A Week of Gaming at Tennessee Maneuvers, 2022
Featuring Tekhenu, Ra, Advanced Squad Leader, Pax Porfiriana, Terraforming Mars, Roll for the Galaxy, Fire in the Lake, Architects of the West Kingdom, and Triumph of Chaos
Has it already been a year since Tennessee Maneuvers, 2021? Apparently yes, because I just spent the last week of July with Mike Hershey, Steve Pleva, Chris Spell, Sean Deller, and others playing board games 14 hours a day in a Lebanon, TN basement.
The drive down to Tennessee was very nice, and featured an overnight stay (and brief sightseeing tour) in Cincinnati, a city I’d never visited before. I visisted with my former Quillette colleague Colin Wright, tried the chili at Skyline, and, on the drive back, I also hit a really good disc golf course in Independence, KY. But you don’t care about that. You want to know about the games.
Getting together with a big group of serious gamers like this is a great way to learn the big new(ish) euros. Last year, the hit in Lebanon was Teotihuacan: City of Gods. This year, we tried a newer one called Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, co-created (with Dávid Turczi) by the same guy who gave us Teo, Italian designer Daniele Tascini.
In Teo, the plot has a strong visual/physical component, featuring block-by-block construction of a pyramid. In Tekhenu, following a somewhat similar motif, there’s a rotating obelisk, casting different groups of dice into areas of darkness, shade, and light—along with a temple that gets built up with various statues and monuments. As with Teo, there’s an abstracted render-unto-the-gods theme, and players are rewarded for laying their various pieces in the temple in a geometrically optimized, god-pleasing, point-maximizing way. It also has the Teo-like element of various counter tracks that players ascend (or exhaust, by moving tokens off their player sheets), strategically applying their assets in a way that allows them to optimize points and keep their production engines going. As in all euros, there’s always a dozen different little missions you want to accomplish, but you can’t do all of them. And the fun comes from balancing them off against one another.
There were four of us playing; and we used the Time of Seth expansion—which, to be honest, doesn’t really add much to the basic charm of the game. Moreover, Time of Seth makes the whole package look a lot bigger on the gaming table, and therefore more intimidating for new players. I wouldn’t call this a particularly complicated game once you get into it. But visually, there’s a lot of stuff going on, which can be unnerving at first. While I’m usually pretty quick on the uptake when it comes to euros, even I was lost for the first 10 minutes of the tutorial that Mike gave us.
Each turn in Tekhenu starts with a player taking a die from the available dice scattered around the obelisk (see picture above)—with each die’s colour, number, and lighting status (darkness, shade, and light, depending on the die’s position vis-a-vis the obelisk, which rotates clockwise every two turns) offering different powers. Each player has 16 turns per game—which means taking and placing 16 different dice—with each turn being essentially an exercise in worker placement.
The twist is that every four turns, an accounting is made of the dice that each player picked in those previous four turns—specifically, a comparison between the “pure” vs. “tainted” dice (usually, you’ve picked two of each, but sometimes it’s three on one side and one on the other). The idea is that the number of pips on each side of the yin/yang divide should be roughly equal. And if they’re not equal, you pay penalties in turn order or victory points. I know this sounds complicated, but it adds a fun and interesting additional factor that players have to impute when they select dice. (By way of example, if you look in the top right corner of the picture immediately below, you will see that the blue player has eight pips each on the pure and tainted sides of the ledger—a 5 and a 3 on the pure side, and a 6 and a 2 on the impure side).
I loved this game the first time I played (in part because I got my engine going immediately, and so cruised to a 128-point winning tally). But the second and third time I played, it felt a little flat. The 2-D temple-construction component of the game isn’t as fun or interesting as the 3-D version in Teo. And the individualized milestone cards each player is assigned randomly at the beginning pretty much dictates your strategy. E.g. If you get a card that allows you to score your temple buildings twice, you’re pretty much guaranteed to focus on temple construction.
I also found the power-up tech-card mechanic to be needlessly distracting, with a dozen different cards being typically available for purchase late in the game. So the game is slowed down regularly as players inspect all of the available face-up cards before making their purchases. Despite the fact each player only gets 16 turns, Tekhenu feels long—over two hours despite the box-side claim that it can be played in as little as 60 minutes. My view is that this would be a better game if the designers massively streamlined (or even eliminated) the tech cards, and maybe allowed players to trade resources with one another, so it felt less like an exercise in group solitaire.
Bottom line: If you like big euros with lots of eye candy and you’re looking for a main-course strategy game on game night, this should provide a few good plays. But if you do try it, make sure everyone reads/watches the rule beforehand, because this is an hour-long teach for new players.
Ra is an auction-based game that’s been around for more than 20 years and, IMHO, ranks as one of the most underplayed light-to-intermediate strategy games out there. It’s simple to teach, full of dramatic highs and lows, and easily plays in less than an hour. The only problem—and this is why I don’t own it—is that it’s out of print. And buying it on eBay will set you back more than US$150. But Mike owns a copy. And we managed to get it on the table several times over the week.
Ra is full of tense decisions because each auction in the game allows only one bid per player. And each bid can only be made with one of your scarce bid tiles, which are denominated in integer values from one to 16. So it isn’t the usual euro-auction experience where you bid a dollar, I bid, two, Fred bids three, and so on and so on. In Ra, you might bid a dollar, I bid five (because that’s the lowest value tile I have), and Fred doesn’t bid at all because the only tiles he has are, say, valued at two, four, and thirteen, and he doesn’t feel like blowing a thirteen-point tile on an auction pot that might be a steal at a dollar, a debatable value at five dollars, and a total ripoff at thirteen. The values of everyone’s available auction tiles are public knowledge, and so skilled players can create value for themselves by calling an auction in a way that allows them to exploit this kind of value imbalance.
Oh, and did I mention that the game allows for the possibility of one-person auctions, which take place when everyone else has used up all their auction tiles, and so it’s just you bidding against yourself? I know that sounds ridiculous, but the game mechanics embed a push-your-luck element that can punish greedy players who try to milk these things excessively. As regular players will attest, these solo auctions can supply some of the game’s most memorable turnabouts.
Excited by Ra? Well you’re in luck, because there’s a new version coming out in late 2022.
About half of this year’s Tennessee Maneuvers attendees were Advanced Squad Leader players. And we spent two days play-testing a new urban-themed ASL scenario package created by Sean Deller and Bill Cirillo. Because this is an unreleased product, I’m not sure how much I can disclose here, so I’ll just mention that I helped play-test a three-player scenario from the pack—an unusual innovation in ASL, which is almost invariably played on a one-vs.-one basis.
The historical basis of this particular scenario represents an interesting subplot from the last days of the war against Nazi Germany. It’s April 28, 1945 and Soviet forces are set to take Berlin and administer the death blow to the Nazis. So sought-after was the honour of entering Berlin in this hour of incipient victory, apparently, that some Soviet units skirmished with one another in their bid to get through the available crossings and bottlenecks. In the scenario I helped play-test, two forces, Ukrainians commanded by Georgy Zhukov and Belorussians commanded by Ivan Konev, face off against German defenders of the Anhalter Bahnhof (whose real-life 1945 ruins appear in the historical photo below). The combined Soviet forces must throw the Germans out of the train station and surrounding buildings, but also are competing with each other to see who will occupy these objectives when the battle is over. This leads to three-way combat.
The creators put a lot of work into this scenario, and I’m sure it will get a lot of enthusiastic play when released. But my honest opinion is that the ASL game system is extremely difficult to implement when you have three-way combat. This kind of multilateral dynamic simply isn’t what the ASL rules were designed for. For one thing, each player gets two defensive fire phases in between turns, which throws the whole dynamic of combat off kilter.
A wider-lens problem is that the German player can easily throw the game to either the Ukrainian or Belorussian player simply by shifting his defensive forces from one side to the other, giving one Soviet faction an easier path to fight its way into the Bahnhof. Such a shift could result from either bad judgment, accident, miscalculation, or simply a preference to let one side win over the other (this assumes, of course, that the German player has already lost hope of pulling off a victory for himself).
This kind of dynamic is a problem in many three-player games, which is why three is often identified as the most difficult number to game-design for. But it’s especially problematic in a game like ASL, where a scenario such as this could easily take 15 to 20 hours to play (despite the fact that it’s only five turns—remember that it’s three player turns per game turn). It’s one thing to get taken down by a losing-player-turned-kingmaker in, say, a two-hour game of Catan. It’s another thing entirely when it comes to an ASL scenario that might have taken you all weekend to play.
Other games I played in Tennessee included Terraforming Mars and Roll for the Galaxy—games that many of my readers will have already played, and so don’t call for much commentary. I will only mention here that I prefer TM without the Venus and Colonies expansions, but that the Prelude expansion is a good way to get the game going quicker… And also that while I enjoy Roll in all its forms, the Boardgame Arena implementation of Roll is so good that it’s kind of ruined me for the real tabletop thing. Roll is a naturally quick game that can be played online in about 10 minutes (one on one) or 15 minutes (in a group). But it gets bogged down in its bricks-and-mortar tabletop version by the need to pass the physical tile bag around during the Explore phase, and I’m not sure I know of any way of getting past that bottleneck.
I also tried my hand at a euro called Architects of the Western Kingdom, of which Sean D. is a huge fan. BGG informs us that Architects “is set at the end of the Carolingian Empire, circa 850 AD,” with “players compet[ing] to impress their King and maintain their noble status by constructing various landmarks throughout his newly appointed domain.” I can attest that (as with most games of this type) this historical conceit runs rather thin, and that this is basically a worker-placement game with medieval artwork.
As with Tekhenu, there’s a twist on the worker-placement dynamic: Whenever a large group of workers convene in any one location, players are incentivized to use a player action to basically round them all up and send them to jail—following which, the jailed players then have to use up one of their own actions to liberate them. So there is an incentive for players to try to operate below the radar, getting the resources they need without creating big clusters of workers who attract 9th-century bounty hunters.
Some of the other aspects of this euro are pretty stock—you’re recruiting “apprentices” to help you build buildings that earn you points (with both workers and buildings going into your tableau). There’s also a subplot where you can help build the collective town cathedral instead of working on your own projects—a strategy that can allow you to rack up big points in the long run (and which almost allowed me to win the game, as I was the only one building the thing, single-handedly running up the cathedral construction track to its 20 VP terminus while Steve and Sean ignored this holy project).
There’s one other game element that bears mention: Players are charted on their “prestige.” And unlike what you might think, this isn’t just an add-on VP index, but a game mechanic that can shape your strategy in real time. As your prestige points fall, you become disreputable, which sounds bad and does carry some disadvantages (you’re not allowed to participate in building the cathedral, for example, and if you end the game in disreputable territory, you can lose a lot of VPs) but also gives you discounts on a lot of expenditures (on the conceit that you’re a sleazy dealmaker who gets his or her assets and workers “off the books,” so to speak). If you have a lot of prestige, on the other hand, you pay full price for everything and you’re not allowed to use the “black market,” which is a board spot that allows you quick access to needed goods and workers that otherwise might be tricky to get through more “legitimate” methods. Strategically, the best way to manage the game is to be disreputable during the course of play, so as to get all those awesome sleazebag discounts—but then find a way to rescue your reputation by game end so you don’t pay the VP penalty.
I should also mention that when the game begins, you are assigned characters who may or may not shape your strategy in this regard. My friend Steve, for instance, was assigned “Louis,” a very disreputable fellow who was outright banned from helping with the cathedral construction, no matter how much he burnished his prestige. And there’s another character, a real Carolinigian Dudley Do-Right type, who’s never allowed to use the black market no matter how disreputable he gets.
One game that got played without my participation was Fire in the Lake, a COIN-style card-driven game that depicts the Vietnam War. This is a four-player game that I’ve played once before, and it does a (maddeningly) good job of representing the poisonous and cynical dynamic that existed among the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces on one side, and the Vietnam People’s Army and Viet Cong on the other. I guess it’s technically a wargame, but it’s highly abstracted, and the military aspect is somewhat de-emphasized in the victory conditions and game mechanics (which feature, among other things, the desire of South Vietnamese generals to extract as much cash from the Americans as possible).
I found Fire in the Lake interesting (as distinct from enjoyable) during the one occasion when I did play it—at J.R. Tracy’s place in NYC back in the pre-COVID era. But that experience was enough for me. And to be honest, I mostly remember that experience for what it taught me about why so few popular boardgames have been produced with a Vietnam War theme. Some historical periods are difficult to capture in a wargame, and this definitely seems to be one of them.
Pax Porfiriana is another example of a game that attempts to game-ify irregular warfare in a developing country—in this case, the internal Mexican struggles among the various factions seeking to rule the country following the demise of long-serving strongman Porfirio Díaz in the late 19th and early 20th century. Unlike Fire in the Lake, this one entirely dispatches with the need for a map, and simply tracks each player’s progress through their card tableau—with each card representing the various mines, banks, trade unions, ranches, militias, U.S. businesses etc. that you’ve managed to force, bribe, or inveigle into your sphere of influence.
This game follows many of the same game mechanics that Phil Eklund game fans will know and love from Pax Renaissance and Pax Pamir. For those interested, I gave a fuller description of the game in my dispatch from 2021. In this year’s playing, I assumed the role of Mexican plutocrat and politician Venustiano Carranza. And I carved a path to victory with a complex mix of businesses (spanning bullfighting rings to metallurgical processing), co-opted U.S. military detachments, banks, and those gullible stooges at the Hearst Newspapers who did my propaganda bidding.
The means I used were far from savoury. But surely Mexico will prosper now that the Primer Jefe can impose a sensible constitutional blueprint upon the post-Porfiriato era.
Readers who follow me on social media may know that I’ve been developing an interest in the Russian Civil War. And it was on this basis that I’ve been trying to get my head around Triumph of Chaos, an extremely complicated two-player wargame that attempts to model the mind-bending conflict between the Reds (i.e. communists) and Whites (the umbrella term used for anti-communists) that played out amid the ashes, famines, and general ethnic and class-based bloodletting that marked the entire swathe of real estate between Poland and Vladivostok from 1917 to the early 1920s.
The setup for this game is a huge project in and of itself, since you have to organize force pools not only for Reds and Whites, but also for the 20-odd other nations and factions that participated in the conflict. In some cases, this means bordering countries such as Finland and Japan. But in other cases, it means sub-national forces: Ukraine, for instance, is divided into three independent factions: rump Ukraine, the southern anarchist redoubt controlled by legendary rebel Nestor Makhno, and the western portion (including Lviv) lorded over by Polish forces during much of the conflict. Like the conflict itself, the whole game can feel like a mess. And even the repeatedly rewritten rulebook does an uneven job of explaining it all. In fact, the only way that Michael H. and I were able to make sense of the whole thing was by reference to a three-page standalone order-of-operations cheat sheet prepared by Steve P. (which I can send to interested readers looking to try this monster).
I had arrived at Michael’s house early to set this thing up and play it. But Michael and I (playing White and Red respectively) didn’t finish the game, because by the time we’d played into late 1918, other Tennessee Maneuvers participants started to arrive, and few of them were interested in hearing about (much less observing) my various strategies for protecting Tsaritsyn and Samara from White capture, preventing the western powers from supporting a Baltic incursion into Petrograd, or getting an edge on the Poles in advance of the upcoming Polish-Russian war (a massive conflagration in and of itself that often gets unfairly lumped into the Russian Civil War, as it does in this game).
Before giving up the game, however, there was at least one moment of genuine excitement, when I tried to send some of my Transcaucasian communist minions through the wilderness of southern Kuban to capture Novorossiysk and surrounding ports, with the aim of cutting the whites off from their imperial supply train coming up through the Sebastopol area. Alas, a white propaganda offensive caused my Astrakhani legion to change sides, and then that army began marching east!
That’s when I called it a day. Chaos had indeed triumphed.