Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a demo of "The Habit of Victory" by OSG at The Game Parlor in Chantilly, Va. presented by the designers, Kevin Zucker and Mark Herman.

The game has beautiful components and, as I was quickly corrected by Kevin, is a "Card Assisted Game", NOT a "Card Driven Game". This is only the second game that OSG has come out with that uses the CAG system.

The Habit of Victory covers Napoleon's campaigns in Poland, 1806 & 1807. There are 3 scenarios and the Campaign Game. The scenarios covered are Pultusk/Golymin, Eylau, and Friedland. Attrition, initiative and French morale play major roles in the game. Each card in the deck has an attrition table printed on it for easy reference. The larger your particular army, the greater the odds for attrition. There are also attrition modifiers such as season and weather to consider.

A little about the CAG system: Although there are actions that can be performed with the cards, their main use is in movement, initiative, and speeding up game play by reducing the number of die rolls required to play.

Anyone familiar with any of the recent OSG offerings will be able to learn Habit of Victory more readily than those who are not. Since most of the attendees had played OSG games before and I had not, I opted to observe, learn, and take some photos. In the photos you will notice counters which appear to be control markers. These are actually inverted unit counters with their true identity hidden from your opponent. On the flip sides are the actuall IDs, values and gameplay info.

Although I was not able to stay for the conclusion of the demo, I really liked what I saw and will definitely add this to my collection and get it on the table when time permits. I would recommend this to anybody interested in this period of history. Here's a link to the game from OSG's website:

http://www.napoleongames.com/HoV.html

Attached file:   French Begin Their Advance North-a.jpg (265.58 KB)

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As you can see, the French start the game concentrated around the Warsaw area. They quickly will run into the Russians across the river line. Bridges also play a key role in the game.

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A couple of overhead shots of the entire game and the beginning phase.

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Another overhead.

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The renowned designer and the guru of OSG, Kevin Zucker. Kevin is a great guy and very patiently taught and explained the rules and concepts of the game to all. That's Mark Herman sitting at the table on the left.

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Here's Mark Herman, co-designer of the game. As most of us know, Mark is also a very renowned designer with all sorts of games to his credit. Also a great and friendly guy, he helped patiently with all of the attendees as well as Kevin. Here we see mark smiling for the camera and poring over the rules in preparation for the start of the game.

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Here the game has begun and Kevin is making adjustments to the one of the record tracks (printed on the map) while Mark and some of the other players prepare for their next move. To hear Mark talk about some of his games, check out P2P podcast episode #14.

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Attached file:   Pondering Play-a.jpg (258.71 KB)

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thanks for sharing these pictures, osprey

i'm not into Napoleonics or Zucker systems, but i think Mark Hermann is an awesome designer, so...i could give this one a shot (the map looks beautiful !!)

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Thanks for your feedback preacher. The game really does look fun. I wrote to Kevin Zucker after I posted this and sent him the link to it which he in turn posted on Consimworld and sent another email out to a distro. Should bring in a lot more folks to the site. I noticed your other post about the P2P write up on the Consimworld Socials page and looked at that. Then I just went to their home page and P2P got top billing! Pretty friggin cool!!

Anybody that would like to read a bit more about the game on Consimworld, especially some of Mark Herman's comments can check it out here:

http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX 14@290.VhhHdVzdTXq.107@.1dd2bf33/0

The link doesn't work properly from here so you'll have to copy and paste this into your browser and remove the space between the WebX and the 14 and insert a question mark in between the two.