Having played a few of The Gamers' OCS games, I've been interested in looking at their SCS games, which are similar in some concepts to OCS, but very much in a simpler vein, in fact the SCS rules clearly identify them as 'Beer & Pretzel' type games, designed to be quick and easy to get into.

So it was that Chuck and I got Afrika II on the table this last week as our game of choice. I read the rules at lunchtime in preparation and found the series rule to be very short and simple, almost laughably so. The Afrika II game rules didn't seem to add too much to the brain loading either, so perhaps I'm just becoming too used to OCS.

We decided on the Compass scenario, a 2.5 turn scenario (starting on turn 4, finishing at the end of turn 6), which is also in the equivalent OCS game, DAK2, so I was familiar with the general game situation. I volunteered to take the Italians, knowing that they were going to take a pounding, but I wasn't worried by that. The Commonwealth (CW) forces are required to take Tobruk, Benghazi and eliminate all the units fulfilling the Mussolini Line (ML) (have to maintain 5 divisions and 3 exploitation capable units east of Buq Buq, although eliminated units still count).

The first phase of the turn is replacements, and Chuck rolled poorly, facing the immediate withdrawal of the Aussies back at Alexandria, so not a good start. He got his campaign rolling with a strong push west with pretty much his entire force, overrunning, combating and overrunning 3 divisions into elimination, rolling 7, 9 and 8 in the movement, combat and exploitation phases. However, this last overrun was against my units in Sollum, as they hooked back from their drive to Tobruk.

That concluded the first turn, which only had a CW player turn, and onto the Italians. First off was a ML check, where I found I only had 4 divisions to the east of the line, from the initial set up, and facing instant and immediate (sooner, even) game forfeit. That seemed a bit ludicrous, the CW player just has to isolate the eastern forces from reinforcement and he wins automatically. We went back over the set up and found we'd missed an Italian division, which meant that the Italian player starts the scenario meeting the requirements. Phew!

Anyway, onto the port rolls, which decide how much I could ship in reinforcements. Pah! Doug's Deansian Statistical thingy kicked in as I rolled 1,1,1,2,5, (hint: low is not good) which meant that I couldn't ship much at all of the required units or supply. The replacement roll was 5 (2d6), so no replacements for me, either. Good start. With the CW LRDG marauding towards Benghazi I had to ship a unit in there, using its single shipping allowance point, facing being out of supply immediately, which meant it would lose a step. Another unit went to Tobruk. Fortunately I found that the available truck points were enough to truck an SP to Benghazi, or close enough for supply purposes anyway, but a bit of a waste to supply a single unit. (In SCS you count up the number of steps, divide by 10, and that the number of SPs you need to feed them. Standard OCS/SCS rounding applies, so 14 steps would be 1.4, rounding to 1SP. 15 steps would round to 2SPs.)

However, that wasn't the important point. Remember I said that Chuck started with a strong push west? Well, that meant he'd left only a weak force protecting his supply dump (with only a single SP, but to the guys cut off beyond the ML with no chance of being resupplied it looked really enticing), and I had to attack it with the aim of capturing it and cutting off his main road to supplying his forward units. The attacks went weakly, as I rolled a 7, then a 4 on the overrun of his surviving unit in the following exploitation phase. Even worse I missed the 50/50 roll to capture the supply, which meant that units would start losing steps in my next turn if Something Good didn't happen next turn. Still, I had achieved the basic aims of cutting the road, and denying him the use of the existing supply dump, so it was a moderate success.

It became even more of a success as Chuck then reversed direction with a few units to address the situation in his rear, although he had enough truck points available to drive an SP around my roadblock to supply his lead units. However, he dumped the SP 1 hex short, so when he overran into the outskirts of Tobruk in his exploitation, eliminating my unit in a step trade and with advance being mandatory, that left him one hex too far away to be supplied. The rules for being out of supply require a step loss, so that unit was removed as it had only a single step remaining. (I should have had the overrun taken back, because it felt a bit gamey to allow him to push forward knowing that the unit couldn't be supplied.) The LRDG pushed on towards the coast, preventing me from supplying Benghazi by road like last turn. By the end of the exploitation phase he'd reopened his main supply road, and pushed forward again.

And so to the last turn. My port rolls were decent this time, but now my shipping capacity roll sucked so I had all this port capacity, but no damn ships! I used the single shipping point available to reinforce Tobruk, which made it pretty safe. With this turn the ML rule is now removed, so my units were free to attempt to escape, and they did, most successfully. I was able to use a couple of units to place units into the ZoCs that were blocking the supply path, negating the ZoCs, and putting them all back into supply. Other units just occupied locations that blocked the main approach roads, forcing him off-road. (Moving into a ZoC hex costs +2 MPs, with roads being either 0.5 or 0.25 MPs/hex, depending on the road, so that delayed him considerably from diving forward.) I also placed units just outside overrun range, to prevent a dash towards Benghazi. Otherwise it was a pretty quiet turn, and looking good for a win. The unit in Benghazi was unsupplied, so took a step loss, but had a couple left, so no panic there.

In Chuck's final turn he recognized pretty quickly that he faced an impossible task. Especially so when he realized he was just 0.5 MP short from being able to overrun my flank protection ('Oh, really? That is a surprise! My, it's almost like I planned it... ), and therefore had no chance of getting to Benghazi with any decent strength to take it. He also had little chance of hitting Tobruk with enough strength to fight his way through the defenses, so at that point we called the game.

Chuck had a bad start with the replacements, but I also rolled very poorly with my replacements/shipping, which didn't allow me to bring much in, so they pretty much negated each other, and the CW attacks didn't face any early set-backs. Even so, the CW has a really hard time in this scenario, and it looks an almost impossible task against an even semi-competent Italian player. Perhaps one way for the CW to win is to force units beyond the ML line to retreat out, and then prevent them from getting back in and meeting the ML conditions, therefore forcing the automatic CW win. A trifle gamey, perhaps, as the CW aim was not just to clear the ML, but that's the trouble with these sorts of limited scenarios, they introduce rules attempting to reflect the overall strategic situation that are open to abuse.

From my perspective, the game turned on Chuck failing to protect his rear and turning back to attack Sollum rather than pressing on towards Tobruk. The CW doesn't have much time, and they have to advance, and anything that diverts them from their main goals could (will?) lose them the game. Then again, perhaps losing those Aussies to the withdrawal in the first turn had a bigger impact than I'm allowing. If we had a second go at this scenario, Chuck said he would press the ML units more, not giving them the freedom to move behind his main line.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, very tense, and I'd most certainly try this or another SCS game, any time. My first reading of the rules left me feeling they were not only simple, but simplistic, but that isn't so in practice. Yes, it's nowhere near the level of OCS, but it doesn't want or try to be, and I think it hits the target with where it wants to be. For me it has just enough of OCS to feel comfortable, and the rules are just enough to be easy to get into, yet provide enough challenge to keep the challenge up. Even with such a limited scenario I got a good feel for the game, and I can see that it will get plenty table time in the future.

Dang, the last thing I want or need is another series of games that I really like and want to play more.

Well, it looks like I'm back in business on the iPhone front. After getting home I tried to complete the 2.0 update and it went through with hardly a hitch. What did give me a problem was restoring the backup that was taken in the morning, giving an error near the end, and aborting the synch. On checking I found that my iPhone was empty of everything. However, reconnecting and a second go saw it restore correctly, and everything appears to be back, not that it would have been a terrible hardship if I had lost the few notes that aren't part of the sych process and would have been lost if I'd just started with a clean synch to my Mac.

I did take a quick browse through the available apps on the app store, and downloaded the eBay one as a sampler. It downloaded with no issues, and runs perfectly, no problems. I had a quick look for some sort of ftp app, but couldn't see one jump out at me. It would be useful to be able to post pictures to my hosting service so I could link to them in the blog, but I'm sure something will come along at some point.

For the moment I'm going to play with 2.0 and see what it does for me.

And so it's finally here, iPhone 2.0 day. And I'm not in line. In fact I may not even get one, although a certain part of me is certainly thinking about getting one and selling my original iPhone on eBay/CraigsList. But for the moment I'll just upgrade the software on my existing iPhone and see how that goes.

So this morning I checked for an update and, sure enough, it reported that the 2.0 update was available so off I went to update to the latest and greatest. Stoopid move, because so was everyone else. It managed to get the update loaded, but it had severe problems connecting back to the iTunes store to re-authenticate, so my iPhone is currently unusable, which is no great hardship - I'll just have to do without tunes for the day, and rely on email/web IM if I need to get hold of people. No biggie. Reading news on the day, I see quite a lot of reports that there are server issues with getting new iPhones registered and older ones updated, so I should have waited. Oh, well, I'm sure that it will all be resolved by this evening or tomorrow morning, but it would have been better if they had planned their capacity better, because they must have known that demand was going to be very considerable.

Then again, I could always swing by the Apple store this evening.....

After planning and thinking about it for a long period (read: too lazy to get off my butt and actually execute) I spent the large part of my 4th of July clearing out the garage. I'd collected quite a lot of boxes, for shipping eBay sales, and they were taking up a lot of space, so they all got broken down and stored flat. I also decided that a lot of them were too small and they went to the recycle. All the packing peanuts were put into bags and stored in the loft. (Although quite what I'm going to do with 5 bags of them I'm not sure.)

Lots of other clutter was tossed into either the recycle or trash bins, I condensed all the wine boxes, and arranged them for better access. (I finally found a use for some older Windows PCs - stacking the wine boxes to make for easier selection. Other things I may need (I am such a pack rat) went up into the loft, and the same, finally, for all the Christmas stuff. Lots of sweeping, and general tidying left the home gym accessible again, and loads of floor space. I also moved the Airport Express out into the garage, and connected a spare set of speakers, so now you can connect wirelessly.

Then came the next stage of the cunning plan! I got out the spare tables, and finally created a gaming space. (It has to be admitted that Cathy didn't seem too surprised by this last step, she knows me too well... :) One of the problems I've had over the past several months is that with all the game sessions and hosting I do, I don't have the ability to set up one of the bigger wargames and leave it out for any period of time long enough to get a decent amount of it played, let alone through to completion. Now I have all the space I need, and I took immediate advantage of it by setting up Case Blue. Saturday morning and most of Sunday saw me out in the garage, a bit of playing Case Blue, some guitar (firing up the stack, and the extra space has allowed me to get the pedals in a better position), a quick walk on the treadmill, pumped some iron on weights, and more playing. All the while rocking out to some loud music.

Doesn't get much better than this....

A lot of pre-orders finally arrived, so I had a large box of games arrive from Boards & Bits, including Aquaretto, Stone Age, Hanging Gardens, Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, Qwirkle, Metropolys, and Caylus Magna Carta. KC and Rita were over at the weekend, and we gave Aquaretto a first play with Colin and Catriona.

There's a lot more stuff going on here than Zooloretto, loads to think about. You also have to watch your building a lot more, as you can only have 3 groups without extending, and you get a bonus coin every third animal in your pen, and a worker every fifth. The latter are used to give bonuses in a few different ways, more than I have time to blog here. Suffice to say, that there's a lot to keep track of, and a second game will definitely be required, pretty soon. What's also intriguing is that you can combine it with Zooloretto. Can you say 'mega-game'?

We played a lot of other stuff, mostly very light. One I did finally get to try was Trans America with the Vexation expansion. This gives each player 3 sticks of their own color, and which only they can use, placement rules being the same as usual. Certainly adds a bit more tactical play to the game, and even Rita thought it made TA a decent game to play, as it's not one she's fond of normally.

After leaving, KC called me up to check that his misplaced bag had been left here accidentally. So I headed into town the next day to hook up for lunch, and we played a 2-player Hanging Gardens. Now this one hasn't excited me in the 2 4-player outings, but, like Carcassonne, it makes for a really decent 2-player game. A lot more tactical play, as you get to actually plan a move for your second card (you still lay out 4 cards, taking 2 each per round) and you have to watch what your opponent is doing. definitely more enjoyable than the 4-player version.

Once again, I've come to the situation where I have too many games for the amount of shelf space I have. This time, it's more serious, as I no longer have the physical space to just go out and buy another set of shelves. Every corner in the dining room now has one or two shelf units (all reaching 5-6' tall), and I've had to start piling games up on the top shelves, not very good for the games, reaching, or for safety.

Partly this is due to having a lot more wargames downstairs on the shelves nowadays, when they used to be upstairs in the closet. But as I'm playing more of them, I want to have them available. Of course, this isn't entirely the source of the problem, as there has been a moderate acquisition rate as well. Some games have been sold, but these have been mostly games that were hiding upstairs, and not in regular (or even irregular) play.

One solution I'm mulling over is something we used to do with the kids' toys - split them up into 2 (or 3) groups, and only have one group available on the shelves. The other group(s) goes upstairs or into storage in some way, and I cycle the groups every few months. That would solve the space problem, allowing me to remove a couple of shelf units, as well as cutting down the AP that occurs from having too many games to choose from on game night.

Of course I then have the problem of where to store all the games that aren't in current rotation, and how do I split them up? I think I'd keep all my unplayed games always available, but after that, no idea. I'll think on it some more.

We had some quite spectacular lighting and thunder on Thursday evening, very bright and very, very loud. So loud, in fact, that it woke me up at 2am, and I am a very solid sleeper. By far the loudest thunder I can ever remember. And then some rain. Buckets and buckets of it. With all the noise and dripping of rain water, it took me a little while to get back to sleep.

However, I did, and all too soon it was time to get back up for work. Cathy was already up, and reported that there was no internet access, and, sure enough, I wasn't getting anything on my MacBook Pro, either. We tried resetting the modem, but although it showed a power light, there were no other lights blinking away. No chance to do anything immediately, I left for work and hoped that it was Comcast that was having problems after the storm.

Cathy was in class in the morning, so when she came back she called Comcast, because there was no change. They tested up to the modem, and declared that they couldn't see any problems. After trying the modem on a couple of different connections, with no further joy, so it was looking increasingly likely that the modem was fried.

So, it was off to Best Buy to find a new modem. Just as we were entering the parking lot, I had the dreadful feeling that maybe others were in the same boat, and they'd had a run on modems, with none left! Oh no! That would have caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Deans' household, and Graham was already getting concerned, as he was due to go on a WoW raid in less than an hour's time.

Fear not, there were still a few on the shelf, although not many to choose from, and I just picked the cheapest ($50) and dashed off home. We plugged it in and powered it up, to be rewarded with a whole bunch of flashing lights, so connection was established. We just had to go through the Comcast registration process, which only appears to work on Windows, and even then it shows pages without the buttons appearing, although the general area where it should be is clickable. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief, especially Graham, who went off raiding.

If nothing else it shows how reliant we are on internet access these days. The kids were all chomping at the bit to get back on-line. And me and Cathy too. I'm almost tempted to get a spare modem to keep as a backup, to make sure that we're not in the same position again. I think it's the first time that I've ever had a piece of electronic equipment fried in an electrical storm. It was on a surge protector for the mains power, but not the actual internet connection. Hmm, I might switch the surge strip with the one in the garage, which has surge protection for the tv/internet as well, as that part isn't being used.

After I'd got back, I received an email from George on Sunday evening. It turns out he'd just returned from a two week trip to Harrisburg, and that we were both just an hour from each other, and neither of us knew the other was there. Dang! We'd have hooked up and visited Gettysburg together. 3,000 miles from home and we both pick the same time to travel and end up 90 miles apart. It's a funny old world.... :)

Just watched the ancient rock opera Tommy, the first time I've seen it all the way through. All I can say is that Ken Russell must have been on some really strong sh*t to come up with all that.

Thursday saw me take the very short hop from the training location up to the Valley Forge National Historical Park. I hadn't realized just how big it was, but it's actually several miles across, although there is a very good set of walk/bicycle pathways through the park, and there were lots of joggers and cyclists there.

I wasn't sure exactly what I'd see, but in the end there wasn't really much. A few reconstructed huts along the lines of what they would have looked like, a few markers for where we thing the various units were roughly camped, a few guns in reconstructed positions and that was it, a few signs of where the outer and inner lines were thought to have been. Not really much to see at all. And, of course, because this was after 5pm there were no guides available and all the buildings (including Washington's HQ were already closed. I just managed a quick squirt around the Visitor's Center before it closed at 6pm, although the park itself was open until 10pm and was still fairly busy with visitors on a very fine summer evening.

I looked at the on open reconstructed hut at the SW end of the site, then wandered around to the monument, and also Washington's HQ. Just as I was about to leave that area, a guy in period costume wandered up, and rested around the corner of a building, watching a bus tour that had just arrived. I tried to engage him in conversation to find out what he could tell me of uniform and arms, only to be told that he was 'busy'. Then proceeded to stand at his corner for another 10 minutes, before wandering off to skulk behind another building. Busy indeed. I headed for the coach party, where there was another guy in costume, presenting to the group, but, obviously, didn't try to talk to him. I did try to get a better look at what he was wearing, and was very disappointed to see very modern type cloth and rubber soled shoes, not at all period. I had expected a bit more.

Overall, I was very disappointed with the whole site. Very little in the way of information boards, and those that were there were showing a lot of wear and in some parts were unreadable. I was also shocked at the amount of weeds growing on the paths and walkways around the monument, and would have expected a monument to the Revolutionary Army to be better maintained. I was also very disappointed that there was no effort to cater for those people still in the park after 5pm, with most information points being closed from 4.30pm at the latest. Unless you're a real history buff, and just being at Valley Forge means something, it's not a place I'd recommend the average visitor to go see. I'm glad I didn't have to go far out of my way to visit.

I did take some photos, but I'm just now back home, so that's a task for the weekend.