State of Play: Battle Line - making peace with the chaos

 

 

 

The game: nine Flags (red pawns), a sixty-card Troops deck and a twenty-card
Tactics deck, and a four-page rules sheet. The handy reference card
I downloaded from BoardgameGeek.com

I arrived at the expected time for a game with T (remarkably on a Monday for our sometimes inappropriately named Monday night game), only to find he had a visitor. T is taking some extended leave from work, and his boss had come around to discuss a few matters regarding his area. T’s taking a few months off to deal with some things. After introductions, I scurried off to make some coffee and rustle up a suitable diversion, nothing having been set up as yet.

T keeps his games in his home office, among the family’s extended game collection. The shelves run floor to ceiling on the back wall, with most of the wargames on the top shelf. There was no way I was climbing on his swivel chair to try to retrieve something from up there, but a did spot something just about at eye-level which seemed perfect for a truncated game and a chat.

I’ve written about the Reiner Knizia game Battle Line (GMT Games, 2000) previously (and more than once). I have a storied relationship with the game. I like it as a game, and it ticks a lot of boxes for what we’re all about here at A Fast Game – Monday’s session took about forty-five minutes from taking the box down off the shelf to putting it back in its spot. Battle Line a numbers game, which doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I like to play the percentages in a non-gamble-y way.

If you haven’t played it, it’s much more a war-themed game than a wargame; the game involves setting out nine wooden pawns, called Flags. This is the battle-line of the title. Play involves each player consecutively playing a card from their hand before one of the flags, trying to construct three-card runs Adjacent to the flags, then drawing a replacement card from either the Troop deck or the Tactics deck. When each side has completed a run, they determine which side has won and place the Flag on the winning run. The game is won when one side has scored five flags or three adjacent flags (harder than it sounds).

The Troop deck is made up of variously six suits of ten cards each, rated 1 to 10 in value, and these are used to make runs in the following configurations (in descending order):

Wedge – Straight flush

Phalanx – Three-of-a-kind

Battalion Order – Flush

Skirmish Line – Straight

Host – Any other formation (numerical values tallied)

So, a Wedge beats a Phalanx, which in turn will prove more than a match for a Battalion Order, and so on, down to the Host (in a competition between Hosts, the greater value of Troops showing up will carry the day, in the case of a tie, the side who completed their run first is the winner of that Flag). The Tactics deck mixes the straight mathematics of the Troop deck up a little. Various Tactics cards can be played to stand in for a particular (or any) card required but not drawn or allow the removal of a card your opponent has placed, and its re-placement on a run on your side of the battle-line. These are the wild cards that add a little chaos to the mathematical order of the game.

Flags placed cards dealt, anticipation building.

There’s quite a lot going on at the moment in life outside of games so, interestingly, T chose not to draw any Tactics cards at all – usually he’ll draw around half a dozen in a game – and I only drew one, and then only when I needed a Hail Mary for a run I was trying hard to build (I’ll come back to this), which paid off in the short term. We were both playing a fairly pure mathematical game. There’s an argument in literary theory and the development of the detective genre in the late nineteenth century and especially the rise in its popularity after the Great War was a societal response to the diminishing influence of religion as a source of assurance in everyday life; when people lost faith in God, there was still a need for a sense of order, and people retreated into a world where wrongdoers always received their comeuppance, and Truth was always revealed, Order inevitably restored. Battle Line may just be a perfect game for restoring a sense of balance, for a little while at least, in the face of life’s topsy-turviness.

At the outset, the goal for me is to try to win the game by garnering three adjacent Flags. I have never accomplished this, nor have I ever seen it done.* But I have to believe it’s possible, though it might require your opponent to be oblivious to your machinations and entirely absorbed in his own. To accomplish it you need to set an anchor, a solid, insurmountable run at least third Flag in from either end. This will give you the opportunity to win the two flags on either side, or two consecutive flags from the anchor. I can’t say this has been an effective strategy, having, as I said, never won with three adjacent flags, but it carries a kind of logic that I find compelling. And try as I might, I haven’t come up with a better opening.

Needless to say, this is what I tried to do from the outset. I don’t think there is a positive or negative effect related to playing the first card; T did in this game. The first card placed in a run can suggest some clue as to what your opponent is planning to place at that flag, which will in turn suggest what cards he his holding or hoping to collect. I used to approach every game like this, what you might call the Great Detective approach, parsing the evidence in the search for meaning. This way lies madness. I’ve adjusted my approach to Battle Line,

A blow by blow of cards played would be tedious beyond comparison. Instead, I’m going to present some photos of the developing game with some extended commentary on each for the reader’s edification.

About half-way through the game. No Flags claimed yet. I'm working on a Skirmish Line
(straight) for the third from my  right and hoping I can build a Wedge (straight flush) in the
Centre - most of the Green suit haven't been revealed yet. I've already written off the extreme
left Flag, but praying for Elephant reinforcements for the second from right. Straight flushes
are the ideal, even with lower value cards, but you have to play with what you're dealt.

.

I was pretty confident with my Hypastpist Phalanx (second from left) until T began building
his own  out of Light Cavalry, one after another (and one point higher in value). That was
the first flag to fall in the game. 

I'd been holding the purple 9 and 10 for eight or nine rounds, so when T laid out the purple 8
I knew I needed a bit of luck, or some clever Tactics.

The only Tactics card drawn in the entire game, but it paid off.  Alexander gave ne the purple
Heavy Cavalry I needed to beat T's Wedge with the actual purple 8. A case  of winning
the battle but losing the war.

I've just now realised T awarded the third Flag from my left to me incorrectly and I didn't
notice at the time. Clearly his Wedge (straight flush) beats my Phalanx (three-fer), so
technically, he won with with a three-adjacent Flag when he closed his 3 three-of
-a-kind, beating my 1 three-fer at the far left *about three rounds before
the game's natural end.

In the end, the game came down to the last two Flags, which were both taken quite handily by T. Even with a more sanguine approach to the game, I can get a touch of white line fever with some runs; I hold out too long for one result and miss the opportunity to close it with a less optimal but still serviceable formation, only to lose it to an unimpressive but still effective opposing run.

There is a purity of thought in crunching the numbers in Battle Line, a certainty in the absolutism of the game’s parameters that offers a kind of comfort. T likes to use the term, “Playing your own game.” There is the space of play and there are the boundaries, quite distinct. The space within becomes a manageable world of probabilities, where options can be weighed against one another, and you can feel a small measure of control over your own fate, however illusory. It‘s a strange thing, but a game that once represented a kind of chaos in miniature has evolved – for me at least – into something, if not peaceful, then somewhat controllable. I don’t think T ever had the issues I've had with Battle Line – or if he did, he certainly hid them more convincingly, but It seems to have become a safe harbour for him as well.

End state. As mentioned, T should have won about a half dozen rounds earlier, but
in the end, the honourable Opposition was shrouded in all kinds of victory.

 

* While I was finishing this post, I caught up with T for another game. We played Battle Line again, and T won with a three adjacent flag sequence at his extreme right flank, which duplicated the technical result here.

 

 

State of Play: Battle Line without tears

 

 

With T still away overseas, I caught up with B at my local watering hole for a few quick rounds of Battle Line (GMT Games, 2000). This time I made a concerted effort not to stray down the rabbit hole of probability, or at least not much further than the entrance (see my previous ramblings on this excellent game here.

Obligatory beer not pictured.

Three rounds were played, the first going to B. I managed to eek out a win in the second, and in the third game, the odds ended up playing us both for fools, with the game ending in a draw. I don’t often win playing one-to-one against B, so I was happy with the 1-1-draw result. I went lean on tactics cards all three rounds, trying to increase my odds of gathering the particular cards I sought to complete the tricks I thought I had the best chance of winning. B is harder to read than T when it comes to what cards he’s hoping to nab, and I made his win easier by conceding a battle of my three 1s against his three 2s, then pulling the Mud tactic card almost immediately, which would have allowed me to stretch that particular battle to a four-card trick, when two of the other three 2s were already on the table. I think this would have only prolonged the inevitable, though, so it didn’t stick in my craw too badly.

In the third game, B had the Red 9 and 10 on one position, and the Red 6 and 7 on another and I sat on the Red 8 for at least two-thirds of the game, which left me in a position to sue for peace (bring the game to a draw), when he played a Red 5 with the 6 and 7, matching my Yellow (Lemon?) 5-6-7 suit.

Battle Line is probably still my number one favourite filler game. The simple line structure and rather arbitrary allocation of card strengths as designated by unit types shouldn’t be able to capture the theme of Greek city-state era land warfare as well as it does. And you have to love a game that has elephants.

 

State of Play: Undaunted: Normandy (3/6)

 

Just a quick update. Monday night T and I returned to the bocage for the third scenario of Undaunted: Normandy, Raid Across the Canal. A slight change to the feel of the scenario with the objectives for both sides simply being the acquisition of victory points through securing various points on the map. To be fair, US forces begin at a slight advantage, already holding a 2-point position as their spawning tile. The Germans (under T’s command) did everything right and probably should have been able to take the day. I had a lucky suppression shot with one of my machine-gunner units, tying up his rifle squad long enough to give me a slim advantage, and a lucky break with the last card draw allowed me to position my own rifle squads to claim control over the two terrain sections I needed to claim victory. Had it not been for that lucky draw, the day could have easily gone to the Germans.

I think we are both really enjoying the game. It’s definitely a wargame, and it emulates a lot of factors of squad level actions in a simple but functionally realistic way, but with its level of abstraction, Undaunted: Normandy is probably the gamiest wargame T and I have played together (with the possible exception of Battle Line). The deeper I get into the play of Undaunted, the more I respect the design decisions that went into putting the game together. I’ll Try to get some thoughts together for a review some time soon.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about changing it up next week and introducing another 6x6 game to the mix; T is getting too good at the ones we’ve played so far for any confidence of a win.

State of Play: Battle Line; or, Down the Rabbit-Hole

 

So, on Monday night I had this thing - I'm the treasurer for a university-based History group; we organise half-a-dozen lectures each year about some fairly random subjects, under the aegis of the History of Science, Ideas and Technology. Monday was also our Annual General Meeting, and as treasurer, I had to give a short report on the state of the group's bank balance We're in the black). The talk was interesting with lots of questions afterwards, so when I managed to extract myself from the throng, i was a little late getting to T's for our scheduled second Undaunted: Normandy excursion. To add to this, T's wife's (and my wife's) aunt and uncle are over visiting from the UK for a week; lots of hellos and hugs all round and pictures of their new granddaughter, and another twenty minutes is lost. When we manage to extract ourselves from that throng, it's getting late and I'm not sure I have a game left in me.

T to the rescue. For his job job, T has to travel overseas sometimes, usually a couple of times a year. When he's in the States, I'll arrange for a couple of games to be shipped to his hotel, and he's happy to mule home for me. T's done this for years, so last time I bought his own copy of Reiner Knizia's Battle Line (GMT Games, 2000). Monday night, T pulls out this little gem, and we squeeze in two matches before I drag myself home to do the bookkeeping from the aforementioned AGM.

Now, I like to think of myself as someone who is present during a game. I think about what I'll be doing next while the other guy is taking his turn, and I try to not run out the clock with deliberation. If I'm playing Commands and Colors Anything, I know what card I'm going to play next as soon as I've picked up my next one, and have a pretty good idea of what I'll likely play after that. I try to maintain that kind of focus and discipline in whatever I play (wargames, I mean; I'm probably a little more cavalier with multi-player family games, and I have been known to reach for my phone in RPG sessions when someone else is hoarding the spotlight or um-ing and ah-ing about what spell they are going to cast next). 

I do this mostly because I assume my opponent is bringing their best game, and I owe them the same measure of respect. And I can usually do it. In nearly every game I play with any kind of regularity. Then there's Battle Line.

Don't get me wrong. I love Battle Line. I love the structured theme of the game, the mathematical underpinnings, the press-your-luck mechanics. It is on-the-fly strategy distilled into a game that can be over in twenty-five minutes. Except...

Battle Line is maybe my White Whale. I feel like I have a pretty firm handle on it, but I lose more games than I win. Something about Battle Line gets under my skin and makes me question every decision before I've even settled on it. I always suspected I had a play-issue with it, but it wasn't until Monday past that I realised how big an issue it was. Let me set the scene: T had already taken the first token, second in from my Left, and was in a strong position (setting up a Phalanx - three of a kind) on the second in. He'd also played a purple suit 3,4,5 Wedge (straight flush) on the third from Right. I was feeling strong in my Centre with a Yellow 7,8,9 Wedge on Centre-Left and and a Phalanx of 9s in the Centre, with enough 10s either already played or in my hand that I was sure it couldn't be assailed. I had the Blue 4 and 6 in my hand and as far as I could tell, the Blue 5 hadn't come out yet. I'd kept the Centre-Right position completely open because I really wanted to play that blue Phalanx when the 5 showed. But I had a Red 4 in the third from Left position and the blue 4 I 'd been hanging on to: I was pretty sure - but not certain - that T wouldn't be able to make a formation that could beat 4s, as he had a green five opposite and nearly all the fives were already out, and I had the green 6 in my hand.

I didn't realise until T asked if I'd done my turn, after he'd finished with a call from work, that I'd been stuck in a feedback loop, weighing up playing the whether to play the fours or hold out for the Blue 5 for a Phalanx play for NEARLY SEVEN MINUTES. I apologised, got on with the game, and proceeded to lose, of course. 

In my Wednesday group, we talk about analysis paralysis. I thought this was something somebody had come up with at the table, but it is actually drawn from psychology to refer to the overthinking of a problem that is driven by the fear of an unfavourable outcome. I don't think what I'm experiencing is fear-driven; it's a twenty-minute game, always between friends, and I'm simply not that invested in the outcome.

Driving home, I thought about my decision fugue (that's the name I've given it). As I thought about it, I started to recall other instances in adulthood where I'd got so deep into the circular reasoning of deciding my next play, that I'd lost my perception of time and opponent. Nearly every single time, it was during a game of Battle Line. I'm not saying it's endemic to my game - I'm sure I've played Battle Line through quite often without experiencing this, but I'm also sure it's the only game I've played often where it happens with a noticeable pattern of frequency. Seven minutes is a long time, probably the longest decision fugue I've experienced, but two to three minutes at a time would not be uncommon for me, and nearly every instance of this has been playing Battle Line (one time I can remember that wasn't was my introduction to New Angeles (Fantasy Flight Games, 2016), but I think that was driven more by the unfamiliarity of the situation and being a little bewildered by the options available on my first time out.

I think the decision fugue (in my case, at least) is driven more by the procedure of the decision-making than by apprehension over the outcomes the possible decisions. Decisions in Battle Line are initially based on very limited, explicit information - all you have to work with is what you can see in your hand. A couple of rounds in and presented with more explicit information - the cards that have already been played, as well as any new cards you've drawn for your hand - but the beginnings of a completely new tier of information, the information suggested by what cards your opponent has placed and where. Say they've put down a green 8; they could be holding another 8 or two, or they may also be holding a green 7, which would mean they're hunting for a green 6 or 9. They don't know that you're holding the green 9, but in two rounds they'll play the green 6 on a possible three of a kind with the red 6 that they placed as their opening move, so it's probably 8s they're hunting, which would explain why two of their last three pick-ups have been drawn from the Tactics deck; they're probably looking for the Companion Cavalry card which will give them the third 8 they need for a Phalanx, which in turn suggests they're already holding another 8, but they might be hoping to use that in another contest, maybe that lone yellow 7 sitting alone on your extreme right flank?

As more cards are revealed, the pools of explicit and implicit information grow steadily. But the chances of a specific card that hasn't yet appeared being held by your opponent. This is the only time a skill in card-counting could possibly be of some use in a game of Battle Line. Your opponent has just drawn another card from the Tactics deck; that's their fifth Tactics draw (incidentally giving them a reasonable chance of picking up that Companion Cavalry card), but they've only played two so far. That means four of the cards in their hand are troop cards. To keep things simple, let's say there are six cards left in the Troop deck. That means there is a 60% chance that orange 5 you're hoping for is still in the deck, with a 40% chance that it's in your opponent's hand already. Except you can't help but think if your opponent did hold it, they would have used it to make up that 2-3-4 orange Wedge on your Centre Left contest into a 3-4-5, just to be safe. Since that play, they've only picked up one troop card, so the odds are now (in all likelihood) closer to around 15%* of their holding that particular card. If you each pick up and play a Trop card the next round, those odds shift to about a 33% chance of the orange 5 being held by your opponent, if you haven't picked it up yourself in that round. 

It's a lot to think about. I don't think everyone goes into this much detail at the table with Battle Line or any other game that doesn't have money riding on it. I swear, it's only when playing Battle Line that my thinking turns so analytical over what I would still class as a pretty unserious game. 

That's it. I have a lot more to say about Battle Line, but I'm going to stop it there. I realise I've been talking about the game like everyone knows it well. I'll swing around again and look at how the game works and how it plays - a review, if you will - some time in the future, when I've cleared some of the backlog of games I've already flagged for review here. 

* Actually a little better than 14.2857%, if you want to get pernickety about it.