Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
I mean unintentionally, its just a really powerful pesticide. Like someone above said its still used in places for malaria control.
A little weird to see people freaking out about it, it saw really widespread use otl from around this time till like the 70s, its not weird or sinister that it would be advertised as a agricultural wonder chemical.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
You'll know how I feel years down the line when you meet your first person who doesn't know what 9/11 is...
Well, now I feel old.
You'll know how I feel years down the line when you meet your first person who doesn't know what 9/11 is...I don't normally answer direct questions, but Falecius is right, this is not related (except that they both involve the Meridian/Societist chemical industry).
Well, now I feel old.
You're welcome.
Would my nine year old sister count or is that cheating?
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Well, yes, but no.Would my nine year old sister count is that cheating?
279.2
Thande
Donor
(Lt Black’s note)
While Jack locates that one problematic edge piece (in more ways than one, you should see the picture on the box), thought I’d try you on something I’ve found. Not sure exactly what happened, but one of the charity bookshop-type places we tried near Charleston had what looked like leftover stock from a newsagent’s—a few months old. I suspect the place must have closed down and they were just hanging on to it briefly before chucking it, seeing as it was mostly topical newspapers and magazines that people wouldn’t buy months late—maybe they planned to sort it to find things like puzzle monthlies that they could still sell on. Anyway, it might have been rubbish to them but it was a bit of a treasure trove to us, and though Captain Nuttall didn’t want us to take that much for fear of arousing suspicion—suspicion of what, Nutty?—among the more recent world news stuff, I managed to pick up a copy of something that was relevant to my interests.
The Complete Gamester Monthly is a magazine devoted to what we’d call tabletop gaming, though the way it’s framed here is a bit differently from what we’re used to. Wargames specifically are still pretty much the same though, what with them ultimately going back to the time our timeline diverged from this one. I’ll talk about that some other time, but I couldn’t resist when I found out this issue had a description of a wargame about a key battle early in the Black Twenties. It says it was published in New York City, but it appears this fold-out review column was written by the obligatory ‘token Brit’ on the writing team. Or ‘Anglo’ in this case. Having been that guy at times, I sympathise, even if some of the stereotypes they’re making him evoke are maybe not the ones we’d recognise.
So, digitising this should pass the time till Bob and Dom get back from the pub. Bob’d better have remembered to bring my umbrella back or I’ll have his head for real this time…
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From: “The Complete Gamester Monthly, Issue 213 (October 2019)”—
MARTIN YORK-ADAMS, our Anglo Fandango, is served up a promising feast this month with Shike and Pott’s latest module for their WDS 2nd Edition system, “Ceylon 1922”. But is he happy with everything on his plate?
’Ello mates! It’s been chuckin’ it down in the Weald this week, but on the plus side, I’ve had lots of time to focus on this new offering from Shike and Pott, “Ceylon 1922”—even if it’s driven The Wife spare in the process! Such are the sacrifices we make for journalistic integrity, eh?
Regular readers of my column—first, have you had your head examined by an alienist lately—will remember I’ve reviewed a number of S&P’s offerings over the last five years, and generally been favourably impressed. I’m a protgun boy first and foremost, and their “Sunrise War Great Protgun Battles” pack-in module for Iron Harvest 4th Edition, back in 2005, got me hooked. A bit simplistic and rough in hindsight, what with it being a demo preview of several battle modules, but I still have fond memories of that one. And six months ago you may remember me singing the praises of Wine Dark Sea, their naval warfare adaptation of their game system, for the module “Trafalgar 1783”. As a patriotic Anglo, nothing pleases me more than trying to avenge Admiral Keppel’s tactical defeat at the hands of the French and Spanish—though it won’t stop me arguing with people over Motext that it was still a strategic victory, with all the troopships he sunk, and (Note from Ed. – We regret Martin’s Trafalgar rant had to be cut for space reasons. Again).
This isn’t to say that I didn’t spot some flaws in “Trafalgar 1783” which I mentioned in my review, but they seemed like minor and easily fixable issues to me. Unfortunately, for “Ceylon 1922” not only have this issues not been fixed, but they’ve grown larger and more significant. Firstly I should give the disclaimer that maybe they just seem worse to me here because I’m more familiar with twentieth-century warfare, and maybe an expert on the Second Platinean War would have said the same about “Trafalgar 1783”, I don’t know. And if you don’t care about these things that much then I have no hesitation in recommending “Ceylon 1922” as an excellent, well-balanced (tactically) and playable game, a fine addition to the S&P stable. But, I suspect, if you don’t care about these things, you’re also not likely to be the kind of person who would want to play historical wargames in the first place!
I’ll start with the good news. Firstly, this was a really good choice of subject matter for the strategic-tactical split style that S&P have become known for. The Battle of Ceylon was the first major naval engagement of the Black Twenties outside Europe, and came weeks after the Protocol beat the Pact at the Scheldt, led by us Anglos under Admiral Hotham.[12] At this point, the Protocol had had a string of bad news following China’s refusal to enter the war, Germany’s dithering, and the French failure to effectively exploit the Russians’ internal conflicts in Tartary. The win at the Scheldt helped them recapture the popular narrative, and played a part in Germany finally entering the war soon afterwards.[13] Together with mixed news from Tartary and the isolated Russian forces in India, things were looking bleak for the Pact and they needed good news.
Ceylon, a Belgian colony, had been built up to be a major Pact naval base over the previous few years, but the powerful Indian Ocean fleet there, with four Belgian and two Russian lineships, would still be easily outgunned if the Protocol were able to combine their forces. These, almost all of which you have access to in the game, consist of Persian and some French forces operating out of Persian and Kalati ports with one lineship; Scandinavian ships operating from Yemen with another; the main French fleet at Cochin in Bisnaga[14] with its five; and the Bengali Navy with its one each at Dacca and Juggernaut, both older vessels purchased from the Americans.[15] I should praise the game for including a mechanic to reflect the Bengalis’ reluctance to become directly involved in the war, with the Protocol player needing to allocate resources to ‘persuade’ them to combine their forces rather than stand on the defensive. However, I do think a similar mechanic intended to represent the early part of the Bisnagi Mutiny is rather crude and dismissive of the real history of Bisnagi workers striking for better pay and conditions; the game basically represents the potential stoppage of supply in French Bisnagi ports as being solely a political play by King Chamaraja Wodeyar XII of Mysore who can be bought off by reallocating resources. This badly misrepresents how the Mutiny actually played out and how it was inspired by the Home Rule movement in Pérousie. While I can understand that the designers did not simply want to ignore this part of history, I think a half-hearted nod that misrepresents it is almost worse. I suspect this game will end up being banned in Bisnaga—though, of course, many countries in the region tend to ban such games for trivial reasons regardless.
As gameplay goes, “Ceylon 1922” is very detailed and granular, with relatively few of the simplifications that us purists like to complain about! S&P are a professional, successful mass-market company and don’t face the bottlenecks that smaller independent operators do, which we must remember. It’s relatively easy for them to ensure that all ships down to tenders and toothboats have their own distinct pseulac models, for example, but it’s still worthy of praise. The game board uses the classic hex grid format common to almost all S&P games, and it continues to work well and better than the more traditional square grid layout, which always created an unrealistic distinction between units clashing on lines rather than corners. Like “Trafalgar 1783” the game has both a tactical and a strategic aspect; players begin with the board one way up showing a large-scale map of the Arabian Sea and India, from Yemen over to Burma. They must manage logistics and supply, and choose where to send their fleet units and when; correct to history, this is more of a challenge to the isolated Pact player in Ceylon. The game can end relatively quickly if the Pact player makes a mistake or dithers, allowing the Protocol player to combine his or her forces for an overwhelming advantage. But I would tend to prefer historical accuracy like this over artificial balancing, at least in a strategic sense; the manual booklet also comes with suggestions for applying handicaps to even things out for players who prefer that, or to make things fairer if there is a difference in experience between the players.
When units of the two players enter the same cell on the strategic map, the board is then flipped for the tactical map: a small-scale ocean landscape, with players using provided hex cells of green to create the coastline of Asia if it is nearby, and adding units for local forts. While this system works well in theory, I do feel it was insufficiently play-tested; it requires players to keep notes of their other units’ locations on the strategic map so they can be replaced when the battle is over, and one can imagine bitter arguments breaking out if anyone’s memory differs when it comes to reassemble the former state of play. The time it takes to assemble the local coastline is also tedious and slows down the action considerably. I feel as though this system was designed for modules like “Trafalgar 1783” where there is only a single decisive battle, and does not work so well for a campaign like this in which multiple smaller skirmishes are possible. This also counteracts the classic game solution for a historical source battle or war being unbalanced: to just play two games, with the players switching sides. In this case, that would make for a prohibitively long play session for all but the most dedicated gamesters.
To their credit, the game designers did include a “Beta-Type Game Mode” in which the players set up the tactical board to resemble the real, historical Battle of Ceylon, and just play that as a single, shorter play session. I do like that this option exists, but to my mind it loses some of the point; the reason why the Ceylon campaign is interesting is because so much of it was about the opposing admirals’ wider strategic planning to try to hit their opponents with as much of an advantage as possible, as the Protocol struggled to combine their forces. The real-life battle is only one of thousands of possibilities, though admittedly a tactically interesting one in itself. Nonetheless, just because of how tedious the repeated switchovers are in a full campaign, I suspect I’d usually end up showing the Beta mode to friends if I was trying to sell them on this game.
And, indeed, I did have my mate over to play through it with me (you may know him as the writer of the “Statesman” political trivia column in Election Gambling Fortnightly) and we tended to focus on the Beta mode, knowing how long-winded the Alpha strategic game would be. Unfortunately, there are other problems with the tactical phase of the game, and these become more apparent in the Beta mode if you’re at all familiar with the real-life battle. This is celebrated as a triumph in Russia; while it was only a temporary tactical victory that delayed the inevitable fall of Ceylon, it was certainly a remarkable success by Admiral Cornelis van de Velde. But as his name should tell you, the fleet was under Belgian command, and unlike the one at the Scheldt (where Belgian forces were unmotivated due to the Russians acting as an occupying force in their homeland) far away in the East, Belgian forces were unaware of this and worked together well with the Russians. The Russians certainly fought well, but the battle was won through strategic—and controversial—decisions made by van de Velde and implemented by the majority Belgian naval force.
Van de Velde knew he had to force a decisive battle before his enemies could collect their forces. To that end, rather than standing on the defensive as Governor Maximiliaan van der Noot counselled from Colombo, he launched a number of audacious (and outrageous) terror raids on French Bisnagi coastal cities, including Nagapatnam, the capital of Pondichéry and Tranquebar. Van de Velde had correctly calculated that the French defences here, though they included supposedly dice-loading weapons like toothboats and ironsharks, would be complacent and unable to counter the small forces he recklessly split up his fleet into, each around one or two lineships. The largest force attacked Pondichéry, which was defended by a dentist force and an old sub-lionheart now no longer considered a lineship. This Pact splinter force, commanded by Russian Vice-Admiral Sergei Menshikov, successfully sent most of Pondichéry’s defences to the seabed.
The terror raids did not inflict much military damage (and are regarded as crimes de guerre by many) but had the desired effect of Lectel lines to Cochin going berserk as French local governors demanded protection; many of the few vessels they had were now wrecks, leaving them naked to further Pact attacks. This also had the effect of rousing local pro-Home Rule sentiment in the Carnatic lands, whereas previously this had mostly been on the west coast region of Travancore, modern Queralie.[16] If France could not protect their people, then what was the point of them paying taxes to Charles XI without representation? Some have speculated that van de Velde’s acts were intentionally meant to cause this disruption, but this gives him too much credit—besides, as van der Noot had warned, the attacks on mainland Tamil peoples also caused revolts among their cousins on the island itself, hampering his attempts to build new defences.
But van de Velde’s ruthless acts succeeded in forcing the hand of his Protocol counterpart, French Admiral François Louis de la Rochefoucald. Rochefoucald is often dismissed as an overpromoted aristocratic dilettante (he was a duke) who only held his position because of social ladder climbing at home. This is unfair and indeed ridiculous, given the preceding years had had the anti-aristocratic Diamantine Party in power in Paris, the time when Rochefoucald was assigned. Rochefoucald was a competent commander suddenly forced into having to play politics, to make decisions based on the clamouring by Governor-General Rondeau in Pondichéry and the Cazeneuve ministry in Paris. He decided he could not wait for the Franco-Persian force from Persia or the Scandinavians from Yemen to turn up, assembled his fleet and steamed for Cape Comorin, hoping to catch van de Velde which is own forces were still divided.
In real life, van de Velde was able to assemble his forces quicker, which the game accurately represents as a difficult task. His six lineships faced Rochefoucald’s forces at a point actually closer to the mainland than Ceylon (and, indeed, some Belgians call it the Battle of Murugna [Thiruchendur] instead). Like the Battle of the Scheldt, it was a fight in which aero power still provided only a secondary role, mostly as spotters, though there were frequent exchanges of bombers between Ceylon and the mainland (still mostly steerables rather than aerodromes). Some have called the Battle of Ceylon the last great lineship battle, before the advent of aerodrome warfare on the American-Pacific front would become apparent. It was a great, dramatic and decisive battle, in which van de Velde managed to sink three of the French’s lineships and damage the two that escaped, for the loss of only one of his own plus heavy damage to a second. It was one of the greatest French military defeats of any kind in history. It was a shocking result that had a big impact on the war beyond this front; people started muttering that the threat of French military intervention, that had kept France neutral but feared during the Pandoric War and allowed her to be the architect of the peace, might have been a bluff all along. Had the French become soft in the decades of peace her people had lived through? Her vaunted Conquérant trimaran lineships had failed to stand up to the more conventional designs of Russia and Belgium. If the battle had come slightly earlier, the result might even have kept Germany out of the war, and it probably played a role in other countries staying neutral; the ball was back in the Pact’s court.
Such an important battle certainly deserves a wargame; unfortunately, to come back to my problems with “Ceylon 1922”, there are issues I can’t ignore. One of the most dramatic and decisive moments of the battle was when a shell from van de Velde’s flagship Karel de Stoute scored a lucky hit on Rochefoucald’s flagship André Malraux and touched off her magazine.[17] It’s hard to design a wargame around such an unlikely event, the fortune of war, because that more than anything—the French fleet being decapitated of command at a crucial moment—is what did more than anything to win the battle for the Pact. However, I don’t like the way S&P’s designers have approached it here. There’s an entire minigame about you getting the shell through the armour, with dice rolls and everything—and, annoyingly, it specifically requires it to be the Karel firing on the Malraux. It’s not as if there was some specific flaw, that could have happened with any of the lineships firing on any of the others, and it feels like an uncomfortable piece of railwaying the events towards the real-life outcome.
Except it’s not, because this minigame is also (realistically!) incredibly hard and frustrating to pull off, which makes it all the more aggravating that the game’s design seems to urge the Pact player toward doing it. I admit I got so angry after my third failed attempt that, well, you know what happens to things that annoy me around here: THE TUBECOOKER BECKONS!
(Note by Lt Black: here we see an image of the angry-looking author holding a small, slightly melted and scorched looking plastic model of a trimaran battleship, while standing in front of a smoking microwave oven)
So would this game be fine without this minigame mechanic? Unfortunately I have one other major issue with it, which I find a nonsensical decision. All the gun calibres are given in inches. No, I’m not just being a hardcore Divvy, I know they need to translate local units so they make sense for beginner players—but I mean they’re not rounding up, they’re literally using the same data sources as for the closest American ship cannon and shells at the time. That’s appallingly lazy and misleading, and it baffles me considering the level of detail put into the rest—what, was this the intern’s job? It looks as though they’ve just recycled data from an earlier game involving one of the American-Combine naval battles from later in the war, and it’s just inexcusable. Not only is it bad history, it also means the tactical battle doesn’t play like the real one should. My mate and I tried deliberately setting up events as close to the real life battle as we could, including me letting him win at that blasted minigame so he could blow up the Malraux—and the outcome was still a Protocol victory, because guns on ships that could penetrate other ships’ armour in the real battle couldn’t do so here because they were using the wrong numbers.
So, in summary, this is an ambitious game that does a lot of things right, but is really let down by laziness and poor decisions in a couple of aspects. I don’t know who the target market here was; casual players won’t care about what I said, but they’re also unlikely to appreciate all the detail put into the strategic phase or the multiple ship models, either. It’s a shame, because there was clearly a lot of potential here. I have to give it four out of ten.
Next issue, join me as I explore Mikkelsen’s new module about Modigliani’s invasion of my home turf, the Weald, in 1807! And if you think I got pedantic on this review, wait till I can tell them off for getting the local landscape wrong!
Martin York-Adams is a freelance book and game reviewer from Sussex, England.
[12] Adams is using “(Vitebsk) Pact” as the generic term for Russo-Belgian forces, which is not something that would have been commonplace in 1922 (where the new Belgian alliance was usually treated as something new and separate, even if Belgium had formally joined the Pact) but is a common hindsight appellation by historians used to talking about the later stages of the war. Similarly he generically uses ‘Protocol’ for the opposing forces, another historian’s shorthand derived from the ‘Marseilles Protocol’ of the Pandoric War, even though the current alliance structures (the Cannae Mondiale, the Bouclier, and new bilateral alliances with places like Persia) are only vaguely derived from that. It too is not a term that would have been used much at the time, except perhaps by the Russians in a derogatory way.
[13] More on this later…
[14] AKA Kochi; Adams is being anachronistic by referring to the French colonies in southern India as ‘Bisnaga’ which is a later, post-colonial name.
[15] Dacca is the older spelling of Dhaka, and Juggernaut is a name used for the city called Puri, an anglicised form of its alternative name Sri Jagannatha Dharma. (Jagannath is another name of Vishnu and the city is known for its large temple and parades, the latter involving large wooden ceremonial chariots which gave English the word ‘juggernaut’ as in unstoppable force). Puri/Juggernaut was in the state of Odisha/Orissa, but this was destroyed as a separate kingdom in the Great Jihad and much of its former territory is now part of the Confederation of Bengal.
[16] Nagapatnam, Pondichéry and Tranquebar are today called Nagapattinam, Pondicherry still or Puducherry, and Tharangambadi. Tranquebar was formerly a Danish colony, which ended up being sold to France (in OTL it was sold to the British East India Company in 1845). Queralie is a Frenchified transliteration of Kerala.
[17] Karel de Stoute is the Dutch/Flemish form of Charles the Bold (1433-1477), a historical figure whom Belgium has painted as a sort of spiritual founding father, for his earlier attempts to unite territories roughly corresponding to the current Belgian nation state.
While Jack locates that one problematic edge piece (in more ways than one, you should see the picture on the box), thought I’d try you on something I’ve found. Not sure exactly what happened, but one of the charity bookshop-type places we tried near Charleston had what looked like leftover stock from a newsagent’s—a few months old. I suspect the place must have closed down and they were just hanging on to it briefly before chucking it, seeing as it was mostly topical newspapers and magazines that people wouldn’t buy months late—maybe they planned to sort it to find things like puzzle monthlies that they could still sell on. Anyway, it might have been rubbish to them but it was a bit of a treasure trove to us, and though Captain Nuttall didn’t want us to take that much for fear of arousing suspicion—suspicion of what, Nutty?—among the more recent world news stuff, I managed to pick up a copy of something that was relevant to my interests.
The Complete Gamester Monthly is a magazine devoted to what we’d call tabletop gaming, though the way it’s framed here is a bit differently from what we’re used to. Wargames specifically are still pretty much the same though, what with them ultimately going back to the time our timeline diverged from this one. I’ll talk about that some other time, but I couldn’t resist when I found out this issue had a description of a wargame about a key battle early in the Black Twenties. It says it was published in New York City, but it appears this fold-out review column was written by the obligatory ‘token Brit’ on the writing team. Or ‘Anglo’ in this case. Having been that guy at times, I sympathise, even if some of the stereotypes they’re making him evoke are maybe not the ones we’d recognise.
So, digitising this should pass the time till Bob and Dom get back from the pub. Bob’d better have remembered to bring my umbrella back or I’ll have his head for real this time…
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From: “The Complete Gamester Monthly, Issue 213 (October 2019)”—
MARTIN YORK-ADAMS, our Anglo Fandango, is served up a promising feast this month with Shike and Pott’s latest module for their WDS 2nd Edition system, “Ceylon 1922”. But is he happy with everything on his plate?
’Ello mates! It’s been chuckin’ it down in the Weald this week, but on the plus side, I’ve had lots of time to focus on this new offering from Shike and Pott, “Ceylon 1922”—even if it’s driven The Wife spare in the process! Such are the sacrifices we make for journalistic integrity, eh?
Regular readers of my column—first, have you had your head examined by an alienist lately—will remember I’ve reviewed a number of S&P’s offerings over the last five years, and generally been favourably impressed. I’m a protgun boy first and foremost, and their “Sunrise War Great Protgun Battles” pack-in module for Iron Harvest 4th Edition, back in 2005, got me hooked. A bit simplistic and rough in hindsight, what with it being a demo preview of several battle modules, but I still have fond memories of that one. And six months ago you may remember me singing the praises of Wine Dark Sea, their naval warfare adaptation of their game system, for the module “Trafalgar 1783”. As a patriotic Anglo, nothing pleases me more than trying to avenge Admiral Keppel’s tactical defeat at the hands of the French and Spanish—though it won’t stop me arguing with people over Motext that it was still a strategic victory, with all the troopships he sunk, and (Note from Ed. – We regret Martin’s Trafalgar rant had to be cut for space reasons. Again).
This isn’t to say that I didn’t spot some flaws in “Trafalgar 1783” which I mentioned in my review, but they seemed like minor and easily fixable issues to me. Unfortunately, for “Ceylon 1922” not only have this issues not been fixed, but they’ve grown larger and more significant. Firstly I should give the disclaimer that maybe they just seem worse to me here because I’m more familiar with twentieth-century warfare, and maybe an expert on the Second Platinean War would have said the same about “Trafalgar 1783”, I don’t know. And if you don’t care about these things that much then I have no hesitation in recommending “Ceylon 1922” as an excellent, well-balanced (tactically) and playable game, a fine addition to the S&P stable. But, I suspect, if you don’t care about these things, you’re also not likely to be the kind of person who would want to play historical wargames in the first place!
I’ll start with the good news. Firstly, this was a really good choice of subject matter for the strategic-tactical split style that S&P have become known for. The Battle of Ceylon was the first major naval engagement of the Black Twenties outside Europe, and came weeks after the Protocol beat the Pact at the Scheldt, led by us Anglos under Admiral Hotham.[12] At this point, the Protocol had had a string of bad news following China’s refusal to enter the war, Germany’s dithering, and the French failure to effectively exploit the Russians’ internal conflicts in Tartary. The win at the Scheldt helped them recapture the popular narrative, and played a part in Germany finally entering the war soon afterwards.[13] Together with mixed news from Tartary and the isolated Russian forces in India, things were looking bleak for the Pact and they needed good news.
Ceylon, a Belgian colony, had been built up to be a major Pact naval base over the previous few years, but the powerful Indian Ocean fleet there, with four Belgian and two Russian lineships, would still be easily outgunned if the Protocol were able to combine their forces. These, almost all of which you have access to in the game, consist of Persian and some French forces operating out of Persian and Kalati ports with one lineship; Scandinavian ships operating from Yemen with another; the main French fleet at Cochin in Bisnaga[14] with its five; and the Bengali Navy with its one each at Dacca and Juggernaut, both older vessels purchased from the Americans.[15] I should praise the game for including a mechanic to reflect the Bengalis’ reluctance to become directly involved in the war, with the Protocol player needing to allocate resources to ‘persuade’ them to combine their forces rather than stand on the defensive. However, I do think a similar mechanic intended to represent the early part of the Bisnagi Mutiny is rather crude and dismissive of the real history of Bisnagi workers striking for better pay and conditions; the game basically represents the potential stoppage of supply in French Bisnagi ports as being solely a political play by King Chamaraja Wodeyar XII of Mysore who can be bought off by reallocating resources. This badly misrepresents how the Mutiny actually played out and how it was inspired by the Home Rule movement in Pérousie. While I can understand that the designers did not simply want to ignore this part of history, I think a half-hearted nod that misrepresents it is almost worse. I suspect this game will end up being banned in Bisnaga—though, of course, many countries in the region tend to ban such games for trivial reasons regardless.
As gameplay goes, “Ceylon 1922” is very detailed and granular, with relatively few of the simplifications that us purists like to complain about! S&P are a professional, successful mass-market company and don’t face the bottlenecks that smaller independent operators do, which we must remember. It’s relatively easy for them to ensure that all ships down to tenders and toothboats have their own distinct pseulac models, for example, but it’s still worthy of praise. The game board uses the classic hex grid format common to almost all S&P games, and it continues to work well and better than the more traditional square grid layout, which always created an unrealistic distinction between units clashing on lines rather than corners. Like “Trafalgar 1783” the game has both a tactical and a strategic aspect; players begin with the board one way up showing a large-scale map of the Arabian Sea and India, from Yemen over to Burma. They must manage logistics and supply, and choose where to send their fleet units and when; correct to history, this is more of a challenge to the isolated Pact player in Ceylon. The game can end relatively quickly if the Pact player makes a mistake or dithers, allowing the Protocol player to combine his or her forces for an overwhelming advantage. But I would tend to prefer historical accuracy like this over artificial balancing, at least in a strategic sense; the manual booklet also comes with suggestions for applying handicaps to even things out for players who prefer that, or to make things fairer if there is a difference in experience between the players.
When units of the two players enter the same cell on the strategic map, the board is then flipped for the tactical map: a small-scale ocean landscape, with players using provided hex cells of green to create the coastline of Asia if it is nearby, and adding units for local forts. While this system works well in theory, I do feel it was insufficiently play-tested; it requires players to keep notes of their other units’ locations on the strategic map so they can be replaced when the battle is over, and one can imagine bitter arguments breaking out if anyone’s memory differs when it comes to reassemble the former state of play. The time it takes to assemble the local coastline is also tedious and slows down the action considerably. I feel as though this system was designed for modules like “Trafalgar 1783” where there is only a single decisive battle, and does not work so well for a campaign like this in which multiple smaller skirmishes are possible. This also counteracts the classic game solution for a historical source battle or war being unbalanced: to just play two games, with the players switching sides. In this case, that would make for a prohibitively long play session for all but the most dedicated gamesters.
To their credit, the game designers did include a “Beta-Type Game Mode” in which the players set up the tactical board to resemble the real, historical Battle of Ceylon, and just play that as a single, shorter play session. I do like that this option exists, but to my mind it loses some of the point; the reason why the Ceylon campaign is interesting is because so much of it was about the opposing admirals’ wider strategic planning to try to hit their opponents with as much of an advantage as possible, as the Protocol struggled to combine their forces. The real-life battle is only one of thousands of possibilities, though admittedly a tactically interesting one in itself. Nonetheless, just because of how tedious the repeated switchovers are in a full campaign, I suspect I’d usually end up showing the Beta mode to friends if I was trying to sell them on this game.
And, indeed, I did have my mate over to play through it with me (you may know him as the writer of the “Statesman” political trivia column in Election Gambling Fortnightly) and we tended to focus on the Beta mode, knowing how long-winded the Alpha strategic game would be. Unfortunately, there are other problems with the tactical phase of the game, and these become more apparent in the Beta mode if you’re at all familiar with the real-life battle. This is celebrated as a triumph in Russia; while it was only a temporary tactical victory that delayed the inevitable fall of Ceylon, it was certainly a remarkable success by Admiral Cornelis van de Velde. But as his name should tell you, the fleet was under Belgian command, and unlike the one at the Scheldt (where Belgian forces were unmotivated due to the Russians acting as an occupying force in their homeland) far away in the East, Belgian forces were unaware of this and worked together well with the Russians. The Russians certainly fought well, but the battle was won through strategic—and controversial—decisions made by van de Velde and implemented by the majority Belgian naval force.
Van de Velde knew he had to force a decisive battle before his enemies could collect their forces. To that end, rather than standing on the defensive as Governor Maximiliaan van der Noot counselled from Colombo, he launched a number of audacious (and outrageous) terror raids on French Bisnagi coastal cities, including Nagapatnam, the capital of Pondichéry and Tranquebar. Van de Velde had correctly calculated that the French defences here, though they included supposedly dice-loading weapons like toothboats and ironsharks, would be complacent and unable to counter the small forces he recklessly split up his fleet into, each around one or two lineships. The largest force attacked Pondichéry, which was defended by a dentist force and an old sub-lionheart now no longer considered a lineship. This Pact splinter force, commanded by Russian Vice-Admiral Sergei Menshikov, successfully sent most of Pondichéry’s defences to the seabed.
The terror raids did not inflict much military damage (and are regarded as crimes de guerre by many) but had the desired effect of Lectel lines to Cochin going berserk as French local governors demanded protection; many of the few vessels they had were now wrecks, leaving them naked to further Pact attacks. This also had the effect of rousing local pro-Home Rule sentiment in the Carnatic lands, whereas previously this had mostly been on the west coast region of Travancore, modern Queralie.[16] If France could not protect their people, then what was the point of them paying taxes to Charles XI without representation? Some have speculated that van de Velde’s acts were intentionally meant to cause this disruption, but this gives him too much credit—besides, as van der Noot had warned, the attacks on mainland Tamil peoples also caused revolts among their cousins on the island itself, hampering his attempts to build new defences.
But van de Velde’s ruthless acts succeeded in forcing the hand of his Protocol counterpart, French Admiral François Louis de la Rochefoucald. Rochefoucald is often dismissed as an overpromoted aristocratic dilettante (he was a duke) who only held his position because of social ladder climbing at home. This is unfair and indeed ridiculous, given the preceding years had had the anti-aristocratic Diamantine Party in power in Paris, the time when Rochefoucald was assigned. Rochefoucald was a competent commander suddenly forced into having to play politics, to make decisions based on the clamouring by Governor-General Rondeau in Pondichéry and the Cazeneuve ministry in Paris. He decided he could not wait for the Franco-Persian force from Persia or the Scandinavians from Yemen to turn up, assembled his fleet and steamed for Cape Comorin, hoping to catch van de Velde which is own forces were still divided.
In real life, van de Velde was able to assemble his forces quicker, which the game accurately represents as a difficult task. His six lineships faced Rochefoucald’s forces at a point actually closer to the mainland than Ceylon (and, indeed, some Belgians call it the Battle of Murugna [Thiruchendur] instead). Like the Battle of the Scheldt, it was a fight in which aero power still provided only a secondary role, mostly as spotters, though there were frequent exchanges of bombers between Ceylon and the mainland (still mostly steerables rather than aerodromes). Some have called the Battle of Ceylon the last great lineship battle, before the advent of aerodrome warfare on the American-Pacific front would become apparent. It was a great, dramatic and decisive battle, in which van de Velde managed to sink three of the French’s lineships and damage the two that escaped, for the loss of only one of his own plus heavy damage to a second. It was one of the greatest French military defeats of any kind in history. It was a shocking result that had a big impact on the war beyond this front; people started muttering that the threat of French military intervention, that had kept France neutral but feared during the Pandoric War and allowed her to be the architect of the peace, might have been a bluff all along. Had the French become soft in the decades of peace her people had lived through? Her vaunted Conquérant trimaran lineships had failed to stand up to the more conventional designs of Russia and Belgium. If the battle had come slightly earlier, the result might even have kept Germany out of the war, and it probably played a role in other countries staying neutral; the ball was back in the Pact’s court.
Such an important battle certainly deserves a wargame; unfortunately, to come back to my problems with “Ceylon 1922”, there are issues I can’t ignore. One of the most dramatic and decisive moments of the battle was when a shell from van de Velde’s flagship Karel de Stoute scored a lucky hit on Rochefoucald’s flagship André Malraux and touched off her magazine.[17] It’s hard to design a wargame around such an unlikely event, the fortune of war, because that more than anything—the French fleet being decapitated of command at a crucial moment—is what did more than anything to win the battle for the Pact. However, I don’t like the way S&P’s designers have approached it here. There’s an entire minigame about you getting the shell through the armour, with dice rolls and everything—and, annoyingly, it specifically requires it to be the Karel firing on the Malraux. It’s not as if there was some specific flaw, that could have happened with any of the lineships firing on any of the others, and it feels like an uncomfortable piece of railwaying the events towards the real-life outcome.
Except it’s not, because this minigame is also (realistically!) incredibly hard and frustrating to pull off, which makes it all the more aggravating that the game’s design seems to urge the Pact player toward doing it. I admit I got so angry after my third failed attempt that, well, you know what happens to things that annoy me around here: THE TUBECOOKER BECKONS!
(Note by Lt Black: here we see an image of the angry-looking author holding a small, slightly melted and scorched looking plastic model of a trimaran battleship, while standing in front of a smoking microwave oven)
So would this game be fine without this minigame mechanic? Unfortunately I have one other major issue with it, which I find a nonsensical decision. All the gun calibres are given in inches. No, I’m not just being a hardcore Divvy, I know they need to translate local units so they make sense for beginner players—but I mean they’re not rounding up, they’re literally using the same data sources as for the closest American ship cannon and shells at the time. That’s appallingly lazy and misleading, and it baffles me considering the level of detail put into the rest—what, was this the intern’s job? It looks as though they’ve just recycled data from an earlier game involving one of the American-Combine naval battles from later in the war, and it’s just inexcusable. Not only is it bad history, it also means the tactical battle doesn’t play like the real one should. My mate and I tried deliberately setting up events as close to the real life battle as we could, including me letting him win at that blasted minigame so he could blow up the Malraux—and the outcome was still a Protocol victory, because guns on ships that could penetrate other ships’ armour in the real battle couldn’t do so here because they were using the wrong numbers.
So, in summary, this is an ambitious game that does a lot of things right, but is really let down by laziness and poor decisions in a couple of aspects. I don’t know who the target market here was; casual players won’t care about what I said, but they’re also unlikely to appreciate all the detail put into the strategic phase or the multiple ship models, either. It’s a shame, because there was clearly a lot of potential here. I have to give it four out of ten.
Next issue, join me as I explore Mikkelsen’s new module about Modigliani’s invasion of my home turf, the Weald, in 1807! And if you think I got pedantic on this review, wait till I can tell them off for getting the local landscape wrong!
Martin York-Adams is a freelance book and game reviewer from Sussex, England.
[12] Adams is using “(Vitebsk) Pact” as the generic term for Russo-Belgian forces, which is not something that would have been commonplace in 1922 (where the new Belgian alliance was usually treated as something new and separate, even if Belgium had formally joined the Pact) but is a common hindsight appellation by historians used to talking about the later stages of the war. Similarly he generically uses ‘Protocol’ for the opposing forces, another historian’s shorthand derived from the ‘Marseilles Protocol’ of the Pandoric War, even though the current alliance structures (the Cannae Mondiale, the Bouclier, and new bilateral alliances with places like Persia) are only vaguely derived from that. It too is not a term that would have been used much at the time, except perhaps by the Russians in a derogatory way.
[13] More on this later…
[14] AKA Kochi; Adams is being anachronistic by referring to the French colonies in southern India as ‘Bisnaga’ which is a later, post-colonial name.
[15] Dacca is the older spelling of Dhaka, and Juggernaut is a name used for the city called Puri, an anglicised form of its alternative name Sri Jagannatha Dharma. (Jagannath is another name of Vishnu and the city is known for its large temple and parades, the latter involving large wooden ceremonial chariots which gave English the word ‘juggernaut’ as in unstoppable force). Puri/Juggernaut was in the state of Odisha/Orissa, but this was destroyed as a separate kingdom in the Great Jihad and much of its former territory is now part of the Confederation of Bengal.
[16] Nagapatnam, Pondichéry and Tranquebar are today called Nagapattinam, Pondicherry still or Puducherry, and Tharangambadi. Tranquebar was formerly a Danish colony, which ended up being sold to France (in OTL it was sold to the British East India Company in 1845). Queralie is a Frenchified transliteration of Kerala.
[17] Karel de Stoute is the Dutch/Flemish form of Charles the Bold (1433-1477), a historical figure whom Belgium has painted as a sort of spiritual founding father, for his earlier attempts to unite territories roughly corresponding to the current Belgian nation state.
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I see there are still massive nerds ITTL.
I'm assuming that, due to computer technology being behind OTL, that boardgames are even more popular.
I'm assuming that, due to computer technology being behind OTL, that boardgames are even more popular.
The first chat system was used between 1971 and 1986, by the US government. The first public chat service began in 1973.
Heck, there might even be a version of the CompuServe, which started in 1980.
Chat room - Wikipedia
I always thought of it as "more or less French Carnatic".
Kaiphranos
Donor
Interestingly, the described game seems to be a bit of a cross between "hex and chit" wargames and miniature wargames - guessing this is a knock-on effect of "pseulac" catching on earlier, making it more cost-effective to produce plastic models.
Why should it be? As far as I know, Muslims are a minority in Kerala IOTL and I don't see any reason for that to change ITTL. Of course, this TL's changes will play merry hell with Keralian history and specifically with the history of St. Thomas Christians there. They might not generally adopt the Jacobite Antiochene Rite here, for example, and depending on how French rule manages the unification with the Catholic Church (which IOTL the British and Dutch viewed pretty dimly) there may be a more unified, and likely Uniate, Malankara Church. But I would suppose that the overall religious demography of Kerala does not have to change very significantly anyway.
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My inner board game geek is sad that I could only give this post one like.
So Germany has finally joined the war, opening the European land front (EDIT: actually no. I presume the French high command has made occupying Belgium its top priority and that an attack is already underway. And Russia has a land border with Scandinavia, even if logistics could mean that particular front will be a sideshow). While I don't remember if any specifics were mentioned, IIRC it has been implied that this won't end very well for Germany, or at least for the Emperor and his government. For one thing Dresden is dangerously close to the Czechosilesian border. There is some uneven terrain on the way, but if the Russians do break through ... I suppose it may be wise for the government to relocate to somewhere farther away from the Russians. Such a move would make strategic sense, but might not be well received by the capital's population.
And the crosstime expedition seems to be rather careless about their trips to the pub.
So Germany has finally joined the war, opening the European land front (EDIT: actually no. I presume the French high command has made occupying Belgium its top priority and that an attack is already underway. And Russia has a land border with Scandinavia, even if logistics could mean that particular front will be a sideshow). While I don't remember if any specifics were mentioned, IIRC it has been implied that this won't end very well for Germany, or at least for the Emperor and his government. For one thing Dresden is dangerously close to the Czechosilesian border. There is some uneven terrain on the way, but if the Russians do break through ... I suppose it may be wise for the government to relocate to somewhere farther away from the Russians. Such a move would make strategic sense, but might not be well received by the capital's population.
And the crosstime expedition seems to be rather careless about their trips to the pub.
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