Stronghold-An AT/Euro Worker Placement Game?

[url=http://http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/45986]http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/45986[/url]

Thinking: a Battle of Helm's Deep-like game without minis but with wooden cubes? Not much info but I'm interested to see how this develops.

Are you kidding? It has wooden cubes AND victory points? aaaaagh! Can't you just see the "real life" implications of this?

"Wallace, take your men, see if you can get around their right flank and get us four victory points. Davis, your squad lays down suppression fire in support. If any of you are in danger of any losing victory points, however... I want you all to pull back immediately."

Or next... maybe we'll get a new "Euro" submarine game:

"Get me 1MC. This is the Captain. I have the deck and the conn. Maneuvering; Dive. 10 degrees down bubble. Angle trim to 0-1-5 on the bow plane. Right full rudder. Come to course 1-niner-5 smartly; full reciprocal of torpedo bearing. Make your final depth 3-5-0 feet, and make turns for one half standard.

Fire control; flood stern tubes 3 and 4. Load with cube torpedos and open the bowcaps. Plot a firing solution to target and prepare to fire for 2 victory points, on my mark."

Ryan B. wrote:

Are you kidding? It has wooden cubes AND victory points? aaaaagh! Can't you just see the "real life" implications of this?

"Wallace, take your men, see if you can get around their right flank and get us four victory points. Davis, your squad lays down suppression fire in support. If any of you are in danger of any losing victory points, however... I want you all to pull back immediately."

Or next... maybe we'll get a new "Euro" submarine game:

"Get me 1MC. This is the Captain. I have the deck and the conn. Maneuvering; Dive. 10 degrees down bubble. Angle trim to 0-1-5 on the bow plane. Right full rudder. Come to course 1-niner-5 smartly; full reciprocal of torpedo bearing. Make your final depth 3-5-0 feet, and make turns for one half standard.

Fire control; flood stern tubes 3 and 4. Load with cube torpedos and open the bowcaps. Plot a firing solution to target and prepare to fire for 2 victory points, on my mark."

You ever play Commands & Colors: Ancients? Wooden blocks (not cubes, but close) and victory "banners". Admit it, if they used plastic armies instead of wooden blocks and called them "objectives" instead of "victory points", there would be no problem.

I found this response to it having cubes rather sad:-
Good news ,don´t want any plastic or detailed miniatures ,because they work in the complete other direction ,making the game less realistic in my eyes!

But a two-player siege game that uses VPs - what's the feckkin' point of that??!!!???!!!

Not all this again. VP do not automatically equal boring, themeless drivel.

VP *can* be used effectively, just like any other mechanic to be enjoyable for the AT crowd. C'mon - two great AT games like Twilight Imperium and Nexus Ops use them quite well.

Wooden cubes? Eh - not my favorite, but I really love Wallenstein.

Ska_baron wrote:

Not all this again. VP do not automatically equal boring, themeless drivel.

VP *can* be used effectively, just like any other mechanic to be enjoyable for the AT crowd. C'mon - two great AT games like Twilight Imperium and Nexus Ops use them quite well.

Wooden cubes? Eh - not my favorite, but I really love Wallenstein.

I'm definitely not slamming wooden cubes or victory points. If it truly is a Worker Placement game, then I think that the theme of a siege would be far an above more appealing to me and my gaming choices than building a castle or running a farm.

I thought Agricola was a good game but how awesome would it be to play a game where your "actions" could be used to fuck with people's shit. This could very well be a WP game for ATers. Again as I originally stated I'm fascinated to see how this develops.

Ska_baron wrote:

two great AT games like Twilight Imperium and Nexus Ops use them quite well.

Starcraft, Game of Thrones, Warrior Knights, Memoir'44/Battlelore/C&C:A, Conflict of Heroes, Twilight Struggle, Cosmic Encounter (arguably),...

No argument there.

Yeah, sorry - mostly aimed at Ryan B and Notahandle I guess.

And thanks for the additional games clockwirk - I just named the first ones that popped into my mind.

And I agree that WP as a mechanic seems like it'd go pretty well to a siege theme.

Ska_baron wrote:
" Not all this again. VP do not automatically equal boring, themeless drivel."
I didn't say they were, I said they're pointless for this. It's pretty obvious who's won, either they got in or they didn't.

SIEGE OF JERUSALEM is a siege game with victory points. I don't have anything against VPs, they only have to be implemented meaningfully. I just forgot the rest of what I wanted to write.

The game looks really cool, you guys need to get over the anti-VP, anti-cube part. I think this is going to be a good Euro. It's the guy that did NEUROSHIMA HEX, so it's got a promising pedigree at least.

The VP thing makes perfect sense for a siege game. If one side manages to incur enough VPs, they either break the siege or cause a surrender or overrun. Blow up a wall, 5vp. Archers take down the whole battering ram crew, 3vp. Enough VPs and you win. That makes sense to me on a thematic level.

What's more, the worker placement thing actually works. You've got X number of defenders or attackers, and you can assign them to different positions. Boiling oil, trebuchets, archers, door-bracers, whatever. If you lose guys throughout the course of the game, that will make the decisions tougher.

I think it looks cool...so far, it's the only Essen title I'm really interested in.

BTW, Notty, how dare you say all that terrible stuff about VPs. VPs have always spoken very highly of you.

Michael Barnes wrote:

What's more, the worker placement thing actually works. You've got X number of defenders or attackers, and you can assign them to different positions. Boiling oil, trebuchets, archers, door-bracers, whatever. If you lose guys throughout the course of the game, that will make the decisions tougher.

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to get at.

It would be cool if you had an action that was delayed a turn or would need additional workers to activate it but, once the requirement was met it would do some crazy damage.

You should check out the Designer Diaries on BGN

Designer Diary 1

Designer Diary 2

The inspiration comes from a famous WWII battle where a few Polish soldiers held off a lot of Germans for a real long time (sorry I'm skimpy on the details, I'm no WWII historian).

For me victory points make sense in a siege setting. But I always think they do in war oriented games because there is more to war than just killing all the other dudes on the map.