S&T Magazine Mini-Reviews From Consim-L
- Compiled by Danny D. Holte
Issues #90-99
· S&T #90 Monmouth
· S&T #91 RDF
· S&T
#92 Iwo Jima
· S&T #93 American Civil War
· S&T #94 Nordkapp
·
S&T #95 Soldiers of the Queen
· S&T #96 Singapore
· S&T #97
Trail of the Fox
· S&T #98 Central Command
· S&T #99 Thunder at
Luetzen
S&T #90
Monmouth
---------------------------
"I had fun with this one. A nice
adaptation of the Wellington's Victory system." TES
"By Leonard Millman
and Dr. David Martin, this is one of my favorites and, IMHO, the best tactical
board wargame of an American Revolutionary battle ever done (not that there have
been a lot). Essentially, it was TSS and Wellington's Victory meeting in 1779.
Less emphasis on fire (unless you're a bunch of rangers in woods) and more on
the bayonet (wind up the British Grenadiers, play their theme song, and watch
them go). A winner." GGG
S&T #91
RDF
-----------------
"Some interesting formation rules but I found it
cumbersome." MP
S&T #92 Iwo
Jima
-----------------------
"IMHO a gem. A nice solitaire game that I
still pull out on occasion." TES
"What seems to start out as a cake-walk
soon turns into a nightmare as one crapes the barrel for healthy Marine
companies... very tense for a solitaire game." HG
"Gem, a good solitaire
design." DM
"Another solitaire game as puzzle." MP
"Judging from
the responses I've seen so far, I'm in the minority about this, but I thought
the game was boring. I admit that I never played it all the way through, but
that's because it failed to hold my interest. I remember reading a review in a
game magazine that came to the same conclusion." RF
"The early posters
were saying gem, then the later posters had a backlash against it. I don't think
I would put it in the gem category, but I did enjoy it. The fact that I know
next to nothing about WWII in the Pacific may have helped me (I had no
preconceived ideas about what should be happening.) Overall, I thought this was
a good subject for a solitaire game." JB
S&T #93 American
Civil War
----------------------------
"The rules were a mess, but
once I had flowcharted them, this turned out to be a real gem. It is VG's Civil
War-lite, and it shared the same roots - SPI." HG
"Mediocre, especially
when compared to the VG version." MP "I had fun with this too. Neither a gem nor
a dud, but still a good game imo. I guess it suffers in comparison with the
Victory product, but if you don't want or need the full meal deal, this game
might fill the bill." JB
"The ACW game that, had Eric Lee Smith not left
when SPI folded, would have grown up instead of Victory Games'. There is much
that is similar, but Victory was first with the best." GGG
S&T #94 Nordkapp
----------------------------
"I
liked this one, too. A relatively noncomplex straightforward system." TES
"Gem, an interesting part of the world. Terrain and different unit
capabilities made this very interesting. Other variants allowed one to "update"
the Canadian and USMC units tasked to reinforce Norway." DM
"Fun game.
lots of chrome but not too encumbered by it. Nice air system." MP
"I
thought this was a fine game that I would put in the gem category. I really
liked the "go heavy/go light" decision that you faced in this game. Playing it,
I was reminded a lot of the Northern Front game in the World War III series by
GDW (an excellent series in my judgment). However, I liked Nordkapp better as a
stand alone product. The GDW Northern Front game was fun in conjunction with the
main show in West Germany. I should check this, but I'll go out on a limb and
suggest that Nordkapp was a Charles T. Kamps design. Yes, I checked and it is.
One of my favorite "unknown" designers. Is he still active? We'll see another of
his designs later in the S&T 90s. Nordkapp featured a very distinctive map
style--you can tell right away that it wasn't a Redmond Simonsen product. There
were a lot of features in the rules that supported the game very well. I liked
the little OBs and technical information that was given. And I liked the fact
that the back sheet of the rules presented the counter faces. All that plus
Swedish fighter planes, I mean, how can you go wrong?" JB
"Only played
it solitaire it once. It was pretty, but I just wasn't interested in the topic."
GGG
S&T #95 Soldiers of the
Queen
------------------------------
"Isandlwana 22 Jan 1879.
Appropriately hard to win as the British but still offered some interesting
options for deployment and tactics." JG
"Gem, even if the games are a
bit unbalanced. I would have liked to see this system extended to other 19th
Century battles. IMO, captures the feel of 19th C grand tactical scale without
the complexities of Wellington's Victory and GBACW." TES
"Another hard
game to win as British player. It was an innovative game and not too bad to play
: unfortunately the counters are "double face" (units of a game on the front and
units of another game on the back) so I decided to cut them in half and glue the
halves on hard cardboard ... but I never did that and the game was put apart.
But if you are interested in this argument this is a game that you have to buy."
PC
"Great subject, played lousy." MP
"Looked interesting, but I
was just a little put off by the "primitive" attempt to include two games in the
same issue by printing the counters for one game on the backs of the counters
for the other game. I still think this is a cheesy way of doing things. Anyway,
I didn't play it." JB
S&T #96
Singapore
---------------------------
"I had to admit that the map was
as nice as any SPI had put in S&T. The game played well, and very
historically, (the Japanese won our game) but, due to the nature of the conflict
we felt it had limited replay potential. I've heard others remark (objection,
hearsay evidence) that this is a gem." FEW
"Another gem. This is a nail
biter until the last turn. Will the Japanese capture the reservoirs and force a
surrender ? It's an elegant treatment of a sadly neglected bit of history, and
the historical outcome was by no means inevitable." HG
"Gem. A beautiful
map and counters. I'd assert it was eminently replayable as variants allowed the
Commonwealth player to tinker with deployments, capabilities (i.e. what is Op
Matador happened, what if the Commonwealth trained for jungle fighting). And
even the traditional game is a nail biter." DM
"IMHO the gem of the
group. [#90-99]" MP
"One of the things that's been very interesting to
me in going through the games, and hearing the responses of others is to find
out that, while there is a lot of noise (don't get mad anybody, I'm talking
about variability in our judgments), there is nevertheless a signal. I wouldn't
have thought I was going to like this game, but like lots of others, I found
this to be a very involving little puzzle. I have since thrown it into my
briefcase and taken it with me to conferences on a couple of occasions. It works
perfectly in that setting: Unwinding in your room after the conference
presentations. A clear gem in my book." JB
"A winner. Good game, comes
down to the wire if played well." GGG
S&T #97 Trail of the
Fox
-------------------------
"Best of the 'TSR' S&T's." WS
"I commented just a couple of weeks ago that this was a good game, but
not a gem like Desert Fox. Had I just played out my interest in the system, or
was this part of the campaign just plain not as interesting as the great sweeps
through the Western Desert?" JB
S&T #98 Central
Command
--------------------------
"’Played it only twice, but I liked
it. I especially liked the US transport constraints that required good planning
by the US player." TES
"Sorta’ like Nordkapp (in the air anyway)
Situation didn't work as well." MP
"My first S&T game ever, so I
feel much obligated to reply:
Good points:
- The US reinforcement
schedule: really makes you think ahead.
- While not as detailed as Crisis
Korea 1995, the air game works pretty well. Although once the USAF shows up it
is pretty much over for the Soviet air force.
Bad points:
- I think the
ground scale is way too big. I forgot what it was exactly, but I remember that 6
or 7 unit stacks were pretty common.
- Those Soviet mech bttns that can
"dismount" and forms two separate units, one the carrier the other the infantry
component, both being pretty decent combat units. Phbbbttbbt!" EH
"Another Chuck Kamps design. I'll gemify this one. Others have commented
on the force pool concept that was used here--As the American, you need to make
a decision about what forces to use your limited transport resources on-and
there are some real consequences to choosing well or poorly. I'm not sure that I
ever figured out what the optimal mix was. Here is a very minor irritant. The
combat system is pretty clean, but there are *lots* of idiosyncratic situations
that result in DRMs, and they are real hard to remember. They are all summarized
on the map, but the table is printed at a 90 degree angle to the way the typical
player is going to be looking at the map. So do yourself a favor and photocopy
that table before you set the game. You'll thank me." JB
S&T
#99 Thunder at Luetzen
----------------------------
"Blah! Watch the
brittle Allied armies crack and evaporate at the first rumor of a French unit in
their vicinity. . . senseless boredom." HG
"Was it the sound of the
wargamer's snoring that was thunderous? I've been waiting to dudify this one. I
don't know who the designer was, but he made a fatal error, imo, when he used a
counter scale that did not correspond to the sizes of the historical units. You
can make 'em divisions, brigades, regiments, or battalions, but you can't make
'em "2 or 3 battalions". That just won't do. Speaking as a Napoleonic guy, when
we play a board game depicting a battle in that period, we feed the counter
information into a mental scheme that tells us something about how concepts like
"frontage" "depth" and facing ought to work. It just doesn't work if the
counters represent "rubber-band" units. And I was really bummed about it,
because there aren't a whole heck of a lot of games on the battles of the Spring
1813 campaign." JB
"Napoleonic campaign done simply. It worked but
didn't do much to enthuse me." GGG
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