10 Tabletop Scenes That Defined My Board Gaming in 2024
Top 2024 board game moments from the notebook in my head. It was a cinematic year.
Every board game session has a bravura move, catastrophic fuckup or well-placed quip that crystallizes the game. Or the session. Or a new friendship. Presented here: An unranked look at my top 10 board game memories of 2024.
1. Star Wars: Outer Rim - Never Tell Rygar About the Odds
Star Wars: Outer Rim multiplayer: Rygar toasts himself in advance of some swashbuckling shit he’s about to pull off.
The setting: the Outer Rim, where the Empire’s grip is loose enough that Syndicates, Hutt and Rebels can effectively jockey for pockets of control. It’s a good place to make one’s fortune.
The players: The Don as Han Solo, myself as Ketsu, and Rygar as Dr. Aphra. It’s our first-ever play. Our first few turns. Ryan attempts the Kessel Run job almost immediately. The Kessel Run is supposed to be hard, with several layers of skill checks. I try to explain this to Rygar.
He’s not hearing it. He simply picks up the eight-sided dice and starts passing the checks. He hits the third one and I’m still trying to tell him about ways he can increase his odds of passing. “I’m gonna crit it,” he says. And does. It was only the fourth turn or so and he had just run away with the game. He pushed all his chips on the table in the opening sequence and won.
You can hear the whole story — along with my solo and multiplayer review of this game — in Ep. 80: Star Wars Outer Rim and a Nice Glass of Farmer’s Punch.
2. Project L: Joe Serves Up Some Savory Italian Understatement
Learn Project L with Joe, who will show you how to build and eat a spicy meatball
So my homie Joe down at the game shop — who I nicknamed Project J because he taught me this game — is doing his usual thing at Project L, an inviting and addictive affair where you draft bright plastic polyominoes to fill up scoring boards of various values.
Joe is a machine at this. I am a mere laborer, painstakingly crafting a few scoring boards across the table from his gleaming point factory. This particular loss is bigger than the others. I’ve somehow become worse at this game than when he taught it to me. A four-point gap is usually a pretty resounding win…but I have just posted a score of 18. To Joe’s 29.
Now, Joe is not sparing with his editorializing during a game, but to his credit, he also doesn’t gloat. When I announce my score, he is impassive. He lets out a small sigh, pauses, and says, “That’s a spicy meatball.”
We both knew I just got gutted.
That’s all that had to be said.
I finally bought a copy of this game for myself down at Frontier Geeks, so look for a proper review sometime in 2025 in a Game of the Week segment and hopefully an end to the double-digit losses.
3. Final Girl: Madness in the Dark - The Wicked Bitch is Dead
Final Girl: Madness in the Dark - Once you start swinging the Hook-Handled Bone Hammer, you don’t stop until the Ratchet Lady is flat and motionless
It’s my 15th attempt to beat The Ratchet Lady in the halls of Wolfe Asylum, playing as Veronica, a teen who must do what we expect all horror leads to do: Get her head together, save some of her friends, find a weapon and fight back all on her own.
Except this movie never seems to materialize. I have to yell CUT like 15 games in a row because the Ratchet Lady and her little minions are slicing Veronica to ribbons on every attempt.
Until.
I get some early breaks and get the right weapon early. And start swinging it liberally. Veronica clobbers her way down several hallways, stalking the Ratchet Lady and taking every opportunity she can to mount big attacks. Veronica tracks her down and kills her in the Doctor’s Office. And the room fills with confetti. I’m sprinting up and down my living room and yelling. It’s the most vindicating, elusive solo win of the year, which you can hear about in more detail in Episode 83: Dark Colorado Beers and Rich-Tasting Boardgame Replays.
4. Survive! Escape from Atlantis - The Sharks Eat All the Thanksgiving Leftovers
Survive the Island (The Board Game Formerly Known as Survive! Escape from Atlantis): These look like real nice folks until one of them triggers a 10-foot tidal wave that pushes you into a shark’s mouth
This is currently the game down at Frontier Geeks, along with its successor title (Survive the Island), which is now in stock at the shop and which you should get if you like chaotic fun by the barrelful.
Our new friends Bethany and David put this one in front of us after we’d stuffed ourselves on Thanksgiving…and what a hoot we had trying to pilot people off an island that’s about to get broiled by emergent volcanos.
There’s a massive scramble for the boats as you take turns manipulating sea monsters and kaijus and sharks to mess up everybody else’s escape plans. It’s simply a blast that roused me from a deep food coma and has turned into our go-to for quick, fun, evocative “take that!” contests.
I went into it in more detail in Episode 84: Enough Thanksgiving Board Games to Make You Puke. Check it out.
5. Vale of Eternity: The Don Activates His Sleeper Cells
Vale of Eternity: The Don adds another powder keg to a card combo that’s gonna go sky-high in about three more turns
Every time I think I have this game about surveyed, some new twist in how to summon and score the pretty monsters on the cards up and bites me in a new place.
Thanksgiving Eve: My old HS buddy Hurricane 75 visited and we sat down for a game with The Don down at the game shop. The Don sat and did almost nothing for six turns, then unveiled an interlocking scoring combo of creatures and effects that turned him from a speck in the rear view mirror to a faint glimmer on the horizon.
Which is to say, Vale of Eternity keeps proving its value and showing me new facets months after I thought I’d seen all its tricks. I said last summer that the card pool needs to grow (which it is), but it was nice seeing that the base game is still plenty to chew on. It keeps popping up on the year-end roundups of other boardgame bloggers and YouTubers I follow, so that testifies to its sticking power.
I talked about Vale of Eternity in some detail back in Episode 79: After the Board Games of Summer Are Gone if you’d like to give it a listen.
6. Thunderbolt Apache Leader: Laughing and Eating in a C-130
Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A whole mess of enemy battalions queued to overrun my airbase; this stew needs a pinch of C-130
You can get a squadron shot to pieces really quick in Thunderbolt Apache Leader, which is the most rules-intensive thing I played in 2024. It absolutely rivets me. When I’m in the middle of a campaign, everything else vanishes at the margins. It’s that engrossing.
By the time of my spring campaigns, I’m branching out, trying new aircraft combinations to run the missions. And I finally see what the C-130 Specter can do after learning its special flight and attack rules.
Oh my. It is destructive.
I sent it out alone and chortled as the guns bristling from its port side just raked everything it could see with lethal fire. I whooped as I saw that drawing damage markers didn’t bring the sweaty apprehension as usual; that thing was so high in the air, so chockfull of countermeasures, that I was shrugging off the kind of thick surface-to-air fire that had been mincing my smaller craft for weeks. I had to mop up pieces of breakfast from the terrain tiles after I was done taunting the enemy elements, across whose faces I had just drug a giant, veined dong. Which felt good after losing so many games of cat-and-mouse with smaller craft.
This game is my muse. I wrote a four-post blog series about my learning experiences and the first of a new series: Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, where I mine the game for every bit of comedy and drama I can find as I develop myself into an intermediate player.
Every time those primary weapons start chattering, my keyboard lights up, too. Sometimes I beat myself up because I never captured those fiction ideas or worked with discarded essays, but I feel like this game gave me occasion to do my best writing of the year. Check out the blog and tell me if you agree.
7. Cascadia Solo: Eating Shit on Reddit After My Fake High Score
Cascadia solo: Check it out, I placed 26 animals. That is cheating.
Playing Cascadia, a beautifully executed nature tile-laying game, was my extended palate cleanser after Thunderbolt Apache Leader. I played it allll summer, chasing a rating from the rulebook: The 110-point solo game, for which you earn the Ascended ranking. I would play the thing half of every morning, racking up 105s, 106s, even a 109. But I never hit the 110.
Until one morning I picked up my cup of coffee and made those patterns of habitat tiles and animal tokens dance like I could see the mind of the creator in a perfect clockwork universe. I’d scored over 130 points.
I take a pic and post it on the Reddit solo boardgaming community to brag about it. And it’s not until I see the picture on my post that the explanation for the stratospheric score becomes clear: I miscounted my tile supply for the solo variant, hypnotized myself and took several extra turns. When you grant yourself extra tiles and animals, there’s all kinds of amazing scores you can hit.
I had to walk it back in front of everyone on the thread. Luckily, they were very nice about it.
The quest for the 110-point solo game continues. I reviewed the game in Episode 79. It was the light-playing, easy-setup answer to the heavy thud of war that was Thunderbolt Apache Leader, and it ate a disproportionate amount of my 2024 calendar.
8. Cockroach Poker: Eating Bugs With Matthew Schniper
Cockroach Poker: Matthew Schniper demonstrates the importance of having something to wash down all the bugs you eat after clumsy bluffs
Cockroach Poker is one of the best things you can own for fast-moving, funny bluffing with a deck of cards. It was an easy teach, but that’s not really what this play was about: It was more about who was at the table: Matthew Schniper of Side Dish with Schniper, who does the most exhaustive and generous food writing and podcasting you’re going to consumer in Colorado Springs. He paid the Purgatoire Valley a summer visit and I played a round with him and Lauren.
It bolstered me to see a face from the old days. It was nice to know that Colorado Springs hasn’t forgotten about me entirely. I finally had an ear for a curated valise of observations, theories, recommendations and complaints I’d been carrying around since I moved down here. And I got to see my adopted region with new eyes when he published his excellent travelogue after his 48-hour whirlwind trip through Trinidad.
9. Warhammer 40,000 Conquest The Card Game: Having My Own Weapons Turned Against Me
Warhammer 40000 Conquest the Card Game: You, too, can get steamrolled and added to the trophy wall
I doubt I’ll ever have another game that will transfix and possess me like Warhammer 40,000: Conquest did. It gave me everything I wanted: a thematic and thrilling way to have battles in the W40K universe without having to buy codexes and minis and take part in the rest of the economically sordid gavage of the Games Workshop assembly line.
For four years, I had a small group who loved it as much as I did, and they all had one thing in common: They were former Magic: The Gathering guys who left the game behind for various reasons and who loved the Conquest application of theme or just got sick of Magic and its burgeoning supply of cards and conditions.
For about 45 minutes, I found another kid like that down here in Trinidad: A former competitive Magic player who, not even done with his undergrad studies, had more or less set the game down. He didn’t know anything about Conquest or W40K or how well its theme manifested in the game’s warlord-driven system, but he liked the idea of a saner, smaller card pool. I played him once. He murdered me in that little pool.
When I teach this game, an event that gets more rare with every year, I usually hand the neophyte my Ork deck built around a slugger named Nazdreg. The scheme is straightforward and strong. And within three turns, he was playing it smarter than I ever had, especially impressive considering you also have to consider which of five planets you want to invest your resources in, as the game models key engagements of a running battle for supremacy in a ten-planet sector tucked away in Warhammer 40K’s sprawling, ultraviolent and cynical expanse.
He grasped the nuances of the the Ork cards with frightening speed. Outplayed me badly on the planet strategy, too. It was breathtaking. Beheaded by my own pupil in minutes flat. And that would be the last of it, because this young swordsman returned to college not long after our match and, like a lot of young locals who have a plan, has no immediate reason to return.
Hell of a game, though. Good job, youngster.
10. Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Psychic Attack Heard Round the World
Space Hulk: Death Angel, The Card Game: This game still makes me yell
No fewer than 12 Blood Angel Terminators are arrayed in a column down the table, marching into the pitiless jumble of a space hulk filled with cunning, agile Genestealer aliens. I’m teaching the game to Rygar and The Don, so I’m braced for early catastrophe as they learn to maneuver and shoot in that bulky relic warplate.
It doesn’t take long. A member of my squad, Brother Adron, gets flanked by a xenos swarm comprising no fewer than eight Genestealer cards. It is not survivable. But then Lexicanium Calistarius, the group’s battlefield psyker under the command of The Don, attacks.
Lexicanium Calistarius has a special ability: If he rolls a skull icon on a six-sided die — something which you can do 50% of the time — he gets to attack again. More skulls? More attacks.
The Don pitches a skull as Calistarius’s eyes turn argent and deadly empyrean power incinerates the first band of Genestealers bearing down on the helpless Adron. Then he pitches another one. And another. And another, the deadly energy arcing from beast to beast. He used a special token once during the attack that gave him a reroll, but all told, he cooked the entire column of Tyranids. All eight cards in the swarm. Slumped and smoking.
It was then I shouted. I shouted so loud that poor Bethany, who had just arrived and was observing the action, buckled in her chair. A table full of Magic players right next to us all looked up in alarm. Rygar told me that was my last bit of yelling for the night, which was a self-solving problem, as I have never seen an attack like that in my 14 years of playing this game, and had no chance of seeing another one that night.
We folded up the cards and started a different game that would include David and Bethany because Rygar is a good host and not a hyperfixated, drunken teenager. I would have let those poor people sit there for an hour while we played that out. Better judgment and manners prevailed, but I saw it. The most legendary close-quarters attack ever made in service to the Emperor and Sanginius. I was on that ship and I saw it.
What was the most singular scene that materialized on your game table in 2024? If something unforgettable now forms in your mind’s eye, hit me up on the Breakup Gaming Society Contact page and shoot me a note about it, I may read it on a future episode or feature it on the blog. You have the storytelling stick, should you want to seize it.
Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 1
What have I learned about Thunderbolt Apache Leader 14 missions in? Let's find out.
I started trolling the boys again with fake medals and citations. They ran with it and it’s gotten out of hand. Somebody up the chain wants an explanation as to what the Lord Quincy Entertainment III decoration is for and why it has been awarded to a nonexistent flyer, a “Capt. Rarginalt.” They fired off a press release to some goof they went to the Academy with and now it’s all over CENTCOM.
What’s this? New intel? Surrounded? It’s good timing in one sense, but have the Pakistanis gone mad? Who let us get flanked and cut off? All of a sudden me and my impish flyers are out of the administrative spotlight and into the furnace.
***
Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Setup
It’s the ceremony, pre-dawn. Only six hours of sleep despite how I timed everything and drugged myself up. Plenty of work to do today. I don’t know about you, but a raft of tasks and nothing else isn’t a day worth living for; some have stolen moments of endorphin checking the Instagram feed, some have love and a natural way with being with others; I have a Cut-Off situation in Pakistan. Usually waking up pre-dawn sours me, but this process — setting up the conditions, composing the terrain hex pool and enemy divisions, is a trill of bright-calm-excited.
Including the imagined space where I think I can survive a Cut-Off, which I never have. The usual pattern: Commit at least one deep strike on Day 1 to blunt the persistent effect of the most annoying Support or Command battalion, let the lesser craft slow down the most aggressive frontline Assault elements…then send flurries of parrying attacks out in a panic over the next three days with increasingly split forces, degrading craft and pilots, until I’m overrun about Day 3, or I wake up one day, look at the board and just pack it up. I’m losing my appetite for grinding out an extra day, wriggling and bleeding for an ounce of maneuver room, just for honor.
And here we are again: Two battalions that accelerate battalion movement, and the first part of the puzzle: What’s the craft mix?
Not overthinking it this time. Modest-cost sluggers in quantity: Two A-10 As and two AH-64 As. And we’re doing concentration of force. After all, the game is Thunderbolt Apache Leader, not Carnival of Esoteric Decisions (a medal I won after sending an amusing, if ineffective, mix of craft into some imbroglio in Libya; somebody had an algorithm or something that awarded you a ribbon if you wasted exactly $50M each from the Northrup Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin piles. Stand up, stupid, you hit the Imperial Bingo!)
So what if the annoying and surprisingly sophisticated Pakistani command battalions—check you out, Pakistan, I see you—can push everything at me at double speed. I’m going to fix on one thing: Making sure they have less and less stuff to push each day. Go ahead. Force march your shot-full-of-holes ragtag bullshit my way. I’m going to try to turn the Front Line and Friendly Transit zones into a buzzsaw into which they can push all the crappy particle board they want.
Wish me luck. If this works, I could end up with a shiny Order of the Malted Milk Falcon.
My, my, aren't we frisky.
***
What have we learned since Thunderbolt Apache Leader pulled us singlehandedly from an intractable late-winter depression? I’ve now filled 14 mission sheets out since learning this game in late winter ‘24. In service of not being a monophagous slouch — the world already has enough twats who just want to hunch over one title with the same people week after week, year after year — I’ve added several new titles to my collection: Final Girl, Wingspan, Cascadia, Vale of Eternity and Star Wars Outer Rim.
But the test is this: What do I regularly crave? What am I going to reach for? Along with all these new arrivals — some of which I have played heavily — I still need TAL on the table at least once a month. What sticks is its own testament.
Missions to Date (Personal Surrender Notes Sometimes Substitute for Formal Rating)
• Pakistan, Cut-Off Outcome: Tap-out - Untenable by Day 3
• Libya, Cut-Off Outcome: Day 6 Tap-out
• North Korea, Show of Force Outcome: Dismal
• North Korea, Surge Outcome: Good*
• North Atlantic, WWIII Outcome: Failure. Overrun.
• Iran, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Are you kidding me with these attack rolls?!!
• Iraq, Show of Force Outcome: Good
• Libya, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Good
• Pakistan, Holding Action Outcome: NOPE
• Pakistan, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Poor
• Iraq, Cut-Off Outcome: Good
• Israel Defense, Cut-Off Outcome: Mission failure.
• Iraq, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Good
• Pakistan, General War Outcome: i can’t take it any more
*Even my best efforts are marred here. There are a couple things I was playing incorrectly. 1) You get ONE auxiliary pilot for every craft TYPE, not every CRAFT. I was playing with too deep a bench. 2) I thought I was being clever and economical by collapsing all the Arm Aircraft steps for the day into one umbrella move. I was cheating. It’s a separate step for each mission, I believe, so my SO expenditure was also padded. Whoopsie.
***
Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 1, Mission 1
Target: Fast Assault Battalion
Pilot: Viper, A-10A
The enemy — none of whose vehicles have ranged attacks — obligingly clusters in key points along neat reverse-S pattern on flat ground between ridgelines, offering themselves up to at least be halved in strength with one low-altitude pass. Viper seizes this opportunity by knocking out a grand total of three points worth of vehicles, missing hilariously with every kind of armament on the craft. He tops off this gobsmacking display by getting the HUD damaged and biffing a 6+ Bingo check, accruing three Stress on homebound approach. What an asswipe. This was a weak battalion that he could have cratered and should have halved at the very least. My opening gambit is already sideways. Concentration of farce. With the exception of one late APC kill, I have a string of something like six attacks where I didn’t generate more than a natural three on the d10. That is discouraging.
Award: Medal of Defecation
***
Experimentation: In my rookie outings I anchored on the Fast ability to make the variables less dizzying. Then I ease my way into the charms of other abilities, figuring out the nifty trick of having Slow dudes enter low-altitude under heavy ridge cover, wait out the enemy’s fire step, then burst onto the scene in a breathtakingly destructive, patiently timed counter. It takes more Loiter time, but it slaps.
Experimentation: The possibility vibrates. What happens, for instance, if I requisition myself a Specter gunship and then spam a cluster of choppers? Let the Specter, with its free ammo pass and giddy lack of weight restrictions, hit the enemy deep to take out far-away divisions who think they can sit back there between three bands of friendly cushion and just fuck with me? Then we dispatch our cheapo choppers — two AH-1s and an AH-64A—in a cluster to knock out the most menacing frontline assault battalions.
It turned out pretty good because I challenged another habit: Stewing about three delicate complicated entry points onto the battle hex map. What if I just bunched them up for a cavalry charge? It was not only effective, it was devastating. Riding low and dispensing generous ladles of Hellfires for Stand-Off strikes and LAUs for close-in work, they would scour their hex, pound the next one and glide easily over the smoking bric-a-brac. Sometimes I had chopper pilots who had nothing to do on their turn except throttle forward, hoping they could at least dump a bird or two before their mates slagged everything. It was glorious.
***
Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 2, Mission 1
Target: Tank Leader Battalion
Pilot: Halo, A-10A
With Viper’s loose stool being pressure-washed out of seams in the cockpit previously thought impermeable, I give the stress-resistant Halo the nod. The Tank Leader battalion that was halved on Day 1 by yeoman work from my AH-64 operators—Rock and Eagle—has rumbled into my rear band. Halo has to mop it up post-haste. I decide we don’t have the luxury of running fewer than three missions today, as the Friendly Transit zone now has three assault battalions jostling for our necks—including the Fast Assault Battalion that so baffled Viper. The Apache duo is going after that. I repaired nothing, so hopefully that compromised engine gets the bird to the zone. I don’t even want to detail what I have asked Rebel to do. The bandsaw has to start whirring, missing teeth and all. I’m not diverting to rear-line attacks and I’m not sparing the horses.
Halo starts off with a bad break: Bad Coordinates. But he caught a good one earlier: Four HVTs are clustered in two hexes, which allows him to rip across the board in two turns and unload obscene amounts of munitions into each. He comes home with three Stress and a much lighter aircraft. There are two hellacious missions left to go before I could dare call what I see daylight.
Award: The Timely Mop-Up. It’s a watch glued to a mop I found. Just take it to your billet. Yes, I thought you would appreciate the googly eyes. What’s that? You’re going to fuck the mop. That’s fine. I’m very proud of you and you’re a very good pilot and would you please go away.
***
The brown bear that digs through my trash must be hitting some insane pre-hibernation caloric requirements. I took a full-on whiz in the remains of a Safeway rotisserie chicken, hoping to dissuade it. Every scrap was gone the following morning. I was awestruck.
I’m paralleling that path in anticipation of what I call the Awful 90: November, December, January. I’m laying in calorie-dense stores at all costs. My table will be a bonfire of crackling new endeavors. A deep black-and-red coal bed of Roman, German, American, and Russian goings-on, aiming for that March day when—probably drunk—I will realize the evening sun is stretching and stretching, hanging there like it’s stuck, and I’ve made it.
I now own GMT’s Storm Above the Reich. By Thanksgiving I hope to add Pavlov’s House and Hadrian’s Wall. When the sun starts setting at 4:43 p.m. and I feel hollowed out by 6, I hope to remember in November what I learned in March. Just take the game out. Set it up. Take Ambien and fall asleep with the rulebook on your chest. Bank the fires and grind through. Dream of bears, their stomachs full of chicken bones and piss.
***
Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Sitrep, End of Day 2
It’s been a day of valiant flying. Rebel executed a simply brilliant run, halving a full-strength infantry battalion singlehanded. He found a seam somehow, clearing two AAAs his first turn with a well-placed one-two of a Maverick and a GBU-16. His Evasive ability and ECM then kept him aloft as he plied his way west over scads of APCs and infantry with MANPADs, blessing the occupants—which included both enemy command units—with a judicious sprinkling of cluster bombs and Mk. 83s. He even somehow returned a useable craft.
It’s the kind of thing you could put your feet up and savor over a whiskey if it weren’t for the sirens and the fact that there’s no whiskey. The remains of the enemy Infantry Force and the Fast Assault battalions — along with a full-strength Air Defense Unit — have all barreled into the Friendly Rear band.
There’s one play. It’s the same play as Day 1. Lash out at the nearest antagonists with the best-placed shots you can muster. I have eight SO points, most of which I assume I’ll need to reserve for the penalties for extreme encroachment. But those infantry and assault elements are half-strength. If I go at those with two craft each, pitiable state though they may be in, I’ll knock them off for a three-SO kicker. That will keep us in it. The craft will be armed with stuff my adjutants found at Lowe’s*, but we’ll be in it, and the Pakistanis will only have two operational assault battalions left. Maybe just few enough that my tattered squad can gang up on and neutralize on Days 4 and 5. Maybe.
Award: The 7 Seconds Clenched-Fists, Black-Eyes Medal of Being Hardcore as Hell
*You have not had a true retail experience until you’ve visited the Lowe’s in Kandahar. Haggling for cart food in the front alone is worth the trip, the most fun you’ll have on this side of the Durand Line.
Rebel's in the arena. He's trying stuff.
***
Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 3, Mission 2
Target: Infantry Battalion
Pilot: Halo, A-10A
Today Warthogs and Apaches were paired off with each other for our desperate sweep of the back porch. There was much hooting on comms as we confirmed Rebel and Rock had finally crushed the Fast Assault Battalion that had been flooring it through our fire for the last 72 hours. They spotted a surviving truck or two hauling ass to comical banjo music, but those discombobulated lees will never be a coherent fighting force again. If Halo and Montana can do the same to the remnants of the Infantry Battalion, we can likely weather it when the Air Defense Unit enters our tender rear zone, regroup and make them pay on Day 4.
My gamble with Montana’s engine block craps out. He plummets into scrub and rock en route to the attack zone. Halo pushes on, his A-10 laden with with the fruits of one of the last SO points I can justify spending. He opens with a classic: busting a command unit wide open with a Maverick and simultaneously knocking out an AAA in his approach path with a GBU-16 shot. He banks back, switching to high altitude. His strike ability is compromised, but the three Mk. 20s and two Mk. 83s should be enough to hollow out the remnants of the battalion bunched across three hexes in the middle of the board. With a little luck.
There’s no more luck. He calls in the ping from the helicopter that materializes at six o’clock low. And the Sidewinder that issues from it. That’s the last we hear.
Two enemy battalions will be hammering the base by evening, with a third due to arrive before we’re reinforced. I’ll have one SO point left on Day 4 with which to send out two chewed-up craft, with pilots that are all about to go on tilt. No sense in throwing them away; we’re beat.
I think of Halo’s freshly widowed mop. For some reason that’s really getting me down.
Award: Order of the Nice Try, Cowboy
***
Day 4 of running 2-3 missions a day on Total War in Pakistan. This isn’t turning out much better than the Cut-Off debacle. I quit. This has been on the table for two or three days now and I’m just tired. The last run was my two AH-1s on a hopeless bid…I was begging for the Killed chit.
It was a miracle even in its failure: Gator (a replacement for another KIA Cobra jockey) and Grandpa were running the gauntlet, surviving just enough damage draws not to get killed, but not enough to remain effective. HUDs were knocked out. Stress levels were spiking. Depending on the ad hoc targeting, one or the other were drawing three hits per turn as they barreled for the other edge of the map. I did a count. They were one point shy of halving the battalion…but the penalties from damage were so severe, the few birds they had left in the rack wouldn’t do anything.
The fact that they made it home was just another in a desert full of such. I speed-ran the Close Support Old and New Testaments in two days and I didn’t even care what happened next. Please let it be the Apocalypse. Do I get to at least put my head down on the desk for 15 minutes if it’s the Apocalypse?
On the second mission, I lost the F-16 and Dart — one strike short of finishing the remains of Infantry Battalion 1A. I wasn’t worried about mortgaging my score and blowing the VPs for a new bird. It was the psychic energy and focus I didn’t have.
Each mission had the emotion of a movie. The solo flights, last-chance shots closing up and opening again with a miraculous Enemy Cover roll and then the pilot missing on the last possible try with the last possible missile. Anticipation and rage. Despair and resignation. And the overlap of unnameable alloys that should be added to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I was relieved to set it down, but still happy to savor it. Although I’m wondering if the eight-day missions just aren’t a bit protracted for me.
If you’d have told me two years ago that a solitaire boardgame about close air support would be my muse, I wouldn’t have believed you. This is a categorically unique being on my shelf, a private and exhausting and thrilling second life on my table — not exactly spiritual, but undeniably transcendent and engrossing.
I can only say to those who have made that AGM-114 strike at the last possible moment before the tanks run dry and your tailbone chakra disappears down a black flume, thank you for reading. And good hunting.
Award: It’s for you, my fellow Special Option-point spenders and pilot allocators: the Gen. Johneld B. Dubious Patient Reader Award. I can only thank you for indulging me. I am currently lobbying BGG to get you some profile flair for this one. Should happen any day now. Count your mops before you shut down the house tonight. This century is freaky as hell.
Further Recommended Reading: Here’s Part One of my four-part series about my freshman season as a TAL commander.
Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 4
Thunderbolt Apache Leader learning journal: My butt stinks and I think I popped a blood vessel in my eye. I’m deep into this thing.
I packed the game away after my first-ever play, looked at the box for a few minutes, then took it all back out again for a second play. Following is a collection of notes and observations on my sophomore experience.
Setup: A random draw presents me with a Cut-Off situation in Iraq. I scour the cards to find the name of who’s responsible for letting a whole-ass airbase get encircled. As usual, there’s no accountability, just rigid parameters: I’m getting most of my Special Options points up front and there are very few ways to get any more. I’ve got five days to punch a hole in the approaching enemy forces that’s big enough to reopen supply lines.
Let’s Try it Again from the Top, But With More Killing This Time, Work With Me, People, Work With Me: During my rookie mission I fielded a tiny squadron and sent them all at one target for the first few days to make game management simpler and just focus on mechanics. This time I want to have more craft that I can combine for separate strikes starting on Day 1. I end up with five: a Harrier, an F-16, an A-10A, and two AH-64s.
I want to commit Day 1 just to strikes on the enemy’s front-line assault elements: Degrade their ability to project force, then practice equipping missions that reach support and command elements in the rear range band — exotic regions I never saw during my inaugural game.
Looks like this scenario will penalize me for using craft or pilot replacement options. Looks like the only way to earn more SO points — there is no daily income in this episode — is to knock the hell out of stuff. You want resources? Let’s see some blowed-up stuff. The enemy’s hand is already closing around your windpipe.
Beginner’s Strategy Heuristics: To simplify the strategic puzzle, I’m carrying over the basic approach I settled on during my first game: Low and fast. My Day 1 crew is comprised entirely of pilots with the Fast ability (they get to fire before enemy units do). I don’t care if they’re good at other things, just give me the ones whose DNA helixes spell out K-I-L-L. These are the guys who you don’t turn loose anywhere but places like these, because they’ll pick off a civilian airliner or two out of restless hunger if you’re not constantly feeding them live target data.
Keeping the mission at low altitude means I can focus on zooming through selected lanes where they can do their dirty business in between ridgelines. No fancy Ridge Evasion checks for me. And no Pop-Up units (for each craft that starts a Loiter Turn at high altitude, you have to do a blind pull from a bag of Special Surprise Jerk Counters that might appear on the map). During my first game, Pop-Ups offended me to an almost pathological degree. I don’t like being interrupted. So we’re not doing any of that.
Privation, The Great Teacher: Having nearly all of the SO points given to me at once turned out to be an instructive limitation: With SO points desperately low as the mission days went on, I got a lot more familiar with each type of munition and what it does. I was setting tight budgets for each sortie and finding out how very much I could do with a little. I didn’t have to go grab my Xanax if there were damage markers on my craft; I got a lot better at picking which kinds of dings I had to deal with right away and which I could just let ride. (“Oh, waaah, your display is damaged. Just don’t shoot stuff from real far away, stupid. Get right up on ‘em, it’ll be fine.”)
Still Learning: When I teach others new games, I always remind them that they’re going to get major stuff wrong and to not be too upset about it. I got anxious enough to forget my own bromides. I was applying the Evasive ability wrong. I wasn’t applying Battalion notes correctly. I was routinely forgetting basic steps. I still got chewed to pieces, even with the little accidental advantages I gave myself through blithe incompetence. But as I re-read the fan-compiled FAQ on Boardgame Geek, I remembered that I was just one of hundreds of dudes effing stuff up, getting stuck, re-reading, and figuring it out in a distributed fraternity of souls siloed in thrill and despair.
Speaking of which: The several days I ran my first few games were a carousel of confusion and insight, joy and rage. I noticed last week my left eye looked a bit cloudy. I tell you in all candor that I think I popped a blood vessel in my eye screaming at Tex. He went down in his AH-64A, killed on impact from a SAM hit. His job was to take it out with LAU-61 rockets. It was important to clear this hex out, so I committed two rocket pods to the attack. Two chances to produce a four on a ten-sided die. He had some diabolical talent for avoiding the plainly achievable. Whatever came out of my mouth next would have been Q.E.D. in any divorce proceeding in any court in the U.S.
But I was already already divorced anyway, so fuck it. My hygiene suffered during these days. I hadn’t been happier in recent memory.
***
By Day 5, I can tell I’m en route to a failing grade: There are no more SO points, and despite getting pounded to half strength, my Day 4 mission troubles must have emboldened the armored spearhead battalion I tangled with the day previous. They’re advancing.
But I have rested pilots who I’m going to pile into these once-gleaming craft for one more run. Fuck mission ratings. Fuck victory points. It’s you and me, assholes, one last time. The damage markers on these craft are comically dense, but it’s late in the day and we have murder in our hearts.
I love this fucking game so much. I don’t rue the days of the old Colorado Springs crew when this is on the table. When the board has the glow of morning catchlight, I can’t even remember their faces. My eyes narrow as I sip some scalding coffee, look at the distribution of the new target battalion’s units over the terrain hexes and start planning attack lanes. I want for nothing.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
New Series: Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 1
Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 3
Thunderbolt Apache Leader learning journal: I got my boys in the air for a fairly successful Day 1 attack, but Day 2 is looking dicey.
Mohawk’s inaugural high-altitude pass in his F-16 resulted in a cratered enemy AAA unit — that guided 1,000-lb. GBU-16 is a hell of a drug.
Then rookie mistakes set in: Mohawk wasted a cluster bomb trying to take out two tanks, then I blithely ended his movement right in the sights of an enemy chopper, which would have shot him down had I not equipped the bird with an ECM unit. Mohawk chuckled his way through several attempts at reprisal.
Thor swooped in with his A-10’s cannons to shred the chopper soon after. All this time, Grandpa was tasked with hunting a pair of command units, one of which he eliminated with a tidy volley of Hellfires. But owing more neophyte sloppiness in the commander’s chair, I’ve also exposed the craft to costly potshots from another enemy chopper and AA unit: Thor and Grandpa have accumulated Stress points and taken hits to their pylons, which compromise the amount of effective weight they can carry in ordnance.
This matters less to Thor, who still has a Wal-Mart distribution center’s worth of boom-boom slung under the wings of the A-10, but Grandpa’s little Cobra only has two big-punch munitions left and his cannon efficacy isn’t good enough to bank precious attack turns on….
As I age, the more painful the gap between complexity and desire becomes. Bouncing around between three different applications and four different source docs to harvest some sliver of Boring out of 15 different shards of Boring for some boring-ass project makes my mind claw for Elsewhere like a mouse trying not to drown in a jar.
But last night, driven by the building tickle of finally feeling all the game’s information and steps start to gel, I fought through it until I got into something resembling a flow. I was still doing stuff wrong — LOS, figuring out who can shoot and who and when and with what — still had me bouncing back and forth between the rulebook and BoardGameGeek forums every few minutes. But the mound of stats and chips was starting to take the shape of a game. And now I’m hungry and I want more. I’m finally feeling the thrill, the quiet pride and accomplishment of figuring it out.
Building odd monuments with a single viewing chair in a protean gallery of your own learning experiences is one of the things you learn to treasure as a solo gamer. I believe these little triumphs and insights enrich the inner life.
So Day 2 of the mission looms, and per the restrictions of the Rapid Deployment scenario, I can’t switch any pilots out. Just to see how it goes, I’m going to split my trio of flyers into two separate groups and see if I can effectively harass two enemy battalions.
Are ya winnin’, son? Grandpa and Mohawk barely made it back from the Day 2 foray vs. an enemy recon battalion. Thor’s Stress is pushing Shaken range even before he’s in the air. Feels irresponsible to send him out, but I’ve explained to him that this is a learning experience for all of us.
My expectations for this experiment are low: Grandpa was a mess after Day 1. He’s one more hit from crashing after failing a Ridge Evasion check that put his Stress levels close to the Unfit range. Also now there’s a Munition Shortage, so I’m trying to find a few missiles he can fire off while hovering and hopefully exit before he gets shot down, which almost feels like an inevitability. Mohawk, his craft still undamaged, will be hunting the rest of the hexes vs. an assault battalion, while Thor—whose Stress levels have also crept up dangerously—is heading after a separate target to see what he can get away with.
Quibble: I think I’m going to ignore the step where the rules say to strip damage and stress counters off of the pilot and craft cards, then log them all on the sheet during the bookkeeping steps. Why not just track them with the counters on the cards? It’s a better dashboard for me. Maybe this doesn’t work when you have bigger squadrons and more damage to track, but it feels like an efficient workaround for now.
Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 2
Journaling my experiences learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader, a solo wargame from Dan Verssen Games
It’s about to get hot: Thor’s A-10A and Mohawk’s F-16 are poised to criss-cross the 10-hex tactical map—at low altitude and high altitude, respectively—and knock out as many surface-to-air threats as they can on their first pass. The hexes are sprinkled with 10 units from an enemy armor battalion, including tanks, anti-aircraft units and choppers.
Between them is Grandpa, hovering menacingly in his AH-1 over a hex that contains an enemy mobile command vehicle, all plump and dumb and gunless. The plan is to have Grandpa mop up these high-point targets while Thor and Mohawk swoop over ridgelines and across desert, hunting targets that can shoot back.
My armament strategy was, “A little of this, a little of that.” I used three SO points against the weight allowances of the craft. The strategy? Buy munitions that had a lot of different names: “GBU-16, you say? Oh, that sounds lovely. Let’s bring along a bit of that.”
The boys went shopping and found some stuff they liked
Which brings us to a consideration of the imaginative space where these bombs, in a split-second of game time, will fall. I’m no fan of the last few decades of the U.S.’ actual desert escapades. There doesn’t seem to be an option for even voting against them anymore. Think about it too much and you’ll crawl atop your wargame collection in despair, doused in lighter fluid, for a fiery penitence.
But since I’m secretly 12, I still can’t resist the “toys” themselves—or the games that allow a 54-year-old to go “PEW! PEW! BRRRRT!” in tactical systems with a toothsome degree of verisimilitude and no stakes outside the pebbled plastic of my Wal-Mart folding table.
But shit, you know what time it is: I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some version of this hardware I’m playing with isn’t falling on Palestinian families right now. What one person considers an escapist shoot-em-up will be the next person’s depression spiral. Who can settle in for a night at the opera when you can hear Napoleon’s artillery rumbling at the outskirts of town?*
Immersing myself in the world of Thunderbolt Apache Leader as a private exercise takes some delicate bargaining with the imagination and the conscience. While I like games with militaries and combat, I get why people would rather play in arenas with anthropomorphic badgers building point systems on riverbanks, or trading buttons, or seeing who can make the fastest abstract bowl of noodles in a fictional restaurant. It’s an age of crisis. The theater walls and our psyches are paper-thin. The Worst of Everything is heaved from the wings directly onto center stage with volcanic fury. Play how you will, and when you can.
But back to my table and its accepted boundaries: I’m at the step where my pilots’ thumbs quiver angrily over the Fire buttons while I double-check attack rules, line of sight, altitude, target, and armament stats. Because all hell’s about to break loose. (P.S. I love this rulebook. There’s a lot of information, but it’s fastidious and procedural; crisp examples and well-chosen illustrations abound. I sense now—as I did when I first heard about it in 2012—that once the bookkeeping and engagement steps become second nature, this game will pack the perfect balance of engrossing detail and propulsive action.)
Frankly, it’s a godlike feeling and one of the most beautiful things about of the tabletop medium. The luxury of feeling the anticipation of a decision stretch in time. Seeing how it’s a node in a living story, part of a vivid diorama of tense action, partly under my control. Just maybe in a universe without an American God, one where flying sorties into Pakistani airspace is just a wacky thing that happens, and is forgotten in an afternoon.
*Every night for a year I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of Toby Longworth narrating Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 books. It’s been a long day. Time to drift off to the sounds of a hive city being shelled into fragments. To mangle the famous Josef Stalin quote: “10 million deaths is a tragedy, 100 million is hysterical.”
Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 1
Journaling my experiences learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader, a solo wargame from Dan Verssen Games
From a production and budget standpoint, I completely get why a scrappy, independent publisher of wargames would get a couple of pilot illustrations done and then duplicate that across several characters. You switch out the name and stats and keep going because it’s not like the margins are huge in this business.
But in the early going, I find these dudes hilarious; it’s like I’m in charge of an army of hale and doughy vat-cloned yahoos who all were past winners on some military reality show called Top Jerk. (How much post-discharge therapy would you need if you woke up in quarters at 3 a.m. and three identical dudes like this were massing at your cot for some kind of coprophilic prank? These portraits are bursting with grim comedic potential.)
Genius, Divot and Pro are preparing a variety of Midwestern surprises for you
That aside: my plucky All-American homonculi and I, according to the draw of the cards, are off to Pakistan, where we face a Rapid Deployment scenario in the variable setup. Special Options points—your “money” for equipping the squadron and its fliers, among other vital functions—are at a premium. Whatever it is we’re going to do, we’ve got four mission days to do it and twelve enemy divisions to do it to.
What else do I know so far? I love the granular “Now put this here, dummy” steps in the meticulous rulebook. I’ve blown 16 of my 25 initial Special Options points on a squadron consisting of an F-16, an AH-1, an A-10A (if I can’t go BRRRRRRT on my first go, I don’t see the point of any of this) and a scout unit.
I’ve got a roster of six flyers: Mohawk, Dart, Freak, Grandpa, Thor and Gumby. All rated Average in the cockpit, even if they’re exceptionally terrifying while chewing in unison at mess behind wraparound shades. I love filling out the player log, it feels like I’m doing a TTRPG bolted onto very solid rails. I promoted none of my guys in anticipation of point expenditure on armaments. You pick out and “pay” for all your air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance, following the aircraft data cards for which craft takes what kind of bomb or missile. I’m not worried about strategy at this point: These MFers are probably going to die. I will get sent to another post and apply their sacrifice to my continued improvement. I’ve never felt more patriotic than while typing the previous sentence.
According to the Special Condition card I pulled, I’ve got satellite recon data on my side, which will increase my Loiter ability by 1. I’m not sure what this means yet. I’m just going to assume it’s like stoned and vicious HS sophomores hanging out at 7-11s in the mid-’80s—the more they Loiter, the more damage they can do. Right?
There are also 12 enemy battalions—a mix of Assault, Support and Command—waiting for me in the Pakistani hills, which I have to metrically knock the shit out of, and quickly. I’m not counting on it. For now, I’m going to make some fairly arbitrary and stingy decisions about munitions mix in hopes of eventually using my SO points to cushion the bravura series of rookie commander fuckups that is about to occur.
I’ll hit you up once the boys have scattered a few payloads about.