Yesterday, while waiting for the guy with Mars Attacks to show up (he never actually did due to his inability to understand the difference between afternoon and evening) I showed the proud owner of the Ogre reprint how to play his game.
This game was famous in its day and still has a strong following (a recent Kickstarter campaign for a huge version was extremely successful and you can find Ogre in a box the same size as they pack G Scale train sets in if you look), but GenCon saw a reprinting of the game in its glorious no-color original baggie version.
Actually, as I told the proud owner as he watched me showing his friend how to play it, the set he had was much better than any of the monochrome versions put out "in the day" since it featured real wargame thickness card counters that were pre-punched a-la SPI, not two sheets of thin card you had to cut up with scissors.
It was fun to watch the faces of the others as I explained that one side got only one unit, the eponymous Ogre, and the other a slew of infantry, tanks and hovercraft (aka "G.E.V.s"). Then it was fun to watch again as they absorbed the stats of that one unit and realized it was a damn-near unstoppable leviathan bristling with weaponry.
Jackson did a really good job with this game, crafting something that was fun and easy to pick up and play, highly portable (it packs down to about the size of a large phablet), and balanced so that two players of roughly equal ability should find it tough on either side of the battle.
The "balance" part of that is a very hard thing to do, but is vital for an enjoyable game. No-one enjoys a game that provides an easy win or easy loss.
The game has a hex-grid map, mostly blank but for the features that block movement (but not line-of-sight). The army player must try and take as much advantage of these as possible while not boxing his own units in. He must also understand that the infantry, tanks, GEVs etc are expendable in the long term, yet must get as much damage infliction out of them as possible before ythey are inevitable ground under-tread.
The Ogre player must trundle ponderously down the board and around the craters and ridges (one version of the game had a color map that depicted these in glorious color and isomorphic three-d), trying to stay in the game until he gets within range of the command post, which is his first objective. When that is destroyed he must then exit the map at the bottom (so that the Ogre has crossed the length of the map).
The army player must decide whether he will attack the mobility of the Ogre by targeting tracks or go for the weaponry mounts. Leave the Ogre too mobile and it will ram the CP and gain at least a marginal victory. Bringing it to a standstill will involve being in range of its formidable weapon arrays and that will result in fast attrition of the infantry and armor units you need to get the job done.
As we played, the younger guys, who had never played an old-style card-and-counters wargame and so had never been exposed to the concepts that once were staples of almost all of them, marveled at how straightforward the game was, how playable it was, and how rich the tactical possibilities were.
For me it conjured 1982, and meetings of the Coventry Wargame Society and the Lanchester Polytechnic Game Society, both of which were the source of many hours of pleasant company and interesting conversation in addition to demon wargaming.
It also served to demonstrate the truly diabolical die-rolls I could get - I had boasted of these to them but could tell they thought I was laying it on thick. After one round in which ten consecutive attacks were miserable failures, even the "sure thing" ones, they became believers in my power to distort the local statistical field.
Anyway, if you want to try Ogre in an affordable and portable form, I recommend looking for this version. It costs, I'm told, less than 4 dollars. I saw it for a shade over 6 bux at Amazon. The semi-portable version will set you back about $150.
Resources:
Ogre, Pocket Edition
Ogre, Over-The-Top Edition
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