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.

An entertaining look at Munchkin

Check it out:

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.

Reviewing collectible games from a wargamer's perspective: INWO

Illuminati: New World Order is an odd fish in many ways, starting with the theme, of course.

The basic premise is that all those tinfoil-wearing conspiracy theorists are right and there really are unseen powerful secret groups manipulating world events.

In the game this manifests itself with players constructing decks made up of two basic kinds of cards: Groups, which the player is trying to control or destroy, and Plots, which are the tools used to help get control, destroy or defend groups.

The game is heavily satirical and explicitly not Politically Correct, although all groups, ideologies and cultures are mocked equally.

Also making the game an odd duck is its status. Is it dead, alive or something in between?

On the one hand, it's a member of the Class of 1995 first wave of CCG's that came out after Magic: The Gathering was recognized as having created a whole new genre of games. Only a handful of games from that era survive, although M:TG is going strong.

On the other hand, INWO is still available from Steve Jackson Games, the original publisher, which would seem to qualify it as "alive."

But on yet another hand, there hasn't been anything new published for about a decade, which implies a certain like of vitality, to say the least.

However you characterize it, the current state of INWO means that it avoids some of the more annoying aspects of CCGs. No cards have become obsolete. There is a finite set to collect and yet there's always the possibility some new cards will show up.

The M:TG-style collectibility is further undermined by Steve Jackson's less than wholehearted support of the concept. Yes, he admittedly jumped on the bandwagon, by his own account, but never went whole hog. There were very few promo cards and no ultra rares. There are at least two ways to buy into the game while by-passing the whole collectible aspect. SJG offers a "One-with-everything factory set" that includes all the first edition cards. There is also the INWO Subgenius (which is even more weird than INWO) which is a completely standalone 100-card INWO game but also fully compatible with the regular INWO.

Players build a conspiracy structure based on their particular variety of Illuminati (UFOs, Bemuda Triangle, Bavarian Illuminati, etc.) trying to meet their goal. This can involve controlling a certain number of groups, but can also involve destroying groups or meeting other special victory conditions. The available groups run the gamut from personalities such as Bill Clinton, countries such as Canada, organizations such as the CIA or even loose groups of like-minded folks like wargamers!.

As a multi-player game INWO is best played with a group, but the off-beat theme may make it hard to find a group that are all interested in playing it. I think a wargaming group may be willing to try it, it is after all, a game of conquest, but is is not really a game of maneuver. There's a lot of strategy in it but it tends to be more Sun Tzu or Machiavelli than Clausewitz or Napoleon.

The game is, as I noted, still available from Steve Jackson Games, but players can also pick up cards off of eBay on a regular basis. Casual players who want to try the game out can either buy the Subgenius expansion or the regular Illuminati non-collectible card game, which plays much the same.

INWO can be spooky

Illuminati: New World Order can be a spooky game, even if you're not a conspiracy theorist.

The game, for those who don't know it, is a collectible card game riff of an earlier Steve Jackson noncollectible card game design that postulates that there really are shadowing conspirators pulling the strings behind the scenes in a bid to control the world. Players represent one of those secret societies, such as the Bavarian Illuminati, the Gnomes of Zurich or UFOs, using plots such as Currency Speculation or Media Connections to control groups such as Feminists, Offshore Banks or the Recording Industry in pursuit of goals such as Power for Its Own Sake or Kill For Peace. Players attempt to build networks while disrupting the networks and plans of their opponents.

It's all very dark and fun, and a spot on satire of the world scene circa 1995, when the game was designed.

Looking at it some 10 years on, though, given some of the events that have occurred, the game can be kind of spooky to look at.

The single spookiest card has to be the "Terrorist Nuke" card, with its image of the Twin Towers being attacked in a way that eerily resembles the actual terror attacks of 9/11. It wasn't a nuke, of course, but the card illustration bears an uncanny resemblance to the location and scale of the first airplane impact.

The controversies over the government's warrant-less wiretaps programs might make one consider the implications of the N.S.A. and Phone Company groups.

Saddam Hussein really did have the power to distract a government from its goals, as it turns out.

Quite a few of the personalities from the 1995 game are no longer with us (Princess Di, Ronald Reagan and Imelda Marcos) while many of the others have faded from view (Ross Perot, Dan Quayle and George H.W. Bush). A few others refuse to fade away completely, although their time seems past (Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Fidel Castro).

At least one seems relevant still, such as Al Gore (he got the Nobel Peace Prize plot card played on him, no?)

While individuals come and go, some of the organizations that dominated the news 10 years ago seem just as potent now, such as OPEC, International Cocaine Smugglers and the Supreme Court while others have faded from view such as the Moonies, Moral Minority (sic) and the KKK. A few have even started bouncing back into view such as the Libertarians, Gay Activists and Anti-War Activists.

I've heard it said that the basic Illuminati game is a better game, perhaps because it's easier to balance a particular set of cards than the more open-ended environment of a Collectible Card Game with constructed decks. One way around this is to play out of one common deck. There are rules for playing that way available from Steve Jackson Games.

I think effective satire is hard, especially in a game format, yet INWO manages to achieve that goal. It's a little dated now and a new set of cars might freshen it up a bit. After all, we have a whole new set of personalities in the news and crazy events since the new century started.