Kriegsspieler: Ogre -- Designer's Edition: Exercise K

I turned 50 a couple weeks ago and took the occasion to spend as much time as possible over two weekends playing wargames. Now, in general, my tastes have tended to heavier games of late, but, knowing I'd have a few old friends and HL to hand, I decided to take down something lighter namely the notorious "Exercise K" as played in the Ogre Designer's Edition.

For those unfamiliar with the former, the scenario is intended to represent a computer simulation testing the ability of ogres; no other way to explain the fact that you've got 12 ogres divided into four teams, each of which has two Mark IIIs and a single Mark V.

For those unfamiliar with the latter, this is the version of Ogre 6th edition that brought in nearly $1 million on Kickstarter and which comes in a box that could easily have four legs glued to the bottom and be turned into a coffee table. I bought it from Amazon a couple years ago and let my free shipping nearly pay for a year of Amazon Prime.

The scenario is simple enough, the four teams start out at the four corners of the map. Each corner has two radar stations and a single command post. Points are scored by destroying the structures (big points), destroying ogres (fairly big points), and damaging ogres (smaller points).

My friend Rob -- who had to leave the game and was ably seconded by MB -- wound up winning the game. While I started out with a significant initial advantage, I eventually fell to a grim fourth place as all three of my ogres were eventually incapacitated and then destroyed.

Some observations:

1. This is a long scenario. Allowing for the relatively brief learning of the rules, we went for the better part of seven hours.

2. There's a natural human tendency to have ogres slam into one another. This really ought to be resisted. While ramming does rich amounts of damage to opponents' treads, they damage yours as well and they distract from the rich points to be earned in taking out structures.

3. The original scenario was intended for 12 players playing on four teams. While the four teams worked fine, there were moments where we were able to coordinate our teams far better than we thought they'd have been coordinated if there were two other players on our side.

4. The ogre war room app -- available free in the store -- is an hoot and a great way to keep track of ogres as well as dice-rolling. All but made for Exercise K.