The Conservative Zone

In case you didn't know it, Mike and I get together every Wednesday and play Epic:Armageddon, a 6mm scale wargame. You can do a search on the Zone for Epic and see all of the posts that I have done on the subject.

Anyway, Mike has picked up the book The Art of Maneuver and it has improved his game markedly. His strategies are more thought out and "crisper" in execution. Then he loaned me his Library copy. So now I am picking up all of the same tips and hints he has been using on me recently.

I bring this book up because he has gotten a lot more confident of his game since reading it and has been trying "Mind Fu" or trying to psych me out before the game ever begins. Little does he know I have no mind to psych out ;-). Anyway, armed with only the first 67 pages of the book, I went into our battle today. I did Mind Fu right back at him, not by psyching him out, but be concentrating on his weakness and applying it against him.

Our first game lasted a grand total of 15 minutes. My changing tactics on him caught him and his forces flat-footed. His Space Marines had no anti-air weapons, and I had 6 Fighter-Bombers and a Lander roaming the air with impunity. I used my air units first, before he could do almost anything, and I destroyed one unit and put serious hurt on another. Seeing that I had outclassed him, Mike realized that he was beaten before the battle had been truly joined. He capitulated and asked to tweak his list. I agreed.

In the second game, things fell into place according to my plans. I had a total of 4 Ork Warbands, two mounted in Battlewagons and two on foot, garrisoned in the middle of the board. I left the foot Warbands right where he could not ignore them and let him throw his forces at the foot Warbands. While he was busy advancing his forces into my retreating foot Warbands, my mechanized Warbands were pulling off a classic double envelopment maneuver. I also ignored his Warhound Titan roaming the board, realizing that with no Terminators he would be sprinting that Titan towards my Blitzkrieg objective. I let him have it, because by the time the Titan had got there, I had killed one of his Devastator squads, giving me a balancing point for Break Their Spirit.

So by the end of the third turn, He held my Blitzkrieg, but I had BTS and was one stand away from getting his Blitzkrieg. His Titan was rendered ineffective, because it could not leave the Blitzkrieg (he would lose his battle point) and all of my units were out of his range. He capitulated again, knowing that there was nothing he could do to protect his Blitzkrieg. I would have won in the next turn 2-1.

So my Orks received not one, but two victories tonight! I am most pleased that I have finally won with them. I am also pleased in the fact that Mike is getting better as well. I stuck around and let him play a third game, which he handily won against another friend.

If you don't play, you should try some kind of wargame. It helps you think dynamically. It teaches critical thinking skills, prioritizing of targets and with dice, unlike chess, you can sometimes lose when you are on top. Mike and I still talk about the situation several games ago where he worked very hard to set his units up in the proper position, set up my units for a Close Combat attack by putting several blast markers on them, then attacking. The bad news is, even with an advantage on the roll, he lost the roll-off, which meant his unit withdrew, broken. That precipitated the crumbling of the entire flank. He did manage to still win the game, but that lost flank made it a lot harder for him to do so.

I like dice based wargames over Chess because in Chess, the Pawn will always take the Queen if she ends up in one of his attack squares. In dice based wargames, it is highly unlikely that the Pawn takes the Queen. But if you get lucky enough, you can pull it off, to the squeals of delight and howls of frustration that a dice roll like that can cause.

Thanks for a great game Mike. I promise to read the rest of the book by next week. Let's see how well my Mind Fu works on you. ;-)