Strike for Berlin has struck

Yesterday I got an entirely-too-large-for-the-purpose box from Coolstuff Inc., containing my designer copies of Strike for Berlin (along with a year’s worth of styrofoam packing peanuts – unfortunately not the edible kind).

Very nice physical presentation; quality map and counters by John Cooper; good diecutting and the maps match up if anyone wants to play the Link Game; even some interesting articles in the magazine. The rules are bound into the back section of the magazine and you cannot remove them; you should probably make copies of the more useful charts.

One thing they did not have room for was an expanded and annotated Sequence of Play that I have taken to writing for my games, as a way of ushering players through a turn until they get used to the sequence. So here it is:

S4B exp sequence

Thanks, hope you enjoy the game!

And if you haven’t had a chance yet, buy it here: https://flyingpiggames.com/products/yaah-magazine-issue-11

Brian

Chile ’73: errata, supplements, replacements

“Gang aft agley.” Getting a bit tired of this, though…

Regrettably, there were a number of production errors and unsolicited additions and changes to the rules and components of Chile ’73. Most of them are rather minor on their own but taken all together, detract quite a bit from what people seem to think is an interesting design.

Tiny Battle has moved to address and correct most of these errors, and remove the changes (which only introduced further confusion in the game) in the print-and-play version available at wargamevault.com. But when I received my physical designer copies after they were mailed to me on April 20, they still contained all of the errata that I had brought to Tiny Battle’s attention as soon as I saw the first PnP version, on March 3.

Tiny Battle will do something about this; they usually do. So far they have emailed what buyers of the physical version they had addresses for with a link to get a free copy of the PnP version, so they can print out the corrected rules and assemble the corrected counters for themselves.

Not everyone is going to want to, or be able to, do this, and there are other customers out there who would never have received that link at all. Which means I am going to be answering errata questions about this game that may or may not have been addressed, for some time. It all counts as “game support” but I would really rather be doing other things, like making new games, instead of answering for or about someone else’s mistakes.

So, here is the file for all the Chile ’73 errata that I have found or have been brought to my attention, as well as some clarifications.

Consolidated Errata for CHILE 73 10jan

(as of January 10, 2020)

Also, here is an expanded sequence of play to use as a player aid to prompt you through the game – something I included in my submission but which they couldn’t fit into the rules booklet.

CL73 expanded sequence 20mar

Oh, and some final points, if you do make a set of the PnP counters:

In the game I submitted, all of the unit Control Chits were the same colour on the back. I just left them white. This was so that when you drew them out of the Control Pool no one could tell what Faction of unit (Civilian, Paramilitary or Military) you were picking and choosing – just that when you took one in and discarded an Infiltrate chit at the same time, the unit you took was not of your faction or you did not have the faction leader (or you could just have been faking people out).

This gave more depth to the pre-Coup phase, so people would have more incentive to play Investigate chits on other players, or trying to make deals with others to sound them out for what faction they were. Colouring the backs of the unit Control Chits by their faction (which TBP’s artist did for some reason) removes that mystery, and makes it obvious pretty quickly who is what faction…

Again, like the other counter errata, this does not make the game unplayable. But those of you who are making up your counters with the free PnP download might want to make this change when you are pasting up the counters.

Also, it would be a good idea to print the counters out at a smaller size than 1″ square, and print the map out larger if you can. TBP’s doubling the area of each counter (from 5/8″ to 1″) but leaving the map at 11×17″ results in several map areas where only one stack of units can comfortably fit.

Here is a set of counters that I made that both make the above correction and are adequately sized: please download them and print them out.

Chile73ctrs11

Chile ’73: review at Paxsims

Over at the redoubtable Paxsims blog, Rex Brynen and students try Chile ’73 and find they like it!

I’m not sure I would ever use it to teach about Latin American history. It is, however, a terrific design with very different pre- and post-phase phases, and it does get at the uncertainties and strategic considerations characteristics of successful and unsuccessful military takeovers.

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/review-chile-73

“As you know, Bob,” Chile 73 is a historically-themed version of my multi-player, hidden-agenda and -information game Palace Coup, which is itself an extensive re-do of Power Play, one of the very first games I designed… back in 1991. But the basic concept of very different pre-coup and coup phases was there from the beginning. And it joins the very small group of games that deal with the coup d’etat:

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/gaming-military-coups/

Rex is certainly right, I would not ever use this to teach about Latin American history either. Almost all coups are very unbalanced affairs, by design, and succeed or fail in a matter of hours.

In Chile 73 game terms the actual coup of 9/11/73 in Santiago would see about a dozen Army units including at least one Tactical air unit,  plus one or two Paramilitary units, sitting in different objective areas while Allende and the GAP (his personal bodyguard) are in the Palace. Whoosh, one big attack backed up by the Tac air and the defenders are eliminated.  This  doesn’t make much of a game, which is why we try to make something interesting of the pre-coup phase.