Of course, the controversial aspect is the random turn order. Players with lower income (which is only paid during a merger) get more shots at a turn each round. Some people aren’t going to like that. But the interesting part (to me) is that all the players are manipulating the game length and (yes, again) alliances based on who owns which stock.

I’m not sure that this totally replaces Wabash (which I also played again a few weeks ago), but it certainly seems much more accessible. And, given that I’ve only played P.O. once, fresher.

Current Feeling– Suggest.

On first glance, better than Le Havre (which I owned and sold because I feel there’s only one way to win).

But there’s really not much to say. So rather than drag this out:

• Clever resource growth (“The wheel”)
• Nice spatial element
• Lots of ways to get points
• Feels like Le Havre with a zillionty resources to manage
• Non-obvious decisions abound

Rating — Indifferent-Suggest borderline (because of novelty. We’ll see).

• A section top (2nd overall flight b) when playing with a pickup partner (favor to partnership chair) who had some … odd bidding ideas. (But he played the cards well). Almost every ‘wrong’ bidding decision he made worked out (and these weren’t judgement calls, but gross mistatements of value/shape).
• A rather routine 60% playing in a side game while the North American Pairs qualifier was going on (I didn’t play in it because I can’t play today, and it’s a 2-day event). A few mistakes, a few gifts. But during the game the Tournament Director comes up to ask if we’d like to play in the next session of the NAP Flight A (because an extra pair brings them a much better movement). Sure.

Now, I’ve only played with this partner a few times, so it’s a fairly new partnership, but the NAP session easily (and unsurprisingly) had the most consistently good opposition I’ve played against. So getting almost 50% despite making a few conservative decisions that didn’t work out and having a ‘new partnership misunderstanding’ felt pretty damn good.

I feel like I’ve been seeing the cards much better the last few weeks. Perhaps my new year’s bridge resolution is working.

It’s an odd game. We played the (short) game relatively quickly (2.5 hours). There are a ton of moving parts, but fairly simple decisions. Each turn you can:

• Auction off private companies and buy and sell stock
• Use Private companies to form Corporations (essentially, an IPO to raise capital)
• Corporations buy private companies (from players or other public companies)
• Corporations can issue stock
• Players and corporations earn income based on their privates base income; but corporations can also get bonus income from having synergistic assets.

Like 18xx, there are different phases of the deck and as you progress, the early cards go away. In 18xx, this is the ‘trains rusting.’ In Rolling Stock, companies have a cost of operation that rises, which will eventually make older companies unprofitable.

So, apart from getting rid of the board, what does rolling stock do?

1. The accounting and stock movement makes basic sense. In 1830, if you pay out dividends your stock value rises. So a company that has depreciating capital assets (rusting trains) and dwindling capital  grows. Rolling Stock uses a ‘book value’ approach. If a company has $40 cash on hand, and two companies totaling $40 and four shares outstanding, it will naturally gravitate towards $2o ($80/4).  If you use it’s $40 cash to buy another company at face value, it’s book value is unchanged (although now it will presumably be generating more cash).
2. Paying out dividends reduces your book value. It could go to the players or bank, but never back into the company. (This is true for some 18xx games and not others).
3. You have transaction costs. If a stock is at $20, when you buy it, you have to pay $22 (the price moves up first). When you sell it, you only get $18 (the price moves down first). When a company issues a new share, they basically sell it. You can buy and sell the some corporation over and over in one stock round, but you get eaten alive in fees.

From a game play point of view, there’s a large change because private companies are not just assets that can be bought, in essence they are the ‘trains’ of the game. Also, you can’t just form a public company with money. You need an asset (and usually some money, although there are some potential price points where you can get around that).

The game is one of managing liquidity. If you form a company and don’t have a private to sell it (or have a poor private and cash situation) you could easily fall out of the pack, and end up with a fraction of the winner’s score. The sequence of play also means that you can’t (in most situations) convert cash quickly. For example,

On turn one, you can buy privates and get their income (usually no more than 1/3rd or 1/4 of their cost, assuming you got them for the minimum bid).

On turn two, you could have a private IPO into a corporation. Then the auction. Then your corporation could buy your other private companies. Finally on turn three you could use your (now unlocked) wealth to buy a better private company. Of course, now your corporation is short of cash, so perhaps it will issue a share on T3, T4, T5 to raise more money so that you can continue “washing.” (One of the key restrictions is that corporations do not bid at auction… they only buy opened companies).

It’s fascinating, because you can make money by:

• Starting a company, having it buy your private companies (maybe after you get a turn of income, maybe not, but turning a personal profit) and constantly issuing stock to cover. This may stall, but it can work. (The standard 18xx loot).
• Starting a company, driving it’s price down via dividends (which lower book value and give you money) then snapping up a cheap share or two, and have your company buy a few assets and just gain your value via stock growth.
• Start a company, spam stock, have it buy assets, then start a second company (where you own 50%, instead of the %20 of your original) and transfer as many cheap assets to your preferred company.
• Never own a company, just buy privates, collect the income, then sell for a profit to a company. (There is a ‘foreign investor’ who basically buys up cheap private companies, and will sell to anyone at max price … he’s basically a ‘timer’ to prevent a complete stall).

In my (one) game, 1st through 3rd (at $180-$155) each tried a different strategy. 3rd place didn’t run a company until the final turn.

To say that the strategy is opaque understates it. I find this fascinating, but we’re definitely talking about a limited audience. There are a few points I think may be a bit rough:

1. Each price point can only have one company. So if you should drop two spaces and that space is occupied, you drop an extra space. This sometimes means that when you want to buy/sell/issue a share, you have to take a two space spot. So if your stock is at $16 ($18 is the next spot) you could pay out dividends to get to $18. But then the $20 company issues a share, so it’s price falls to $18. Now your stock costs $20. This isn’t chaos (it’s all driven by players), but it’s hard to calculate and these are ‘butterfly wing’ sort of events.
2. Once you know the companies, a lot of the decisions will be “Well, this will be a great buy IF the following company is in the deck.” Which is random. I suspect experienced players will play with the deck (which is built randomly each game) face up. But to each their own.
3. Share prices never stay the same, so sometimes you get a situation where being $1 short in a company means down 1 instead of up 1. And if one of those spaces is block … more butterfly wings.
4. Some of the strategies that are viable don’t really give you many decision points.

Finally, unlike 18xx, a lot of the realism (companies having an increasing operating cost, instead of just disappearing) makes a compelling “Yes, that’s correct” at the cost of removing a ‘bomb’ from the game. Missing a critical point by a $1 is terrible in either game, but a lot harder to plan for in Rolling Stock. In 18xx you can plan a stock’s price point (if you are the president) but the interdepence of prices in Rolling Stock makes planning chaotic.

Anyway, I think people who love economic games should head on down to kinkos and print out a copy, but this definitely an esoteric taste.

Update — Session report (and some strategy analysis) at BGG.

• I played one session of bridge every 5 days or so.
• I played slightly more than 100 games of FtF Dominion (almost all with the TaoLing)
• No other quarters for the year, but…

Dimes

1. Race for the Galaxy
2. Backgammon
3. Rallyman
4. 7 Wonders
5. Black Friday
6. Puzzle Strike
7. Yomi
8. No Retreat (not 10 games, but well north of 25 hours, so that makes it a dime in my book)

Nickels

1. Air Baron
2. Arena: Roma II
3. Chess
4. Hansa Teutonica
5. Kakerlakken Poker
6. Tichu
7. Blood Bowl : Team Manager
8. Jambo
9. To Court the King

As is typical, I played roughly 150 titles, although almost half of them got 1 play each. Some of those are long  or classics (or both), but most of them were just Meh.

Game of the Year? Off the top of my head, either Rallyman or No Retreat, but I’m not sure either gives off the “I’ll still be playing it in a few years” vibe. A few months of obsession is good enough for my GotY, apparently. To be fair,

To be fair, it was the second game for one player and the first game for everyone else, so it took a Caylus-amount of time, while delivering (IMO) not less bang. But it should speed up more than Caylus, as there are only a handful of fought-over spaces (each player having their own spaces). I have a few nitpicks on how it works; but still cromulent.

The game works by a 1/4″ jack to USB converter. So, the XBox actually listens to you playing the guitar. That this actually works (with the caveat that it’s sometimes a bit touchy), but overall it’s a dancing bear.

Look, this teaches you to play the guitar, and all the reviews I’ve read said “Hey, this isn’t really a fun game.” So I knew that going in. What I didn’t know is how crappy everything else about the game is.

Let’s go through it. You play a song. The user interface for showing what notes to hit is not as clean as Rock Band. It does kind of work, but when notes comes quickly it’s basically a two dimensional square (with high to low to show the string, and left to right to show the fret). The notes rotate from one orientation to another to give a sense of timing, but when there are lots of notes, I sometimes can’t tell which one is coming first. But, hey, it’s difficult to show this.

So you play a song! Yea. Of course, you can’t set the difficulty. As you get a better score, the next time you play the song it gets harder. Now the game suggests you do some technique training.

Go to technique training. Wait for it to load.

Strum each string so the game can tell if your guitar is still tuned.

Now load the training…that was the tuning load.

Now a video on the technique. Skip it.

Now a one minute practice. Maybe two.

Now you should practice this chord (say).

Loading.

Tuning.

Loading.

A video.

The chord.

Now you are ready for some songs.

Loading.

Tuning.

Loading.

Songs.

So, my complaints:

1. You should only have to tune your guitar once a session. Given that it takes 30-45 seconds for each tuning, it’s a nightmare. (To be fair, if you play a set you only tune once, so I suspect I’ll mainly be doing that).
2. If you’ve watched the video for some technique, chord, whatever, it still shows it the next time unless you skip.
3. The chord library is a bunch of videos and practices, there’s no “Just show me the hand positions for all the chords” (or even “All the chords in this song.”) So if you don’t know it, it’s 5 minutes to gain one screen of information.
4. Despite the constant tuning, there are a few times where it misreads the notes. This doesn’t bother me, since it’s complaining that the dancing bear sometimes misses a step.

On a practical level, you can’t practice guitar while people around you play rock band. That may matter. And, of course, you only need any old electric guitar, not a special rock band guitar. And it is nice that you can then watch the song and hear the notes you actually played. That’s good feedback for learning.

Given that this is an XBox game, there’s a chance that Ubisoft is listening to reviews and will patch the game (it should be fine to skip the tuning, and a simple fix).

But what I’m really hoping is that Rock Band buys the “Guitar to XBox” technology.

As a pedagogical tool, this is pretty cheap motivation. I get 50 new songs (which are much more obscure than I’d hoped) and even if just use the ‘play song section’ then I’ll get a fair amount of practice. If you do use this as a learning tool, get a chord book and a book on technique, and just use this for songs. (There are also some “guitarcade” games that may be useful, but I haven’t spent much time there).

So if you play a Bomb and the defender plays a prevent, I’m stuffend and probably roll “black & play”, which means I’m probably stuffed for a small sack (barring a penalty). But if the defender played Goal Line Defense, then it’s probably Red + Yellow + Blue + Black + Play, which is probably ~30 yards (barring penalties, etc) and if the play is a breakaway, it’s likely 60+ yards. When the offensive player runs out, it’s halftime. Running plays make you discard another card, so it eats up the clock. (With a passing plays, I believe after a completion you can voluntarily discard to eat up time). As in football Strategy, a few plays can’t be picked once you get inside the red zone.

So, a good strategy is useful, but rolling well counts for as much (or more).

This is a gateway game. Played non-seriously it’s fine. My first game opened up with me going down by 21 quickly (two turnovers) but marching back up to tie it (more turnovers) before losing in the final minutes. So, fine.

If you care about football:

1. Interceptions, Penalties and incompletes happen too often. (The “No yardage” result also happens 1/6 times). More bothersome, I’m just as likely to intercept or incomplete a pass if I call a run defense. I think Breakaways happen too often, as well.
2. Extra points miss 1 time out of 36. Too much.
3. When you switch possessions, you hand across the unused deck and hands then reshuffle. Which means that if my opponent plays a bunch of Bomb cards, I can’t throw bombs. Huh? Also, just quickly glancing at the deck, it appears that the Cover 3 defense is universally good.

The last point is hard to fix (ok, not that hard. See below), but here’s an easy variant to reduce luck.

With each roll, through a regular d6. On a 1-3, the special die is ignored.

You could make a variant to add a modifier if the defense picked the right setup (run versus run, pass versus pass) and modify it so that turnovers and no gains were more likely and breakaways were less likely. Easy enough. I’d also make the PAT fail also ignored on a 1-3 (so they are down to 1.5% failure).

If you wanted to play a more strategic game, you could just use the cards as a reference and play with ‘pick whichever play you want!’ I’m not actually sure if I like that idea. Unlike Football Strategy, this keeps the AP down to a minimum.

There are expansion teams, each team adds a new set of dice so that one team may get better ‘running’ dice and worse ‘passing’ dice and defense.

I think they missed (or more likely, decided not to make) each die has numbers and icons so that one team can have a worse quarterback (more interception chances), another team has a steady solid running back where another has a usually stuffed but sometimes breaks open huge plays back, etc. The nice thing about sports games is you can tinker with them if you like, because everyone knows what you are trying to model. (Cricket Excepted).

My rating is Indifferent, but I could play in a league for some amusement.

I want to recommend No Retreat unreservedly. I should be able to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thinking about it, playing it, teaching it. I can teach enough rules to get a new player crossing the Russian frontier in 15 minutes (while I set up the game) and finishing the game (assuming no dawdling) in an hour or two. When a campaign game had to be split into two sections, it only took a few minutes to write down the position. (It would have taken half that If I’d had a sheet that listed units by front and back. So I made one up).

The system of Counterattacks and Counterblows is confusing at first; but it allows for complex possibilities in a simple system. The attacker could retreat, even though that option doesn’t appear directly on the CRT. It handles minutiae cleanly. You may have a great 3:1 attack, but your opponent makes a diversionary attack from a nearby unit, and now you have a 3:2 attack and a 1:1 attack. That 1:1 may result in a counterattack, and suddenly you are retreating on your turn and that Russian infantry advances and sneaks behind your lines, cutting supply. This transforms a simple Igo-Ugo into a (potentially) fluid situation. Not often, but sometimes.

The card deck isn’t monstrous, but it provides organic flexibility. Sometimes units sneak an extra MP of movement (often during your turn!). Sometimes your perfect 3:1 attack becomes a 3:2, or just a counterattack! A fortress, which normally takes 2 attacks to fall, could be shelled by siege artillery and collapse quickly. Hitler and Stalin meddle and order attacks or divert your resources. It’s a great little experience, with lots that could potentially happen.

But after 20 hours of playing and 5+ more hours of soloing and compiling a FAQ, I’m still discovering  a missed rule or wondering about a card ‘s interpretation. Perhaps that says more about me than the game, but I consider myself good with rules. (Wargames have tougher rules than Euros, to be sure; but having 55 cards means that the rules aren’t really just 24 pages, they have all the additional “But what if you play card X in this situation?”).

For the most part, we take a stab and played on. After each game, we send out an email saying “This is what we got wrong.”  I think I finally (finally!) have the first 11 turns worth of Rules down pretty well, and most of the next 12 turns.  The 1945 rules and cards clutch their fair share of surprises tightly to their chest.

It’s fair to say that the rules need work.

My other complaint is that the variance is too high. Getting a mitt full of ‘useless’ cards can be terrible. (Technically all cards can be discarded for rail movement, organization, counterblows and replacements, but sometimes those aren’t really options). Germany could start with 6 useless cards, or they could start with extra movement, battle cards, cards to cancel a Soviet card (“Stalin”), cards to pick up a good card to use again on the next turn. One card effectively discards itself without replacement … and makes you reshuffle before your next card. I’ve gotten it twice in one turn, so instead of getting 4 cards, I got 2. Over a campaign, you’ll have amazing turns, terrible turns and one or two “I don’t believe it turns.” Hopefully they balance, but it’s entirely possible that a game could end on a sudden run of terrible luck where you draw a card that randomly flips the weather, then get a useless hand short a card or two while your opponent plays cards to give him an extra hand’s worth.

I’ve had games end on turn 3 (out of 23!) when that happens. No big deal. But if I’d been playing for 4 hours and then it happened on turn 16? I’d be miffed, I think. And I love No Retreat. If you only roll a few combats a turn (and you can’t have more than 10, even 7 would be extreme) then a few unlucky rolls can seriously put you behind schedule, and that  compounds. Worse would be a situation where your position collapses and you have hours left. If that bothers you, make sure your opponent agrees that concession is OK.

I also have nits. The short scenarios, being short, are more susceptible to variance. Lose 3 cards (or have your opponent luck into 3 extra) over a game, eh. During a 4 turn scenario? Ugh. Additionally, Barbarossa seems to hinge on the first two turns of German luck. Either they get lucky and win going away or have no hope.  That scenario could be decided half way into the game. I think I’ll save it for a teaching tool (or the start of a campaign). I suspect Fall Blau could be tweaked to be a turn longer (or slightly more fluid at the start), but it’s fine. I need to try the other scenarios. I think that the general ’44 victory conditions should allow for an Soviet victory if they greatly exceed the Axis high tide (like the tournament game has). But, as I said, these are nits.

Look, I love No Retreat! I played a campaign game for 5 hours Sunday, then taught a player (via Barbarossa) then played Fall Blau tonight. I’ll play it again this weekend, given a chance. I think there’s a cyberboard module; I’d play by email.

Do I recommend it? To grognards with a high tolerance for variance, yes. If you want to plan things out to the nth degree, you need to stay away from this.  If you need to know how every rules works at the time, and how every card works, you’ll need a good wifi connection and a search engine … (there are 230 odd posts on rules questions as I speak).

I expect that in a month or two this will move from an obsession to “a game I like to play and will suggest.” That’s just how these things go. That’s a better fate than befell Twilight Struggle, whose interesting idea didn’t survive repeated plays (even though it’s rules work fine). No Retreat! goes into the “Glorious Mess” category, along with Here I Stand. Unlike HiS, I don’t (yet) need a year off between plays to work up the enthusiasm to try it again.

My feeling — Enthusiastic. (I upped my BGG rating to 9 after I broke the 20 hour mark).