Across a Blasted Plain

It's the end of another year, and things have been a little wild. So as far as game blogging goes, I haven't been able to give much time to it. I had intentions of doing so; oh, such great intentions! But, alas, intention and action are two very different things.

But no more! Today intention and action combine! Hooray! Huzzah! Whoopie! And other exclamations of Joy and Enthusiasm!

Joy and Enthusiasm. Plus, I'm a wizard.

And on to today's blog, already titled (as you saw above)...

Across a Blasted Plain

It is the not-too-distant future. The world has changed, both physically and politically, and not for the better. War rages across the continents, headed by the two last vestiges of the once great nation states: The North American Combine and the Paneuropean Union. Who is good and who is bad is difficult to define. Suffice it to say that the sides are at war, and it is hell. And the devil that rules this hell bears neither horns nor pitchfork, though fire is certainly its plaything. For this ruler is more than devil; it is an OGRE!

Okay, there's my nicely evocative intro for my latest nostalgic obsession: the classic micro-game, Ogre. For those who weren't gaming all there was to game in 1980-ish, Ogre is a game of futuristic armored combat set in the (uncomfortably close) year 2085 (sorry, kiddos, not my future in all probability, but a year you might indeed see). In the original game (sold for $2.95 in a plastic baggie), one player commands a force of heavily armored tanks, missile tanks, howitzers, armored ground-effect-vehicles,  and powered-armor equipped infantry. The other player gets one tank—an Ogre. It is a decidedly unfair game... for the player who doesn't have the Ogre. For the Ogre is an enormous robot tank bristling with weapons of all kinds (including tactical nuclear missiles) and armor so thick the other force has little hope of penetrating it. Once the Ogre starts moving towards its objective, it is almost impossible to stop. But trying to figure out what forces are best to use and how to best use them is the fun (and challenge) of the game! (For the Ogre player, the fun comes in crushing the puny forces sent to stop it. You can almost hear the evil, mechanical MUA-HA-HA-HA in your head as your Ogre roll onwards towards your targets...)

The original cover. I'd tell that guy to run, but it's too late at this point.

Decades back Steve Jackson Games released metal miniatures for the game, including a large glossy paper hex map for the game. It was a great product, but a paper mat (however gorgeous) just doesn't quite work with realistically scaled three-dimensional miniatures. I bought these miniatures years ago, and painted them up, but they've been sitting in their boxes for quite awhile now, largely because actually buying enough metal miniatures to replicate the possible forces in Ogre (and its sister game, G.E.V.) was prohibitively expensive. (I lucked out and got my sets at half-price, before they became a hot nostalgia commodity. Don't believe me? Look on eBay!) At the time I, and many others, cried out for Steve Jackson Games to sell these figures in plastic, assuming that would be cheaper. (It probably actually wasn't back then, but we assumed it was anyway.)

The metal miniatures set box cover. I also have the GEV set. Envy me.

Well, Steve Jackson Games has finally done just that. Last year and this year I hopped onto a Kickstarter for plastic miniatures for Ogre— miniatures in the same scale and style (in fact, identical) to the metal figures I already had.

My first set arrived last month (I'll blog about them later). And with them they brought the full-on Ogre bug... that I wanted something bigger and more impressive than the original paper battle mat.

So I started looking around at makers of battle mats. Though these mats are often gorgeous, they are also expensive; too expensive for me. I then toyed with the idea of making my own, but honestly, as a DYI-er, I'm more of a dreamer than a fabricator. The thought of spray painting cloth to produce the look of an atomically-blasted desert plain was simply too daunting. Maybe if I could just find a piece of cloth that already had the look I wanted?  Cue Google search!

Now, tracking down a vaguely described visual appearance for cloth just really isn't what Google is good at (sorry, Google). It seems that cloth makers don't describe their wares as "nuclear-devastation brown," or "radioactive apocalyptic desert." Maybe the ladies and gentlemen who are sewing blankets and pillow shams just aren't attracted to such descriptions. Strange, but likely true.

Therefore, I had to resort to actually looking at fabric stores! Walking down aisles! Muttering "blasted plain, blasted plain, blasted plain..." over and over to myself while nice ladies with shopping carts of flowered prints swiftly scooted to other regions. Then, at our local Joann store (ask your sewing and home hobby friends), I stumbled upon a mottled green fleece labeled "Tie-dye Green." Well, I didn't want green, but it didn't look like what I associated with tie-dying at all; it looked like an abstractly mottled surface in multiple shades of no discernible repeating pattern. Had it been brown (or a suitably radioactive muted orange— no, Google can't help with that, either), it would have been perfect. But alas, the aisle bore no browns or oranges or even yellows. But now I knew how fabric makers title their "nuclear apocalypse disaster" colors to attract hobby sewers. They call it "Tie-dye!"

"He can be taught!"

Armed with knowledge, I scurried back to my command center and called up Google again. I typed in "tie dye brown fleece" and hey, presto! up popped "Blizzard Tie-Dye Khaki Fleece..." at Joann! (I should have muttered my way down at least one more aisle...) And this week it was on sale at half price. Cue me saying, "Hey, Honey, how would you like to go to that clearance shoe store you like?" To which she replied, "That happens to be near the Joann store with the desert fabric you were looking for? Get in the car."
I am known very well.

So, one car trip, two pairs of shoes, and about $7 and change later, I have the below:

A BLASTED NUCLEAR-DEVASTATED POST-APOCALYPTIC PLAIN!

The Ogre approaches. Give up.
(PS to Ogre-geeks. Yes, those are Combine vehicles, and the Ogre is technically a Combine unit. Guess making killer AI tanks that can think for themselves is a bad idea, huh? Oddly, this is how SJG packed the original metal boxed set. Yes, I painted those.)

And as you can see, it's already Ogre approved.

--- Howard Shirley, aka Parzival