Black Ops: Trouble With the Guards

One thing about "Black Ops" that still gives me pause is the concept of 'raising the alarm'.  In one sense the game has dual-states; either the defenders are unaware of intruders or they are not.  Unless individuals become aware, and then the question arises of what it takes to raise the alert for everyone.  My understanding is that the first guy to be alerted can wake the leader, who then moves about unaware of threats unless he passes an observation check.

That leaves a lot of activations in play where the attackers can set up a nice little ambush.  Three-quarters of the defenders are stuck in their house or off-board.  It tilts things really heavily in favor of the the attackers, and it is only when you have an objective buried deep inside a building or the attackers have the poor luck to find their objective on the last marker on the board that things balance out.

Which they might in the long run, but on the short run it can make for some seriously short games.

But then, I guess that requires a lot of luck on the part of the attackers, and is perfectly in keeping with the source material.

The Littlest Big Igloo

Back in the day, at the height of the Cold War, cloak and dagger battles were deadly earnest affairs, with only the rare example of a Get Smart to lighten the mood.  Today is no different, with the added frisson of a clandestine asymmetric war waged by entrenched forces against a beleaguered and largely leaderless resistance.  Into such weighty matters and ray of humor must shine, and here we have my tongue-in-cheek campaign wherein the forces of CONTROL and KAOS are played by Hapless Control Freaks and a Well Meaning but Poorly Led Herd of Cats.  You can decide which is which for yourself.

Here, we have the Black Hats infiltrating a small, rural airport on the hunt for Very Important Financial records that take the form of rare Pokemon cards.  Black Ops involves more status tokens on the board than I really like, but they speed play and I'm less inclined to obsess over "visual appeal is everything" than in my younger years.

The leader of the Black Hats, Very Special Agent Ray Getard, takes aim at an airport guard from the corner of a field office.  The resin terrain came from GameCraft Miniatures and they offer a set of three different models for $16.00.  Not a bad price for the kind of terrain you can drop into a variety of settings.  They work for everything from 1950s Africa through modern, post-apocalypse, and well into the future.

And here's a group shot of our plucky resistance.  The guy in the cowboy hat is charismatic leader Ron Wildcard, and for the first time in a short stealth-campaign, he has managed to get his hands on not just an RPG, but a guy who knows how to use it without blowing off his own head.

The campaign has really helped maintain my interest in this ruleset, which I've discussed at length elsewhere.  Just good stuff, man.
 

Black Ops: Extraordinary Rendition

Been breaking out the old Black Ops for a bit of the one-two lately.  The African militias work great as disgruntled Americans, and now we can run some domestic, near-future wargaming on the streets of Bloody America.

Rebel Minis makes a fine selection of modern figures, suitable for everything from 1980's banana republic fighting in South America to 2020s banana Republic fighting in North America.

It's a card driven system that works really well.  It feels strange to play a full game of four turns that contains so much back and forth.  In this scenario the cops are escorting a political prisoner from a small backwater airport to a waiting off-site transport vehicle when they are ambushed by Team Red Hat.

Team Red Hat has a slight edge in numbers and motivation, which make up for a lack of training and overall competence.  The above shot was taken moments after the balloon went up - yellow tokens represent noise counters that will surely alert the SWAT Team Leader that it just got real, yo.

And finally, for a last bit of eye candy, a hidden sniper opens up from the hilltop just next to the escape vehicle, to good effect.  The green ship indicates that he was hidden at the time he took his shot.

A fun game, easy to film, and just about the only real world satire you'll see outside of a webcomic these days.  Look for it on the Joy of Wargaming this week.

Black Ops: Octopod Escape



In a Black Ops battle featuring two newly painted forces, a small Octopod task force has been discovered operating deep inside Prang!* territory.  The 12 man group of conscripts including one leader (Ace) and one RPG toting heavy (for a total of 54 points) have regrouped inside a small park.  Meanwhile, a 9 man group of Prang! featuring a leader (Ace), two GPMG toting heavies, and six troopers (for a total of 73 points) have boxed them in, and look to wipe them out. 

 

Shortly after the start of hostilities, as evidenced by one octo down.

The octopod forces win by exiting half their number off board by the end of turn 5, if they fail to do so, the Prang! mission will succeed.

 

The Prang! drew the bulk of the early cards, giving them a chance to move into position and set up a few test shots.

The general flow of battle with the octopods sprinting northwest,
while the Prang! slowly work around to get some decent fire lanes open.

But the mid-deck cards come up all octopod, and with escape just four moves away, they waste no time running to the northwest.

A three man fire team tries to cut off escape with a long,
and mostly clear fire lane, but can't get their heavy guns
set up in time.

The Prang edges around, plinking away where they could, and inflicting a few casualties along the way.  They had really hoped to draw the cards that would give them held actions, but it wasn't meant to be.

Taking cover behind parked cars and advertisements.

Leading the way as a good leader does, the octopod Ace was the first octo off the board.  It might have been better to stay behind and issue orders to move the troopers along faster, but at 14 points, the leader model represented almost half the points needed for victory. 

Follow me!

The Prang! did manage to set up a few decent shots near the edge of the battlefield, but opted for kill shots instead of suppression shots.  The difficulty of firing on the move at figures behind cover proved too much for the Prang!, who were only able to knock out five of the low cost troopers.

Even setting up crossfire lanes doesn't do much good
when the cards don't give you a chance to
hold fire for effect.

In the end, the octopods managed to clear 34 points worth of models off board by the end of turn 2.

Winning like the British at Dunkirk

Take home lessons: 

1. When the game calls for no more than 50 points for one side, don't give that side an extra 4 thinking, "what difference does it make"?  It makes a difference.  Taking out the one extra trooper still gives the octopods 30 out of 50 points, but a lot of those fallen figures took a bullet for the big point leader and heavy.  If one of those models had fallen, the Prang! would have eked out a close victory.
2. The rule that turns a 7+ to hit into a 6+ at the cost of half the dice works really well.  This rule came up a lot in this game, and allowed for massive volleys at long range to have a limited effect.  You could still risk those shots, but the effects were lessened.
3. Overwatch and suppression are your best friends when trying to keep models from sprinting for the sideline.  In retrospect, the Prang! should have spent a lot more ammo on suppression fire.  The goal is to kill, but by slowing the octopods down - and forcing moves into cover and away from the goal line, the Prang! could have bought enough time to get everyprang into position, and that would have meant a lot more shooting with fewer penalties in the latter stages of the game.

 * I don't know why, there's something about the Prang! that just makes me want to add an exclamation point to the end of the word.  Maybe it's onomatopoeia-esque nature of the word.  Whatever, get used to seeing it written that way around these parts.

Shrodinger's To Hit Roll

Continuing on from yesterday's discussion on suppressing fire in Black Ops, but the same sort of thing happens in a number of wargames where the condition of a model is left ambiguous until that model next activates.

So there you are, staring at the table where your opponent has just laid down a barrage of suppression fire on the fire team that represents the tip of your spear.  Four hits total, which results in your squad...well, being suppressed.

In Black Ops you have a couple of choices.  You can take the fire, which means those suppression markers become actual hits - roll to wound.  You can pull back into the nearest cover directly away from the shooter, which means those markers just disappear.  Or you can do nothing until that fire team's next activation.  If they do nothing, the markers disappear.  That last choice effectively results in that fire team losing a turn.

Here's where it gets interesting.  The fire team doesn't have to choose which one they do until their next activation.  Given that this is a card driven activation system, that could be a while.  The rest of your platoon could be off running about, shooting up the place, tossing grenades, and generally having a grand old time as the tip of your spear sits there, hovering in that not-quite-hit-not-quite-run-off state.

At least until their card comes up and they have to make a decision.  Then everything snaps back into focus as we open the box and find out whether the cat is dead, suppressed or run off.  It's like a mini cliffhanger built right into the middle of the game.

Well written, Guy.

Shooting Around Corners in Black Ops

When somebody uses suppression fire at my table,
they always announce it like this.

Osprey's Black Ops uses a card driven activation system.  It's a randomized IGOUGO system broken up by held actions, orders, and suppression fire.  As can be imagined, suppressing fire is more likely to have an effect, but less likely to cause casualties.  Each hit forces the target to choose one of three bad options: do nothing for the next activation, duck back into cover, or take the hit and make a wound roll.

Where it gets interesting, is that suppression fire can be targeted at a visible model...or at a point on the ground.  The suppression markers sit there like a big fat landmine daring the opponent to move anywhere within three inches of the area being suppressed.  It's a great way to force your opponent to make sub-optimal choices.  If you need that squad to get across the street, you're going to have to risk the hits.

The photo on the right shows just such a situation.  The three green beads represent three suppression 'hits' laid down by the hazmat suit's opponent.  Since the hazmat guys cannot be seen, they cannot be targeted, but the opposing heavy can still force them to keep their heads down.  If they move out from behind the corner, they will be exposed to that gunfire.

Where it gets interesting is when just one of those hazmat models is visible to the shooter.  In Black Ops hits are spread around the squad in equal numbers, meaning that the shooter is actually targeting all three models, even though only one can be seen.  That sounds crazy until you think about it for a bit.

This tabletop pretend gunfight is a simulation of a crazy simultaneous charlie foxtrot.  Although our little dudes move specific distances in discrete little hops and jumps one after another, that's just a crude representation of the swirling and fluid chaos of battle.  So what really happens in a case like that is the squad dashing up to the corner, taking a couple steps out into the road, and then being forced to duck back into cover.  Maybe they make it in time, maybe they take a few hits.  Either way, the place they end their movement isn't always indicative of a snapshot in time, but like the location of an electron around an atomic nucleus, their exact position at any given moment is...somewhere in or around a general point centered on this model.

Quantum wargaming, people.

You think that's something? Wait for tomorrow's post on Shrodinger's To Hit Roll.

Black Ops, Trial Run

In northern corner, the crew of the G.S.S. Myconis, four hard charging Special Forces.

Crew of the SS Myconis, from left to right, a specialist,
heavy, trooper, and ace.

In the southern corner, a dozen conscripts working for Hazmat Security, Inc.

An ace, a heavy, and ten troopers.

Since this was just a trial run, we opted for an asymmetric, stand-up fight between a small special force of four, and a dozen conscripts.  Nothing fancy, just two 50 point forces, line 'em up, and shoot.  The battle wound up being a Special Forces defense of the lone two-story building on the table.

Black Ops, Around the Horn

Welcome to another clickbait article.  This one has a lot less weird tricks and local single moms and a lot more Black Ops.  With the rules out for less than a month, there aren't a whole lot of actual play posts around the web just yet - I haven't written any up yet myself - so here's your old pal Warren's handy finger pointing to a couple:

• Black Ops rules review and playtest (SP Project): Whilst I attended the recent Fiasco show (great to meet up with a few people but the show wasn’t great- not a good look when a third of your demo/ participation tables are no shows…) I picked up a few bits including the new Black Ops rules from Osprey. As a basic skirmish game the rules work well enough, not better or worse than other comparable sets really though I would have preferred a bit more friction in the activation system. Here the rules really came into their own with wandering guards and noise token which had to be minimised by the raiding player to avoid raising the alarm- though I’d like to see the noise list extended.

• Black Ops Trial Game (Stefano V): Yesterday night we played our first Black Ops game. We found it quite interesting and we will play it again. The scenario chosen was a stealth mission, assassination over the Terminal map. The target started from the landed helicopter and and to travel across the table to exit on opposite corner.

• Need to know basis: Black Ops reviewed (Pijlie's Wargames Blog): The best thing that can happen to a wargaming fanboy is to get hold of a new ruleset prior to publication. This happened to me with Black Ops, the coming new release by Osprey Publishing. Unfortunately it took me several weeks to find the time to play it, as I eventually did at Crisis in Antwerp. So I completely blew my scoop! Despite of that, the game is definitely worth a review.

And here are a couple of resources for the game:

• Get your own copy (aka let me find that on Amazon for you)
• A PDF army roster
• An excel roster sheet

Black Ops Counter-Intuitiveness

Apparently I'm not the only one having a hard time wrapping his head around a couple of quirks of the Black Ops system.  Over on the Lead Adventure Forums asked a question that had bothered me on my first reading as well.

In Black Ops your model stats are target numbers, and all modifiers are written as modifiers to the target number, not to the die roll.  So instead of needing a 4+ to hit your target and subtracting one from the roll if the target is in cover, you add one to the target number.  These are just two different ways of saying the same thing, and long term gamers should have no trouble converting on the fly.  For you D&D types out there it directly translates to the ascending vs. descending AC situation.  It's really not a big deal...

There were two moments in my first read-through that gave me pause.  In both cases, I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that a Tough roll was easier (4+) to make than a Normal roll (5+).  In both cases, the problem stems from confusion about the face that the word "Tough" modifies the model, not the roll.

When it comes to observation rolls, it is the defender that rolls the die.  When the model makes himself Tough to notice (i.e. by using smoke, poor lighting, or cover) the target number goes down. I read that thinking, "Wait, the Tough observation (4+) is easier than the Normal observation (5+)?"  To which the response was, "Yes, the model has made it harder to be observed, so he needs to roll against a lower number."

The same thing applies when it comes to wound saves, the defender rolls the die.  In this case, the term that appears in the modifiers table is also Tough, but again that word modifies the model itself and not the roll.  A model that is Tough will have an easier time surviving a wound (4+) than a model who is not (5+).

It is really easy when you think about it that way.  You just have to shift your perspective a little bit to get your head around it.

Full thread linked here.

Black Ops: A Capsule Review

Is that what you call it when you write up a review of a game where you've only read the rules?  You'll get a proper review after we've had a chance to take these bad boys for a test-drive.

These rules are great.  in just about every sense they hit the sweet spot between extremes.  Guy has somehow managed to put together a rule set that straddles a number of lines in ways that feel familiar, but fresh and new.  Not only that, but he has put together a modern day skirmish that manages to give you all the options you need without bogging the game down in minutiae.

The basics of the game consist of a card driven initiative system and a model stat line that describes each figure or fire team's abilities.

Your figures break down into four different types of figures: heroes, specialists like hackers and heavy weapons types, standard mooks, and civilians.  Any old deck of cards can serve as your intiative deck with the four figure types each assigned a face card, and jokers thrown in to add that piquant flavor of unpredictability.  Your leaders can use their card to issue orders to specialists and mooks, and figures can forgo their activation to go on overwatch.  Overwatch works as an interrupt, just like most other wargames, but facing is all important for who figures can interrupt.

The stat line consists of the four standard stats for moving, fighting, morale, and toughness, with weapons and special equipment bolted on.  A typical shooty combat consists of a roll to hit and a roll to save with cover and concealment factored into the saving roll.  A typical melee consists of a dice off with both figures rolling against their melee skill.  If your dude makes his roll and the other guy doesn't, then you win.  If you both fail, nothing happens.  If you both succeed, whoever has the better melee weapon hits.  If you can get your little man to charge a model in the back, he doesn't get to defend.

That last bit can play a crucial role in stealth missions, the real raison d'etre for this ruleset.  While the standard game feels like a stripped down skirmish game, and it can certainly be played that way, it is clear that a number of critical design choices were made to enhance the play of stealth incursion missions.  The melee system in particular is designed to allow for taking out sentries in a single, silent attack, but only if you can get the drop on him.

The stealth rules incorporate blind markers, semi-random sentry movement, and a sort of event driven countdown timer.  As the infiltrators move around, take out guards, and approach their goal, they will inevitably make noise.  Each event results in a noise counter that attracts nearby guards and has the potential to alert the defender's heroes and specialists.  Too many noise counters, or one poorly aimed sniper shot on a guard, and the alert will be sounded, triggering the activation of the hero and the arrival of reinforcements.

Taken alone, nothing in this ruleset is particularly innovative, but the way that Guy Bowers has integrated everything is pretty well seamless.  Everything fits together in a way that is easy to understand, builds on each other, and fits together like one single unified system.  All too often the infiltration missions feel like a bolted on separate game that is played before the knock-down drag-out battle.  In Black Ops the stealth mission feels like an integral part of the battle.  That is no small accomplishment.

The game also includes six scenarios, a brief paragraph on using near-future tech, and the obligatory rules for force construction.  A stand up fight will consist of 12-20 models per side, with infiltration missions having 3-5 covert ops up against 10-12 mooks and 3-5 heroes and specialists.  You will need plenty of terrain to get the most out of these rules, though.  As with any modern wargame, wide open spaces will make for a short and bloody fight, and a shorter and even bloodier black op.

Other positives include clear, concise rules written for us old timers that have been through the ringer before.  A first time wargamer could probably suss out how these games are played using this ruleset, but he would have to make a few leaps that experiences gamers know intuitively.  While not terribly complicated, there are better introductory games out there for first timers.  As a non-first timer, I was glad not to have to wade through yet another wargaming primer.

On a related issue the book is easy on the eyes both in the artistic sense and the legibility sense.  The artwork, both painted works like the cover and examples of miniatures in play, is attractive, inspirational, and present in just the right quantities.  The text and tables are clear print on backgrounds uncluttered by noisy graphics.  A definite bonus for us grognards with failing eyesight.  Combine that with the terse conversational writing style, and this book is just plain easy to pick up, read, and understand.