone else, I find myself tiptoeing through the room. Moving through the room slowly, it feels like my stomach could drop. Then—I hear a sound: A small, startled inhale.

This sets up the following encounter as the being who made it forms in sight and action:

Tsk-huhhhh

I am seized with fear and shame.

Tsk-huhhhh

A diminutive form regards me, glaring.

Tsk-huhhhh

The sudden need to placate it trumps the fear of its wrong-presence; I release the muscles in my clenched feet and wamble forward. It vibrates with impatience.

I peer at it, trying to find some outline at the edge of the simmering seven-shades-of-dark that ought to be its center. I test the air between us with a slowly raised hand. My heartbeat feels like a finger being drawn around in circles on the skin of a snare drum.

I rummage for mollifying words. It will not wait for the words. A hand reaches out, grabs my wrist loosely, thumb playing along my radius with a tentative, imploring pressure, then darts straight for the left pocket of my sweats, digging for something. I am rapt with its anger.

Tsk-huhhhh

The hand darts away, and with it the thonk of whatever it was fishing for. The noise preempts the hiss of the snare drum’s skin; I find a lamp, turn it on and see my Motorola on the floor, screen spiderwebbed from edge to edge. 

I did not. I did not carry that in here, I can never relax with that in my pockets. I wouldn’t do that any more than I would wear plate armor to bed.

I did not. I know it.

Only the phone’s date and time display clearly now. I am able to unlock it, my skin dismayed at the new microcontinent of jagged fissures on its face. Key app icons occluded by milky cloud of errant pixels, like a mind trying to gnrrr out its last few sentences in the middle of a grand mal seizure. Half-digested juices of 10 years of sudden-onset arguments, resolved by fatigue and breakage, if not reason.

I cannot afford to replace the phone nor think too long about replacing the phone. I place it on Uncle Jay’s dresser, my eyes fixing on the top leftmost drawer. That’s where I found as a boy what I would later learn is called a Moleskine notebook.

Was I five, six, seven? On visits here to see Jay and Beverly with my parents: I was better than average at verbal stuff for my age, but unable to penetrate the atmosphere they generated around themselves in the evenings, when Facts in Five would come out and they would play far into the night, smoking joints and drinking red wine and bantering in a tongue I badly wanted to acquire.

Sometimes I would try to yip out things that sounded like they belonged in the category they were working on, but I would usually be left to entertain myself after tiring of staring at the box cover on the floor and failing to puzzle out how I could gain entry into a world where Abraham Lincoln, some kind of Asian princess, and a rushing football player all waited for you in a city of skyscrapers and old temples. 

Glum with being excluded and tired of the box that suggested everything and told me nothing, I’d wander the house. That’s when I found the Moleskine and Jay’s block type and recognized some of the words: “savage,” “gray,” and “sicknesses,” but the sentences only resolved to the growing boredom weighing on me and the increasingly enchanted gulf between me — too tired to know I was past bedtime — and the laughter from downstairs. When the laughter tipped to fighting, Jay’s voice was always knifing over the top of everyone.

Something snags or tickles inside my sweats. I reach in and pull out a long, dark hair from the seam between my thigh and crotch. I whip it away backhanded.

I did not. I did not bring this in here with me.

Despite the displacement and anger, pure exhaustion, sweet and total, beckons me like a maritime wreck at peace in the silt.

And that’s the way the Guest Room encounter concludes. But no rest for our narrator, dear reader, because this long night is full of more sounds.

Ready to go downstairs? Me either, but fuck it, because we hear the loud creaking of a door hinge from down there.

Dwelling Solo RPG Prompts: Uh oh, we’re headed downstairs because there was a sound. There’s always a sound.

The next exercise is the descending staircase, where you’re invited to recount the scenes from the day that led to this moment in time. I count eight steps in the illustration on pages 24-25, so I do eight memories. But not before my character yells at the source of the noise.

STAIRCASE/DOWNSTAIRS

“For Godssakes can we please not have any more Krakatoas or Hindenburgs in the remaining seven minutes of this fucking day?” I shout back at the unmistakable long creak of a door from downstairs. I know the cadence of those lumbar pops by now. That was a door. Yelling back seems the strongest defensive spell I can cast. Good old annoyance, even as bravado, helps resituate me.

I wait for an answer, for it to duplicate itself, then head downstairs, policing slowness, ears on high alert:

A List of Happenings aka This Fucking Day

Step 1
I entered this house again from the dream of the debauch in the loft, steel and glass like I imagined I’d have one day, the city off its balcony a pile of fulvous jeweled yellow, friends and employers there. There was a curtain of force that kept me at 15’ remove from the faces. It would give at first when I moved near them, then swell and repulse me and I’d find myself in stairwells, pushed into the wrong clothes, trying to avert or start emergencies in fuseboxes, looking at drywall and olive drab diamond plate steel landings, talking to undercover cannibals full of ruses and sinister half-formed phonemes, sentences fused together and rolling, rolling. An enduring feeling of failure that kept me in bed long after I woke.

Step 2
Noticing the welts on the insides of both wrists like an allergic reaction, raised, red, like pollens went at me with claws.

Step 3
Washed my server uniform and jeans in Uncle Jay’s ancient Kenmore; it works fine, but I was so unsettled about taking ownership of this museum that I was still using laundromats a month after moving in. While doing this, I worked out a few more lines about the realtor bluegrass jingle where you get blown if you close on a house: Stomp your hands, clap and scream/It’s the #1 Dicksuckin’ Realty Team/Wrap your lips ‘round the ‘Murican Dream…

Step 4
I only have one freelance client left, so I should have done a better job. I used to crush stuff like that article in 45 minutes, now it takes 3 hours. The writing is easy. Caring about it is nearly impossible. 45 minutes of breaks in between every few paragraphs: Yahtzee on the phone, hunting for a pair of cufflinks — cufflinks! — in the living room’s unpacked boxes. I was seized with fear at the thought of not having those cufflinks anymore.

Step 5
Again I daydreamed until my body was past hungry and tipping into rage, shrugged at the kitchen — still the only fully unpacked and operational room after three months — then drove up and down Welty Boulevard., unable to make a decision about lunch as if if there were a firing squad waiting for me after the meal. Wound up at Sonic, four cars deep with four heads each and they all looked like bearded dads in UnderArmor hats with full vehicles modding every single thing in every single bag, can you fuckers die. Reminded me of that time Uncle Jay took me to Yosemite and we got caught behind some cross-country cyclists on a two-laner while trying to exit the park. After 15 minutes of glaring over the top of his steering wheel in silence, the exquisite groan: “Uuungh, can’t they just hop tree to tree and leave me alone?”

Step 6
I gorged at home and attempted a half page of the book about the Byzantines. It was chief in J’s collection and he’d package what he thought were the funny parts for me over the years. Sometimes when I’d get on his nerves he’d tell me to comply or get the Byzantine Retirement Plan, which by then I knew was having your eyes gouged out. I still can’t get through it; I’ll read a book a month sometimes then stick on one for a year even if it’s labor. The bare bedroom was getting too warm in September’s late heat. I am at ease when the weather is pleasant enough not to think about and beset the other 10 months of the year. I know I should read but all I could see was a shifting scribble of a brain trying to read.

Step 7
I tried to relax with a walk at dusk, tracing a halfhearted three-block rectangle, the horizon opening up briefly on the shortest leg of the rectangle, 23rd Street. I saw a disintegrating colossus of thunderheads in the west but drizzled with pink on the outer rinds, green on the bottom where the edge of the municipal golf course began blocks away. I passed the janitorial supply store and the bleached cutout of the woman and the mop; I’ve walked by that shop since I was a kid and I still can’t tell if it’s in business or not.

Step 8
I found A.B. on Instagram because cycling tabs for a dribble of likes starts crushing you after the sun goes down. It was the same smile from when she asked me in the HS library where the pencil sharpener was, she knew damn well where the pencil sharpener was. Still a lovely dresser, stylish without being trendy. When she asked me about the pencil sharpener I remember she had a turquoise bandana rolled into a perfect hairband and I didn’t understand in my panic what she was asking for at the time, but I did understand, or thought I did, that if you had a girlfriend with a turquoise bandana hairband and a smile like that, you were all right, you had a foothold on something.

Next comes the living room, where we see the first manifestation of A.B. I’ve got the living room scene written, but I’m going to pin this for now because I want to refine the scene a bit and talk about my impressions of the game so far.

As a writer, I’m a fountain of jokes, complaints, opinions and stories. That comes easy enough. I’m good at scenes, bits and fragments, but rarely attempt the discipline of longer stories. And when I do, it’s usually show-off observation and ideas and riffs without much shape.

Dwelling — and the way it nudges you to triangulate the book’s cues with things you remember and things you can embellish — has got me writing an actual goddamn story. Much more of one than I set out to do.

I had to quietly eat some crow about my contempt for people who workshop stuff, go to conferences and do guided exercises and the like. But what pure stories have I ever written with my big, manic imagination? Almost none. Yet here I am, several thousand words in to one. Turns out I needed a prod in my ass after all, just like all the earnest amateurs I mocked to my friends. So I’m walking that one back. QED. Score one for you, Seb Pines.

The fact that it’s a former uncle’s house is also rich ground. Because of the dream I had, I more or less know the outcome and the arc I want — the intoxication of attachment and desire, its awful fulfillment and the grace of letting go. But now I’ve got a subplot on my hands with the lingering presence of an uncle that has me thinking hard about the encounters as chapters and how Uncle Jay’s strand mirrors or diverges from the narrator’s wanderings. It’s almost overwhelming. This is turning into a workout.

This goes for the emotional processing, too. I’ve noticed something else cool happening in the past few weeks: I’m revisiting scenes of my old self with less recrimination, less shame, less bitterness. I don’t want to oversell this as some replacement for more formal means of care, but grinding through these scenes transmutes the poison tang of how I recall things, at least lately. I feel lighter. I can sift a bit more dispassionately. Not picture everything as evidence against myself or others.

So where does this sit in the tableau of experiences we would call games? I can’t tell you yet. It’s categorically different and I’m incredibly glad I sought it out. And I intend to stick with it.

If you like the story so far, keep up on the Breakup Gaming Society blog this summer as I add encounters and work through the book.

Learning Board Games: I Interview a Newbie About the Line on the Pain/Reward Graph

As a lot of board gamers who defaulted to solo mode when their friends refused to play have found out, the avoidance of the unknown and the learning curve is real.

Contributing writer Fritz Godard had never engaged with a solo dungeon crawler before 52 Realms: Adventures and writing this account of his struggles with the experience.

This was fascinating for me, as I love strategy and hobby games, but still hate learning them. I called him up so we could compare notes about the process of getting over the hump of confronting new systems and hitting the payoff.

We talked about the pleasure vs. pain of learning new stuff, what we saw as a reviewer’s responsibility, and I also asked for his help in trapping/killing some kind of wight or will-o-wisp on my property now that he’s a big, tough dungeon adventurer. Hit Play below to hear our chat.

A Sublime Moonlight Massacre: Fritz Godard Lands in Starkville

This is adapted from the script of Episode 92 — “Faraway Review + My First Time on Board Game Arena” if you’d rather listen than read.

“There’s two things you need to know about this place,” I told Fritz Godard when he pulled up in my weed-choked driveway a couple nights ago. “I got in way over my head when I bought this old place, and I cleaned today until I got bored, which was 12 minutes.”

It helps to say these things next to a Char-Griller with sweet oak and tangy mesquite smoke pouring out of it, and to follow it up with a cold pint. I figured I’d get a rapid buzz in this dude and the black grime on the kitchen baseboards would make him feel at ease and generally better about himself, if he noticed it at all.

I had two six-packs on ice: Avery Brewing’s White Rascal — I’ve always enjoyed having the Rascal around as temperatures climb — and Leinenkugel Berry Weiss. It seemed like a decent side bet, considering this was the year’s first string of cloudless high-70s days.

Beer and boardgames: The Hamm’s vintage beer goblets are broken out to celebrate Fritz’s safe arrival.

The taste of the Rascal reminded me I had two old friends in the house. I love nearly every Avery Brewing product I’ve ever had. White Rascal brought what I always remembered: suppleness while still being crisp, the orange zest playing along on the beer’s body like sundogs. These got crushed quickly as I taught Fritz how to run Project L, which I reviewed back in Episode 88.

Pivoting from that to the Leinenkugel Berry was the evening’s only disappointing turn: The whiff of orange that comes off a White Rascal is girded by an actual beer around it. These Leinies had a tinny ring of artificial-tasting berry and nothing else.

“It reminds me of what Vitamin Water tasted like in 2008, like they were trying to come up with something to compete with a boozy seltzer,” I said.

Learning Project L: Fritz ponders what to do with the nice base of pieces he’s acquired; he used them to nip me 21-20 in our second game.

“This is like what you give a niece or nephew who are having their first beer ever,” said Fritz.

The digitized berry startup sound that was the entirety of the beer’s personality stuck in my mouth for several minutes after, as if I’d been trance-eating SweetTarts or Spree while watching schlock on YouTube.

I dislike this beer intensely. I’d reach for a Keystone Light before I’d ever open one of these again. It is an annoying beverage. Know what sounds like Berry Weiss? Bari Weiss, which is also trash.

This was when Fritz’s time bartending and being a semipro lush in Louisville, Kentucky paid off. After pouring, trying, and touring his way through bottles, shelves and vats of brown liquors made in the Southeastern U.S., he pulled his favorite from that era of his life out of a brown paper bag: a bottle of Michter’s Rye.

The first belt of that Michter’s after that candy nothing beer, the reopening of the senses, was akin to the relief of being in a room where somebody is blasting anime theme music over a phone speaker for 20 minutes and you don’t realize your body’s been slowly tensing up in rage, but all of a sudden it stops because somebody else just drowned it out by throwing on some vinyl, maybe MC5 or Thin Lizzy.

Fritz said Michter’s became his go-to for its blend of bite and smoothness. And it was all there, that sharp, woody, upfront first hit, then a layered mellowness across the middle and back.

We knocked it back neat the rest of the night, stopping only to savage the half chicken and pickled okra I dropped between us on a cutting board, popping out back occasionally to watch the progress of a full moon and let the chill spring breeze from the south rake surplus heat off our boozy faces.

I showed him the ropes on Final Girl: Madness in the Dark before we succumbed to the ranks of unmedicated maniacs on the asylum map and passed out, him on the eastern couch, me on the southern couch, all the lights killed except, the orange accent strips on the floor beneath the couches, all sounds cut except the brisk tenor of the narrator. I’d thrown on an audiobook of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. The rhythm of the words made drunkard’s hammocks in the middle of the book’s sweltering post-apocalyptic lagoons.

Damage report: 1.75 six packs, a chicken, most of a fifth of rye and several residential patients of Wolfe Asylum were destroyed in the making of this session.

I woke up several chapters later, Fritz’s eastern couch vacated, the moon and its jamboree mass having pulled with it in its western plummet the last strains of fight songs from fabled bandit enclaves in Brooklyn, the sun arrived to police chicken bones, the drying husks of night-bloom playlists, shot glasses, dice and the many yellow victim meeples from Final Girl that didn’t survive the second, deadlier night inside Wolfe Asylum.

Learning Faraway and Race for the Galaxy on Board Game Arena

I’ve always resisted Board Game Arena the same way I resisted drop-in play at a game shop: If you’re not at a table with good friends, holding the damn pieces, what’s the point? Second-order experiences will not sustain.

But my transition to being mostly a solo player has been surprising and joyful, so why not challenge my absolutes again?

BGA has given me a chance to bond remotely with a new online pal from Canada — Dave from Dude! Take Your Turn — and a friend of the show for a few years now: Noisy Andrew of Party Meeple, hailing from Western Australia.

I buck against the experience at first. Not being in the haptic envelope is simply jarring, and my trial free account triggers a lot of upsell points for things I want to do, like invite either of my pals to a game.

I am completely unengaged for the first few turns of each match, but because Board Game Arena game apps know the rules and forces me into plays that are legal, if not optimal, the structures starts to gel as I play asynchronous games of Faraway with Dave and Race for the Galaxy with Andrew.

Faraway on Board Game Arena: On top, my first three visits are focused on modest prizes, but maxing the benefit of sequential locations. On the bottom, Dave doing something that will probably beat me.

Faraway With Dave

Dave offers to show me the ropes via this recent hit, a card drafter and tableau builder with two piquant extras going for it:

• Your scoring path is presented as a journey in a vividly imagined land with illustrated locals who greet you on each leg of the journey. They’re rendered with touches of the familiar spritzed with the fantastic. The theme seasons the moments of gear-grinding when you’re trying to puzzle out which cards to place on your journey and when. It’s always successfully atmospheric because its graphic choices are clever: Deserts are blue. Your hostel hosts wear elements of traditional garb lifted from across cultures and centuries, paired with imagined touches. Some of them look like maniac shamans, some your next best pal, some saturnine or standoffish…this place has flavor that always suffuses the calculus of the scoring puzzle.

• This “meet the locals” scheme also informs the puzzle aspect closely: These strangers are going to hook you up with a meal or a place to crash on your way through, but they’re going to want sought-after regional gifties on your way back if you want to score any points. This puts you in a turn-by-turn kaleidoscope of options — trying to build regional color runs vs. time-of-visit bonuses vs. rare plants, rocks or animals — that’s yoked to a very tight timeline through which you must think backwards and forwards. Once I get my first few drubbings out of the way, I’m hooked. And ready for my second series of drubbings.

In addition to being a welcoming docent in the shifting and deeply personal galleries of a passionate hobby player, Dave is a prodigious player. I enjoy peeking onto the his table to gauge “hotness” lists against what actual human beings are doing and documenting. I have a collection of creators like Dave on my RSS reader because of their enthusiasm, authenticity, and sheer amount of games they cover. This is especially valuable considering my glacial, neurotic and solipsistic play style.

In our current game I’m trying a strategy where I focus on the kicker Sanctuary cards you get for sequencing the regions you visit in ascending numerical order.

The automated oddsmakers of Board Game Arena give me a 27% chance of succeeding.

Race for the Galaxy on Board Game Arena: Andrew builds a vibrant economy while I mortgage everything to buy guns and seize production worlds that I don’t know how to run. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Race for the Galaxy with Noisy Andrew

Small board game designer Noisy Andrew and I go a different way: He proposes Race for the Galaxy — a game I tried once a long time ago while badly hung over. I neither grasped nor enjoyed it.

But I did notice its sticking power. In the years years since Rio Grande Games released RftG, despite hundreds of intervening iterations, twists and improvements on tableau building and set collection, it’s still mentioned fondly and bobs up in the occasional “best of” retrospectives. Andrew is only popping back onto BGA because I asked, so I run with his pick. I don’t want to miss out a second time.

I am taken immediately by the flavor of empire- and galaxy-building in the variety and names of the cards. I am also taken to the woodshed. I focused on stacking military muscle as a beginning action framework — pick a direction and row even if it’s not the right one, that’s what Dennis Hopper’s Deacon taught us in Waterworld. The unique “pick a phase where your stuff activates” and the “why” of cards otherwise evades me totally. Andrew thrashes me.

Smashing into the game’s guardrails repeatedly, I start to gain a sense of how to put together combos by my second game. As I write this, I’m doing quite well down the home stretch by shoveling alien tech and novelty goods into a consumer world apparently populated by people with lots of discretionary cash and little discernment. Unlike the U.S., which now has neither. I think we should import Dave and Andrew. That’s my economic plan. I expect your vote.

As I become competent with the BGA interface and the strategy of each game, I also become impatient with asynchronous play. I like these games. I’m getting that thrilling first step change in understanding where basic mechanics are connecting to better decisions. I want to play harder. To be fair to Andrew, he did tell me he was a “move a day” kind of guy, but when he hit two days in between moves, I recorded a plaintive Australian song to remind him to take his turn:

Thanks for being a sport, Noisy. You’re a good sort.

On to Squad Leader and Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India, 1290-1398?

These gents might help me fill another shortcoming in my current tabletop career: Multiplayer stuff that’s more crunchy and involved than what we’re getting on the table during Monday night play at Frontier Geeks down on Main St. in Trinidad.

Once in a while I’ll lift up the silver lid on my wargame tray for local pals, seeing if they like the scent of old paper, reference tables, the promise of sweeping combat, the dense and spiky broth of highs and lows they’ll feel during this kind of story. No takers.

I complained about this to both Dave and Andrew. Dave shows me Rally the Troops, a small-collection, rules-enforced historical wargame platform where he has been fumbling his way through Vijayanagra, a game on my watch list. I’ve been wanting to get into a COIN/ICS title so bad this year. This might be the best way.

Andrew offers to help me with another late-in-life wish in that category: I got Squad Leader for Christmas in 1979 and never played it. I want to return to it and play it before I die. It feels like an important current of my life that petered off into a bog somewhere. Fortunately for me, he knows the game, confides that two-player wargame opponents are one of his shortages, and not long after he starts sending me screen caps of his Vassal downloads and Squad Leader tutorials. Holy shit. We are going in.

Board Game Arena — with the help of a couple buddies — is delivering new surprises all the time. I avoided platforms like BGS for years. Now it looks like I’ll be playing on three. Game on.

Pavlov’s House Review: First Tries at a Valiant Defense

This is adapted from the script of Episode 91: “Pavlov’s House Puts the ‘Fun’ in “You’re Fundamentally Screwed,” which you can listen to here.

This is the second time Sgt. Pavlov’s position has been targeted as he directs his squad and tries to stay alive on the north side of the House.

He’s scarcely spit the dust out of his mouth from the German mortar shell that hit the roof almost right over him before a sharpshooter, seeing him dazed and temporarily out of cover, sizzles the top hairs of his ushanka with a bullet.

To his left, Murzaev and Turdyev take down their third Panzer with their anti-tank rifle. To his right, Gridin is slumped over his now-silent mortar.

Pavlov’s House Solo Play Review: As goes the integrity of the walls, so goes the ability of the cats on the west side to do anything. They’re all suppressed by explosions.

This is my second, and geometrically more rewarding, tussle with Pavlov’s House from Dan Verssen Games, from the publisher’s popular Valiant Defense series — which includes Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms, Castle Itter: The Strangest Battle of WWII, Lanzerath Ridge and Guadalcanal: The Battle for Hendersen’s Field.

This series of designs offers history buffs and boardgamers with an appetite for accessible, middleweight game systems the chance to manage desperate pockets of WWII action against Axis powers that ended up meriting their own chapters in the era’s history, mythology and propaganda.

This is hard-pressed platoon-level action that forces you to think like a lieutenant — or a sergeant if the lieutenant’s already dead — whose unit is surrounded, whose ammo is low, and enjoy from the comfort of your chair weighing a string of critical decisions made in a world with a scant supply of second chances.

In the case of Pavlov’s House, designer David Thompson deposits you in the thick of it: The Battle of Stalingrad and the storming and subsequent defense of Pavlov’s House, a four-story apartment block where Sgt. Yakov Pavlov and Co. seized and held this do-or-die strongpoint in the center of the city, where key locations sometimes changed hands dozens of times in terrifying chains of assaults and counterassaults.

Thompson puts another historically grounded proposition in front of you: Since about 26 of Pavlov’s 30 men died in their initial sprint to the house and the ensuing welcome-to-the-neighborhood firefight, how do you keep it? The answer plays out across three horizontal sections of game board, which zoom you into three levels of building detail and pressure:

Regimental Command on the Volga

On the right, the board gives you a high view of the regimental command areas around the nearby Volga River, where you have to think like a general in a bunker and make tough decisions about how to support the boys in the house with Stuka dive bombers appearing regularly to disrupt your defense and staging areas: Do you ready some artillery? Get food and medicine on a boat across the river? String up comms lines that will give you more breathing room and help you more efficiently issue commands? Fix a cratered anti-aircraft site in time for the next appearance of the howling Junker 87s? You can’t do it all because the House is just one of many pots on the Russian command stove — and sometimes even when you do get the right adjutant to the right place with the correct order, a bomb swill swat your intentions off the board like a cat at play.

In my first game, my first-ever casualty was due to hunger because one of those Volga boats didn’t make it — a vivid connection point in play between your decisions in the right area and how it rolls down to the street-level bind those men across the river were in.

Plotting the German Squeeze on 9 January Square

Let’s pan to the middle part of the board; we’re looking at an aerial shot with the roof of Pavlov’s House, with its commanding views of 9 January Square, and the German armor and infantry that spawns on six tracks surrounding the House: Panzer 2s, 3s and 4s, Stugs, Scouts, Infantry, MG squads. This view lets you see where the Germans are pushing toward you, drawing cards from a deck of German actions that conjure not only the aforementioned units, but other lethal interference: bombings, shellings, snipings, all designed to wear you down and let the on-board units breach the house when the next Assault card comes up in the Wehrmacht Deck. If that happens, you’re done, there’s no final score to tally up.

Every so often, you’ll also have to pass a supply checkpoint. Not having comestibles in the house has immediate consequences, as I learned early.

The Action Inside the House

On the left board: An abstracted map of the apartment block itself, where you command Pavlov’s squad, represented vividly with counters, some of which even have period photos and names of the men who mounted the stand.

This is where you make a different set of decisions — informed by both your command-level panel on the right third of the board and what the Germans are up to in the middle — told in individual motion and lethality.

Using limited command abilities, you can hustle specialists around, get key dudes out of reserves and into play, shoot at encroaching German units, or forego move-and-shoot to set up suppression fire opportunities, refresh an exhausted comrade, or get heavier weapons and their required teams manned — a constant dilemma between the horizon of the near-term and the undeniable now, which both yell in either ear, with equal legitimacy. Everything is paramount.

The boys looking properly stern considering what’s coming down the pike.

I’ve played three times now at the basic setting, so here is the state of my sketchbook and impressions so far:

• For the most part, I found the rulebook a clear and useful conduit that connected the action on all three parts of the board. By my third play, I was still getting my clock cleaned, but running more and more of it on the reference cards without looking things up.

I’m thinking about some kind of formula here about decision space vs. roll-and-check deterministic elements and how they deliver story, and it all feels wonderfully balanced on the whole. There are a couple minor points I’m still having trouble with, but the curve was generally not steep. I used to have to take a break between turns; now I’m running several turns smoothly, with the exception of a few German deck questions that still keep bugging me. But on the whole, I feel I’ve picked a wargame with the right weight for me.

• I love how the rationing of actions and pressure to act ripple across the three sections of boards, the shit rolling downhill to the nervous systems of whoever’s still alive or able to man a gun inside the House. I’ve been experimenting with my opening moves inside the House itself and with command focus on the right half of the board, finding multiple paths to explore within those first few critical days of battle. Deciding when and if to bring in heavy weapons teams vs. high-stat individual shooters vs. bonus-granting leaders, overlaid with what you’re focusing on at the regimental level, is stimulating without being cumbersome.

• In my second game, I survived and the held the house, losing just two men, but scored dismally on points because I was too timid to stage counterassaults with the Storm Group options that come up right after the Resupply check. I’d built up my comms on the right board by sending my Russkies up telegraph poles, plus rushed my whole officer command team into the House, which also widened up the range of responses I had to depressurize the German advances on the street level.

I tried the same thing in the third game and simply got bombed off the map. On the right, my AA gunners just couldn’t seem to hit anything. The Stukas ripped everything apart, forcing me into a reactive state where I was nervously chasing them around with a dustpan, trying to ready sites that they doggedly hit and again; at one point, I had zero functioning staging, artillery or AA sites anywhere on the east side of the Volga, freeing the Luftwaffe up to blast my Sisyphean attempts to establish comms and threaten my regimental HQ.

At the House itself: German artillery dudes must have been given extra-good methamphetamine that day, because they dropped every size shell they had right where it needed to be, peeling back the squad’s fortifications like an onion, then pounding the soft flesh within into an almost constant state of suppression that meant they could do little except shiver behind piles of brick and get the occasional rifle shot off.

But this was fine. It was better than fine, because the story welled up out of the bedrock of the game easier and easier each time, the game’s charms distilling out bright and clean.

This Game is Earning its Laurels and I’m Going to Play the Shit Out of It

Three years ago I would have told you that Warhammer 40,000: Conquest the Card Game was my unimpeachable #1 of all time, but in my late mostly-solo career, I’d have to tell you that Thunderbolt Apache Leader has taken that spot. I can scarcely imagine what would dislodge it, but I will say that Pavlov’s House is delivering everything I wanted to get out of it and is going to be seeing heavy play this year.

Thunderbolt Apache Leader passed — or failed, depending on how you look at it — The Hygiene Test. When I was on Day 2 of a mission, this game was so engrossing that I did not want to bathe or eat. Nothing I’ve played, wargames or otherwise, in the past five years was so engrossing.

But Pavlov’s House earns a different, but laudable, medal: War Before Breakfast. By Game 2, I’m waking up and walking right to the table to play out the rest of a game. Before anything else except coffee. It also wins the Resident Guest award: I’m currently not putting it away in between games because I know I’m going to be setting it up again within the next 12 hours.

That’s a winner. That’s something that will see heavy play for the next few months. That’s your money’s worth.

There’s only one bittersweet note: The knowledge that this game has been out for seven years and I’m just now getting to it. Scroll to any memory: looking for bullshit at Lowe’s on some Saturday, eating a so-so meal with people who don’t say anything interesting, binging some series whose name I can’t even remember…I could have been defending the House this whole time.

Within the game and without, the tragedy of misallocation will always haunt you.

Hadrian’s Wall Solo Review: A Rewarding First Move-and-Write Experience

This is adapted from the script of Episode 90: Hadrian’s Wall Has a Spankin’ New Pict-Fil-A, which you can listen to here.

The year is Rome.

The challenge: Build a thriving slice of Roman colonial society with one hand and the infrastructure that defends it with the other.

The setting: Wherever you have time to spread out Hadrian’s Wall, stop being a jerk, and play a game.

The genre? It’s a move and write, part of a surge of designs where your decisions and their results get tracked by marking up sprawling game sheets to show your progress. You also have flip-and-writes, roll-and-writes, etc…

Hadrian’s Wall Solo Review: My first score of 51, playing on the easiest setting. Throughout the following weeks, that number — and the challenge level — goes way up.

Being a late adopter who likes to watch and measure a gaming concept before I make a purchase, I finally land on Hadrian’s Wall as I see this design — which is generally favorable to solo players, but can include others — take off and catch fire.

Hadrian’s Wall surfaced on my consciousness over and over again, a combination of praise from reviewers and social media accounts I respect…and also a blink response that stuck it in the front of my brain. Beyond the mechanics, I looked at the pictures and wanted in; I saw what looked like a beautifully illustrated, well-regimented historical sim game at the lovely pace of markers and pens.

Both casual players and non-hobbyists usually balk at first glance and would be forgiven for saying “Oh, hooray! It’s Rome: The Spreadsheet,” but I did break it out multiplayer once for two noobs and within minutes they more or less had the self-directed game turns down as they assigned builders to extend forts, got their profile up among other Roman generals, and built the odd civic structure or two.

The two biggest obstacles in front of you are the icon systems and the (at first) overwhelming variety of things to do: On the left sheet, you’re faced with row after row of fortifications, basic infrastructure, and foundational builds that bring in new wooden meeple peoples to fuel the effort — citizens, soldiers, builders, and *cough* servants. We’re gonna about those later. You’ll also see the dashboard that shows you how your ambitious general is doing in the four attributes — Renown, Piety, Valor and Discipline — that will determine your final score.

Over on the right sheet? The citizen tracks that let you specialize in developing trade, the arts (including death sports), religious life, bureaucracy (including bribes), and the time-honored game of kissing the asses of the rich, which helps you out with diplomacy and resources.

Each of these sections contains specialized minigames with their own logic and opportunity costs: You can build out markets, temples, gladiatorial arenas and bathhouses, which is where your civil servants prefer to receive their bribes. I don’t know why you can’t just slide them an envelope while they’re having their morning coffee at Pantera Bread, but that’s just the way stuff works. If you send muscle to the Patricians, they can unleash scouting raids and attach diplomats to your armies that blunt the Pict attacks that happen at the end of each of the game’s six years.

Yes, the Picts. These are the armed locals who, for perfectly good reasons, don’t want the Romans there and don’t care about the fussy little projects on your Asana task list. You draw cards to see how many of them slam into your military cohorts beyond the wall, arriving in bigger numbers with each attempt. If bands of them get through, you start to accrue Disdain, another drag on your ambition and your score. This is what I referred to earlier when I talked about how the game creates sweaty-palm moments by forcing you to choose, always choose, between allocating resources and people to the military or civic and infrastructure projects. Building one is gambling with the other.

Early Games: A Puppy Romping Through an Ancient Construction Site

A few impressions from my early games, which I played solo at the easy difficulty level: You can expect to invest some time in experimenting as you start to see how making moves ripples combos of actions back and forth across your two game sheets.

In your favor: This rulebook is excellent. One walkthrough gave me a solid foothold on not only the interlocking logic of the resource systems, but all the flavorful subsystems that are both mechanically impressive and evocative.

So I start flinging wooden people into the furnace of Brittania. For my first game, I simply decided that whatever happened, I was going to have a strong army and not lose points to incursions. 

I wasn’t efficient, but I was stimulated: Filling in sections you’re working on with magic marker produces a chain of endorphin strikes that keeps you in it even when you’re not sure if your strategy is sound. And then you start to see the rhythm of actions and resources feeding other actions; as you get more stuff at the beginning of each game year, the drug gets potent. The first few hits in years one and two peak and fade, but what happens from year 3-6 is a binge. What happened to the afternoon? According to the final grading, I got a 51, earning me the rank of Primus Pilus on my first go.

I’d focused on Traders and Theater Kids as the primary pistons of civic life behind the wall, maxing out both of those tracks and building a bustling theater that put on five flagship performances and a market that did a decent trade, even if it was somewhat underutilized.

Time Out For a Sidebar Here on Potentially Troublesome Aspects of the Setting

Early on in the rulebook, it is explained to you that about 30% of the Roman empire were slaves, so slaves are one of the four meeple flavors you generate to get stuff done.

If you decide to proceed after that knowledge, they are referred to as Servants for the rest of the book, which feels like a dodge after the frankness of the explanation on the intro page. If you accept the proposition, knowing that playing around with surface evil significance doesn’t make you an advocate for imperial slavery any more than playing Monopoly makes you a BlackRock shareholder, do you need it masked from you as you cross the threshold into the Magic Circle and its absolution from ethics? 

Hadrian’s Bribes: Yeah, we can finagle you some more forced labor at the Courthouse, but it’s not going to be pretty.

For example, look at the Courthouse over on the right sheet: If you lavish your Apparitores with enough budget, you can build it and use its actions to generate Rulings that kick out more slaves. Immiserating the populace by servitude with decrees. That’s life in Rome. Or in the Jim Crow south. Or the optimized modern versions: Making prisoners go fight wildfires or break sanitation strikes. It’s a supercharged bolus of history, morality, semiotics and symbols that I can sense, but only partially unpack. 

In a future installment, I’m going to try to explore this in the context of the few pure wargames I own, but if your primary reaction to all this is revulsion? Don’t blame you a bit. If your heart is tenderized by the implications, this might be your cue to back out. Or instead consider the newest Garphill Games’ spin on the concept: The Anarchy, which uses the same system, except this time it’s about a succession crisis in England in the 12th Century. Maybe you’ll find simple internecine English slaughter more relaxing.

Takeaway: Yes

As a testament to quality of pure play, the growing stack of marked-up game sheets are QED: I’m thinking of using them for a decoupage project on an ugly door in my living room. I’ve completely killed the tips of two Sharpie markers. (Pro Tip: Put something under those game sheets if you use a marker, it will bleed through to your table.)

As of this writing I have played my way up to the top difficulty level and achieved a 70+ score at that tier, refining my play with each turn and finding satisfaction in even the late incremental improvements. Strategically, it feels somewhat solved, but I took it out again last week and played it twice in one night because the action is good and it’s gratifying to have that hard-won early knowledge from stop-and-go learning sessions turn into pleasant riff-variations of a song I can play well.

But that and wall art isn’t the end of the value chain: I haven’t even touched the game’s solo campaign mode, which lets you play solo sessions as an interconnecting epic, each chapter with its own wrinkles and strictures that challenge you to adjust the reflexes you honed while playing in standard solo mode.

Hadrian’s Wall is a rock-solid and beautifully realized system, a rich and rewarding entry point to the roll-and-write genre that sings in its visual presentation, beguiles with its flow, and stimulates where the gears of its system mesh with its setting.

52 Realms Adventures: The Ayahuasca Method

A Note from the Editor: I turned former Donnybrook Writing Academy colleague Fritz Godard loose on a solo dungeoncrawler to see how a guy with a well-developed sense of fun, but no experience in playing this type of game, would respond. This is his story.

Solitaire, sudoku, a dice-based version of Catan my ex-wife stuffed in my stocking, and pocket pool are the only non-virtual games I have ever played by myself.

Before taking a look at Postmark Games’ 52 Realms: Adventures — Map 1, “Tomb of the Ever-Wandering Soul” — I assumed a “dungeon crawler” was what they called the Roomba at an S&M club. I never would have assumed it could be a solo game where all I needed was a standard deck of cards, two markers, a map, and a character sheet.

I was out of my element from the beginning of the assignment. The photo on the page to download the map and directions had cards spread across the table as if someone was trying to cheat at solitaire.

I’m supposed to negotiate a dungeon by stocking an inventory of Equipment, Items and Loot from drawn cards, and then draw more cards to determine who I’m doing battle with and what they are doing in the battle. So many gaming questions would have been answered once I printed the instructions; instead the printed instructions sat menacingly on my desk for weeks.

I even asked myself if reading is really all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe I should settle into the new world and let the YouTube algorithm create my personality and control my destiny. This was the size of my apprehension. Then I got the courage up to finally peek at the game, saw the five pages of horizontally printed instructions, and set it down for another two weeks. The hardest part of the game was starting it.

Or maybe it was after my first few plays, when I fled to Colombia.

My First Wight

It was nearly the end of January before the guilt of disappointing Breakup Gaming Society’s 3.5 average daily listeners got me back to the table. The first thing I had to do was choose a character: Seer or Barbarian. I decided to go with a Seer because it was blue and the face on the card looked like something straight from Jim Henson’s nightmare-inducing ‘80s workshop. 

My first battle I fought something called a Wight. Is a Wight something known in the gaming world? It sounds vaguely intimidating, but also slightly sexy.

My first battle I fought something called a Wight. Is a Wight something known in the gaming world? It sounds vaguely intimidating, but also slightly sexy. Will I get seduced by the Wight unless I pack my ears with wax? While trying to decipher the enemy’s essence and actions, I realized that it was best not to risk trying a new endeavor on an empty stomach. So I quit to go get myself a chicken sandwich for a couple of weeks.

[Ref’s Whistle] Illegal Potion, 10 Yards, Loss of Down

Weeks later, while on some down time from my brewery shift during the Viking Bluegrass Festival in Golden, CO, I decided to play again. In honor of all the braided hair, Grateful Dead tattoos and refillable leather-crafted beer steins at the event, I chose to be a Barbarian. 

I struggled to grasp the numbers and baddies before the rooms, but once I did, I was good to go. I defeated my first Goblin, then merked a Ghoul. I drew my first Curse of the game, but luckily I illegally used a Health Potion to get rid of it. REMINDER: A Health Potion doesn’t work on Curses.

I got to face my first B-level baddie: With the miracle of more inadvertent cheating, I defeated the B-level Lizard. On to the Lizard’s Lair: I drew three cards to keep two, but gained another Curse.

ACES ARE BAD IN THIS GAME: So bad, that I now hate aces and if I encounter you in public and tell you “You’re aces!” it is an insult and I hope your life gets as fucked up as my game did when I drew this ace. I drew the ace of spades (Motorhead now sucks, too) and had to take a fatal wound.

Trying a Different Kind of Cheating

I tried again, aiming to collect maximal Equipment, Items and Loot to assure my victory. Eventually I got all the way to the Boss, loaded to the teeth with all the necessary cards to defeat it. I lasted one round because I exhausted the deck, and therefore myself, and died. 

Even my subconscious mastery of accidental cheating could not overcome No Cards. I was smoked, and this was without following the clearly labeled instructions: “At the start of each round, exhaust 1 EQUIP,” a rule I would forget to follow for my next handful of plays. 

Intermission: Flee to Colombia for an Ayahuasca Refresher

I give the instructions another thorough reread and discover that my equipment stockpiling was illegal. REMINDER: You can’t go back through a door once you’ve passed through it.

Realizing I neglected to play by the rules made me doubt myself. Instead of starting another game, I let it sit for two weeks. By week three I figured I better start looking for burnt-out buildings where I could leave my dental records. The Colonel surely wouldn’t expect a review if I am burned to death in a fire, right? 

Instead of faking my own death, I pawned enough of my uncle’s coin collection to get a one-way ticket to Medellín. Why use the Get Out of Jail Free card on a fake death when I could just as easily flee the country? 

On my fourth night in Colombia a nebbishy guy with Birkenstocks and a Guinness harp tattoo sat in a VIP booth next to mine. When I heard him order a bottle in English, I invited myself to his table for a nip and to chop it up in a familiar tongue.

Please do not ask the guides anymore questions about Wights, every asshole from the U.S. wants to know about Wights.

Turns out the guy had just come from an ayahuasca retreat in the valley between the Andes and the Amazon. He told tales of visiting infinity and being shown the secret to the universe. If this ayahuasca can show the secrets of the universe, it will surely know what a Wight is and how I can win the prize at the end of Tomb of the Ever-Wandering Soul. Instead of paying my tab, I snuck out to find the retreat before any of the BJJ-trained security guards found me. 

The retreat with the most positive Google reviews was only a 40-minute bus ride from my Colombian den of sin. I sat through word circles where everyone from backpackers on a gap year to grizzled boat captains went on about the intentions and exceptions for their encounter with “the medicine,” as we were asked to call it. 

None of their trauma or insights compared to my noble pursuit to master this indie dungeoncrawler. By the time I took my second cup at the ayahuasca ceremony, I was well on my way to answers.

I saw a room full of stacks of paper, each sheet with a thousand lines on it. When I asked my spirit guide what it was, they replied, “All the ways you have played the game wrong and the countless number of outcomes if you play the game right.” 

“Ok, cool. But do I have to read all of these? I was hoping to just get some quick answers here.”

Then I saw a guitar with a plastic tube that collected all of the tears produced by the songs played on the guitar. How was this going to help me beat the game, though?

Then I saw God. A giant H.R. Giger machine, a trillion years old, broadcasting consciousness to create the vastness of the universe. 

I asked God who made them. And they replied, “I made myself.” Pretty tight. 

“What is a Wight?” The question caught it off guard. If God didn’t know what a Wight was, then this motherfucker wasn’t God. I grew 10,000 feet tall and began stomping on the machine that claimed to create the universe. 

The next morning I was on a bus to the Medellín Airport before anyone could drag me to another word circle. Back stateside, I needed a few weeks to fully integrate back to a realm that hasn’t touched the infinity of pure bliss only produced by locally-sourced fake tits chased with ayahuasca. When I felt properly balanced, I returned to the game. 

The Acolyte Returns to the Dudgeon

My sixth playthrough clicked. The instructions sounded like poetry. The cards and the markers danced across the map with ease. I won the first battle in two moves, taking the baddie’s character card per the Barbarian’s skills. 

Second battle: Equally as swift, doubling a spade attack from a 10 to a 20. I only encountered one Curse before I got to the boss. I won. I beat the boss, in shock that it fell with such ease. Mother Ayah must have guided me. Then I look back and realize that a) my doubling attack doesn’t work on the Boss b) I forgot to exhaust an equipment card prior to each turn. Still, I sensed an honest victory in my future. 

I entered the dungeon again the next day, determined to remember all the rules and give it my best shot. I got extremely lucky with my equipment cards. In the initial draw I received a King of Hearts and Jack of Spades. As a Barbarian, the Jack of Spades let me defeat nearly all of the early baddies in two turns and — another Barbarian perk — allowed me to take the character card as a reward. I had a stacked hand of equipment and items by the time I got to the Boss. 

I was sure that I would win, even without the doubled attacks. But when I drew a Wight, my confidence wavered. Using the Deadly Riposte ability, I slightly damaged the Boss Wight on the first turn with a block, moving two down on the health bar and landing on a two-card refresh spot. After three more turns my collection of equipment was diminished and it looked like Boss Wight would be my demise again. But I used a Strength potion and refreshed all of my equipment. Two more rounds and I was victorious, for real. I had won the game and defeated my self-doubt. Suck it, Boss Wight!

52 Realms: Adventures - Map 1 “Tomb of the Ever-Wandering Soul” proved I can learn a new skill and even have a little bit of success with it in time. Now that I know the world of tabletop gaming isn’t as impenetrable as I once thought, I’m looking forward to learning my next game, and maybe even getting the second map for 52 Realms: Adventures.

Welcome to Frontier Geeks: Hear Reviews for Stuff You’re Looking at Right Now

Thanks for stopping by Frontier Geeks — Breakup Gaming Society’s favorite Friendly Local Game Shop.

We’ve played and loved these titles extensively right here in the shop. We think you’ll dig ‘em, too.

Just hit the audio player below to hear Breakup Gaming Society’s review of the title you’re interested in. Cheers.

Tokaido

Survive the Island

Project L

Hadrian’s Wall: I Was Surrounded By Surprisingly Well-Behaved Picts

This is an excerpt from the script-in-progress for Episode 90, slated to publish by mid-April. Latest episodes here.

Having already achieved my solo-play laurels on the lowest difficulty level of Hadrian’s Wall, I graduated myself to medium difficulty. I wish I could tell you the score, friends. I tried to play it in the lobby of a local hotel for a change of scenery, the magic circle was compromised and I don't remember.

At 55, I don’t feel like I can afford to wait for the right companion to do all the stuff I want to do. I can see death’s outriders chucking tasseled spears into the ground the next ridge over. Last year I was in Colorado Springs on Valentine’s Day, craving the chicken makhani from Little Nepal. They sat me by myself at a two-top in the middle of the room, encircled by booths full of couples. I didn’t give a shit. I wanted chicken makhani. Chicken makhani is real and Valentine's Day is made up.

Breaking out a solo game in a public place is a similar proposition; you look queasily ungrouped. Living in a former coal mining town of about 100 souls after COVID, a divorce and a reckoning with myself as an obsolete economic unit has warped me socially, but compensated me with an inner life that’s like a Mandelbrot set into which I slow-motion plummet day after day. Hauling artifacts from this mesmerizing descent into the middle of a bar or restaurant rarely translates. The ratio of pieces to people denotes some kind of illness.

My experience reminds me of the stories I hear on the Reddit solo boardgaming sub: Folks look at you funny when you tell them you mostly play solo. Even funnier when you do it. A great many of these Redditors are solo players by necessity, having bought a stack of games but finding no corresponding stack of people. These kids play privately and share snapshots of crowded folding tables in lamplight for those who understand.

When the scout group of otherworlders arrives in the hotel lobby — a wiry dad with piercing cult leader eyes and two energetic women his age trailing the first of their young charges — the tower of Domino's Pizza boxes soon follows. Enough to placate an office park. I’m about to be swarmed left, center and right.

I don't have sufficient cohorts in place, so I parley. In the game, you can partially mitigate your lack of forward defensive forces by sending citizen meeples to the care of the patricians, who will reward you with this and that. I send these parents my remaining Oreo mini-cupcakes; the rest had gone to the desk girls who keep me in the latest WiFi passwords. They are courteous enough. We will coexist in the room.

Within minutes more kids materialize to envelop every edge of the two big table islands, me retaining a quadrant on one of them. I can’t remember the strategy I wanted to do. I go fast. Drive the fort on the left sheet, don’t snag on an unbuilt granary, that’s the spine, that’s one of the breakthroughs I manage to recall. The kids are mostly preteens, with a few teenagers there as shepherd dogs. Their good behavior skirts the eerie. There are no raised voices. I hear talk only of skiing and church.

I have been in similar situations where somebody will walk by my table and want to know what’s going on. I tend to overexplain, pitch like I’m manning a demo table at a con. Not today. Not with this crew, even when hailed.

“What are you playing, sir?” I hear from across the table. I pretend not to hear her until she switches it up, tacking the honorific onto the front end: “Sir, what are you playing?” I look across a tundra of table at a short-haired girl of about ten, flanked by the same. She looks a dead ringer for one of the moms chatting at the other group of tables.

“Hadrian’s Wall,” I say, picking up the box and pointing at the cover. Then I go back to playing. By the time I rack up a mediocre score that reflects the rushed thinking, the room’s emptied out again except for the parents, who linger to laugh about their teen-year courtships, ‘80s playlists and church.

I’m Sharing My ‘80s Comic Book Collection With Podcast Donors

People still look surprised when I tell them my age. They’re usually under by about a decade. That’s because while my fellow students at Smoky Hill High School were kegging in the sun at Cherry Creek Reservoir or showing off the raccoon-face burns they got on ski slopes, I was inside playing 7 Seconds records and masturbating and reading comic books.

Between 1984 and 1987 I acquired quite a few comic books, and most of them are in surprisingly good shape, like me.

The multiples are there from an ROI standpoint, but who gives a shit about a 75¢ investment that went 6X?

You do, because I’m giving most of the collection away to people who support the show. (Swag tiers and basic overview here if you’re done reading.)

Here’s how it works:

• When you donate $20 or more, you get the Breakup Gaming Society cocktail booklet, the Defiant Frog sticker AND a pull from the comics vault.

• I’ll show you an image of three comics randomized from the giveaway pile. You pick one. I mail it. Lower U.S. 48 states only, sorry.

Here’s how the first giveaway went. I showed my friends at Inkling Print Company these:

First pull from the vault. What will you get? Visit this page to see what cross-sections of my comics box are revealed — and what people are picking.

Then Inkling was like:

Isn’t that beautiful? I mailed it last week.

My homegirl Idelle got shown these and opted for Beauty and the Beast.

Breakup Gaming Society longtime supporter Christopher F. Smith chose Spanner’s Galaxy

Dig it: My man Justin Kramm from Shitshow Creative saw these and wanted the one with Plastic Man, Aquaman and Starman

Meanwhile, danielle over at damolade opted for Transformers because she’s gonna collage with them.

FAQ
Q. What if I don’t like any of the comics you pulled? Can I request different ones?
A. Yeah, if you’re a dick. Or your donation was excessive. This is for fun. I’m not running a sale here.

Stay tuned here for more shots of what odd joy springs from this old comics box — and what people are picking. Donate page here.

D&D NPC Table: Various Rappers to Spice Up Your Next Adventure

Yeah, you’re great at making up NPCs. Do any of them have bars? Didn’t think so. That’s where your last campaign stalled.

Breakup Gaming Society continues its roleplaying innovation with this handy table of ready-to-spit MCs for your boring dungeon. You can summon oddities of varying talent that includes:

• Bloodaxegrimnuts: Bland ectomorph who wants to be a dwarf so bad. Tries to talk hard dwarf shit and brags about being a UnderGuard Disciples soldier, but nobody’s ever heard of him.

• Duncan Deez: Don’t do it. Don’t talk to this guy. Do not answer any of his questions.

• Yummy Sharkey Posse: The crew that got jumped so many times, it’s just one guy now: Potemkin V. Is oblivious to the fact that he no longer has posse.

Just roll a d26, plug in some of these loons, and get busy!

Escape the Dark Sector Gambles it All on Throwback RPG Vibes and Wins

A Note from the Editor: My homie Jojo taught me this game last week and we blasted and brawled our way through a rousing first session. Look for more thoughts on this title in an upcoming episode.

Hello! I’m Jojo and I will be your guest DJ for this review. I’m a huge aficionado of sci-fi. I love it all and have spent copious amounts of time consuming the genre in all forms and formats — from TV to books, from more heady and artful works to pulpy schlock, from classic to contemporary, from short stories to multi-novel epics, from the fairly mundane to the bizarre and confusing. But sci-fi storytelling via the tabletop medium is new to me.

Escape the Dark Sector (EtDS) is a cooperative tabletop choose-your-own-adventure/role playing game deeply influenced by pulp sci-fi horror from the ‘70s and ‘80s that seats up to four players. A solo option lets you control 2-4 characters while trying not to collapse from loneliness. 

Released by Themeborne in 2020, Escape the Dark Sector is a sci-fi re-flavoring of their Escape the Dark Castle. I haven’t played EtDC, so I can’t do much of a compare and contrast, but from what I’ve seen of it, the similarities are strong.

Escape the Dark Sector is relatively easy to set up and quick and easy to play; the worst thing I can think to say about the setup is that it involves shuffling 7-8 different sets of cards. I’m bad at shuffling.

Each player chooses a character who comes their own unique d6. The symbol distribution on the character die reflects their proficiency across three main attributes: Cunning, Might and Wisdom. Choosing characters based on balancing the team’s attributes does a lot to make the challenge of the game much simpler. In my experience, the larger the group, the better chance you have. (I suspect this is why the rules cap the number of players/characters at 4.)

Escape the Dark Sector character cards: Excuse me, Lieutenant. No, after you, Lieutenant. You seem to have a smoking laser burn in your chest cavity, Lieutenant. How dreadful.

The action is driven by draws from a deck of randomized encounter cards that set you loose on one of three possible opening scenes; a middle stretch of Act One, Two and Three challenges; and finishing with one of five possible final boss cards. There are just enough possible encounters to keep replays varied and interesting, but the encounter pool is shallow enough that you will almost certainly repeat an encounter or two by your second session.

The strategy of EtDS lies more in the long haul rather than the individual encounters. Knowing when to press an existing advantage, knowing when to gamble, and knowing when to play it safe is the bread and butter of the experience. This is definitely where a lot of player discussion and disagreement happens. Resource management is the name of the game, whether that resource is hit points, items or the good will of your teammates. Most encounters aren’t individually dangerous, but mismanaging team health is central; you either all make it out together or nobody does. You’ll make it to the final boss on most of your tries, but then everything will hinge on a smidge of extra health or a singular item card played at the critical moment.  

Escape the Dark Sector clone encounter: Wait, there were already too many Lieutenants to begin with. Time to cull the unwanted extras.

The strategy layer for individual encounters is relatively straightforward — with just enough crunch to make the most advantageous play not immediately obvious — but the best play is pretty clear once the players have dug into it a bit. 

While I wouldn’t call the minute-to-minute gameplay of Escape the Dark Sector boring, I wouldn’t call it the most engaging game I’ve ever played on a purely mechanical level. There is a bit of gambler’s thrill in the decisions and dice rolls of the mechanical layer that create thrilling moments, but the real meat of the experience lies in the atmosphere of the game: EtDS goes all in on its pulp sci-fi roots. The gritty black-and-white art wears its hand-drawn aesthetic on its sleeve. The soundtrack (Yes! There is a soundtrack for this game you can find online!) by Alex Crispin uses analog synths to harken back to the B-movie feel of the setting. The harshness of the mechanics recalls both clunky old computer adventures as well as pencil-and-paper classics.

Escape the Dark Sector final boss encounter: Itssss the Alien Queen, one of five horrors standing in between your Lieutenants and a ticket outta this place.

The key to enjoying Escape the Dark Sector lies in enjoying its immaculate vibes. If you have a group that doesn’t really gel with the vibe, the game night is probably going to be a flop. If you have some folks over who are willing to get invested in the atmosphere of Escape the Dark Sector, you will have a great time.

Hip Hop Golden Era Deep Cuts, Classics and New Underground

Breakup Gaming Society Track of the Week Retrospective, Episodes 1-20

Quality on the early episodes of Breakup Gaming Society varied wildly, as did the BAC and whatever other chemicals were at hand. But the Tracks of the Week were always good. Or at least interesting. We pulled some lesser-known Golden Era tracks, a few hands-down classics, and the occasional new effort from the 21st Century talent pool.

Whether these are “deep hip hop” tracks or not depends on your age, perspective and level of fanaticism.

There will be few surprises here for oldheads and obsessives. If you’re one of these, you still might find a surprise or occasion to dust off and reunite with an old Golden Era/underground banger.

For casuals who love the era but keep letting Spotify pick the obvious stuff for you: You are ready for this list. Listen and tell me I’m wrong.

Related Stuff to Check Out:

• If you’d like to hear me talk through hip hop tracks with commentary and highlights — and maybe find your next favorite drink or board game — check out an episode.

• Here’s a playlist where you can listen to another deep cuts list I compiled for Hip Hop’s 50th birthday. (Some overlap with this list.)

Episode 1: Big Pun "Twinz (Deep Cover '98)" (featuring Fat Joe)
I still use the famous “Dead in the middle of Little Italy…” run as a mic warmup.

Episode 2: RZA "Grits”
I handed the reins to El Pistolero for this episode (The Death Angel Comes on New Year’s Eve) and he pulled a good one. I didn’t realize this episode was the last time we’d ever play Space Hulk: Death Angel together, which we’d done for nearly 10 years.

Episode 3: Cage "Agent Orange”
A selection from Xian, a mainstay of the Unsustainable Days, when I thought I could orchestrate a gang of millennials, get super fucked up, turn on the mic and just win.

Episode 4: House of Pain "Jump Around” (Pete Rock Remix)
One of two allowable versions of this track, the other being Muggs’ 25-Year Remix with Damian Marley, Everlast and Meyhem Lauren. The original’s only for shitheads at sporting events, sorry.

Episode 5: Mantronix “Listen to the Bass of Get Stupid Fresh - Part II”
Kurtis Mantronik was a magician. This was the episode where we featured it, which also birthed the Fetid Haze shot featured in our cocktail booklet, “Chaotic Shots and Cocktails That Will Hurt Your Friends.”

Episode 6: Smokey Joe & The Kid “Jailhouse Blues (feat. Blake Worrell)”
An interesting pull from HP, another member of the early crew in Colorado Springs. We played Yahtzee.

Episode 7: Run-D.M.C. “It’s Tricky”
Tweek got his rotational pick in on a night of Tincup and King of Tokyo. He said this song was in one of his video games. I’d never heard of it before.

Episode 8: 3rd Bass “No Static at All”
The Dread RPG is attempted. I take control of the playlist again to fantastic effect. First of a series featuring Prince Paul production guest shots.

Episode 9: Boogie Down Productions “How Not to Get Jerked”
Xian and I posted up at a restaurant where I worked part-time and crushed $200 worth of Don Julio then closed a bar across the street. A fiasco in every regard. This outstanding track is the only thing I want to keep from the whole affair.

Episode 10: Big Daddy Kane “It’s Hard Being the Kane”
Another shambolic party, almost impressive for its emotion and sprawl. The third and final installment of the three-episode “Prince Paul guest-shot production” series.

Episode 11: Custom Breakup Gaming Society Mix
”Just begin and end it with ‘The Creator’ by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth,” I asked him. And he did. Skip to 13:12 and listen, this was a minor triumph of the early show, never to be repeated.

Episode 12: Sylvan LaCue “Best Me”
Another fine pick from Xian that sounds a lot better without me drunk and interrupting everything with stories and lectures.

Episode 13: Stetsasonic “Pen and Paper”
COVID hits. The desolation of Arkham Horror and a deserted downtown. Sans posse, I drink Suavecito Añejo until I can barely speak.

Episode 14: Lil Darkie “THERAPY”
The crew reunites for card battles and Xian pulls another pretty artful track for us.

Episode 15: Sean Price & Small Professor “Refrigerator P! (Peaky Blinders Remix) (feat. Rob Kelly)”
Our drunk asses didn’t even remember to pick out a track during this one. So I’m retroactively picking P!

Episode 16: Jay-Z “Reservoir Dogs (feat. L.O.X., Sauce Money & Beanie Siegel)”
A chill time with Xian talking Sekigahara: Unification of Japan and drinking Maestro Dobel.

Episode 17: The Beatnuts & Tha Alkaholiks “Grumpy Crocodile”
They turned all my cousins into bags and boots/In crowded elevators, I just laugh and poop

Episode 18: Social House “Magic in the Hamptons” feat. Lil Yachty
Probably the single best pure talker I’d ever had as a guest, let him pick the Track of the Week, then drunkenly argued with him about it.

Episode 19: billy woods “The Man Who Would Be King”
A second tawdry stunt that becomes an entry in the Breakup Gaming Society cocktail booklet. In retrospect, a pretty thoughtless juxtaposition with the searing track Xian picks out later.

Episode 20: Milo “Call + Form (Picture)”
Another daffy guest who took to the mic and made the show unforgettable, making me think this gonzo board game approach might actually work. Xian picks the track again!

A Stolen Extra Lap With Dominion, the Buzz-Building Game

Delicious stouts in the fridge, hot cocoa coming off the stove ready to get spiked with cinnamon whiskey, three nice people coming over to play Dominion. I have another board game, Mysterium, ready to give away at night’s end as a door prize.

When I moved down here nearly five years ago, I thought it only a matter of time until the many classics in my storage room would come back to life. They moldered instead. I often imagine my bonds with others as stronger than they are.

Last winter I started pacing around the stacks and admitted that I’m probably never getting to play most of these ever again. Instead I resolve to pry a few stories from them and start letting them go, beginning with the least favorites.

It is impossible to show a new group how charged with feeling these boxes are. I have only the base Dominion set and two expansions, Intrigue and Prosperity, which always proved plenty for us. The old group is gone, connected to this moment only by a mess: Every single box is full of mis-sorted cards from a hurried pack-up. From when? 2015? Three days before the crew arrives, I pour a Samuel Smith’s Organic Chocolate Stout and set about reorganizing them. Straightening a library when you know all the books are going to be read again is delirious busywork. I call the cards’ names and chant them back to order.

Dominion Deckbuilding and Samuel Smith’s Organic Chocolate Stout: I’m going to savor this.

They made the chocolate good and strong in this brew. I wish I’d picked up more than one. But the house is clean-ish by the Night Of, the drinks are ready and so are Bethany, David and Rygar. Two sets of headlights in my driveway. What a sight. I emcee the turns of the first game while they situate themselves, beating them handily on a simple supply of cards that seems bright with obvious (to me) choices.

They request a new setup for the second game. I get excited and have only stouts (Founders Breakfast Stout and Dragon’s Milk Bourbon Barrel-Aged) for dinner while they crush the saucepan of hot cocoa, put a dent in the whiskey jar, and mop the floor with me. There are two attack cards, powerful late-game conversion cards, and extra action/buy cards to consider. It’s late on a worknight and I’m being indulged, so I don’t begrudge Rygar feeding the supply to ChatGPT to get a quick strategy. Which Bethany overcomes anyhow because she timed her “greening” — when you start acquiring your final tranche of properties in a sprint and stop worrying about the efficiency of your deck — better than Ry.

Nobody walks empty-handed. Bethany wins Mysterium; Ryan and David each score a new paperback. I come back from seeing folks off and see that Bethany has neatly packed away all the cards and I feel like a country pastor with a brand new congregation.

Gunning for Daylight: Meditations on Depression and Storm Above the Reich

If you’d rather hear this than read it, check out Episode 86.

I had to treat 2023’s two-month run of nightly suicidal ideation with some skepticism. In 2022 I daydreamed about it for three days because my job was boring.

While detailed — my garage, a stepladder — it lacked sufficient motivational agony. The view through that escape hatch solved itself when I went deep field. Oh, look. There’s me being found by my neighbors’ grandkids. Poor form.

I still had to ask: “Where is this coming from? Why so appealing? Why so often?”

Aside from what was likely some kind of major seasonal depression, thinking about snuffing it gave me a sense of power and relief. Everything since 2019 had felt like the same long year. 2019 was when bad habits and bad breaks finally got on the phone and started coordinating with my warehouse of unattended personal work. It was a hell of a collab. Eject switches glowed disproportionately.

Everything from unanswered emails to the gradual, silent burial of general indifference had twisted my mind. My God, the amount of tribunals I conducted during the average day, alcove after alcove of defendants spiraling in a tower up to the hell of my skull. I restarted and won several fights from years ago in the course of any given minute.

I clawed my way to the 17th of January in this fashion. That’s when the gloom lost its density. It was still cold, but the evening light was counterattacking. Minus the hateful business of the holidays, the deep winter tipped to the sweet, the simply quiet, the restorative.

This was when I decided to burrow into Thunderbolt Apache Leader. I’d learned to use these kinds of tools before. But as the biographies show us, you can have the talent, the workspace, the instrument sitting right in front of you and not even have the will to pick it up and play a single note.

But I got the damn box open and started slogging through the rules. It was on my table for something like seven weeks before I could run a turn without having to look at the rulebook every step.

Not only did it finish off the gloom, it replaced it with a different world. I balked at the early pages of the rulebook. But I pushed through until I found myself capering across the high-gloss terrain hexes, running mission after mission, ecstatic.

I’ll never forget the day it deposited me on the other side. It was March. I’d opted for some dark beers and yet another mission on a Friday evening. I’d been hunched over the game every possible minute that week. It was well past six p.m. and I found myself standing in a shaft of warm evening sun that would not dissipate. It was just hanging there over the ridge. I’d found a friend for winter’s last mile and I’d made it. I’d made it, and I knew how to work that board like an air traffic controller. One at a pokey regional airport, but still.

Is There A Lightning Refill Station for This Bottle

It’s facile to say that Thunderbolt Apache Leader saved my life. Patience, time, minor rearchitecting of habits and a bit of self-reflection did that. But the game was an alchemical accelerant.

So was peeking over the fence into the hex-and-counter boys’ backyards. I started relaxing at night to videos of other middle-aged men with single-shot videos and uneven audio and lots of regimental tattoos in their intro music — the less polished and more avuncular, the better — who played chunky historical wargames.

A lot of these guys were my age. And chummy. And not worried about being cool. They were an after-the-fact proxy for the Saturday night basement crew who adopted me socially — and who I rejected — in middle school. They appeared on forums with well-cited answers to rules questions or cheered along with you when you emerged from a scrap with a clever new tactic. They made their own systems of markers and spreadsheets to customize their workflows. They had medical tweezers to move counters around so they didn’t bump the little stacks in neighboring hexes. If you told me I could have spent the next 100 Saturdays drinking beer and hollering at bum artillery rolls in a big table in a garage with some of these cats, I would have done it.

Dozens of videos and reviews gave me the taste for more war- and empire-themed stuff. By midsummer 2024, I had a strategy and a shopping list: Storm Above the Reich, because I wanted to see a different flavor of air war game and the scope — building and managing a squadron, commanding missions and tracking their minutia — seemed similar enough to Thunderbolt Apache Leader; Hadrian’s Wall, because it simply looked arousing and fussy and unlike anything else on my shelf; and Pavlov’s House, which became an idée fixe early in my reading about DVG’s Valiant Defense series.

If TAL provided such a lift, then loading up on three chewy titles would turn the darkness away for even longer.

I started with Storm Above the Reich. My parents visited in early October for my birthday. I got the solid work table and four matching stools I wanted as my primary dining set and play surface. I could then use my folding table as an auxiliary learning space so I wouldn’t have to pack the game away for meals I couldn’t wolf over the stovetop. I got Storm out on the folding table the second week of October. 90 days later it was still there; I’d barely played one mission.

It didn’t work.

November beat me again.

Unboxing Storm Above the Reich: The still-gentle days of October, when anything felt possible.

Learning Storm Above the Reich: The Impenetrable Double Membrane of Chatty Rulebooks and Paralyzing Sadness

I like the dramatic proposition that Storm Above the Reich puts before me. What I don’t know is whether I can pierce the double membrane of depression and the administrative burden of this system.

I smell an action and story payoff in the game’s cycle of picking planes, positioning, approaching, attacking, and getting shot up at various points along the way. But between this experience and me is a cowering numbness, a refusal bordering on panic when I realize my brain doesn’t want anything new. I crumple on each new page. My eyes move over the diagrams, seeing nothing. I overeat processed foods — anything to feel full with little effort — and spend evenings watching anything on YouTube that kills the hours. I pick movies for their running time.

Storm Above the Reich (GMT Games) is the second installment of a (so far) three-game series of designs from Jerry White and Mark Aasted that zoom in on the experience of managing WWII-era fighter squadrons as they try to make dents in wave after wave of incoming bombers. Like a lot of challenging solo games, the aim of the thing is to turn the feeling of being totally screwed into a forkful of moist seven-layer debacle cake.

And because it’s historically modeled, the Luftwaffe were pretty screwed when the Americans fired up those assembly lines; tapped its endless supply of sturdy, pissed-off kids with good eyesight; and got the bomber wings rolling.

The first game in the series, Skies Above the Reich, lets you try your luck in single-mission or campaign mode flying Messerschmitts against B-17s. The third and newest, Skies Above Britain, sees you scrambling RAF fighters against the Germans as they try to batter the UK to its knees. In Storm, my charge is to fly Focke-Wulf 190s against B-24J Liberators and all their deadly helpers, which include Kittyhawks, P-38 Lightnings, and God forbid, Mustangs.

If you don’t get picked off by those, your reward is diving into a formation of B-24Js flying in combat boxes, bristling with .50 cals and fairly snug in their overlapping fields of fire. You hope to harry the bombers enough to degrade their formation and maybe even shoot one or two down. (In case the havoc on the main board isn’t enough, there is an advanced variant in which you can find out what happens when your fighters break out in pursuit of an isolated quarry.)

The historical and day-to-day variables are painted in dozens of hues: The kind of mission you’re going to experience will morph based on which year it is. 1943? You’re somewhere over the Mediterranean and you can spend points to bring Italian fighters along. You’ll have more experienced pilots. 1945? You’ve still got the planes, but a dwindling amount of kids who can fly them off your makeshift fields. The escorts are deadlier and more numerous. The bomber formations are bigger and more disciplined.

A ton of d10 rolls during setup abstractly present the wild variance of the battlefield overhead and your intercept readiness. Some missions you can only scramble a fistful of planes. Is the incoming wave on approach, over the target or on their way home with empty bomb bays? Where is the sun? What kind of fighters are supporting them and how many? Is the formation high enough to throw contrails? Did the Americans have to rush a damaged bird or two out? Which ones are hit and how badly?

Against this richly rendered picture, you enter into a give-and-take of decisions and determinism, tap-dancing in a seam of agency through a field of attack, escort, breakaway and damage resolution tables. Spend your points. Pick your approach — flank, nose or wing. Decide whether the pilot is Determined (that MFer isn’t going to fire until he can count the side gunner’s freckles) or Evasive. A pilot with Evasive disposition fires at greater distance and incurs less chance of being hit, but burns more time getting back into position for another run, also creating more exposure to American fighters that peel out of their bunched trailing positions to stalk you.

Every flavor of fix you’re in has a rationale, a pedagogical thrust. Which I know because the rulebooks’s authors don’t let you forget about it once across 50+ pages.

This brings us to the inseparable aggravation and charm of this system. Storm Above the Reich is profuse and prolix, both in voice and documentation. Even when I’m not “getting it,” I delight often at brushstrokes like these:

“Map 8 represents a combat box of late-war B-24 heavy bombers. Each is armed with a third gun turret mounted under the nose, a ‘chin turret’ intended to punish Luftwaffe pilots attacking head on. The formation by 1944 had become a cauldron of spraying tracers.”

Or this, inserted into the instructions that guide you through how to simulate the behavior of Allied escorts:

“There are other bombers nearby as well as other Luftwaffe fighters, so if it seems an Escort marker is just sitting there doing nothing, it may be because their attention is elsewhere. It could also mean that they are low on ammunition, low on fuel, are following orders, or their pilots simply do not see your aircraft. It’s a big chaotic moving battlefield and maybe somebody besides you screwed up for a change.”

This narration features prominently across the book, loquaciously interjecting between the procedural, the abstracted, the implied animal adrenaline, the sweep of history and the fortunes of the day.

This voice also welcomes me in the sparsely-traveled alleys of the game’s forum on BoardGameGeek. The profile name of the guy with the best rules answers seems familiar. I check the side of the box. It’s one of the designers, Jerry White, the patient uncle who can’t resist a story or an explanation. (I record and speak to others like this often; I recognize the impulse.)

He shows up more than once to nudge me out of the wilds of uncertainty and back onto the board, with its repeated patterns of light grey bombers on flat sky blue. Its tones remind me of the patterned wallpaper I’d trace with my hands as a kid before falling asleep in my grandparent’s spare room over the holidays. It’s a voice from the Boundless Board Game Saturday Night, feet on shag carpet, a recent starchy meal still in the air, bedtime far away.

I don’t think I would have gotten through my first few turns without Jerry (and the dudes who landed on the BGG forum as confused as me). Storm Above the Reich frequently dares you to understand it. The info hierarchy, the typography/color choices on the books and counters throw me a lot. So here is an aid with an Operations Menu on the cover, labeled as Step or Phase J of a mission. OK. I look inside the four-page card: The inside left page is labeled G: Instructions. Explanatory callouts reference incorrect pages. There’s a master turn sequence printed on the board, but it’s at the lower left in what looks about 12-pt. white type and there’s a lot of competing info on the board: flavor quotes, scenario-specific explanatory paragraphs...these boards have been asked to do a lot. Sometimes it all looks like a palimpsest of a prophet cross-talking with generations of breakaway sects.

Is it November or December, taking it in such small bites that I can scarcely carry over what I’ve learned from the last fidgety sit? Some linearity starts to emerge from the insane pile of cards, counters and boards.

Why am I like this? Why is each of these things a new universe? Why is my mind such a piece of shit? Why can I write this, but not be, like, a person? Aren’t there any middle gears?

My favorite is curling up at night in the enclosing drey of sleep meds, hitting in stages as Toby Longworth reads to me about a hive city getting shelled. As I tug the voice on the speaker to the foreground, I close my eyes and see myself as an outline with moth wings, dead man’s pose, a faint stroke of grayscale around me, rising up to the succor of inexhaustible black.

Some Me163 experimental jet jockeys pitched in, but one’s out with a fuel tank hit and the others have been scattered to the four winds. That leaves two other FW109 kiddies whose planes aren’t shot up, but they got intercepted on their approach and pulled into a dogfight by two Mustangs. I’m not sanguine about their chances.

First Mission: Let’s Do This In the Most Difficult Way Possible

Relax, you freak, and read it again. Now just write down your staffel info like it says in the book.

Pops once warned me about the males in our bloodline and their attraction to doing everything the hardest way possible. I wasn’t listening. I decide to learn on a mission that’s set in 1945. I walk the setup steps: I’m dispatched against 27 B-24J Liberators — shadowed by a complement of hungry P-51 Mustangs — inbound to a German target. Because it’s late-war, all my pilots are about 14 years old.

I take three up-armored FW190s, three other FW190s with upgraded guns, and four fast, but mercurial, Me163s—right up the trailing bomber element’s asspipe, because the setup indicates they are throwing contrails that my flyers can use for cover.

I don’t want to try attacking from every angle on my first run, so I rush everything I have at the tail of the formation, luckily avoiding collisions with my own craft. The Me163s and FW109s succeed in knocking the tail bomber out of formation and inflicting three points of damage on another.
One Me163 is now out with a fuel tank hit — I assume this guy is going to be a comet of burning fuel in about .03 seconds. The other jets are scattered to the four winds by Mustang swarms running interference. Of the FW109 rookie wave, Ahrens is shot down and wounded. Clausen takes a heavy hit to his engine. Doppler and Ehlers? Heavy hits to the cockpit and fuselage, respectively. Zick and Oesau get intercepted on their approach and pulled into a dogfight by two other escorts.

The plan is to be well in my cups by the time they die en masse so I can focus on listening to the Psychedelic Furs and staring at that one streetlight down the dirt lane that focuses the middle ground and distracts me from the first of two derelict houses on my property that were supposed to be a toehold on some kind of empire. I need simpler plans, like music and beer.

What I know of the rules is as tenuous as the line I can trace from my streetlight to the neighbors’ to the distant third on the two-laner. It’s OK. Track seven of Talk Talk Talk is up: “It Goes On.” How was this band so good? You can bail out of a plane and land in this song and ride it through the night.

One Thought Can Take a Season of Your Life

I was talking to dudes on BGG’s Squad Leader forum about the copy of the game that The Moms got me for Christmas in 1979. She knew I was into WWII history and war movies, because weren’t we all? 

I was 10. I opened it, gawped at each bit of it, and put it away. Maybe my best friend Jesse could have played it with me. We would have had all of middle school to argue about it on the weekends. But we never did. We ended up moving to the same state as teens, but never re-established the Missouri bond. He died on Facebook. And some of the dudes on the BGG forum mentioned a common denominator: “My big brother and his friends…” They got to learn it under the wing of some adolescents.

And I realize it doesn’t matter how cool these games are unless somebody is there with you, moored at the point of fascination and raised on the broth of brotherhood. And I stopped shopping a bunch of wargames I liked that YouTubers were talking about when I realized I wasn’t shopping for a game. I was shopping for a big brother I never had, or friends I had and don’t have anymore. I thought it through, like I had my visions of eliminating myself, and thought better.

I have to be my own big brother now. I’m a solo player. It’s a lot of goddamn work, raising yourself all over at age 55. The great poets provide hints. Intuition sows fertile blanks between embarrassments. The lack of applause at the checkpoints is appalling.

Try-N-Fly: Mission Two

I try again in mid-January. Sunset is gradually creeping up to that 5:00 mark again, I know because I track it on the weather apps every week. There’s a smear of painfully bright indigo on the western ridges across the highway that wouldn’t have been there two weeks ago.

I set aside a whole Friday night. I let a wall of flame wash over the to-do list. And I still buck at the threshold: Just admit you bought the wrong game, dude. You’re forgetting your own rules: If you continually have to ask yourself if something’s worth it, that’s your answer. You burned $90. It happens. Let it go.

But I march to the table anyway because I don’t entirely trust the guy in my head who told me last month I couldn’t figure this game out. We’re going in again.

This time I start with the very first mission: 1943, the sunny Mediterranean. I pour a nice stout and keep the Golden Era beats perched on the edge of the sonic midground. Just do the turn, I tell myself when I want to drift away and harangue old friends on VoIP. Do the damn turn, you big, sweaty diaper.

Ehlers attacks solo on the first mission in an unmodified Focke-Wulf with two Italian pilots nearby in their MC202s. I conduct the planes in a fluid loop at flank attack angles for six turns of a Near Target scenario, making a mess of the formation’s middle element. P-40 Kittyhawk escorts appear briefly and are easily dodged before they melt away. Ack-ack takes divots out of other elements in the formation.

I finally see the coherent game cycle previously occluded by The Black Dog. The Magic Circle has enough surface tension to sustain itself. Another good sign: I’m bellowing at my aircraft in between runs. “Well, are we gonna get these motherfuckers or what?”

I back my way into a personalized workflow through the reference cards, books and board data. I discover and fix several small things I was doing wrong. I’m running more of the turns using just the abbreviated instructions from the reference cards instead of plowing through the book every step.

I land the craft, make some hashmarks on the mission log with a pencil. Put a dumb, loud song on repeat until I pass out, get out of bed and walk straight to the table the next morning. This cold snap is brutal, but there’s just enough of a suggestion of Something to Look Forward to. Marked against last year, I have gained a playable picture of a daunting new game nearly a full month earlier than last year. It did not salvage November and December, but I note the improvement.

Is There a Future With My Jocund and Bulky New Pal?

Yes. I can tell because I get enough of the mechanics repeating until they generate a luminous still from the movie I sensed on the other side. It is light painting, alive and effective and satisfying even when the story doesn’t go your way. Take a look at this picture:

This motherfucker right here

This is either a picture of how deterministic game elements bog down a player with a plan or one of the greatest air war short stories ever. I rake this single B-24J with high-altitude Oblique and Nose attacks for nearly six turns. I can not force him out of formation. I become livid, fixating on taking him down. Half of his crew must be dead or hit. I pepper the fuselage, engines, the wings, and he’s still magnetized to his three-plane element.

Whoever sits at the controls of this bomber is the most adamantine West Point product in the history of the institution. Some days you will simply bounce like a pebble off the aura of Jupiter’s adopted son and there’s nothing you can do about it, which is one of the brightest threads of Storm’s weft. This most of all: An initially cumbersome machine that belches out its own beguiling gems if you keep turning the crank.

Will I play it again? Yes, although in my dilettante’s eyes this game was difficult, tangential, unwieldy, self-indulgent and baffling — moments of cerulean evocation and constricting pace. It’s a weird niche product. But so am I.

It also feels like a successful bid for entry into the Fellowship of Crunch, resonating with my need to seek, handle and celebrate things whose justification is brighter the farther they are from the digital braying of this putrid age. The little work of the movements, planes trailing caravans of cardboard modifiers, are the ghost notes of the most endearing fans’ war songs. At both its most gripping and frustrating, it smacks of vellichor.

A minute tilt of the seasons can throw you from the planet’s surface. A bad run spiderwebs the canopy. Ever toward the sun, fuckers. Unless a sun position is indicated in the Situation Manual, in which case you keep that shit at your back because the .50 gunners on those B-24Js are not there to cheer you on.

Home-Infused Cinnamon Whiskey and Homemade Hot Chocolate: Suck a Dick, Cold Front

The multi-day forecast shows another week of single-digit or subzero temps: I need something else to look forward to. Time to see if Rygar wants to swing by after work and test my new jar of home-infused cinnamon whiskey — this time made with Fireside Straight Bourbon Whiskey instead of Beam.

It includes the usual big cinnamon stick and a dried arbol chile, but I pull it after three days instead of five to see if the better whiskey and milder spice will make it more approachable. The last time I brought a jar for him to try at the game shop, I could hear the soft tissues of his throat and stomach sizzling like bacon.

Plus I have all the makings for homemade hot chocolate, something I’ve never made in my whole life: Whole milk, unsweet cocoa powder, sugar, semisweet chocky chips, little marshmallows, all that shit. He stomps out of the freezing addition of my house in his electrified vest just as the spiked cup comes off the stove: Damn, this is good.

Project L: I’m flying off the caffeine and booze in this cinnamon whiskey-spiked hot chocolate, of course we want to handle all these pieces. Everybody does.

We try a sip of the cinnamon whiskey straight, too. Switching up the base was a good move: It’s mellower, less brute alcohol and sugar flavor, more depth in the middle, the burn in better balance with the booze. Once it’s stirred into the hot chocolate mug? Potent. I can’t even feel the booze hit because the caffeine and sugar has me off my face halfway through the drink. It’s a good accompaniment to the cigarettes and joints that get taken in multiple hit-and-run attacks in the addition. I can feel the cold conducting into the soles of my sneakers and Rygar points out during our second break that my hands look purple.

He has to go make sure a place he’s housesitting doesn’t have frozen pipes. We have about 15 minutes and half a mug left, so would he like to try Project L? We breeze through his first game in minutes flat and he declares it his new favorite. He mimics eating the irresistible pieces — this game would be a death sentence for any unattended toddler with functioning senses — and heads out with a bottle of Winter Warlock Oatmeal Stout. You gotta design waypoints with treats, light the route with little candles here and there.

More on this game and this drink in a future episode of Breakup Gaming Society.

Project L and Ski In Ski Stout: All the Pieces for a Good Night In

I’m not ready to reengage with the WWII air combat wargame against which I’ve dashed my brains (and my pilots) in intermittent learning sessions throughout winter. On this somnolent winter eve, I switch up the flavors.

Project L solo mode and a new-to-me Colorado stout: Ski In Ski Stout from Telluride Brewing Company

From the first sip and the first turn, I can tell I’ve made the right move: Without Joe across the table beating my ass red, I quickly digest the solo rules for Project L and find a pleasant rhythm of managing the game’s simple automa; drafting and placing puzzles; and a broader, gently forming picture of how to play the game more effectively.

Sometimes you chalk your biggest Ws by learning which games to quit, or at least set down for a while. As I age, I get better at dispelling the imaginary tribunal that lists what happens if You Don’t Stick With It. They’re not here. They never were. Why am I walking this overweight, surly dog? I drop the leash and watch it wander off. It’s not my dog. Fuck it.

When I go downtown to get some stout, I get bat-flights of anxiety, piling up other stops in town even before I’ve parked. It’s Friday night, I should see who’s around and jolt my conversational reflexes. Then I realize I don’t want to do that shit, either.

What I want is to try a new stout. So I skip over the usual Winter Warlock, Guinness and Left Hand. Ski In Ski Stout is new. Let’s do that.

Let’s sip that (it’s delicious and will be on a future Drink of the Week segment). Let’s play this (it’s a perfect ratio of brainpower demanded to pace of play and will be a future Game of the Week segment). Let’s instead ease into the moment: Nothing in the way except what I erected previously, the gelid evening squeezing out a bit more dusk light than weeks previous. The blooming aftertaste of the brew. The fleeting disappointment in a loss to the automa falling to the wildly-within-reach joy of another game.

Then another one. And another. I am candlelit. It is a good, long and slow night.