"Mosby's Raiders" from Victory Games

 "Mosby's Raiders" 

No Phone, No Pool, No Pets, the sterile humdrum life of an ascetic partisan ranger.

Unsurprisingly, Eric Lee Smith has come up twice now in the survey of solitaire games. He is credited as co-designer on “Ambush!” too.

“Mosby’s Raiders” is a solitaire wargame from Victory Games that came out in 1985.

I last played this a couple times in 2011 or so. Maybe 2010. I don’t recall having a particularly strong sentiment either for or against the game, but might recall thinking that it was a little too much fuss and bother for the payoff.

Again, for this game, I’ve largely avoided forums and discussions to minimize potential bias and so I don’t have a feeling for how “Mosby’s Raiders” is seen today by gamers. At some point, long ago, it was considered pretty hip, though. I wonder if there are imitators? Do people even still play it?

This game is a mixed bag and, I hate to admit, I can’t quite decide what I think of it. There are things I really appreciate and respect about the game, but oddly some of those same things might end up being net negatives in the overall experience. I’ll see if I can explain a little.

Oh! but before I do…

Boring pointless digression you can skip and just read on from the section below called “The Good Stuff.”

The story of how I got this game, by me.

Guy received “Mosby’s Raiders” as a present. Then guy gave it to another guy that then gave “Mosby’s Raiders” to me. The first guy said he didn’t get it or he didn’t think it worked, second guy said he didn’t like it, especially – and this was his biggest gripe – the box art. He found the revolvers depicted in the illustration on the game box cover deeply troubling and offensive. He couldn’t overlook them. They bothered him so much that he himself suggested that his intense dislike for the picture on the box cover was interfering with his ability to objectively appreciate the game. So he gave it to me.

But what was his problem with this picture? What was the big deal? 

Well, part of it was disgust with the Victory Games/Avalon Hill editors, but that’s another story. No, his main issue was with the depiction of the revolvers and how they’re gripped in the illustration. Because it’s all wrong.

Here’s why. 

 

Pictured above, a Leech & Rigdon .36 caliber revolver, probably fairly typical of something a confederate cavalryman might have had. And it looks like an attempt was made to illustrate a gun of this type on the box cover.

 

Now here’s how you grip a revolver. Notice the angle of the fingers and hands compared to the angle of the barrel. (I boasted there’d be drawing commentary here somewhere. This is it. If you’re ever drawing someone holding or firing a revolver, especially an old fashioned one, here are some of the tricky bits you need to know to get it right.)

 Pictured above is a fellow holding a revolver something like the Leech & Rigdon piece . . . 

 . . . and another fellow, note the angle between the grip and the barrel. See the relationship between the angle of the gripping hand and the direction the barrel is pointing.

Now here’s the cover illustration. Notice the position and placement of the hands “gripping” the revolvers. See how the grip and barrel are parallel? No angle. 

Now see below an actual historical revolver in situ.

Refer back to the guys gripping revolvers in the original illustration.

Clearly, the illustrated grips are incorrect. They’re in the wrong places at the wrong angles. The guns themselves are deformed as well. So, I get where guy was coming from here with not liking the box art. It is pretty bad.

Anyway…

The Good Stuff:

Heres’ what I like about “Mosby’s Raiders,” though. For one, you get high-end 80’s production values. Nice quality components, fully functional, have held up over time, even though subject to some neglect in storage.

Rules and rulebook are good.

Digestible. Sensible. Navigable. For me, no errata needed or sought. The rules do require a thorough reading, though. Special attention paid to Activations. Some special cases and differences between Operations and Rounds. (Similar to “Ambush!” in this way.) But it’s all coherent and cross-referenced reasonably well. (That said, I’ve found that I really don’t like examples of play as rules instruction. Used to illustrate a recently presented rule or rules in the main body of the text nearby, yes, but sometimes rules themselves are presented in examples of play and it bothers me.)

So, it’s very learnable and playable. The game can be approached, played, and completed in one (longish?) sitting.

As for gameplay itself, it starts slow, but can quickly get into some dicey and entertaining situations. Leading federals on a chase deep into the backwoods (and usually to their ultimate demise) was fun and, I found, a pretty good tactic for dispatching Union drones.

Every turn, the whole time, your chances for success are increasingly diminished by increasing Union awareness. Your activity rarely goes unnoticed. Around turn 5 things get interesting. You start juggling increasingly powerful, aggravated, federals who stir up more federals as time goes by. There's a push-your-luck element, but you can call it and end the turn as an action. This is a core feature of the system. 

Leading union troops on a wild goosechase into the back country. Good times!

It is a short game, 8 turns long. If you’re familiar with the rules, depending, games could be very short. Like many solo games, actions are limited by min/max optimizing and counting moves and odds. But it does work.

As solitaire wargames go, it’ solid. Feels like a real game. Some type of tactics and strategy employable, or feels like it, anyway.

The Not So Good Stuff: It’s bland.

Let’s cut to the chase: it lands flat and plays dry. Not sure exactly why, likely a combination of factors together, but it’s just not very entertaining. It’s shallow or gamey. Lacks a narrative feel of any kind, really. It’s impersonal with a distinct lack of personality and for a game about an outstanding personality . . .

All the mechanisms for different actions are the same except combat. Want to probe? Activation check. How about blow something up? Activation checks for that too. And that’s about it. Except Kidnap. But I’ve played this game four times, I think, and I’ve never once had the opportunity to Kidnap.

Often decision space and options are quite constrained. Interesting moments do emerge in that narrow window where you could use some more performance points but the union awareness is getting high. Do you quit while ahead and disband, or blow that section of rail line? Those are the good moments, but that’s your game in a nutshell. And there aren’t many of those moments. By the time the the tension starts to mount, the game ends. Or can. Something premature in the rhythm and climax here.

It's a skirmish game at arm’s length, seen from a zoomed-out bird’s-eye-view operational vantage point.

So there’s no sense of a tangible relationship between the rules and the specifics of Mosby’s operations. It’s hard to explain. You’re planning to blow up a supply depot deep in enemy territory, but it never feels like you’re planning to blow up a supply depot deep in enemy territory. You count up nearby bad guy combat strengths, consider the odds of an activation and try it or not. It’s very generic, I guess, is what I’m saying, even with the Optional Rules included, that do try to make the demolition actions have some distinctions from one another. It’s all still just a bit hollow.

For a situation so full of potential for action, adventure, bravado, drama and intrigue, the game has none of it. You do two thing that require a die roll. That’s the game for you. And draw some cards that essentially take away the die roll and give you the equivalent automatic result. And so, to me, it really seems like something’s missing. The action and event cards, I assume, are intended to flesh out the more narrative and other pertinent elements not modeled in the game that might impact Mosby and co., but with dull drab cards, a limited menu of special effects, and the rather blunted effects of those effects, they don’t really add much to the theme or atmosphere, drama, etc. Seems like they should, but they don’t. 

 

The final showdown. Mosby blows a bridge while dodging angry federals in hot pursuit.

 

I don’t usually have much to say about game graphics unless they interfere with gameplay, but something is wrong here with the graphics on this game. Not functionally, not mechanically, the game components are top-notch in terms of utility and and convenience, it's just that the graphics are very grade school classroom in style. The map looks like it came out of a 1970’s social studies textbook. Bright completely logical conventional colors and white. Big white spaces on the cards and counters. It completely fails to evoke any sense or feeling of covert confederate guerilla actions.

I will say, though, that “Mosby’s Raiders” isn’t too random, which is a common issue in solitaire games. The random elements are weighted sensibly and placed appropriately. There is a skill or knowledge of some kind involved in playing well, I think, but stripped of its relatively thin veneer of theme, and of its adequate, but rather unexciting, Union bot system, “Mosby’s Raiders” is just basic and bland.

There is an obvious conscious and particular emphasis in the design on streamlined brisk play. While an admirable and worthy pursuit, in this case, the actual effect of this emphasis in practice contributes markedly to the detached superficial quality of the game. I feel the game could have provided a little more crunch and grit for the player. The managing of Union forces is simple enough that it doesn’t overwhelm play, leaving an uncluttered space for the player. Something like a mechanism that would allow the player to spend or risk Mosby’s resources for some possible advantage would make a big difference.

Conclusion:

But I’d still have to say it’s a pretty good game. Especially for a solitaire effort. If you like this sort of thing to begin with, you’ll probably get something out of it. It definitely works. It might work well. There’s something to push against apart from dice and fate. And it definitely has its moments, but really isn’t outstanding in any way. It doesn’t, for instance, even do any one thing really well. The play is thin in places. And it’s not totally evocative of the theme. Still, it feels like an actual game which is more than can be said about a lot of the solitaire designs out there.

Also, I feel like there’s an optimal sort of codebreaker strategy one could find there somewhere, so it may be “solvable” to a degree.

I suspect using the Optional Rules may give you more of the intended game experience.

And even though the action picked up around turn 5 and became more interesting, it still had this superficial gamey feel.

It’s weird and I wish I could explain it, but it’s like “Mosby’s Raiders” should be a better game than it is.

In closing, as a topical aside, as of this writing, Mosby is seemingly one of the few historic Confederate figures to avoid the recent purge of public Confederate tributes. As far I know, Mosby country is still healthy and extant in Piedmont Virginia, though I haven’t visited the area recently.

 

 

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.