If this play-by-comment Combat Mission experiment was a frame of snooker, I reckon the referee would be warning the players that a re-rack was imminent if they continued in their current cagey fashion. Reduced to a single ‘tank’ apiece, and seemingly content to camp on opposite sides of the Vistula, the understandably cautious Soviet and German order issuers provide flip-all for an eager ersatz war correspondent to work with during the game’s middle turn.
Open October is my sidekick Roman’s idea. He reckons that after listening to me evaluate, pontificate, speculate, and alliterate for getting-on-for three years without pause, some Cornerites might appreciate a short break. While I still plan to write and post during the coming month, how often I do so will depend on how many of you take up the following ‘once in a lifetime offer’. In essence THC is yours to use/abuse/populate for the next four weeks.
This week’s handmade co-op puzzle won’t defox itself. If you’re a dab hand at quizzes, lateral thinking, and search engine sleuthing, why not help out.
On the stormy night in 1992 when I made my fateful deal with that hoofed chappy at a crossroads north of Waterlooville, one of the contract clauses I failed to read was this: “The signee hereby agrees to review all Operation Wacht am Rhein digital wargames however shallow, ramshackle, or unoriginal.” As Mr Mephisto currently has his hands full in places like Yemen and Ukraine, I could probably get away with skipping the released-on-Wednesday Bastogne Breakout. However, just to be on the safe side, here’s a few paragraphs on a title that I can only wholeheartedly recommend to Bulge completists.
Back in the no-risk Noughties, dynamic campaigns stopped traffic and popped monocles in Simulatia and Grognardia. Years passed without a single new example appearing. The “They’re too time-consuming/expensive to make” myth was trotted out so often, some began to treat it as truth. Now, of course, we know different. Titles like Boat Crew prove a studio doesn’t need to be loaded or experienced or huge to fashion an imaginative alternative to Ye Olde Linear Mission Sequence.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View and online tools like MAPfrappe work out my location.
In Poland a person with a great sense of humour is sometimes said to “laugh like a Lodowician”. The Silesian city shows its mirthful/mischievous side halfway through Turn 14 when a Studebaker truck barrelling along Copernicus Street decides to explode for no apparent reason. Are there German infiltrators on the east bank of the Vistula already? Did a butter-fingered Ivan drop a grenade? Unfortunately I can’t answer that question without compromising the thick foot-unit Fog-of-War currently blanketing the battlefield.
I’ve never played a wargame quite like Maestro Cinetik’s latest TBS before. Yes, there have been moments this week when, moving armies from Chinese district to Chinese district, I’ve been reminded of AGEod titles such as Birth of America and Revolution Under Siege, and occasions in the midst of political, social, or economic engineering when memories of Paradox creations such as Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, have surfaced unbidden, but Rise of the White Sun has qualities and character all of its own.