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David Scott
United Kingdom
Oxford
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Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?
Lately, I have become completely obsessed by this game. I am primarily an Abstract and Euros guy, but I have always wanted to try wargames. Of course, it isn't easy to find opponents for long 2-player games (my wife is WAY to competitive to play games with), so I really wanted to try VASSAL. I have Pandemic, and I found that it plays quite reasonably there, but I wanted to try a wargame, preferably one that plays solo so I can get my feet wet at my own pace. A quick search at BGG pointed to Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?, which seemed to fit the bill. It also plays quite quickly relative to other non-C&C wargames.
I have a personal rule that I won't buy a game unless I have played it twice (to avoid buying lemons). So I had to learn how to play this game on VASSAL without actually buying it. The game publisher, GMT, makes the rules and playbook freely available on their website, so I downloaded them, printed them out, and went through the playbook scenarios on VASSAL. It is quite an investment to learn the rules, and much to my dismay, I realized that I need the Player aids to play this game, as they contain the solitaire flow chart, and the dice tables, which are not available anywhere online. Luckily, there are high-res pictures of the front and middle pages of both rulebooks posted here at BGG, which I printed, and cleaned up in GIMP before printing (cropped, added contrast, changed perspective, etc.). I was still missing the dice tables, so I actually freeze-framed the draakenstrike components youtube video at several points to copy down the parts of the tables that were visible, and somehow managed to cobble together almost the entire page (I wouldn't recommend this time-consuming practice to anybody, next time I will just buy the game!). Now I was ready to play, and set up Let's Roll solitaire on VASSAL.
My first game was Let's Roll with the default ideology (i.e. the easiest). My strategy was heavily influenced by what happened in the playbook, and I quickly improved Gulf States governance to good just before implementing a Regime Change in Afghanistan in turn one. In retrospect, I'm not sure that this should be done automatically, as RC countries are just as easy to recruit from as IR ones. The Jihadist quickly got Abu Sayyaf going in the Phillipines, and proceeded to plot like crazy there to lower my prestige. I didn't realize the threat, and failed to move troops there, focusing instead on WoI in Afghanistan (another error - even though I was eager to free up my troops from Afghanistan, I should have focused on Pakistan, getting a +1 to WOI from the adjacent 1-Good Gulf States). I was able to improve things in Afghanistan, but my prestige fell to low, and it was a struggle to keep my GWOT penalty at or near zero. Then I played Tora Bora, and got an extraordinary roll - 5-6-6 (with GWOT at zero) raised my prestige by 6! After that, it was all easy, and I breezed through the gulf, flipping everything to Good-1 before half the deck was dealt out.
The second game was 'You Can Call Me Al' with the default ideology. I wondered what I was going to do without the ability to regime change Afghanistan, but I found the simple strategy of building prestige, choking funding, and conducting WoI ruthlessly worked a treat. This time, I got prestige to Very High with favorable events and troop disruptions, and I upgraded Gulf States, Pakistan, Indo/Malaysia, then Saudi to Good-1, then won the game on an oil spike. Soft US posture turns the game into a bit of a race, since you can do little to stop them, but WoI is easy. Of course, on super-easy solitaire mode, the Jihadist have no chance. I'm going to have to man up, and try a harder ideology next time.
I thought it would be hard to stop the Jihadists with soft US posture, but keeping funding down to 6 or lower works great. You need to break up all plots in non-Muslim or Muslim good countries to keep it under control, but the Jihadist AI doesn't actually plot that often. Obviously against human 2-player opponents, the Jihadist can plot as much as he likes, and will ramp up the number of plots whenever you squeeze his funding. But in the solo game, squeezing funding to 6 or lower seems to be a core strategy, which also keeps radicalization from ever denting your prized Good-1 muslim countries. Just make sure that there are always two cells on the track when it is the Jihadist's turn to play. It is easy to keep funding down to exactly six, because the AI doesn't realize that 7 is so much better than 6. If funding is at 5, or if it is the last phase of the turn, you can allow a plot in a Muslim non-Good country, as you will still be at 6 (or go back to 6) once it is resolved. Make sure that you play funding drain cards for the event and not for ops.
I am curious to see how I would do against 'You Can Call Me Al' on a higher ideology, and what new challenges I would face at the higher difficulty levels. By controlling funding, you can often force the AI to travel, and the Travel AI seems pretty stupid. But at Potent Ideology or higher, it only needs 3 cells for Major Jihad, even the dumb travel rules might be able to pull that off. As for 'Let's Roll', my strategy needs a little bit of work - I won easily only because of outrageous luck (and low difficulty level of course).
Anyhow, I thoroughly enjoyed my first two solo games, even at such an easy difficulty level, so I ordered the game from my local gameshop. I am still curious about what the Player Aid says in some parts of page 4 which were too blurry to read in the videos - I guess I will find out next week!
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