Still bogged down in RL. Give me until Wednesday when my exam is over with. Meanwhile, I ran across
FM 7-85 Ranger Unit Operations. Like all US military manuals, it takes too long to say whatever it wants to say. However, what it does say overlaps what our rangers do quite a bit. Example: 5-2.(3) Raid operations on key logistical centers, warehouses, ammunition complexes, or fuel pumping centers supplying logistical support to a specific front is what we did before Cremona. From a quick scan, the pertinent sections are parts of Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6. The PTB/TITK may find this useful to brainstorm possible ranger actions. The manual also has an emphasis on violence/shock to stun a numerically superior enemy, buying time to complete the mission, and then beating a retreat. For my part, I'll be trying to work this into our fighting scenes.
Wargames:
*DROOL* The largest game I have is the 3-mapper
Stonewall in the Valley. Well, technically, if I put all of my Great Campaigns of the Civil War games together, it would be 6 maps. And if I got all 7 games in the series, it would be 15 maps, Harrisburg to Petersburg at one-mile a hex
. Of course, there are no rules (as yet) to link the games...
When I was younger, I thought bigger was better. It would be cool just to set up the game and marvel at all the detail they put into the game. Of course, finding games from the SPI era on a high school student's budget without a modem to access online stores was a near-impossible task. Which is probably just as well since I've discovered that what I want most in a game is design elegance. I don't have all the gaming time I want (who does?), so I'd rather not spend my time handling minutae (one reason I don't play the Civ computer series more often). My favorite games (I can't really choose, but a subset of
Blue vs. Gray (QED/GMT),
Carrier (AH/VG),
Patton's Best (AH),
Raid on St. Nazaire (AH),
RAF (WEG),
Tokyo Express (AH/VG),
Up Front! (AH), and the GMT card-driven games) are heavy on design innovation and elegance. But there is still something really cool about monsters
.
Do you SPI fans still buy wargames? SPI getting bought by GDW and AH getting bought by Hasbro were tragedies because you like heck they will continue to design games with the same quality and design philosophy, but the hobby lives on (SPI in DG and AH in MMP). My favorite current company, however, is GMT.
