Cluedo Hostage Rescue

 We were short on numbers so John produced a perennial favourite, Cleudo Hostage Rescue, Johns game of SAS derring do on a Cluedo board (Clue for our US cousins). 

A brief recap - terrorists have seized hostages in a country house and dumped the body of Mr Black on the steps outside. There are half a dozen hostages (Reverend Green, Mrs White etc) and an unknown number of terrorists. We have a team of eight SAS soldiers to rescue the hostages. There is a limited amount of intel available on the situation from local law enforcement of varying reliability, but we were fairly sure the Conservatory and Ballroom were empty. We were fortunate that Colonel Mustard had escaped, and as a military man, gave us reliable intel that there were six terrorists.

Our SAS team had two specialists (medic No. 2) and dog handler (No. 8) and a section leader (No. 1). We were all armed with carbines and pistols, and the five non specialist had a stun grenade each.

Based on the intel, we planned to make our entrance through the Conservatory and Ballroom, my four guys (Nos 1-4) would then clear the right hand side of the building, while marks guys (5-8) would clear the left. Mark had the dog and I had the medic. The figures normally activate in number order, with two actions each, but the leader can spend an action to change the activation order, which is handy sometimes.

We came across two rooms with a pair of terrorists in each (and a pair of hostages), and despite getting the correct sequence of door opening, chucking grenades and following up with a fusillade of small arms fire onto the stunned terrorists, we were hideously unlucky and not one but two terrorists managed to detonate their suicide vests, sadly we lost a couple of the hostages (Rev Green and Mrs Peacock) but managed to save Mrs White although she was badly wounded. The medic stabilised her. We also had two troopers wounded, one quite badly, by the explosions.

Clearing the last room went better, despite my section leader managing to miss one of his shots and we rescued Professor Plum without further friendly losses and finally found Miss Scarlet hiding in the kitchen. All the terrorissts were killed.

So, not a brilliantly successful operation, but four of the hostages escaped alive and we didn't have any troopers actually killed. Back to markmanship and room clearing school though I think.

Wizard of the Kremlin

 I recently read this book, which was recommended to me by a friend with a keen interest in international relations. 

Essentially it is an account of the transformation of Russia from communism to Putins oligarchy via gangster capitalism from the pov of a (fictional) Kremlin adviser.

Some of the insights aren't particularly new to anyone who has watched the fate of Russia since the Wall came down, but some of it was very interesting and it presents a very Russian view of its relations with the West and the rest of the world. It also has some insights into Putins personality and background,  as well as how to dismantle and subvert democracy and dissent to achieve total state control. Very much 'full spectrum dominance'.   

Anyway, it is a nice easy read and reminded me that when I visited St Petersburg in around 2012, I think it was the scariest place I've ever been in my life, even compared to downtown Rabat at 3am. I gather it has now been made into a TV series airing later this year (or early next?) so I'll be interested to see how they have handled it. Better than 'King and Conqueror' I hope!

What fresh madness is this... Traveller

 Well, I firmly blame Alex at https://upthebluefow.blogspot.com/ for this. His fascinating efforts to make Striker into a playable tabletop wargame, have finally forced me to scratch a long standing itch and (re) buy a lot of my old Traveller collection.

I originally sold all this stuff back in the late 90s, but it is one of those things I regret, as you do from time to time. I had a happy old time with Traveller back in the 1980s, mainly with my pals from the University of London Wargames Club. 

Amazing how much of this stuff is still floating around, as it is well over 40 years old. Various trawls through eBay produced this lot, although a lot of it came from collectibles shops with eBay store fronts. I'm not interested in the modern versions, which have no doubt been mucked around with.

First lot were these two. I was used to the original box set, and as it is impossible to tell on the internet how big things are, I was bit surprised to find that these were much larger than expected. All you need to play Traveller apparently.

Clearly the first set was missing Book 2, so I bought this. Except it turned out it wasn't, as the large format edition had rolled the original Books 1,2 and 3 into two volumes. Doh. The text seemed largely identical. I might sell this as surplus, but I actually prefer the layout in this one.

Between them, I'd forgotten how rich the basic set of rules are. I'm sure when we used to play we just ignored a lot of the stuff in here, we certainly never did any trading, but the whole thing is so well thought through and comprehensive. It very, very much reminds me of En Garde, but better developed.

To go with the basic set, you obviously need some background. The Spinward Marches are just a set of space regions to explore and have adventures in. I've got the GDW boardgames Imperium and Dark Nebula which also cover a lot of the Traveller Universe region of space, but the Spinward Marches is designed with RPGs in mind, not strategic space warfare.

This looks like a mint copy, but in fact many of the maps have been carefully hand annotated, adding in some of the useful stuff (Imperial star bases, refuelling points etc) which could so easily have been printed on the map, but instead is buried in the wierd hexadecimal gobbledygook system description codes.

The second supplement I bought back in the day was Mercenary, which adds military careers, some more interesting weapons systems, and a whole subset of mercenary adventures and the means to resolve them, including a combat system up to brigade level. The latter is sheer genius, straight out of Dupuys 'Numbers, Predictions and War', and the combat results most definitely do not reward the big battalions, but the better quality ones. I spent ages number crunching this one calculating force ratios and outcome probabilities when I should have been revising for my second year exams at University. Ahem.

The third supplement we got was High Guard, which has a much more advanced ship design and combat resolution system. I had a lot of fun doing starship designs with this, and we used to use them as an alternative to Starfire for space combat games. This also includes naval careers for characters.

The basic books, Merc, High Guard and Spinward Marches was all we ever really used for Traveller, as it had everything we were interested in, and even then, most of it came out of our heads.

High Guard can also lead off into a whole rabbit hole of its own via the Trillion Credit Squadron supplement and infamous 'Lenat Squadron' in the 1981 and 82 competitions which used computer assistance, a primitive form of AI, to minmax the rules and produce literally unbeatable fleets.

My good pal Mark is very interested in this stuff, see Geordies Big Battles: http://exiledfog.blogspot.com/2025/03/note-to-self-trillion-credit-squadron.html

In a class of its own however was..... 

Striker! Future tactical combat in the Traveller universe, by one Frank Chadwick.

Honestly, this one was just fabulous and we used to fight company level actions using these. I also invested/wasted a lot of time on vehicle designs when I should have been revising for my finals!  They included a functional Ogre and a lot of WW2 vehicles. sadly these designs were all lost when I sold my stuff.

I couldn't find a physical copy of these at a price I was willing to pay, so I just got the PDFs (four of them) from DrivethruRPG. Enough to look at anyway, and marvel that I actually used to understand these enough to play them, as they are pretty complicated by modern standards. They were worth the effort as they were very realistic indeed in terms of small unit C3 etc. Alex has done a great job of streamlining them and making into more of a wargame and less of an RPG engine.

I'm glad I own these again, they have been a painful hole in my library for decades now, but although they are fun to read, I doubt they will ever get played as written. They might provide some good background for some online RPG sessions though. And rest assured, I did pass my exams at the LSE quite respectably, despite wasting so much time wargaming. I had a bigger, faster brain then, and rather more energy.

Medevac!

 The ever fertile mind of Ian Robinson this week brought us 'Medevac!' - a game simulating the process flow for casualty triage, evacuation and treatment in a near future conflict. Fundamentally it is a flow chart with casualties moving through various stages of the treatment pipeline, and it is mainly intended to highlight the decision making at each stage and potential bottlenecks.

The game is being developed in conjunction with the Royal Army Medical Corps, but the overall framework is flexible enough to cope with other armed forces ways of doing things. This sort of stuff is very familiar from my time spent doing process analysis, modelling and optimisation in the latter days of my IT career.

Here is our "battlefield" , casualties will appear each turn (15 minutes) based on OR casualty rates for brigade level engagements at various combat intensities. We can evacuate up to ten casualties per turn to the Unit Aid Post, which is next in line.

There is a possibility of 'friction' however, which prevents us moving anyone - air/artillery strikes, drone attacks or whatever, which are a real problem for casevac in Ukraine. At the moment it is 'all quiet' so nothing is happening.

Ooer, suddenly we are into low intensity combat and five casualties rock up. These are classified in standard British Army usage into triage levels T1, T2,T3,T4, with 1 being the most urgent. T4 are dead or mortally wounded. Each casualty has some personal info, rank, arm of service etc, wound location and estimated surgery time. In this bunch we've got one T2, three T3s and a T4. Two of the casualties are 'red' (enemy) who have very Russian looking names. There is also a civilian in there with a rather Estonian looking name.

There isn't any friction so we can evacuate all of these back to the aid post.

The intensity of combat ramps up to high, and we are suddenly getting ten or more casualties a turn, and coupled with occasional interdiction, we can't evacuate everyone, so choices have to be made, which is the whole point of the game. We started out with a very Iraq/Afghanistan approach of evacuating the most critical casualties, but in an ultra modern high intensity conflict, that may not be the best approach...

After a few turns of fighting, the Unit Aid Post (UAP) was brimming with casualties, some of whom started to die on us. Obviously we needed to get them out of there and back to the field hospital, and to do that we needed transport, for which we had one Chinook and three Landrover ambulances.

So, who gets a ride in the ambulance? The main problem is limited transport capacity, again based on Iraq/Afghan practice, the more serious casualties take up more room - British Chinooks were actually fitted out with a mobile operating theatre. So eg our ambulance can take 1 x T1, 2 x T2 or 4 x T3 or combinations thereof.

We loaded this one up with a T2 and 2 x T3, including both our Russians and stuck some more serous casualties on the Chinook. We probably made some bad loading decisions with the first wave of casualties as at that point we didn't have that many to handle.

And here is the problem with ambulances - the little white boxes on the left are the areas they need to travel through, so at best they take three turns to get to the field hospital, although in this case this one is interdicted, so delayed a turn. While they are being transported, the casualties may degrade in condition, so there is a fairly good chance T1s and maybe T2s will die on the ambulance ride.

The main problem though, is we just don't have enough transport to deal with the volume of casualties coming in. The ambulances at best take six turns to do the round trip, while the Chinook takes two, the UAP is soon piled with casualties.

Things are a bit calmer at the field hospital. The first casualties have arrived (2 x T1 and 1 x T3) via Chinook and spend a turn being prepped for surgery. Once they are in the hospital, they stop degrading significantly in game time, so at least they won't get any worse. When they arrive they take a turn to prep, but again, we weren't exactly overwhelmed with business at first. 

There are four surgical teams, and each casualty goes into surgery with a minimum number of turns required to deal with them plus a randomised surgery completion time once the minimum is complete. In our enthusiasm we had failed to notice that one of the T1s needed 12 (!) turns of surgery minimum, complete on a 5+ - so that was one surgical team out of action for 15 turns straight away. Many of the T3s were 2 turns, complete on a 3+.

So once the floods of casualties started to pile up at the hospital, we tended to prioritise the least critical just to get them sorted and out of the way with one 'lane' reserved for T1s. Once out of surgery they went into the recovery wards, three wards of eight beds each. Our recoverees were a mixture of armed forces, civilians, prisoners and men and women, so we also had to decide how to partition up the allocation of wards and beds, bearing in mind the need to guard the prisoners.

I won't do a blow by blow account, suffice to say, all the major sections (UAP, ambulances, surgery) were utterly overwhelmed by the volume of casualties - 120 in the course of the game covering around five hours. As a result we had to seriously think about prioritisation at each step and ended up selecting a good number of T3s, many of whom were NCOs and ended up packing the ambulances with them. The T2s generally got to ride the chopper and the poor old T1s got left in the UAP.

Longer term, we considered changing the way the ambulances and choppers worked, and just packing the casualties in without special treatment for the T1s and T2s in the transport itself - so essentially a reversion to WW2 practice and also the practice adopted by NHS Ambulance services after a brief experiment with paramedic roadside treatment which actually reduced overall survival rates from RTAs.

That of course was the main point of the game - to identify potential bottlenecks and discuss both how you would prioritise treatment and longer term, how you might change the way the process worked, allocation of resources to the various stages etc. In that it succeeded admirably, so a very interesting and informative game. Lets just hope we don't get into a serious shooting war soon. 

Some of the lessons from Ukraine in a world of intense and indiscriminate missile and drone warfare is that casevac can take days, helicopter and softskin evacuation is virtually impossible anywhere near the front line (Bradleys are being used as frontline ambulances) and that hospitals can only be in place for around 48 hours before they get stonked, so they have to move repeatedly. Dear me. Can I get back to pushing toy soldiers around please? 

Syria 2025

 Another of Johns modern polmil matrix games, this time covering what happens in Syria after the overthrow of the Assad regime. John had sent out comprehensive briefings which included a veritable alphabet soup of the various factions involved. Fortunately I was cast as the USA, and as we were playing week long turns starting the week after the overthrow (so spanning the Inauguration) , I managed to get to play both President Biden and President Trump.

As ever with remote committee games, there isn't much eye candy I'm afraid. This is what I spent two evenings looking at. Glad I have my extra monitor. We had a lot of players for this one (eight? nine? I lost track in the chaos).

I had two mandatory objectives, which were fairly obvious. 

1. Establish a stable non sectarian government which didn't include any terrorists (particularly IS).

2. Ensure the Russians don't retain any bases in Syria

3. One of my choice, which I elected to be "No further expansion in the US ground presence"

In playing the game I also seemed to adopt three extra unofficial objectives of saving the Kurds, smashing IS all on my own and preventing another civil war breaking out. Team America, World Police. yay. That probably made my job harder than it needed to be.

The other players obviously had their own objectives, some of which harmonised with mine, some of which were in conflict. Figuring those out and trying to thwart them is one of the joys of this sort of thing.

John provided some useful maps, as well as extensive briefings on the various factions, their aims, motivations, who their foreign supporters are, who they dislike etc. as well as the global and regional powers with their fingers in the conflict.

This was the most useful map as it showed, as far as we know, the areas controlled by the various factions. As you can see, the Kurds control more of Syria than HTS do, much to the fury of Turkey. The main US base is that blue semi circle at the bottom, but there are other bases scattered around, particularly in the SDF area in the northeast. The Russian air and naval bases are in the northwest in that enclave around the coast in the HTS controlled area.

The regional map formed the basis for the game control board, which kept track of which factions were in government, who was in conflict, whether a state of Civil War existed and the current IS threat level.

This was the situation after six weeks of play (game time), just HTS and the Druze are in the government, the evil Turks having just pulled off a stunning coup by invading northern Syria and forcing the YPG (the main Kurdish faction) out of government.

I won't do a blow by blow account, but along with bashing IS (no-one else seemed remotely interested) I did support the gradual expansion of the coalition government and managed a great diplomatic coup to terminate the leases on the Russian bases. The Turks and Russians ran around like bulls in a china shop however, as Erdogan released his army on a deliberate programme of terror against the Kurds with Russian(!) air support, while the Russians flew in Spetznaz units and fortified their bases. President Trump had a very direct phone call with President Erdogan to get him to wind his neck in, and the Ukrainians took advantage of the Russian pre-occupation with Syria to resume offensive operations in the Kursk oblast.

There was so much going on it was like playing whack-a-mole. In end, and much to everyones astonishment, we did have a fairly stable coalition government in Syria (mainly thanks to the diplomatic skills of John B) and they had even managed to eject the Russians from their bases. IS was back in its box and the US was able to start reductions in troop levels, the only dark clouds on the horizon was that the Alawites refused to participate in the coalition despite repeated efforts, and the Kurds had not obtained any degree of regional autonomy via federalisataion.

That was a really good game on an incredibly complex and confusing subject, and excellent primer on modern Syria, and a good model of the exteme diffculties of decision making and policy implementation in the region. At one point I did just think of washing my hands of the whole sorry mess, but it actually turned out OK in the end, thanks to the sensible leadership of HTS. I suspect the game outcome is somewhere towards the extreme end of likely favourable outcomes, but fingers crossed.

One bright idea which noone came up with was for the US to simply buy Syria, evict the occupants, and create a 'US Riviera on the Mediterranean'. Well, perhaps that is for a future game.

Cleudo Hostage Rescue

 We were low on numbers so John put on Cleudo Hostage Rescue, which can accommodate few or many players as required.

A very timely game as I've just been reading this (about the Iranian Embassy Siege). Although I was obviously aware of it at the time, I never realised that the terrorists were Iranian Arab Nationalists protesting against the Persian Ayatollah! Very quaintly, none of them had suicide vests either. How times have changed. 

Anyway, back to the present. The elite special forces team today we me, Tim G, Ian and Terry, as Tim had two dogs, he got to be the K9 handler and medic, while Ian was section leader. Terry and I had two soldiers apiece.

As usual, the terrorists have shot Mr Black (T4 at the bottom) and are holding various people hostage. Mrs White and Miss Scarlet have escaped from the Kitchen and Conservatory respectively, so we can be sure they are empty, and the local security forces seem to think the baddies are in the Billiard Room and the Library.

Ian splits us into two teams, we need to check all the rooms anyway, so me and Terry go in via the kitchen and Ian and Tim go in through the conservatory.

Terry checks out the ballroom. Clear! Ian checks out the billiard room by lobbing in a stun grenade. That is rather unfortunate as the only occupant is a rather surprised Mrs Peacock, who is duly stunned.

My guys check out the supposedly empty dining room and find Reverend Green and two terrorists inside.

I didn't have enough actions left to chuck in a stun grenade, but I did have one guy on overwatch and he shoots one of the terrorists. Sadly the other one decides to detonate his suicide vest which puts three hits on everyone in the room and a hit on my guy outside the door. BOOM!

While all this is going on, Tim checks out the library. Clear!

Despite making a right mess of that, we get away lightly. Ian escorts Mrs Peacock through the window to safety. My guys head into the dining room and find both terrorists are now dead, but Reverend Peacock has sustained a light wound. Their flak jackets saved my guys from any harm from the explosion. 

Meanwhile Terry checks out the lounge. Clear!

My guys help Reverend Green out of the building and the rest of the section find the baddies in the study. Two terrorists and Colonel Mustard. There are enough people clustered around that someone has a stun grenade to throw in (the non specialists have one grenade each, so the section has five in total).

The grenade stuns everyone in the room, and the rest of the section pile in and shoot one of the terrorists, capture the other one and liberate Colonel Mustard unharmed. So despite us getting a bit overextended early on, we managed a successful operation - all terrorists neutralised, no casualties and all hostages liberated albeit one with a light wound.

The following day it was just me and Tim, so Tim got to be the dog handler again and I was team leader. We had four blokes each.

As before, we each cleared one side of the building. As before, I found the dining room stuffed with hostages and terrorists. This time we managed to lob in a stun grenade, with satisfying results.

Tim did much the same in the library, where Colonel Mustard was being held. This was all going well.

Until it wasn't. Sadly our gunfire was fairly ineffective and we only succeeded in wounding the terrorists in the dining room. As it was now packed with our own troops, we couldn't really throw in a stun grenade either. Fortunately one of them decided to surrender, but the other one started shooting the hostages. Tim had similar problems, and one of the terrorists in the lounge also detonated his suicide vest. Ouch.

When the smoke cleared we had three terrorists killed and one wounded and captured, but one of our guys had sustained life threatening injuries and another had serious wounds. Even worse, Colonel Mustard and Mrs Peacock were dead and the Reverend Green was (once again) lightly wounded. What a disaster! It just shows how dicey these sorts of operations are. As Major Gullen in 'The Siege' commented "Five second either way, and it could have been a catastrophe".

What a great game, and endlessly repayable. 

Kaliningrad - NATO prepared

 We had another crack at the Kaliningrad game, this time scenario 3 which has  a higher level of NATO preparedness. There are some NATO units already in the Baltic States and NATO has tac nukes available. Belarus is still 'neutral', but Russian units can pass through the country.

As before, Russia aims to open up a land bridge to Kaliningrad, both sides get points for enemy units destroyed, occupied capital cities and big points if the land bridge is open (or not). Use of tac nukes risk nuclear escalation and the end of the world. I missed the Tuesday night session which ended in a nuclear WW3, and lined up for Wednesday starting afresh. Mark and I were NATO and Jim was the Russians.

Starting positions. You can see the extra NATO units in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and there are already the first Swedes and Poles in Finland and Poland respectively. The NATO reinforcements schedule is also accelerated. NATO has roughly 50% more forces in this scenario at start than the first one we played.

The Russians made use of Belarus to mass forces in safety, while the Kaliningrad garrison utterly annihilated the Poles and tentatively pushed into Lithuania. NATO pulled back where appropriate to improve local force superiority but did have a little push towards St Petersburg.

Reinforcements began to roll up and we pushed them onto requisitioned car ferries heading for Latvia.

The Russians now pushed hard into Lithuania and Latvia. Vilius held out but we had to fall back to Riga. The NATO offensive towards St Petersberg also petered out and the Finns fell back to Helsinki. There was now a regular conveyer belt of NATO units sailing across the Baltic into Latvia and the Russian Baltic Fleet seemed very reluctant to intercept. Masses of Russians were now marching west though. 

Perhaps a bit too massed. A big stack of Russians in southern Lithiunia suddenly found themselves turned into radioactive dust, which cleared the way nicely for a NATO counteroffensive to isolate Kaliningrad again. WW3 didn't break out (phew) and the force ratios were suddenly looking a bit more favourable. Ideally we woudl have nuked the troop concentrations marching through Belarus, but that would have made the Belarussians hostile.

Meanwhile we were careful to avoid stacking more than two units together to avoid presenting a juicy nuclear target. There was now a nice mass of NATO units in northwest Lithuania and Latvia, while Estonia had actually repelled the Russian invasion.

The Russians came on into Lithuania from Belarus, but rather more dispersed this time, which led to a vicious series of small battles along the border with Belarus. NATO units were also operating in eastern Poland now and the Kaliningrad garrison looked a bit thin on the ground. 

We ran out of time at that point with NATO ahead on points.

That was certainly an easier fight than the first scenario for NATO, but Russia is still terribly strong, and the early NATO first use of nuclear weapons probably wasn't going to go down well on the world stage. I'm still not convinced about the penalties for using nuclear weapons, the way the game is structured it doesn't make much sense not use them at the earliest opportunity, it just gets a lot more dangerous after the initial exchange. 

Still, it was another  interesting outing to a potential flash point, which like so many others, could kill us all very quickly. 

Kaliningrad 2024

 Another game brought to us courtesy of Ian R and the British Army Fight Club. This one is an extension of the Peoples Army of Voronoi system, using a Voronoi map of the Baltic States to examine various scenarios around a Soviet Russian incursion and NATO responses.

It is an area movement map, much like the previous game, although it now includes sea areas, capital cities and ports (cities facing sea areas). Units, movement and combat are still heavily abstracted to let players focus on the strategic situation, but there is plenty of operational decision making to be made.

A rather scary inclusion in this one is tactical nuclear weapons, whose use is fairly devastating, but carry an ever increasing risk of starting an all out nuclear exchange.

There are four scenarios, covering various levels of NATO readiness and involvement (or not) of Belarus. We started with scenario 1, which has a supine NATO, riven by internal divisions, but a neutral Belarus. The big victory points are if the Russians can make an uncontested land bridge to Kaliningrad by game end, but there are also points for destroying units, occupying capital cities etc. Only the Russians have tac nukes in this one, but if WW3 breaks out, both sides lose. More on that later.

Jim and I were the plucky Baltic States, Tim and Pete the wicked Russians. John ran the game and Ian observed and chipped in to answer questions. The active NATO countries (Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) each start with a couple of units, and we have to take reinforcements from Sweden and Poland before the rest of NATO rocks up.

The Russians have a fair amount more stuff, particularly four units rammed into Kaliningrad. Fortunately all the Belarus units are neutral, although the Russians can pass through them. Our reinforcement rolls are penalised for the first two turns in this scenario. 

The Russian opening attack is devastating. The Polish border forces are wiped out, as are half the Baltic States forces. Russian reinforcements appear on the Russian border. Our guys mainly retire to their respective capital cities (you get a defensive bonus defending your capital). The Russians have been fighting, not moving this turn.

By game turn 6, things aren't looking too great. We have at least held off the Russian attack against Helsinki, and the Swedes arrived to help out. Talinn has fallen, but Vilnius and Riga are holding out. The Russians have pushed across the map and have their land bridge however.

The Baltic Fleet is floating off Kaliningrad, while the Swedes are afloat in the Gulf of Finland, threating St Petersburg with amphibious attack. The Polish reinforcements have now arrived in eastern Poland.

The game ends when the sum of 4D6 equal the current turn (a ceasefire is declared), so we have a way to go yet. So far we've lost 8 NATO SP and killed 5 Russian.

Sadly Vilnius finally falls to a mass Russian assault on Turn 8, and Poles disappear in a can of Instant Sunshine as the Russians fire a barrage of nukes. This wipes out the Poles, and produces a single nuke marker. On a roll of 1, WW3 breaks out.... it doesn't.

Two NATO naval units arrive and lay siege to Kaliningrad.

Sadly this produces another nuclear response, and the fleet goes to the bottom. WW3 on a 2 or less.... phew, we survive another turn.

NATO doesn't give up, more ships and troops pile into Eastern Poland and lay siege to Kaliningrad. The Swedes are just outside the port of Riga, where the Latvians are still holding out. We broke for the night at that point. 

On turn 10, the Latvian defenders finally give up, just as the Swedes debark into Riga and continue to hold the city.

The force ratios are just too much in the Russians favour now. The Swedes are kicked out of Riga again, and our ground troops in Kaliningrad are wiped out. The Russians set about widening their land bridge and occupy Eastern Poland.

NATO (finally) gets some good reinforcement rolls and massed troops pile into Eastern Poland and Southern Lithuania to contest the land bridge. By this time we are deliberately stacking troops up and encouraging the Russians to nuke them, as if WW3 starts both sides lose ie it is a draw. I think that needs thinking about in terms of victory conditions.

The Russians wisely don't rise to the bait and instead our attack into Lithuania is beaten back. All the Baltic States have been overrun now with no possibility of liberating them, and as the game clock runs out, it is a massive Russian win. The geographic locations are largely irrelevant in terms of VPs as the Russians get 22 points just for destroyed NATO units, whereas the land bridge is worth a measly 5 VP.

Well, that was a total wipeout, but a very compelling game with lots of serious decisions to be made. It certainly doesn't bode well for the Baltic States in future - which idiot thought NATO expansion was a good idea? Although the game was thought provoking and fun to play, I do think some of the victory conditions need looking at. The relative VPs for geographic locations vs losses for one - the Russians really don't care (much) about losses. Secondly, the nuclear aspects. The optimum strategy for the player losing is to start WW3, as then they salvage a draw. This really doesn't seem right, as the end of civilisation probably isn't a price to casually pay over whether the Russians have a land route to Kaliningrad or not. My suggestions was that if all out nuclear war breaks out, the player who fired the most tactical nukes to start it automatically loses.  

Anyway, thanks to Ian for the game design and John for putting it on.