The US 40th Infantry Division (headquartered in California but responsible for National Guard units from Nebraska to Guam) is becoming the centre for development of training and doctrine in urban operations. Last summer they ran the first serial of the Urban Warfare Planners course (More on the Urban Warfare Planners Course) and will do it again in July 2022.
This new webpage is a great resource for manuals, case studies, links to other resources, and yes even a page for civilian market wargames on urban combat (District Commander: Maracas gets a look in, and there’s more to come).
Here and now: a FAQ-so-far, together with collected errata, clarifications and some comments on play on the DC system and the three modules released. Also posted to Boardgamegeek under the DC: Maracas module page and on the Free Games page.
Thanks to James Buckley for his help and editing! James has also written a longer, joined-up example of play for the Maracas module on Boardgamegeek.com for people who want a bit more demonstration on how to put missions together.
It needs a few people to work it and check it over for errors or bugs, so this may not be the final version, but there is the page to find it when it is.
Thanks so much for your work Trevor!
(Honestly, I have tried off and on for the past few weeks to finally get it together to understand Vassal and Tabletop Simulator, and both have thoroughly defeated me except for the simplest things. I did make a functioning version of Guerrilla Checkers on TTS, but have no idea how to distribute it now.)
Over in Youtubeland, Andy Mesa posts two videos about getting to know District Commander Maracas. They set up a scenario and play through one turn of the game, so you can hear a lot of explanation of the game’s mechanics. They are new to the game, so it took a little while.
Thanks for doing this guys!
One thing that one of the players mentioned (sorry, I am not sure which one was Andy) was that they would have been a lot happier if the Insurgent counters (which spend much of their time face down) had been on blocks instead, so as to not have to be flipping them up to check them all the time. It’s true that this would have been great, but Hollandspiele is simply unable to source and mail games with blocks economically. Mighty Boards was able to do this with Nights of Fire of course, and they look great, but as a European company with higher margins they could do this without another thought.
It’s no great task to get a printout of the counter sheet onto a sticker sheet and sticker up a bunch of blank wooden blocks. Except that you have to make that sticker sheet, and have some wooden blocks lying around that you know you’re not going to use for anything else.
Another workaround is to get something you can use as counter clips, plastic bases that clamp on to the bottom of a counter so they can stand up. These exist and are available, because I’ve seen them in games like Battletech and even thrifted games, from which I’ve gleaned a bag or two. The Game Crafter makes these in different colours, at 19 cents or less each… and for a game like District Commander you would not need more than 50 of them at a given time, generally.
Another even cheaper way to do it would be to take one of the plastic clips that hold reports together (I’m having real trouble with vocabulary today), in a width that would let it stand up, and cut it into pieces to fit the counters… I tried this but it wasn’t the best solution.
The problem with this, though, just as it would be with wooden blocks is that missions in this game are performed by stacks of units… so you would have to be quite careful about how you grouped these together within each area, to make it obvious what is part of what stack.
Over at his site bigboardgaming, Kevin Sharp starts in on a game of District Commander Maracas, described in a fanciful narrative of the Economic Freedom Coalition striking back against the despotic rule of General Fernando Herra Cortez-Gutierrez.
“General, power and water to Bella Liana have been impacted. We suspect sabotage of our infrastructure. People are demonstrating at police stations and asking how this could happen with so many soldiers on the streets.”
GET IT NOW for $45.00, ’cause it will be $50.00 later.
I’m withdrawing the Maracas module from my free Print and Play selection, but I will be replacing it with another. Other modules will be published in due course by Hollandspiele but I still want to leave up a District Commander module with the core rules, so that people can try the system for free.
So which module should I put up next?
Help me decide!
I can’t have a poll with this thing unless I get an account with some other creepy sounding company, so I put one up over on Boardgamegeek:
brtrain 
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