Wednesday Arrival and Background
About BGF
I’ve been waiting all year for this day to come! Buckeye Game Fest in Columbus, OH will hold a special place in my heart. It was my first gaming convention, and I met a bunch of cool people and played a bunch of cool games. While GenCon is closer to home and an event that is worth checking out for sure, BGF couldn’t be more different. Its a convention that is at most a couple hundred people, and is first and foremost, about getting together to play games.
The other thing that caught my eye about BGF (other than The Players’ Aid raving about it) was that it featured a “war room” dedicated to historical gaming. Followers of Cardboard Conflicts I’m sure can tell my penchant for historical gaming so this was a must for me. I can say that it met and exceeded the hype and I had a blast. So much so that planning for this year’s was early and included what I feel was even MORE gaming than last year.
The Convention itself opens Thursday, but the War Room runs all week. I decided this year to give myself an extra day and come Wednesday afternoon. The trip along I-70 Wednesday morning was quick and I found myself at the hotel by early afternoon.
Wednesday
Arriving around lunch time I was lucky that my room was ready early and I was able to drop off my bags and head down to check in to the convention. I immediately ran into Alexander and Grant playing the grand strategic Unconditional Surrender with another friend of mine Bill Simoni. After grabbing a quick lunch I returned and decided to check out a few turns of the game as it always has intrigued me. Grant was kind enough to let me hop in and give him a hand by running the Italians once they entered the war.
I quickly realized that this game while sandboxy in nature and with relatively streamlined rules, isn’t without its share of modeling. The Italians true to history were pretty useless to run.
They pressed on Alexandria in North Africa, but quickly their navy was dwarfed by the British Force H. Not only were Italians difficult to keep in supply in North Africa, but they eventually found themselves fully defensive in Tobruk, while requiring Germany to do all the heavy lifting in Yugoslavia and Greece as well.
A big thanks to Grant for letting me stop in and take a look, and this one is very cool! In fact it is the sort of thing that I could see my son and I setting up and playing over the course of a few weekends. I immediately took to GMT’s website and ordered the reprint currently on P500 Found Here!
Thursday
Thursday started the first full day of gaming and the first of what looks like a tradition with me and friend Bill Simoni. Last year Bill and I spent 2 days playing The Lamps are Going Out and Salerno ’43 and decided to once again play another big game. This year’s game was the absolutely fantastic At Any Cost Metz 1870. This game designed by Hermann Luttmann uses the Blind Swords system but shifts the use from the ACW to the Franco-Prussian War. This is a period I’ve become increasingly interested in after playing Fred Serval’s Red Flag Over Paris. First off the map looks fantastic and is another example of a fine looking Terry Leeds design, which also credits Mark Simonitch as well.
Metz Gameplay
Wow what a game At Any Cost Metz 1870 turned out to be! The core gameplay is very interesting. This is a game of chit draw activation with leaders having a command range and all units in that corps having to either be in range or adjacent to the commander at the time of activation, lest it pull from the potentially very bad “out of command” cup. Being out of command can model a lot of things that happened with individual battalion commanders that might freeze and not move, move but cautiously, or in some case charge the nearest enemy even to the death of their whole unit!
This is coupled with a very interesting event chit system where many events can be played immediately or held until later in the turn, OR can be used as a “command event.” The command events are typically special events that require die rolls for success and each stored event chit can improve odds of success. For instance the French have an event called “Prussian Aggressiveness” which when pulled allows the French player to move a single Prussian unit any direction and subjects that unit to any defensive fire from French units adjacent. This can be cancelled by a Prussian roll if the command track has been sufficiently built with command events, but that requires the Prussian to give up otherwise helpful events earlier in the round.
Position by Thursday Evening
Metz has many other great gameplay elements and just enough chaos that it is a blast to play with all sorts of interesting narratives coming out. I could go on about this game and quite frankly I plan to play more of it in the very near future, but suffice to say by Thursday evening the battle had really gotten into a spot where the last couple turns of the scenario would spell the fate for the French. Would they be able to gain control of the roads out of Metz and escape encirclement? Or would the Prussians be able to hang on to Vionville, Mars-la-Tour, and the road heading west and force French units to retreat to Metz? We had to end our game early to get to our next event: Nations and Cannons!
Nations and Cannons: A black powder 5E system
Both Bill and I had to forgo the last few turns of Metz because we had a planned RPG session of Nations and Cannons to get to. Nations and Cannons I discovered during GenCon last year (you can read about that Here!) and it is a 5E compatible system that strips out magic and introduces rules for black powder weapons. The focus of the game is set on creating “special forces” of irregular forces in the American Revolution, but the creators of the system generally point at the system running from 1650 to 1850 time period.
Man what a blast this was! Think of if you had “the A-team” but set in 1777. I played one of the pre-made characters Johann “William” Jasper, a Dutch “gunslinger” sharpshooter, that spoke broken English, but hated red coats! If I remember correctly we had a Portuguese two handed sword wielding “barbarian”, A Native American “Hunter”, and a very pyromaniac “firebrand” a unique class that uses what the system calls gambits. These are special abilities that mechanically stand in for spells and cantrips in standard 5E language.
Secret Agents 1777 Style
As our session opened our heroes came together and was hired by a colonial agent to locate and rescue a colonial spy from British authorities as he was transferred from his holding cell in early Manhattan to a ship where he was to be transported away.
Our team scoped out the route and dock and then met up with a bunch of enthusiastic but not very well trained freedom fighters who were able to assist with logistics. Our crew came up with a plan to use a flaming wagon of horse manure to surprise and block the British guards transporting our spy and while our Native American hunter blinded them with a sumac bomb, my character would snipe the guards from a balcony while our spy was whisked away through a side building.
We even drew up with this great plan! A plan can never go wrong once written down!
The Ambush
Everything appeared to be going to plan! We sent some ale to the British garrison hoping to get them a bit tipsy first, then set up in the alley. As I awaited on the balcony we had a tripwire prepped to be set after the escort passed and our barbarian with the cart of manure at the end of the alley.
The plan could not have been more successful showing that good prep is useful in D&D games! The flaming dung did its trick to suprise and stun the party to stop, while the sumac bomb was successful in blinding the guards. William took his opportunity and was able to use his grit to deal avantaged attacks and snipe directly down on the guards while two hand sword wielding barbarian raged and had heads rolling!
Our tripwire stopped a fleeing guard while we ushered out our agent…only to find it was a trap and our agent was just another prisoner used as a decoy while our real spy was moved elsewhere. A quick question of the guard revealed a clue to the location and our firebrand set fire to the guard house (and half of Manhattan) to cover our escape.
Estate along the river
We were able to find out our spy was moved to a local country estate along the river north of the city. As we approached we found a Colonial unit camping outside ready to attack at light. Upon finding it was an evil British Major General known for torture and ruthlessness we quickly devised another plan. This time our Firebrand used his persuasive speech to convince the local Colonial Army commander to attack the estate while we created a distraction by blowing up the guest house. This would allow us to sneak into the mansion and find our spy and liberate him, while hopefully taking out the evil British General.
All went as planned as fire rained down from the explosion at the guest house and the colonial forces attacked. However as we entered the grounds we noticed lights and evidence of digging from an old mission church on the grounds. We diverted towards the church but was met in the open field by a squad of British defenders.
Though we took some hits and went through MOST of our weapons including a misfire on one of my pistols we were able to disperse this group and enter the church. We found a tunnel dug out from the basement and the session concluded with our British General using dark magic to summon a Wendigo. This was an extremely tough boss that took out 2 of our party but luckily as our party engaged at melee. My character was able to stay back and continually lay musket fire at range, ultimately rolling a critical hit as all seemed loss to slay the beast and rescue our spy. All in a days work for the tough as nails rag tag irregular forces in Nations and Cannons! What a blast of a game and big thanks to Alexander for putting together such a cool one-shot. Probably my highlight of the con!
Friday
Metz Epic Conclusion
After a LONG Thursday we were back up and ready to go when the War Room opened Friday at about 8:30am. Bill and I finished our last couple turns of Metz. What an epic conclusion it ended up being! The French blocked Prussian reinforcements coming in from the south but some epic artillery shots was able to free a spot for the Prussian IX corps to enter. They were desperately needed along the eastern flank and was even able to retake Flavigny from the French in an epic Infantry assault into a couple weakened French artillery batteries holding the town.
The battered Prussian III corps was able to rally some units and through several attacks hold against a very strong French III corps in Vionville. The game came down to the last turn where Bazaine Malaise event froze the strong III corps early to really dampen the French ability to gain much needed ground and ultimately the Prussians held on to force a French withdrawal and historic outcome. As I mentioned this will be a game I explore more of in the coming months for sure! It has a great balance of chaos and strategy and once you get going the system is easy to run. I really like the use of leaders to show command and the focus on differences in the units, French have better infantry rifles, but Prussians better at close quarters and have a large advantage in artillery. The use of events is really neat as well and gives again just enough agency and chaos to make each turn interesting.
Strike of the Eagle
Next up I was able to get the intro scenario of Strike of the Eagle played with my good friend Jordan as we waited for other events we had scheduled to play.
This is a block wargame from academy games that has an additional element of fog of war through the use of hidden orders that are placed each round. We had a blast playing and even though this was a small scenario it left us both wanting more! If we didn’t have other games lined up for later in the afternoon I would have totally set this up for a much bigger scenario as I feel this would be really awesome in scenarios using much more of the map and including supply elements into the game.
5 Player Sword of Rome
Next up was a large Point to Point CDG The Sword of Rome played at 5 players. This one plays much like the Washington’s War and Successors and many other GMT games of that era when it comes to these larger point to point style CDG games. Each of us played a faction of the ancient Roman era: Romans, Carthaginians, Greeks (me), Gauls, Etruscan/Samnite.
What can I say about this one? A brutal game. I made a mistake of trying to move east to defend my poorly defended towns only to have Hannibal smash into my town early and utterly destroy me. I think I was supposed to attack first, but with not many forces on the board to start with first I didn’t think that was wise without securing my northern borders. We got through two turns and the Gauls were having just as rough time with me. While the other forces were able to slow down Carthaginians and give me a chance to get back in it, the Etruscan/Samnite faction was running away with it in the North and very close to auto victory when we decided to call it.
It is definitely a game I’d like to try again sometime, and we heard a lot of buzz on if the 5th player (Carthage) expansion made the game better or worse. It sounds like in the 4 player game the Carthaginians are more of an annoyance than a crushing force early which might also be much different for the Greeks.
A HUGE thanks to Bill for doing the teach and making some nice player aids for us to simplify the rules on this one.
Quartermaster General 1914
Next up was another multiplayer game, but the much lighter Quartermaster General 1914. I had played the original QMG set in WW2 but was anxious to see how the system took on WW1. I played the US/British faction and found building up enough attack and counter cards to sustain fighting to be VERY tough to do. This is a very interesting way to take the QMG system that is very abstract and simple, and find a way to add in the attritional and sheer logistical build up that was done in WW1 combat. Each turn allows a play of a card AND to put on face down in a pool of cards used either to defend against an attack, or when attacking continue the attack when your opponent plays a defend card. This allows a back and forth playing of cards until either an attacker doesn’t have a sustain card, or the defender doesn’t have a defend card.
I can’t say how painful it is to take several turns to build up cards only to attack and spend those cards but be one short from victory. Very true to WW1 attritional battles such as Verdun and Somme.
Undaunted Normandy Reinforcements
Last up of Friday Night was a 2v2 game of Undaunted Normandy using the reinforcement scenarios. This was fun because 2v2 is really my favorite way to play the game. Not only is sharing the units fun, but these scenarios tend to have ALL the units that come in the game so you really get to have some fun match ups.
We ended up playing two games where we switched sides and the second game of the scenario saw a wild fight for control of a bridge where most of the counters ended up in an all out brawl. As we were playing with David Thompson the designer he confirmed “There are no stacking limits in Undaunted.” I had to get pictures of this and as always we had an absolute blast playing the game. To me if you are going to play Normandy or North Africa, the Reinforcement system really is something you should pick up as the larger scenarios and team aspect really take this from a good game to a great one for me.
Saturday
Saturday was another long day of gaming for us. I played several 2 player smaller games with Jordan that we had both been wanting to get more of. First up was Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683.
Fire & Stone
For those that haven’t heard Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 is a two player light CDG that pits the Ottomans trying to break through Hapsburg defenses and make their way into the city before the famed Polish Hussars can come to the defense of the city.
This game lived up to the hype for me. I’m a big fan of games with easy rules, but big narratives and this one is very good. Designed by Robert Deleskie, designer of Stilicho and Wars of Marcus Aurelias the game has many unique features:
- Bag building representing digging and planting mines to blow up defenses
- Battles with asymmetrical forces that have element of push your luck style battles
- Random tactic cards used to throw some spice into combats
- More events than turns so that each game you might have some events you don’t see
The game also is what I’ve heard referred to as “all cards are one ops” where instead of traditional ops points on cards, you discard to perform an action from a menu or play the card for its event.
The game itself was very interesting. The Ottomans were able to inflict a lot of casualties on the Hapsburgs as well as take out some cannons so that by the final turn the Hapsburgs had to give up a lot of ground and make a final stand in the victory hex. The Ottomans poured everything including the last tactic card into the fight and was able to get a victory in the final battle in the final card play of the final round. Anytime a game can come down to the last turn for a win that is a big win in my book. This is definitely one I want to try again soon and play Hapsburgs instead to see how that feels to be on the defensive. Definitely a game worth checking out! I’d also be remiss in not mentioning how AWESOME the art by Donal Hegarty is in this one. The game looks fantastic on the table. Great job by Capstone to bring this to life.
Polis
Next up was a 2 player game that is very unique. Polis set in the Peloponnesian Wars period the game pits Athens vs. Sparta and is an interesting mix of civilization building, euro resource management and wargame.
I think I’d classify this as a wargame for Euro players as the focus of the game definitely requires you to carefully manage resources and collect some resources in order to then have enough to buy or trade for what you really need (Food for your population and prestige of the Poli under your control.)
The very unique thing about this game is that I feel more than any other game I can think of you are your own worst enemy in this game. The object of the game is to try to build prestige by conquering city states and/or fighting battles, yet each time you move your armies or navies or collect much needed supplies from regions you control you lose prestige. Also you must find a way to buy or harvest enough food to feed your populations as final scoring is population + prestige.
What makes this hard is that it is very easy to find yourself stuck where you don’t have any means to harvest food and you don’t have any prestige to move your armies to a region you can harvest. If at any end of a round you have 0 prestige the game ends and you lose. Also at the end of a round if you can’t feed your population of a Polis, that town leaves your control and becomes neutral again, giving you less ability to harvest needed resources.
I ended up losing this game, but definitely this is one I want to try a few more times. The battle system is unique but one we didn’t explore in my game and I feel is one you MUST. Battles can be a very quick way to gain prestige especially in the late game, but making sure you are built to do that is the hard part. This is very much a brain burner of a game and if you like hard puzzles with a lot of ruthless play. definitely check this one out!
Showing off Last Stand of the Swiss Guard
In a super interesting change of pace. I was able to bring a copy of my postcards from the front submission: Last Stand of the Swiss Guard: The Sack of Rome 1527. In a very surreal moment I taught the game to David Thompson playing the Papal forces while he played the forces of Charles V trying to break in and capture Pope Clement VII before he could escape to the safety of Castel Sant’Angelo.
I had fun teaching the game and playing it physically after playing it primarily on TTS through its different iterations and was happy to show it off. Also big thanks to Brant from Armchair Dragoons for mentioning it and capturing some cool pictures in his write up of the convention: Armchair Dragoons BGF 23 recap
Undaunted Battle of Britain
Jordan and I got a chance to swing by David Thompson’s table and check out a game of Undaunted Battle of Britain. I’ll say it right now: This is the BEST Undaunted yet! I’m a big fan of X-wing and so tactical aerial combat is something I enjoy but the subtle changes to the system for this game I think really add an element of puzzle into the game and really make the game much more tactical and less reliant on pure luck of the draw/roll.
The major change to this comes in a couple ways. First off when a card for a plane is revealed you MUST always do the move action a minimum of 1 space up to the maximum movement value on the card. Then you MAY do one of the other actions: maneuver – change your facing in the hex, or attack. If you choose maneuver you must perform the move first. So on a move -2 maneuver – 2 you would move, then maneuver, move then maneuver again.
Given the scenario we played had balloons that if flown into immediately kill your plane this really made you focus on how your plane was going to move an avoid obstacles.
The other unique thing about the game is the concept of “Comms” or plans staying in communication. Gone is scouting and fog of war, but in its place is the concept of discord and communication range. Essentially plans must stay within two hexes of each other to be within comms. Instead of squad leader cards there are section comms cards, when these cards are played either for initiative or one of the options on the card the board is checked. If planes are out of comms the player must take a discord card which functions like the fog of war cards in previous titles.
These section card cards can be removed from the game via a “going dark” command much like “hunkering down” in previous titles. This is useful if one plane is shot down, as by definition that element will ALWAYS be out of comms the remainder of the game.
Other cool elements are in the scenario design. The game we played involved ships that the British were trying to protect as they left port. A ship card allowed all ships to move and if two got off map then the British player won the scenario. Also included were AAA cards that can shoot and disrupt planes making the German player take longer to get bombers into position.
Gameplay was great with ace pilots shooting then using a second card to swing around and position follow up shots against another enemy element. really making position and movement much more important than previous titles. Again this game was one that really sold me on taking the game to the skies and one I hope to see some 2v2 variants for in the future (David get on that would you, lol?) Definitely one you want to check out if you like the Undaunted system but want something more of a puzzle and highly thematic.
The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31
While not a wargame our last game of Saturday night was a big 8 player game of The Thing: infection at outpost 31. This is a hidden traitor game very thematic on the move The Thing. With 8 players you could get up to 3 people infected as through 3 point in the game cards are dealt showing if you are human or alien. If you end up being alien your goal is either to sabotage the base and get everyone killed, or to escape on the helicopter at the end.
For the humans you have to escape on the helicopter without taking any infected people with you.
The game is played with one player taking the role of the captain of a mission. During the mission the captain selects a team and each member of the team gives a card representing a tool from their hand secretly which the leader shuffles then looks at. If someone added a sabotage card then the mission fails leading to bad outcomes and the base losing power, catching fire, or many other things.
The game is played in three stages where each stage the team must find an item and defeat the thing. Though the joy of the game is all the guessing on who is and isn’t the thing (It’s always Alexander at the start of every game.) Our game had almost the most epic self-destruct ever with Bill accidently adding a sabotage card then not coming clean on it straight away. this almost lead to him being left behind at the end and will live in infamy in gaming history. Definitely a fun time if you have a large party to play with for sure and can lean into the theme.
Sunday and Ending
Sunday was a partial day as we left around lunch time. However we got to say goodbye to Alexander and Grant and play one last prototype game on our way out, but details on that one to come later!
All in all I had a great time, a ton of gaming and really spent some good time with quality people. To me that is what BGF is all about. Dedicating some time to play big games with people you might not get to in the normal grind of life. If you find larger cons too much or just want to focus on a convention that is about playing games and less about the new games and exhibitor booths then you couldn’t find a better time than Buckeye Game Fest.
Bill and I are already lining up our “big game” for next year and think we are gonna tackle Empire of the Sun! I already can’t wait!
