The Company War (1)

Tags

• the-company-war
• mayfair-games
• cj-cherryh

For various reasons, I wanted to get my average play count back to 7 and my H-index to 13 before digging into a bunch of new games. Both of those milestones achieved, Mayfair Game's The Company War is the first new game on the table in many, many months. The game is based on CJ Cherryh's Hugo award-winning "Downbelow Station," which I am currently reading.

I'm setting up the two player, strategic game.

Turn Sequence

1. First Player movement:
2. Second Player movement:
3. Combat:
4. Repair:
5. Placement of Garrisons:
6. Purchase new Garrisons:
7. Determine and record Victory Points:
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Setting up

Separate out Dartships and Riders from Mazianni and Union counters, all other ships go on the map: Union ships at Cyteen, Mazianni ships spread between Pell, Pan Paris, and Gallileo stations. There is marked asymmetry here, the Union ships outnumber Mazianni ships at least 2:1.

Turn 1

Mazianni has initiative, moves first.

1. First Player movement: roll 4 + 1, move 5 ships.
2. Second Player movement: roll 5 + 1, move 6 ships.
3. Combat: will occur at Mariner and Esperance. Combat at Mariner is inconclusive, Mazianni ship flees back to Pell. Esperance: round 1 no hits, round 2 no hits, Mazianni flees back to Ran Paris.
4. Repair: none.
5. Placement of Garrisons: Russell's, Paradise, Viking.
6. Purchase new Garrisons: none.
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazianni 7, Union: 0.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn.

Interesting. Sort of an area control thing going on.

Turn 2

Mazianni moves first again.

1. First Player movement: Roll 4 + 1…
2. Second Player movement: Union roll 4 + 1…
3. Combat: Mariner: Attrition, 2 losses each, that's really bad for Mazianni. Remaining Mazianni ship flees back to Pell. Paradise, Union prevails with carrier back to Ran Paris, Garrison is destroyed with 3 Union ships at Paradise.
4. Repair: none.
5. Placement of Garrisons: all good.
6. Purchase new Garrisons: none.
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazianni 20, Union 8.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Turn 3

Here's a photo of the top of Turn 3:

1. First Player movement: Union first move with 7 ships!
2. Second Player movement: Mazianni moves 3 ships, takes 2, will fight to open jump points from Russell's.
3. Combat: JP 29: damage to Union, JP 20, damage to Union. All ships flee.
4. Repair: none
5. Placement of Garrisons: none
6. Purchase new Garrisons: Garrison to Ran Paris
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazziani 23, Union 11.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Turn 4

1. First Player movement: Union 5 total. Moves to surround Ran Paris.
2. Second Player movement: 7 total. Chooses not to move.
3. Combat: none.
4. Repair: none.
5. Placement of Garrisons: nothing new.
6. Purchase new Garrisons: Garrison at Pell.
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazianni 26, Union 11.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Turn 5

1. First Player movement: Union move first with 3 ships, 3 CVs to Viking.
2. Second Player movement: 3 ships. Abandon Garrison at Viking.
3. Combat: None.
4. Repair: None.
5. Placement of Garrisons: None.
6. Purchase new Garrisons: None.
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazianni 28, Union 14.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Going to be really hard for Union to catch up at this point.

Turn 6

1. First Player movement: Union for 6. Cluster on Ran Paris.
2. Second Player movement: Mazianni for 3. Move from Ran Paris to JP 31 for what should be an easy kill for 3 VPs.
3. Combat: Mazianni prevails at JP 31 with no losses, Union loses a CL.
4. Repair: none.
5. Placement of Garrisons: none.
6. Purchase new Garrisons: none.
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazianni 30, Union 14.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Here's the situation at the end of Turn 6:

It looks grim for the Mazianni, but they are so far ahead on VPs that they simply need to hold out.

Turn 7

1. First Player movement: Mazianni for 4. Try to retake Viking.
2. Second Player movement: Union for 6. Big throwdown at JP 31.
3. Combat: Viking: Maziannia reoccupy. JP 31, Union drives off Mazianni, casualties both sides.
4. Repair: none.
5. Placement of Garrisons: Viking.
6. Purchase new Garrisons: Garrison to Pell.
7. Determine and record Victory Points: Mazianni 35, Union 18. I think these are a little bit off, Union should have a few more I think, but not enough to tip the game at this point.
8. Advance Turn Counter and play next turn:

Calling the game here in favor of the Mazianni.

AAR and Review

The Mazianni got off to a roaring start, and the Union was unable to catch up within the turn limit.

After 1 play, I'm definitely putting it back on the table. It's definitely very swingy, dice matter a lot, and it's possible to get completely tooled with bad rolls. However, it's still really interesting to me to see what can be made of those sorts of situations. The swingy-ness adds a lot of variation to game play, and will dictate strategy contingent on how the initial die rolls turn out. Looking forward to playing this again.

Blunders:

• Fleeing counts for movement. This means ships which choose to flee have to be moved on the next turn within the bounds of the player's movement roll. This is going to hurt how I've played the Mazziani faction for sure, but I can see that it will bring better balance into the game. This is a case where the rules are all there, and correct, but the paragraph format is difficult for me to parse.

• More? Probably, not seeing anything yet, will need to reread the rules.

From an initial impression, the rules are a bit of a mess, not being organized in a logical manner (to me). I would expect a single rule book laying out the various 2, 3, and 4 player options, with strategic and tactical rules following behind.

I'm not happy that Garrisons can be abandoned by the Mazziani player. I suppose it could be thought of as having garrison rendered ineffective via taken prisoner or whatever, rather than being killed. Will have to watch for this situation in the books.

Overall, I like this game! I'm definitely putting it into rotation for solo play, may try to introduce it to an opponent.

Tags

• the-company-war
• mayfair-games
• cj-cherryh