"Cruel Necessity" from Victory Point Games, notes and impressions

 "Cruel Necessity"

"Is . . . is that absolutely necessary?

Alrighty, this is the last post in the series. You’re relieved, I can tell.

Again, I have the first edition of this game, so that’s the version I’m looking at here.

I’ve played “Cruel Necessity” a few times before. Probably last time just a couple years ago, and honestly, playing it again, it’s more fun than I remember. I think somehow my “Charlemagne” experience colored my memory of this game.

“Cruel Necessity” is a solitaire tower defense type game in the States of Siege series from Victory Point Games.

Similar to “Charlemagne,” from Hollandspiele, not VPG, they share some features and I will compare them here in this post because I want to.

A Good Game:

This is a good game. Let me just say that first to better frame all the criticism I’m about to heap on it. If you like this sort of thing, you should like this. I can see why this series is so popular. Loads of little difficult choices. Options. Risk. Ups and downs. It’s got cool thematic game components and it might also be a little addictive too which is another sign of quality in something like this.

I’m not a fan of the slipcover sleeve pizza box packaging, though. Otherwise, I think the parts and pieces of "Cruel Necessity" are fantastic.

Good rules and rulebook; ordered intelligently, logical, helpful to the new player, writing is clear and straightforward and the game works well, has an organic natural flow (apart from back-to-back Battles, which I’ll address below).

Map and game components on the table look great and are conveniently and smartly arranged.

Several interesting mechanics employed in “Cruel Necessity.” The flexibility of Zeal is a great solution to a number of solitaire game design problems.

And I appreciate the Clubmen and Deviltry markers.

Love the political-religious tracking system. Accessible and at the same time an excellent mapping of some complex hard-to-pin-down abstract factors.

Political track: up good, down bad

Gameplay is pleasantly busy. There’s always something you can do. You always have options. That’s great design, in my opinion.

And there is Ireland, well done.

 Criticism:

But for me, there’s a big  disconnect between events, the strategic situation, and the general flow of the game. There’s not enough of a convincing “responsive” feel coming from Royalist forces so that it at least suggests to me on some level that I am struggling against another will that’s both aware of and acting against my interests. The way events affect opposing forces and their value levels would make more sense in a game meant to model an actual siege operation, where defenders suffer a particular brand of fog of war.

And so, I imagine this system works really well for a literal siege game, but using this engine for other more abstract or figurative “sieges,” conflicts like insurrections or rebellions, it maybe doesn’t work all that well. I feel a mismatch, an ill fit, a crammed, forced, tightness or imbalance somewhere. It is perhaps a mésalliance for a siege game to attempt to model macro geopolitical situations. There’s a certain persistent incoherence or fogginess to the pattern and chain of events in “Cruel Necessity.”

For instance, in the game, you generally don't know where any of the important people are at any time. It's a feature, not a bug. Charles does eventually turn up sort of attached to a Scots Army but that is a special case. Except in Battles, you have no idea where to find Rupert or Cromwell or Hopton and Waller. I think this too adds to the overall fogginess or disconnected sense I experience playing the game.

However, the main driver of the disconnected sequence, or lack of coherent narrative, is the event card. It’s just too much, they overwhelm. The complete randomness is often jarring. Charles hoists his flag in Nottingham after you’ve already fought a bunch of hard battles. You’re attacked by an Army you just trounced and the Monarchy gets a boost in the polls. It can seem really senseless at times. Other historical game designs do this as well. I don’t like it. “Wilderness War,” for example. There’s too much card play emphasis. History gets all jumbled and it’s hard to ignore that in a historical game.

Also note, that you can totally lose the game early, but you can’t win early. As long as you don’t lose, you will play through the entirety of the event deck. As a reward for enduring a steady procession of unavoidable unpreventable difficulties and penalties, and holding your own against same, the game nevertheless insists on subjecting you to a strict, yet arbitrary, lengthy, predetermined, course of abuse.

Victory after battle ought to, at least potentially, have more of an automatic, immediate, and pronounced impact on the military and political landscape than it does in “Cruel Necessity.” It’s impossible to effectively destroy a military association or an Army? If only for a turn?

History isn’t a parade of disconnected random things. Acts of God do happen, but when representing history, the story of something like war, I think a linear coherence isn’t an unreasonable expectation.

Also, to me, it feels like the player is always reacting in “Cruel Necessity” (echoes of “Charlemagne”), is never allowed to take the initiative and make the big play. The Battles, always foisted upon Parliamentarians, never sought, can erupt at any time regardless of how beat up or pinned down the Royalists appear to be. And Parliament can’t ever force the enemy to battle. (Yes, you can Campaign, but it won’t result in a Battle) The player can never really go on the offensive because turn to turn, anything can happen and the happenings are often largely unrelated to the current state of game or the player’s strategic positioning. Regional Royalist forces possessed of seeming endless reserves, a sort of incredible tactical immunity and an adamantine spirit, are able to exert steady unrelenting pressure on your strategic strongholds. They just keep on coming. It’s hard to develop anything long-term here apart from shoring up stuff while playing whack-a-mole and running ‘round putting out fires, which might, again, be fine for a literal siege model, but the British Civil Wars weren’t a siege operation.

Finally, there’s the mini-game Battle Mat thing again. Many many games do this in some way. Many. It rarely works well, in my view. The version in “Cruel Necessity” is better than most, though. Certainly  better than “Charlemagne.” There are special units you can risk using, more nuance, much faster resolution, so much so that it almost feels not worth sorting the pieces and setting them up half the time. In and of itself, the Battle Mat sequence is fine every few turns, but it becomes disruptive when the event deck gives you battle after battle in a row. You just sorted it all, put the pieces back in their box, shuffled and then Battle again. This can happen. On and on, actually.

Battle Mats setup, then commenced play, units revealed, cards drawn, modifiers applied, etc.

And yet…

I am still more than willing to try another one of these, though.

But next time it will be one themed with an actual siege situation, a Rorke’s Drift type thing, which is I think maybe where this game came from originally, i.e. was hatched, developed to model an actual siege scenario or something like that, anyway.

All in all, I don’t love it, but it’s cool.

Conclusion of this survey of solitaire games:

Finally, in the spirit of wrapping up the survey . . .

Right.

Originally, I wrote 1200+ words on this presenting a few of the findings suggested by the survey. There are several tentative conclusions or testable questions raised by the survey that could be examined or argued at length. But as I looked back over the section I’d written, something came over me, something told me, whispered in my ear, to keep those findings to myself and leave it at that. Was told that I’ve said more than enough already to convince anyone who wasn’t quite sure before that I should probably just be quiet, anyway.

A bunch of games didn’t make the cut for inclusion in the survey. Excluded were some unapologetically paragraph-based games (as opposed to “Ambush!” that almost seems ashamed of its paragraphs) or games that are multi-player but also include solo play rules, or any of the many cooperative games that can also be played perfectly well, or better, solo.

And I know that most of the games I’ve covered in this series of critical posts are old now. One reason for that is it seemed like a logical place to start a survey and then also some of these games, “States of Siege,” for example, they keep putting out interesting new titles that are really just tweaks to and reskinnings of older core engines. Some of these are undoubtedly better than others, but still, one can probably get an idea about the newer games playing an older title.

So, now this survey, along with some other materials, has yielded a substantial catalog of suggested do’s and don’ts and things to try in an attempt at a solitaire game design. Recurring themes and some telling consistencies emerge even in this tiny sample.  All things considered, I’d have to say, the survey of solitaire games has been a very useful exercise.

“He says, yeah, he’s afraid it is.”

A Look at "Fields of Fire" - We'll Meet Again, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When...

 Solitaire Survey I, no.5: "Fields of Fire"

A Look at GMT's "Fields of Fire" 1st Edition

 

I am going to have to circle back to this game.

I am going to have to look around for some reformatted rules with the errata included or something and play more.

The are several things here worthy of a more thorough, careful, investigation and examination. And I just want to play it more. The “survey of solitaire games” isn’t meant for in-depth analysis. It’s more about impressions, accessibility, ease, clarity, etc.

Unpunched, but soon-to-be punched, FoF 1st Ed.

 

I’ve also assiduously avoided forums and general discussion about “Fields of Fire” for fear of contamination. I wanted go into this as free from any bias as possible. Thankfully, I know next to nothing about FoF’s genesis or design history.

To be honest, I hadn’t heard of it before the 2^nd edition was released. I assume that’s when I picked up this unpunched 1^st edition, around 2014, I’m guessing. It’s been sitting here collecting dust for years. I think I opened it once, looked it over, and said, “I’ll get to this later.” Well, later is now now.

Anyway, so there is an improved 2^nd edition out there, but I haven’t seen it. I imagine some portion of any criticism I offer here was probably at least somewhat addressed in the revised version, but I really couldn’t know for sure.

Cards in plastic. Do I have to sleeve these now?

 For purposes of the solo game survey, I played this as written in the 1^st edition. No errata.

And let’s call the game “FoF” from now on in this post. “FoF” means “Fields of Fire.”

First things first, with this game you get a quality GMT box and components. Counters and cards are easy to use. Good stuff. No complaints. Well designed. Aesthetically pleasing and utilitarian. However, to talk about 1^st edition FoF we have to consider the game itself apart from the literature i.e. the first edition rulebook.

The first edition rulebook is just bad. I think there are missing rules. Not incorrect rules, at least not many, just missing. Things left unsaid. Or key pieces of information whose manner of presentation is both so disparate and so well camouflaged that I can’t seem to consistently pull them together in a timely way when I need to.

The rulebook is not ordered well. Seems like it should be, the language seems clear enough, there aren’t typos to speak of, but there seems to be an assumption that the player knows certain things about the game that aren’t ever presented in the rulebook. There is this lurking hint of an expected a priori knowledge throughout. Sometimes reads like some of the rules sections were pieced together from a Q and A session that you weren’t privy to. 

 

I don't like punching counters.

There are  also instances of vague language or undefined terminology used in a regulation or rules statement. There are a bunch of little gaps in procedural and sometimes conceptual explanations. Makes certain play sequences a little difficult to parse.

Here’s a solid example; the actual use of the Action deck isn’t described well. I’ve never played a game that uses cards the way FoF does. I could have used a little more elaboration on this core fundamental and somewhat, to me, novel idea of an Action deck.

Moreover, the explanation of components is confusing and incomplete too, or presented strangely somehow. The labels on cards in diagrams intended to explain the cards’ various symbols and numbers are poorly referenced in and related to the accompanying text. Some symbols left unexplained.

And vital information and rules introduced in a chaotic and scattered way. The AT combat modifier on VOF chits, for example, Page 30, Anti-Tank combat modifier on VOF counters explanation in a little brown box – this rule and closely related information is presented in 3 other areas in the text, these VOF modifiers chits are used constantly during the game, but the explanation of the smaller of the two numbers on these vitally important game pieces is buried in the rules in a little colored offset box. These colored boxes are used for everything from design notes and historical footnotes . . . to presenting vital core rules! What are the criteria for shoving info into those brown boxes? No rhyme or reason to it. 

And just generally, related rules are spread out in different sections across the whole document, poorly cross-referenced or not cross-referenced at all. And there’s also several instances where vital info is sprinkled in alongside more general introductory descriptive text. Mixing actual rules with procedural descriptions without any sort of contextual signifier, or just placed or presented in an illogical or otherwise counterintuitive order, some odd choices, etc., very piecemeal, again, often  feels very patched together as if the text was taken or lifted from another older longer document.

But now let’s completely forget the dumb rulebook and focus on the game.

I ended up enjoying this a lot more than I thought I would, or maybe should, have. There’s something slightly indulgent about FoF.

It’s the kind of game you find yourself thinking about even when you’re not playing it.

I say “Fields of Fire” is a beast apart. For most of us, this is not a game you sit down with one Sunday afternoon and play.  It’s one of those you have to take some time with, get to know it pretty well. A game where not only is the campaign king, but it’s part of actually playing the game. You don’t just play one game of FoF and quit.

PC markers at the ready. The A's are almost certainly bad guys trying to kill you.

 

But it’s not really a product for the casual gamer, is it? Once I got it set up, and got to what I felt was actually playing, those first turns were still slow with lots of rules lookups as new situations arose.

There is a ton of variety in terms of factors applied to specific actions or firefights. There are many small but still meaningful and interesting modifiers that stack as you figure out the effects of different commands and troop actions. A dynamic situation. It can get a little complex in some ways, admittedly, but it’s good stuff.

What I’m finding with the solitaire designs is that they’re often so heavily abstracted and mechanical that you have to just set them up and start going through the motions to understand how they work. In the case of FoF, the complexity itself is part of the process of convincing you that there is an opposing force, an otherness in opposition “out there.” And it succeeds. Yet it’s very difficult to achieve this effect. To inspire this feeling in the player requires a fastidious balance and corralling of the randomness into novel but also sensible, useful, information. This game has a great bot, in my opinion.

 

I don't even know if I'm paying this right, but this turned into a real slugfest up here around the objectives. That PDF in the upper right shldn't be there, it's just there to remind me that an unspotted German FO is calling in strikes on that card.

Playing an infantry company captain . . .

This is not to every gamer’s taste, of course, no game is, but there are signs here of a conscientious deliberate appeal to the infantry tactics officer mind, a certain realism, emphasis on command and control as it should be, concreteness in specific ways. The platoons break all the way down to teams. But you’re counting rounds of ammo and patching together communications networks on the fly. You have like one .50 caliber and you need to use it wisely. The enemy can be ruthless.

It's a game of command and control. Cease fire orders are absolutely necessary. There’s crossfire and smoke signals, and you can phone in artillery strikes. There's the Initiative phase, the so very American Initiative Phase, where a couple brave units can take big heroic actions completely disregarding the chain of command. No orders, just action. There’s a serious attempt here to give play the rhythm of company operations with various impulse and initiative phases, a clever use of time.  Psychic energy is almost quantified as a currency. Commands and orders can be saved representing time and energy used efficiently. 

 

Another nasty end stage fight. There's a pinned marker for the German fire team buried under the heavy weapons VoF.

FoF just does some things so well.

It may be more accurate to regard it as more of a game system than just a game. It can produce literally many thousands of unique scenarios to play. Tens of thousands. More maybe.

And I feel “Fields of Fire” was carefully crafted, it has coherence, and an internal logic. That’s something I look for. A sort of holism emerges in quality games. FoF has a bit of that, at least.

It’s a specific vision doing a specific thing. Distinct. Maybe distinguished.

Still, there are significant issues with the 1^st edition, so the second edition was necessary. There’s a cool game in here that was completely hobbled by a bad rulebook. 

 My end to the first mission of the Normandy Campaign. It's probably the simplest setup you can have. I called it victory and ended the game at this point. Rows 1 and 2 were clear of German units and I have units in the Objective cards without any German units present on those cards. Funny, the rules never really say how to end the scenarios. They give you victory conditions and campaign company maintenance rules but not really a guide to wrapping up on map activity . . .

Ultimately, though, for most people, there’s probably a touch too many little details to track here. The game demands an upfront investment of sorts. A steeper price than average for admission.  But I enjoy it. Willing to pay. The carefully selected menu of kinetic factors to emphasize and which to handle more abstractly is a flavorful mix. The game has a very distinct feel and charm. No included detail was arbitrary or without meaning and impact on the larger tactical situation. There’s some elegance in this somewhat tricked-out chromy mass.

Also note that here’s a title that if you don’t want to use reference tables and look things up you should avoid.

It’s probably the sort of thing where either you really like it or you don’t.

As for me, this is a game I plan on revisiting soon. Would recommend to a more experienced solitaire wargamer. Probably would advise against the 1^st edition.