u/ColonelHectorBravado

I want to play solo in another era. I often end up with 20th Century stuff by reflex.

I want you to pick my next game.

Maybe one day you'll hear about it on my little podcast and you can say, "I picked that out for this dude."

I'm agnostic as to era. The important criteria are:

• Strong solitaire-forward design
• Middleweight complexity: Something in the spectrum around Pavlov's House or Thunderbolt Apache Leader (or even simpler, if you think it's a strong outside-the-20th-Century solo design)

Fire when ready.

EDIT: Thanks for the reccos, everybody. Lots to think about, including some titles I'd never heard of!

So it’s the end of a game of Pavlov’s House and I’ve decided to execute every soldier and officer under my command.

The punishment takes place in the form of flicking each soldier counter off the board as hard as I can.

“Somebody FLICK has to FLICK make FLICK an effin' shot FLICK from time to time FLICK.”

It takes me a while to find all the glossy counters. I have to dig Potanski, one of my artillery spotters, out of a vent on the floor.

I figure that’s enough Pavlov’s House for now. I’d had it out on the table for more than a week, running at least a game a day, sometimes two.

Pavlov’s House from Dan Verssen Games is one of my current Big Four: If you took all my other games away and said I could only play Pavlov’s House, Thunderbolt Apache Leader, Space Hulk: Death Angel and Final Girl for the rest of the year, I’d be OK. Well, I’d miss Cartographers because that’s my current light and clever palate cleanser.

I learned Pavlov’s House 20 episodes ago and gave it a glowing review. Still would today, even though it treated me cheap at the end of the last series. I still love it, temper tantrum aside.

Quick recap: Pavlov’s House — designed by David Thompson — lets you take command of a group of Soviet soldiers during the winter of ’42. It’s Stalingrad, WW2’s most infamous sub-zero meat grinder.

The Russian brass wants Sgt. Pavlov and his humble starting detachment of three soldiers to defend and hold an apartment block that sits on 9 January Square. The German 6th Army very much wants you not to defend and hold that apartment block on 9 January Square. They are willing to throw a lot of Stukas, bodies, tanks, and shells at the problem.

Your job is to build up the right mix of soldiers and weapons in the house. You command and maneuver them, trying to keep them supplied with new material and reinforcements as the German ground assault builds in intensity. German infantry and armor spawn on three sides of the house and start filling up assault lanes. If they overflow a lane, the house has been breached and you’ve failed Mother Russia.

No front page of Pravda for you.

A good mix of reinforcements arrives in Reserves: MG specialists Voronov and Svirin with requisite hardware; Potanski, an artillery spotter; and troopers Kiselev and Agimov. Look at the intensity on those faces. None of them will do anything.

Why did this land in my Top 4 and stay there?

The main reason: Tactical personality with an operational element, all without being too heavy.

On the right side of the board, you’re looking at the high view of the major command elements around the Volga. At the top of a turn, you have to think like Russian brass and make tough decisions about how you can help the boys stuck in the House, which is actually a three-story apartment block.

Designer David Thompson made this engaging and detailed without getting cumbersome: The first interesting part is using a limited selection of action cards to decide whether you want to send reinforcements, supplies, improve comms, issue special orders, or clean up and ready key anti-aircraft or artillery sites.

The second interesting part is getting the bejeezus blown out of you by Stukas.

Sure, you can get a lot of stuff done if you skimp on air cover, but a turn doesn’t go by when you’ve decided to push extra supplies over the Volga, looking at the frozen November sky for incoming dots and wondering, “Did I just screw up?” If you can’t stop enough Stukas, all your possibilities constrict. Misfortune cascades down to the House.

\"Guys, you gotta start leading those planes.\" Stukas punishing the Russians’ operational and command areas early, as they do. Orange tokens represent hits on transport lanes, artillery and anti-aircraft sites.

The perspective tightens in the middle of the board, showing an aerial of the building you occupy and the six approach tracks where German infantry and armor will spawn and start to press in. You can also expect snipers, mortar attacks, and, if you look out the right side of the tour bus, artillery.

On the left board we zoom into the House, where your men duck, move, starve, yell or go fetal when a German mortar team dials them in. Their counters have actual mug shots of the dudes who fought there: officers, troopers, sharpshooters, support weapon specialists, and artillery spotters.

Again, detail and pace blend wonderfully here. A simple movement and action point allowance governs move-ready-shoot, with enough granularity around leadership and individual unit abilities to keep your interest.

Moving right to left across the three sections of board has plenty of exciting wrinkles — like the different strategies you can try with reinforcement — while sustaining a quick-paced story of outnumbered men setting their jaws against oblivion in a ruined city.

I blew the dust off my classic template for playing this and did pretty well. My conservative strategy of lavishing air cover on the right side of the board and keeping sapper teams and food coming into the house meant I could hang on for Draws or Minor Victories most of the time. I even earned the lowest-tier Major Victory once and got awarded the Order of Suvorov.

But I started craving the big hardware: Order of the Red Banner. Order of Victory. The 50+ point Epic Victory. That’s gotta be good for a tin of caviar or a weekend at the dacha.

The game, to its credit, gives you ways to go balls-out and not only defend the House, but earn more glory with suicidal raids or interrupting your usual flow by committing turns and supplies to other pots on the crowded Soviet strategic stove.

Each time one of the game’s three supply checks occurs, HQ will give you an assignment outside of the House. If the path is clear, round up a Storm Group, rack up those PPSH-41s and sally out to clear a nearby location in a rude surprise counterattack.

This can get you extra VPs, but the odds say 60% of the guys you send aren’t coming back. Can you afford to lose your one officer? Recruiting for Storm Group readiness without compromising defensive muscle is one of the game’s puzzles. It takes guts, too.

There’s also another variant I started adding late in my series. We know that high command has a lot to think about, and that’s the game logic behind the operational action scarcity around the Volga. But you can add Operational Support cards that put specific historical names on those boiling pots.

If you give up resource tokens from the pool and meet other conditions listed on the card — and you’ve got the opportunity to burn a 62nd Guards HQ action — you can snap up extra VPs.

The Operational Support variant lets you wager valuable ops actions on a better score, but you gotta meet the requirements and hope you don’t compromise the imperative to defend the House.

I started doing all this. And I started losing games because I was stumbling into hidden mathematical traps on the board.

And on the day I yeeted all my dudes, I was also snakebit by the dice. The German artillery were striking my fortifications at will. My specialists missed every critical shot they had to make in the late game, when the most infantry and armor appears.

You can plan and play extremely well and still end up hosed, even when you know you positioned well, so that will be something you’ll have to handle better than me if you want to be a big hero. Bouncing dice are going to yank your whole game this way and that. A bad streak will wreck several turns of prudent moves.

Just the same, I intend to keep coming back because now I’ve got a new alloy of curiosity, ambition and hatred in my body. I’m a patient student and I do not forgive.

Playing and writing about this game for two years has given me happy moments outside the victories: I’ll post about it and somebody who got it in 2018 will be reminded to pull it off the shelf.

Or I meet somebody else who doesn’t even know about the Valiant Defense series, which also includes Lanzerath Ridge, Guadalcanal, Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms, and Castle Itter.

Get it back out on the table if it’s been a while.

Or go check this series out if you’re looking for a menu of solitaire-forward WW2 games that give you electrifying choices and vivid stories without too much rules overhead.

Look for me. I'll be the guy on top of that rubble pile with a medal the size of a dinner plate. I hope.

I've been working on a retrospective of the outsized influence that FFG had on the way we played for about 10ish years.

Ran it by a buddy of mine and he sent me a pic of the Silver Line boxes he acquired when he was in college more than 20 years ago.

His collecting hit about six years before we caught the bug. I'd only played one from the whole stack.

Props to the oldheads who knew and loved:

• Magdar
• Citadels
• Delta V
• Scarab Lords
• Minotaur Lords
• Orcz
• Atlanteon
• Quicksand
• King's Gate
• Kingdoms
• Inkognito
• Cave Troll
• Maginor

He rated Magdar, Citadels, Scarab/Minotaur Lords, King's Gate and Cave Troll as the ones he'd be most likely to break out today.

Cartographers Play Sheet: Rookie mapmaker Stafford Airbiscuit may not be a “culture fit” for this kingdom

As the backstory goes, the great Queen Gimcrack has just strong-armed a fat chunk of land from some other weakling, and it’s my job to help map it in the name of the Great Kingdom of Naloxone.

My name is Stafford Airbiscuit. I am a cartographer. 

“Will the mission be dangerous?” I ask the queen.

“Probably,” she says. “Now get your little pencil out there and zone this thing.”

“How shall I zone it?”

“I don’t know yet,” she says, “it depends on where the mass graves are and how quick we can get residential developers on board. Keep an eye out for my edicts. And don’t put two artisanal burger places next to each other, it messes everything up, ‘kay?”

***

So it is my adventure with Cartographers begins — a game that continues to rate highly in the tabletop community among the past few year’s crop of move-and-write, flip-and-write, roll-and-write games…basically puzzles and engine builders where you attack a particular setting with paper and pencil trying to combo high scores based on where you mark things on your map or playsheet in response to the game’s challenges.

In Cartographers, the challenge is placing strips and chunks of polyomino-shaped terrain — villages, streams, forests, and farms — onto a newly acquired land. This land was won with the utmost probity and respect for international law.

The job description for my Cartographer, Stafford Airbiscuit, will be a lot like yours: You’ve got four seasons to do the job. During these seasons, changes in policy or the Queen’s blood pressure means the terrain patterns you’re trying to place will be rewarded in different ways depending on which exploration cards and scoring cards are out. Those cards also contain some curveballs, like finding Ruins that constrain your placement choices or pulling a monster raid from the deck, which crowds your map with unwanted symbols that drag down your score.

Hadrian’s Wall was my first experience with this school of design. Hadrian’s Wall’s historical flavor, action variety and resource-heavy scheme kept it on my table for quite some time.

Cartographers is much simpler, which is the whole point; what I’m after here is something light and fizzy with a little pulp: Something refreshing in between learning sessions of Comancheria: The Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire, which is still hogging up my main table with its intricate procedures and massive scope.

So I sit down with a pencil and walk a few solo turns. Using the short and clear rulebook, the few solo turns quickly become my first game.

The turn framework is pretty simple and the conditional stuff is easy to get your head around: Set up a season, see which two scoring cards are in effect, then draw explore cards that show you what terrain types and shapes you have to work with.

***

I had an easy time with the mechanics, but not a particularly good game; Stafford Airbiscuit has to go back to the queen with a score of 37. Which translates into a job rating of -45 per the solo grading rules.

“So what were we doing out there, exactly,” she says, holding my map incredulously.

“Well, the goblins kept attacking and the gnolls stole my lunch and went to the restroom on my lunch…”

“And did they also force you to place these two farms in zones where we don’t even get tax credits? I specifically addressed this in Edict B. Did you get it?”

“It was in the same bag as my lunch. They didn’t even eat the lunch, that’s what was so hurtful and sick about the whole thing.”

“Listen,” she says, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, “we covered gnolls in the kickoff meeting. Do me a favor, draw a timeout space somewhere on this map and get your head together. We’re trying to map a kingdom here, this isn’t adult daycare.”

Looks like poor Stafford has a lot of improvements to make if he’s ever going to become a proper cartographer.

There are still 99 map sheets on the pad. That’s plenty of chances to get better at reading the shifting cards for opportunity and scanning the map for better placements — and figuring out how to draw a house better. I still can’t believe how bad my houses look when I fill in a village space. It’s really starting to bother me.

Halo flogs a brilliant finale out of his shot-to-hell A10-A

I first read novelist and jet jockey James Salter's Burning the Days at 29, when I was dumb enough to think I could craft some personal recall as luminous as his.

Re-reading it at 56, I know I never did and never will.

But I re-read it to study his technique, re-experience those sentences that curl and glow like old paper in flame. Maybe he torched his journals afterwards and decided to name the book that way.

Thunderbolt Apache Leader is another private cavern of stories I refuse to forget. The new games can wait. I pull it out in April and run missions as a reward for getting steps done in preparing taxes, which is intrusive and undignified. 

I know I’ve done the right thing when I slot the new mission sheet onto my black clipboard and pick out a sharp new pencil. Here’s how it started:

Mission: Iraq

Situation: Cutoff

Craft and Crew:

• A-10A (Halo and Rebel)
• F-16 (Mohawk and Dart, Dart upskilled for 1 SO point)
• AH-1 (Freak and Grandpa)
• AH-64A (Rock and Shadow, Shadow upskilled at Rock’s expense)

Strategy: Iraq is a forgiving region in this game, but the Cut-Off situation bears some thought. I blow about half my Special Option points on a sampler platter of craft and two Scouts.

The A-10A and AH-64A are designed to be paired against the heavier battalions, with a better-than-average pilot for each craft. Or swap out the Apache for the F-16 if I need more payload to get it done.

I allot two pilots with the Fast ability for the F-16 and AH-1. As the Cobra isn’t very durable, I plan to use it in a hovering starting position at the beginning of a mission, hopefully with LOS on high-value enemy targets that haven’t had the chance to go to cover yet. “Dump everything in the mag and run” is my doctrine for keeping this little chopper in service for five days.

The F-16’s job is to roar in and hunt down choppers and the most dangerous surface-to-air units, with a couple turns after to hunt. The greeting card is a Maverick/GBU-16/Sidewinder mix so Mohawk can slice across the map once or twice and knock out their sharpest teeth before they can bite back. It’s always Mohawk, unflustered by all. His understudy, Dart, never gets a turn in the seat. 

I want to keep these visits brief as the F-16’s speed means it usually has to climb to high altitude and attract lethal Pop-Up Units — or else make a bunch of hairy ridge maneuvers all the time, which is not Mohawk’s deal. He was an enfant terrible in his gunnery courses, but he regarded finesse low-altitude flying as cumbersome and pedestrian. Falcons are only interesting at height and at speed, he reckons.

This is the first time I’m trying this approach.

I walk setup, taking my time with it. In its three years on my table, Thunderbolt Apache Leader is the most exempt from setup fatigue. 

Some say it’s fussy, especially with the terrain and enemy battalion setup and breakdown for each individual mission. They’re right, but it’s an additive, like the overture music you used to get in theaters when movies still had intermissions and scenes that bustled with titanic human effort.

It might be my favorite part of the game, perhaps something akin to what a D&D player feels when picking out their character or getting the dungeon map ready. I can happily spend half a morning on it, the ceremony is like a drum line slowly building in volume.

I am not efficient, but I am engaged and delighted.

The Action

Day 1: Shadow and Grandpa are dispatched to take a bite out of Mechanized Battalion 3A. I send the F-16 and the A10-A — Mohawk and Rebel in those respective seats — to hit Artillery Battalion 1S and prevent the game-long drain on my SO points from that unit’s persistent effect.

Neither mission fails. Both battalions are halved. Mohawk, chosen strictly for his itchy trigger finger, hits his marks and flies off, leaving Rebel enough loiter time to scour hexes in an attempt to destroy the battalion, but he could not capitalize on any in-hex cannon strike opportunities. 

The chopper jockeys fare a tad worse and would have failed had it not been for a single, shocking four-for-four Hellfire and BG-71 salvo from the Cobra. 

Generally mediocre gunnery clouds what could have been a banner day.

Days 2-4: I am spellbound and neglect my end-of-mission notes. But the plan works on the whole. There were two Command units with persistent negative effects; one I hit hard enough to stop the SO point drain, but the other pushed the Assault and Support units at me top-speed for the duration of the campaign. 

I did well by keeping a pile of SO points in reserve for the five-day drought, but that meant flying light sorties that were rarely able to KO a battalion on the first try, necessitating mop-up runs. While the enemy bulk was modest, what was there moved quickly and threatened me with a mission failure at the end.

I’d lulled myself into complacency a bit; never before had I hit Day 4 of any mission with pilots and craft in such good shape. The end-of-day assessment jars me: I was down to fewer than 5 Special Option points and three Assault units, even the battered ones, had pushed into the Friendly Rear band.

I calculated that I had to wipe two of them to survive the Special Option penalty if the remainder moved at all — which they were likely to do, as I’d left the Command unit that coordinated their rapid movement undisturbed for the entire campaign.

Day 5: Grandpa and Shadow (my first-ever in-game promotion to Veteran) are assigned the remnants of a Reserve force that will gain the base unless removed.  An MLRS barrage and a brisk flyover by the whirlybirds breaks them.

This leaves another “must destroy” job for the jets against a halved, but still substantial, Infantry force. Mohawk does what he’s done the whole game and leaves. But the battalion is still at functional strength. It all falls on Halo again. The last path through and out is a three-hex canyon gauntlet, including three Pop-Up units summoned by Mohawk’s glib, high-flying ways.

Halo acquires and smokes the most dangerous Pop-Up Units, but the ground fire is withering and none of those intrepid strikes count against the battalion goal. The penalty exacted by the HUD damage sends Halo’s secondary volleys wide.

By the time he limps to the exit hex, all the loaded munitions are gone and his nervous system is just about on tilt. The A-10A has sustained two structural hits as well as damage to the engine, HUD, pylon and controls.

The math says I’ll destroy the battalion if Halo can use his nose cannon to pop a lone APC in his exit hex. He moves to the one-way exit side of the hex on his nearly exhausted fuel tanks, fires a burst. Nothing. 

That leaves one shot if he opts to fire before moving on his next and final Loiter Turn. The roll is heavily penalized and I imagine him trying to eyeball it in his cradle of noisy alerts on the last circle-back he can afford to make.

The die displays an 8 before serenely scooting an extra millimeter off my table. I don’t want to look at it as I pick it up. It rolled a 9 after hitting the floor, surely siphoning off the last good fortune from whatever bank holds these reserves.

I pitch it again. An 8.

Halo tacks to the base en route to a promotion of his own. The Cut-Off conditions that award SO points for killing battalions give me the cushion I need to absorb the penalty when the surviving enemies head for my base.

All told, I earn a Good rating with 16 net VPs.

Here’s Salter talking about his childhood reading and re-reading of Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West”:

>I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always.

>Of the cardinal virtues, it was fortitude the poem held high, perhaps with a touch of mercy. Fortitude, I saw, was holy. My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it. I was white-skinned, sheltered. In the street I ran from gangs of toughs. Tunney, Dempsey’s most famous opponent, soaked his fists every day in brine to make them invulnerable, my father had told me, to toughen them, and it was in some sort of brine that I hoped to steep myself.

Halo took a good soak in that brine on Day 5. This is etched somewhere in gold leaf that fades as the disorder of my home and all the other undones come back into focus. A voice mail from an old friend that has to be listened to. Preposterous.

It is the first of many transmissions of the age that erase the magic, truer world, bleach that particular color of triumph from the page and the sky.

Halo flogs a brilliant finale out of his shot-to-hell A10-A

I first read novelist and jet jockey James Salter's Burning the Days at 29, when I was dumb enough to think I could craft some personal recall as luminous as his.

Re-reading it at 56, I know I never did and never will.

But I re-read it to study his technique, re-experience those sentences that curl and glow like old paper in flame. Maybe he torched his journals afterwards and decided to name the book that way.

Thunderbolt Apache Leader is another private cavern of stories I refuse to forget. The new games can wait. I pull it out in April and run missions as a reward for getting steps done in preparing taxes, which is intrusive and undignified. 

I know I’ve done the right thing when I slot the new mission sheet onto my black clipboard and pick out a sharp new pencil. Here’s how it started:

Mission: Iraq

Situation: Cutoff

Craft and Crew:

• A-10A (Halo and Rebel)
• F-16 (Mohawk and Dart, Dart upskilled for 1 SO point)
• AH-1 (Freak and Grandpa)
• AH-64A (Rock and Shadow, Shadow upskilled at Rock’s expense)

Strategy: Iraq is a forgiving region in this game, but the Cut-Off situation bears some thought. I blow about half my Special Option points on a sampler platter of craft and two Scouts.

The A-10A and AH-64A are designed to be paired against the heavier battalions, with a better-than-average pilot for each craft. Or swap out the Apache for the F-16 if I need more payload to get it done.

I allot two pilots with the Fast ability for the F-16 and AH-1. As the Cobra isn’t very durable, I plan to use it in a hovering starting position at the beginning of a mission, hopefully with LOS on high-value enemy targets that haven’t had the chance to go to cover yet. “Dump everything in the mag and run” is my doctrine for keeping this little chopper in service for five days.

The F-16’s job is to roar in and hunt down choppers and the most dangerous surface-to-air units, with a couple turns after to hunt. The greeting card is a Maverick/GBU-16/Sidewinder mix so Mohawk can slice across the map once or twice and knock out their sharpest teeth before they can bite back. It’s always Mohawk, unflustered by all. His understudy, Dart, never gets a turn in the seat. 

I want to keep these visits brief as the F-16’s speed means it usually has to climb to high altitude and attract lethal Pop-Up Units — or else make a bunch of hairy ridge maneuvers all the time, which is not Mohawk’s deal. He was an enfant terrible in his gunnery courses, but he regarded finesse low-altitude flying as cumbersome and pedestrian. Falcons are only interesting at height and at speed, he reckons.

This is the first time I’m trying this approach.

I walk setup, taking my time with it. In its three years on my table, Thunderbolt Apache Leader is the most exempt from setup fatigue. 

Some say it’s fussy, especially with the terrain and enemy battalion setup and breakdown for each individual mission. They’re right, but it’s an additive, like the overture music you used to get in theaters when movies still had intermissions and scenes that bustled with titanic human effort.

It might be my favorite part of the game, perhaps something akin to what a D&D player feels when picking out their character or getting the dungeon map ready. I can happily spend half a morning on it, the ceremony is like a drum line slowly building in volume.

I am not efficient, but I am engaged and delighted.

The Action

Day 1: Shadow and Grandpa are dispatched to take a bite out of Mechanized Battalion 3A. I send the F-16 and the A10-A — Mohawk and Rebel in those respective seats — to hit Artillery Battalion 1S and prevent the game-long drain on my SO points from that unit’s persistent effect.

Neither mission fails. Both battalions are halved. Mohawk, chosen strictly for his itchy trigger finger, hits his marks and flies off, leaving Rebel enough loiter time to scour hexes in an attempt to destroy the battalion, but he could not capitalize on any in-hex cannon strike opportunities. 

The chopper jockeys fare a tad worse and would have failed had it not been for a single, shocking four-for-four Hellfire and BG-71 salvo from the Cobra. 

Generally mediocre gunnery clouds what could have been a banner day.

Days 2-4: I am spellbound and neglect my end-of-mission notes. But the plan works on the whole. There were two Command units with persistent negative effects; one I hit hard enough to stop the SO point drain, but the other pushed the Assault and Support units at me top-speed for the duration of the campaign. 

I did well by keeping a pile of SO points in reserve for the five-day drought, but that meant flying light sorties that were rarely able to KO a battalion on the first try, necessitating mop-up runs. While the enemy bulk was modest, what was there moved quickly and threatened me with a mission failure at the end.

I’d lulled myself into complacency a bit; never before had I hit Day 4 of any mission with pilots and craft in such good shape. The end-of-day assessment jars me: I was down to fewer than 5 Special Option points and three Assault units, even the battered ones, had pushed into the Friendly Rear band.

I calculated that I had to wipe two of them to survive the Special Option penalty if the remainder moved at all — which they were likely to do, as I’d left the Command unit that coordinated their rapid movement undisturbed for the entire campaign.

Day 5: Grandpa and Shadow (my first-ever in-game promotion to Veteran) are assigned the remnants of a Reserve force that will gain the base unless removed.  An MLRS barrage and a brisk flyover by the whirlybirds breaks them.

This leaves another “must destroy” job for the jets against a halved, but still substantial, Infantry force. Mohawk does what he’s done the whole game and leaves. But the battalion is still at functional strength. It all falls on Halo again. The last path through and out is a three-hex canyon gauntlet, including three Pop-Up units summoned by Mohawk’s glib, high-flying ways.

Halo acquires and smokes the most dangerous Pop-Up Units, but the ground fire is withering and none of those intrepid strikes count against the battalion goal. The penalty exacted by the HUD damage sends Halo’s secondary volleys wide.

By the time he limps to the exit hex, all the loaded munitions are gone and his nervous system is just about on tilt. The A-10A has sustained two structural hits as well as damage to the engine, HUD, pylon and controls.

The math says I’ll destroy the battalion if Halo can use his nose cannon to pop a lone APC in his exit hex. He moves to the one-way exit side of the hex on his nearly exhausted fuel tanks, fires a burst. Nothing. 

That leaves one shot if he opts to fire before moving on his next and final Loiter Turn. The roll is heavily penalized and I imagine him trying to eyeball it in his cradle of noisy alerts on the last circle-back he can afford to make.

The die displays an 8 before serenely scooting an extra millimeter off my table. I don’t want to look at it as I pick it up. It rolled a 9 after hitting the floor, surely siphoning off the last good fortune from whatever bank holds these reserves.

I pitch it again. An 8.

Halo tacks to the base en route to a promotion of his own. The Cut-Off conditions that award SO points for killing battalions give me the cushion I need to absorb the penalty when the surviving enemies head for my base.

All told, I earn a Good rating with 16 net VPs.

Here’s Salter talking about his childhood reading and re-reading of Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West”:

>I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always.

>Of the cardinal virtues, it was fortitude the poem held high, perhaps with a touch of mercy. Fortitude, I saw, was holy. My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it. I was white-skinned, sheltered. In the street I ran from gangs of toughs. Tunney, Dempsey’s most famous opponent, soaked his fists every day in brine to make them invulnerable, my father had told me, to toughen them, and it was in some sort of brine that I hoped to steep myself.

Halo took a good soak in that brine on Day 5. This is etched somewhere in gold leaf that fades as the disorder of my home and all the other undones come back into focus. A voice mail from an old friend that has to be listened to. Preposterous.

It is the first of many transmissions of the age that erase the magic, truer world, bleach that particular color of triumph from the page and the sky.