Designer Edition OGRE user review

Up until now most of the reviews posted online have concentrated on the massive physical size of the Designer Edition OGRE package. There's no doubt it is enormous. Words really can't do it justice. Even the videos don't. Until you actually have it in hand, you really quite tell how huge it is.

Yes, the $2.95 OGRE sure grew up. (Well, except for the $2.95 Pocket OGRE!), but is there enough game in there to justify the hype?

First, I think it's fair to note that, while billed as the 6th Edition of OGRE, the Designer Edition is a lot more than OGRE. In fact, not even counting all the special counter sheets that were created for the Kickstarter, the basic Designer's Edition includes every single other OGRE product that's been published except for GURPS Ogre. There are PDF Downloads of The OGRE Book, OGRE Scenario Book 1 and OGRE Miniatures. It includes all the units, scenarios and maps from G.E.V. and Shockwave. Many of these items have been out of print for years and hard to get.

So DE OGRE is really DE Ogre/G.E.V./Shockwave/OGRE Miniatures PLUS.

How does it play? Well, OGRE is, at heart, a very basic 1970s style hex-and-counter wargame. It has a IGO-HUGO turn sequence, a CRT, Hexes, a Terrain Effects Chart and all the other accoutrements of your typical 1970s wargame. Steven Jackson made no concessions to advances in the state of the art of wargame design over the last 30 or so years. There are so interactive player phases. No card-driven mechanics. All the dice are D6.

While a monster in size, this is not a "Monster Game" that will take hours to play. Even the more involved scenarios are well within the typical hour or two expected for modern tastes. One of the reasons why Ogre has aged relatively well is that the design anticipated many of the trends we see in today's games. It's highly customizable, plays quickly and has streamlined mechanics.

While the basic OGRE scenario sees one of the massive cyber-tanks facing an array of conventional forces, the other scenarios included in DE provide a nice mix of battles and objectives, many not even including Ogres.

The 1970s saw tactical combat games fall into two general presentation styles that have endured through the subsequent years.

On the one hand are tactical games that feature set scenarios with mostly predetermined forces, often with specific set up locations. Panzerblitz was this type of game, as was Squad Leader and Advanced Squad Leader. Recent examples of this type include Borg's Commands & Colors games, Tide of Iron and the various Lock N Load series games.  Games in this presentation style tend to feature very large numbers of scenarios -- sometimes hundreds. They are often allegedly "historical" (although most of the time there's quite a bit of fudging to improve play balance and interest) and calim a certain amount of realism because real commanders seldom have the freedom to select the units comprising their task force. True. On the other hand, real commanders seldom have exact knowledge of what the enemy force is, either.

The second presentation style is the "Design Your Own" (DYO) approach, where the player selects his forces according to some point-based system or other formula. To the best of my knowledge the first time this was used was as a variant for Panzerblitz by Tom Oleson in THE GENERAL Vol. 8. No. 1 called "Situation 13."  Squad Leader and Up Front included it as variants and number of other games followed over the years. It's the main way that Collectible Miniatures games are played, for example. OGRE is part of this presentation style. Typically this style has just a few basic scenarios and most of the replayability is expected to come from the interaction of player force-mix choices. The benefit of this style is that it mirrors the uncertainty that a tactical level commander has over what his opponent's forces will be made up of. A drawback is that the games often have meta-game problems and unless very carefully designed, there may turn out to be otpimal lines of play that cause some units or tactics to be favored or disfavored unduly. Often realistic constraints and tactical realities are weakly reflected and everybody end sup fielding Tiger tanks or flying squadrons made up of all aces.


In OGRE this isn't a huge problem because the pieces are well-balanced against each other and the future-history setting excuses a lot. This is another are whee the game's inherent simplicity serves it well. There are really only a handful of relevant  characteristics invloved for every unit and so it's pretty easy to keep them in equilibrium. The game has been out and play-tested for more than 36 years and the bugs have generally been worked out. A couple of significant changes were made after the very first edition, but for the most part  the design has been very stable since 1978.


So, while the game isn't the latest "thing" as far as cutting edge design goes, players can be assured that they have a fair chance to win, luck won't play too big a role and the scenarios will generally turn on the soundness of their tactics and not on how well they have mastered an arcane rule book. As much as I enjoy the standard OGRE scenarios, I epect thta I'll be spending a lot more time exploring the aspects of the game I had missed out on before now such as Cruise Missiles and the terrain configurations. At EllisCon recently, after a Mark III scenario, we went straight into a couple of Breakthrough and Train scenarios and had a blast. With luck I'll get in a few more games before the end of the year.

It's Big, It's Bruising, It's OGRE!

So the Boxes arrived!

Dominion box for scale

The long-awaited Kickstarter Edition of OGRE:

It's enormous!

Inside were 40 sheets of counters!

It took me 2 days to punch everything out

And there were maps galore.

GEV and Shockwave shown

And all of it fit into a bag ready for deployment!

Maybe this weekend at EllisCon

Not to be forgotten, there was also a copy of Pocket OGRE, in honor of the game that started it all, back in 1977.

Just $2.95! Just like in 1977.

The contents of the Pocket Ogre were minimalist in style, making quite the contrast with the maximalist apporach of Designer's Edition.

The Pocket edition won't be available for general sale until 2014.

Ogre unboxing on YouTube

Check it out!

Kickstarter news!

Wow! Just check out that layout for Ogre! Steve Jackson Games is planning to ship Ogre on Oct. 21.

Meanwhile The Guns of Gettysburg is shipping this week!  Yes, that's right. This fantastic game is not only going to be out well before the 150th anniversary of the battle, it's going to be in hand before another seven days is out. To my surprise it even looks like it's going to beat Columbia's 4th Edition Napoleon to my mailbox.

Speaking of anticipation -- then there's OGRE

This photo from the Ogre Kickstarter is too good not to share.

Besides showing off the super awesomeness of the new Ogre it also illustrates how Steve Jackson Games is able to afford to do Ogre for $100.

As the KS site points out, the 22 Munchkin Games retail for $24.95 each, so 22 Munchkin games equals  $548.90 retail value. Now some might make the comparison as an argument about relative value. I think that misses the point. Quite obviously many people have gone ahead and laid out the $25 for a small Munchkin Box with a couple hundred cards, four pages of rules and a die, Over and over again as a matter of fact. It's objectively true that -- despite having some detractors -- Munchkin has been an enormously successful product as far as sales go.

And SJG has explicitly said that Munchkin is helping pay for Ogre because there's no way they could offer it for the price otherwise.

Ogre crush! Kickstarter ends at over $900.000!

The Ogre Kickstarter project was simply an amazing episode in the history of the hobby.

For those who don't know, Ogre was a small, pocket-sized game first published in 1977 for, I think $2.95 -- which is about $11.17 in today's dollars, according to the CPI calculator.

The basic premise of this classic game is that warfare of the future features, besides tanks, hovercraft and power-suited infantry, these enormous robot tanks called Ogres. The basic scenario pits one of these against a more conventional force ina classic one-against-many situation. Sequels called G.E.V. (for Ground Effect Vehicle -- what the hovercraft are called) and Shockwave added more units and maps and scenarios.

Later editions included a deluxe version and a miniatures game, but all of it has been out of print since the late 1980s as Steve Jackson moved on to other projects such as GURPS, Illuminati and, most famously, Munchkin.

People have been pestering Jackson for years to come out with a  new edition and  he finally decided to move on the project this year after years of development work and running the numbers. Notably this was always going to be a real "deluxe" or "designer's" edition with lots of extra stuff in it, including basically all the material from the base Ogre plus GEV and Shockwave. Jackson's game company doesn't have a pre-order system set up and so, in order to gauge the level of interest, he used the Kickstarter system.

Kickstarter is a cloud financing system geared mostly toward creative projects that has been used by some game designers. Probably the most well-known before Ogre was D-Day Dice.

Jackson was thinking he could sell 3,00 copies at $100 dollars apiece. In order to create a pseudo-preorder system he set a  goal of $20,000 to get the project going with what are called "stretch" goals in Kickstarter for additional  "swag."

By the end of the 30-day drive the Ogre project had more than 5,500 backers and raised more than $925.000!! Wow.

Very exciting news about Ogre and Kickstarter

Until a few hours ago I had never heard of Kickstarter, but when news broke that Steve Jackson Games was putting Ogre on something called Kickstarter rather than do a Pre-order systen I checked it out.

First, let me say that there's no question I'll be getting at least one copy of this game. It's one of my all-time favorites and there's no way I can pass up getting a swag-rich copy like this one.

But I'm also excited about this leading me to Kickstarter. What a fantastic idea for creative types like myself. I'm already working on a way to leverage this fantastic idea to help me raise capital for my online newspaper www.norwichrose.com -- more on that later.

In the meantime, though, I'm looking forward to seeing this come out. The response has been amazing -- the game reached its funding goal in just two hours! And I haven't even pledged yet! Just need to run some numbers first to make my decision. Stay tuned.

No new OGRE until at least (?!) 2012

1977 OGRE

Wow, this news from Steve Jackson is a real bummer.

Jackson:

I haven't done a good enough job recently of communicating the status of Ogre 6th Edition. The status is: Still planned, still the super-fancy as per the prototypes you can see on that page (and which I expect will show up in the display case at PAX in a couple of weeks) . . .

And definitely still not on track for 2011. I warned everyone in May that it might not happen in 2011, and now I can say it definitely won't. I knew that at the end of June, before I took July off, and I should have shared.

He goes on to note that he gets more mail about this project than any other one -- to say this is highly anticipated would be an understatement.

An undercurrent to Jackson's announced plans is a hint that this may be the last edition of Ogre, ever. The base game has been out of print for a very long time despite a high level of demand, so clearly demand is not the only factor at play here.

I wonder if there isn;t some emotional attachment involved as well. Ogre was Jackson's first design -- and it was/is a big hit. It started out as a very inexpensive, bare-bones wargame and it looks like it may go out in a super deluxe version that could fairly be described as a collector's edition. It's supposed to include most of the content from GEV and Shcokwave as well, which pretty much guarantees there will not be any expansion of follow-up products. He said that there will be just the one print run and he'll let the after market fight over it from then on.

Oh wow! Drool, drool. OGRE 6th Edition!

So we're finally going to get it!

Check out the Open Letter to distributers.

Ogre's premise

Looking over Steve Jackson's Ogre today, I wondered if it's central premise makes sense anymore, given the way technology has evolved.

A key premise of Ogre is that an artificial intelligence robot tank would be a powerful weapon, but the trend these days seems to suggest dispersion, rather than a concentration of power will be the effect of advances in computing. Ogre was designed in a pre-PC age, when mainframes were room-sized, so it made sense that you might need a large, heavily armored tank to carry it.

But now it appears that small, maybe even "nano" bots are more practical.

Featured game: Ogre

It may be hard to drum up sympathy for a souless behemoth of destruction, but consider the fate of MicroGame No. 1. Like a mega-movie star's long-forgotten first spouse, it seems an afterthought in the train of more glamorous hotties that followed. But long before there was GURPS, Illuminati, Car Wars or Munchkin -- there was Ogre.
It's fair to say there'd never be a Steve Jackson Games if it hadn't been for Ogre, the first of the Microgames published by Metagaming back in 1977. Still a highly regarded classic wargame, Ogre launched Metagaming's successful several-year run and when that publisher ceased putting out titles, Jackson used Ogre to be the initial flagship offering for his own game company.
Yet there hasn't been a new boardgame edition of Ogre since the 1987 Ogre Deluxe edition. I guess that being essentially a one-man show means that Jackson's corporate attention span tends to move from one main project to another. Between the million GURPs books, dozens of Car Wars supplements, Illuminati expansions and the never-ending Munchkin mass there hasn't been time for Ogre.
Still, there still seem to be plenty of copies of Ogre around, and many of the real hard-core fans have gotten the Deluxe Ogre miniatures rules. (Why there's both an Ogre Deluxe and a Deluxe Ogre only the Illuminati can answer. Fnord.)
The game, as befits a classic, is disarmingly simple in concept and straightforward in execution. The basic conceit is that futuristic warfare will be dominated by giant sentient cyborg tanks called Ogres. These monstrous unmanned robotic fighting machines are so powerful that only a much larger number of more conventional forces can take them on.
The game in many ways is a typical 1970s-ear wargame. It has hexes. It has alternating movement and combat phases. Combat is resolved via a D6 roll on a CRT.
The Ogre is comprised of various weapons systems (main and secondary guns, missiles and anti-personal guns) and "tread units." Speed is lost as tread units are destroyed, while the various guns are lost through direct attack. Missiles can also be lost if successfully attacked, but are also expended if used. Ogres come in two sizes, a nasty Mark III and the very nasty Mark V.
In the basic game the non-Ogre played selects conventional forces from a menu comprised of powersuited infantry and various heavy weapon/vehicle units.
The basic armored unit available is a heavy tank, somewhat similar to a modern main battle tank although more powerful. Heavy tanks have enough firepower (4) to have a decent chance of destroying any Ogre weapon and some chance -- with a defense of 3 -- of surviving the return fire. They have the speed to keep up with a healthy Ogre (3), but not enough range (2) to stay a safe distance away.
Missile tanks trade off firepower (3), defense (2) and speed (2) for some extra range (4). They have their fans, but I've never found the extra range enough to make up for the rest.
Probably the most popular vehicle is the G.E.V. (ground effect vehicle or hovercraft). While not especially powerful (attack 2, defense 2, range 2) the G.E.V. is speedy, able to move 4 hexes, fire and then move another 3. This makes it a fun tool to use because it can dance around the Ogre, darting in and out to strike and retire. Getting the most out a G.E.V. takes skill and players like the challenge.
The most powerful unit is the Howitzer. It has an attack of 6 and a range of 8 and counts as two units for force-selection purposes. On the other hand the Howitzer only has a defense of 1 and can't move, making it a sitting duck for the Ogre if it gets close enough.
The poor bloody infantry has a tough life in Ogre. It's reasonably mobile, moving 2 hexes and being the only units, aside from Ogres, that can cross the one type of difficult terrain hexside (rubble) in the game. The firepower and defense of the infantry depends upon how many squads (each representing about six soldiers, the rules tell us) are in the hex. Up to three squads can be in a hex, so the firepower and defense ranges from 1-3. Unfortunately the infantry only has a range of 1, so they have to get up close and personal with the Ogre. A lot of infantry generally dies.
The objective is called a Command Post in the game, although it doesn't exercise any command and control game function. It's defenseless and immobile, so it could easily represent any kind of soft strategic objective. Still, Ogres are obviously rare and expensive war machines, probably comparable to battleships or aircraft carriers in 21st century terms, so they wouldn't be risked on routine operations or minor objectives. When an Ogre appears it's a major battle by definition.
The Ogre itself is very dangerous. The lesser, Mark III version has a main gun with an attack of 4, a range 3 and a defense of 4 and four secondary guns with vales of 3, 2 and 3, respectively. (Note very important errata. In the Ogre Deluxe boardgame both the mapboard display and the rules booklet list incorrect -- and different from each other -- values for the Ogre's guns. The correct values are listed in May 21, 1993 errata.)
The Mark III carries two missiles that have a range of 5, attack of 6 and defense of 3. It also has 8 antipersonnel guns that have a range and defense of 1 and an attack value of 1 against infantry and CPs only.
Finally the Mark III has a total of 45 tread units to support its starting movement factor of 3. For every 15 it loses it's speed is reduced by 1.
In the basic scenario a force of 20 infantry and 12 armor units make an even match for the Mark III Ogre.
The Mark V Ogre sports two main guns, six secondaries, six missiles, 12 antipersonnel guns and 60 tread units, so it has relatively more firepower than a Mark III but is somewhat less robust in the treads department in proportion.
The conventional force fields 30 infantry and 20 armor against a Mark V in the basic setup.
This involves the Ogre entering the map, endeavoring to destroy the CP and then escape. The rules include obvious variations such as a defending Ogre, two attacking Ogres, etc. There's also a Scenario Book 1 (no book 2 as yet) with seven more scenarios.
The classic scenario is, however, a single Ogre against the world, and that's the game's signature. There are many approaches to both the attack and defense and Ogre is one of those rare wargames that's actually developed a body of theory. There are named defenses such as the "Three howitzer" defense, for example.
The game is simple enough that it can be used an an introduction to wargaming. Often a new player can be given the Ogre, which seem less overwhelming to handle because it's a single unit, while the more experienced player can take the conventional forces, perhaps spotting the Ogre a unit or two.
While Steve Jackson hasn't paid much attention to Ogre in years, it would seem like a perfect candidate for a new edition, taking advantage of plastic bits from Chinese factories to create a super duper Deleuxe Ogre. That would be a fitting tribute to the game that got him started 30-odd years ago.