Political Tracking update...

Andrew Tannenbaum's excellent US political tracking site is back up. Check it out.

This second, it looks like the Senate ends up divided right down the middle (mmm, vice presidential tie-breaks), and the House in practically the same state.

People of the book

This is a really beautiful piece from the LA Times, ganked from kjc007.

Edit: oops. URL fixed.

This likes a good place for a flag...

I played War of the Ring Sunday night with lonesomepolecat. It was the second time I'd played, and we were all rather tired when we started, so I suggested he play the Shadow player, since a naive strategy for Sauron and Saruman is fairly simple: Overrun the free peoples, who are not yet at war and have many fewer forces, and ignore the Ring for the most part. We played the intro game, which is intended primarily to teach the basic mechanics of the game, and in which it is a fairly pure war game. I was playing nothing remotely resembling my 'A' game, so I was roundly trounced within five turns, but I believe I now have a much better handle on the Free People's strategy, and lonesomepolecat is making noise about playing with the full rules.

War of the Ring is a fairly pure wargame if you're playing the introductory game - the Fellowship's attempts to destroy the ring can change the game dramatically, but the military action can easily swamp the movement of the Ring. That said, I think that the impact of making two hours of tactical play errors in a row was sufficiently educational that I think I can do much better next time I play. Also, I think it's much more interesting to play the Free People's, because of the fact that you have a much more challenging set of objectives to achieve to win.

The game itself is fairly complex - there are several different core mechanics, which interact with each other, so you can't treat it as a pure battle and strategy game and fall back on the traditional 'whoever can get there fastest with the mostest' military strategies. The fact that Lord of the Rings is a story about World War II also comes out quite visibly in WotR, because Tolkein was quite clear about the various states of readiness and basic attitudes at the start of the war, and the boardgame plays this out. The Shadow have been preparing for this war for a while, they're already largely mobilized, and the Free People's are mostly busily pursuing their own economic interests rather than thinking up inventive ways to beat the crap out of their neighbors. And there are way, way more Orcs than Elves, which is just not heartwarming. So at the beginning of the game, the Shadow can almost immediately attack the FP, whereas the FP have to get beaten on for a while before they're willing to fight back, and even then just because Gondor's been overrun doesn't mean that Rohan or the Elves are prepared to do anything about it.

The game attempts to make up for this in two ways: First, the FP have a much more modest goal to achieve a military victory. If you can take Dol Guldur and Mount Gundaband, both far away from the Shadow's center of power in the South, you've won. You just have to do it before Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith, Dol Amroth, Lorien and Rivendell are taken down. And it's not like Rohan and Gondor are smack between Moria, Mordor, and Dol Guldur. Oh, wait...

Second, you can always destroy the ring. This seems to be a less viable strategy in the introductory game, but I need to try some things next time through, I may merely not have understood how to optimally push the Fellowship forward, so that they're a credible threat.

There are also several idiosyncratic things about the game: The set of forces is essentially fixed - you know what all of the reinforcements that you could ever get are at the beginning of the game, if you're playing the Free Peoples. (After all, the Shadow makes Orcs).

Second the fact that all of the FP are theoretically at peace at the beginning of the game means that one of your challenges is just getting them to mobilize in the first place, so that you can get reinforcements and keep all of your strongholds from being overrun. A useful trick for doing that is to send your forces out as pickets to the borders of the Shadow's logical points of attack; that way, when the Shadow overruns your border pickets, your population is outraged and you can take them to war. I did tell you it was a game about World War II, right?

Another trick that didn't sink in immediately was that there was a mechanism for moving the Fellowship that did not become progressively more dangerous over the course of the turn. I'll have to try it next game, but that should be an important micro-optimization.

After all, this game is about matched threats. Don't just blitzkrieg Gondor, because that gives the Fellowship time to sneak into Moria. But if the Shadow spends all of their time looking for the Ring, at least one of the FP will actually get off of their butts and take two of Moria, Dol Guldur, and Mount Gundaband, and there they've got a military victory. So while I think the Shadow player's strategy is more naive, the FP may have a much stronger hand than it appears at first blush.