Lay your hands on FRIDAY, lay your hands on FRIDAYYYYY!

[MengJiao]

Vacation starts today, so we are heading to NYC at 6am to visit Stepson... So no real gaming for me this weekend.. Think we're back Wednesday.. let the gaming begin!

  Vacation looms as well.  Maybe looms is the wrong image.  It should be fun, right?  Millions of kids and relatives!  Maybe a bit of sailing on the Atlantic.

   But I still have this Weekend!  Before Vacation!  And I will be doing the current usual:

Civil war II (Grant has arrived.  The Confederates did not take Pittsburg or Leavenworth or even Harper's Ferry!)
WITPAE PBEM (I have this horrible feeling the KB is going to turn up somewhere horrible)
HG (Driving a tank has so many advantages for me:
       1) snipers don't kill me
       2) my multiple MGs will kill Germans in theory
       3) my clutzy button-pushing gives me time to think instead just getting me killed
       4) I seem to be able to kill German tanks
       5) I CANNOT BE RUN OVER by kubelwagons)
Hoplites -- Fun with boardgames
Fighting Wings -- trying to have fun with airplanes in boardgames

So what happened?  I put away almost all the board games.  The exception is just a few planes chasing each other around.  Easy to take down and put up.
My interest in HG seems to be declining -- it was (for me) a lot like visiting a nicely revised Battlefield 42.  A wary visit.  It was nice to see there still are games like that and the maps were very well done, but I think fooling with the editor in ARMAIII is more my speed these days.
The real fun surprise was Civil War II.  It's quite an amazing game.  The map is unbelievably good in every possible way.  The AI -- well maybe I set it to crazy (I think I left it as close to "normal" as I could) -- but the war so far has been very wild and full of surprises.  Fortunately, I didn't randomize the generals' stats so I have some idea who the good generals are, but (as the Federal Forces) even there there were some pleasant surprises.
1861 and early 1862 were pretty hard for the Feds.  For a while, foreign intervention looked very very likely.  It has been a tough fight with no easy end in sight.  It's Oct 1862 and the Feds are starting to do better.  Richmond is probably going to fall as the AI realizes the rail lines to Richmond are all cut in two or three places and holding on to Petersburg isn't going to cut it.  The Army of the Shenandoah is off near Pittsburg beating up McClellan and Astrocough.  It was a bad idea in 1861 and its pure comedy in 1862.  I think the AI plan there is to cut the Feds in two -- which if the British Empire joins in from Canada could be a mess -- but somebody needs to send Joe Johnson a telegram -- Hello, Joe, time to stop cutting that rail line before half the Confederacy is occupied.
The rail lines are everything in this game.  Or at least so it seems to me.  I could be a bit wrong since Grant is only now (six months late) taking Fort Donnellson and the Feds are nowhere near taking New Orleans.