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Twilight Struggle - ACTS Ladder Launch 19

For the Turn 0 setup I placed my influence in East Germany, Poland, and Austria. 

East Germany (0/4*)  * indicates control
Poland (0/4*)
Austria (0/1)

U.S.A. placed theirs in France, Italy, and West Germany. 

East Germany (*4/0)
France (*3/0)
Italy (*3/0)

Commentary

This is a pretty standard Euro-centric start to the game.  I really don’t have much choice but to do what I did, as I need some extra influence in East Germany and Poland if we make it to the Late War.  The U.S.A. gets their initial placement plus 3 more.  Stacking it all in Europe tells me he might have the Europe scoring card, but maybe he just plays a very strong Europe game.  In traditional TS games Italy is often hotly contested as the swing country due to its low stability [2], but I don’t think that will be happening here.

I’ve decided to use the Vassal Engine to render the screen shots, although I will still be tracking the game using the Excel spreadsheet.  Since I’m only taking end-of-turn snapshots I don’t think this will be too much work, and looks much nicer.

Washington’s War - ACTS Ladder Launch 2

Turn 0 in Washington’s War equals the Setup.  In this matchup I am the American player and Burke is the British.  My first move is to place the Committees of Correspondance: I get one Political Control (PC) marker in each of the 13 colonies.  After reviewing several pervious matches for optimal placement I decided on:

NH Norwich
MA Falmouth
RI Newport
CT New Haven
NY New York
NJ Morristown
DE Wilmington
PA Bassett Town
MD Baltimore
VA Alexandria
NC Salem
SC Camden
GA Savannah

This was followed by the British player placing 2 PC for the King:

NY Long Island
NY Ticonderoga

Commentary

Having only played the previous game and not as the Americans I chose to base my initial placements based on what others have done.  I took the CoC placements of several games from the previous round from as top players as I could find and looked for patterns.  Any cities that were common to all games I immediately selected as ‘best’ locations, this left a few stragglers which I chose based primarily on preference.  The American move to Long Island is a smart one I think because it gives the British a PC beach-head there to branch out from later.  The British did not opt to play a campaign card and go first, so this is a good way for them to stop me from closing off that route with a PC placement (which I was absolutely going to do).  Let’s see how the first turn goes.

Workbench Tip - Magnetic Sweep

As I was clipping the transistors for CIRC-05 I had one leg fly off unretrievably.  At that point I remembered I had a stack of rare earth magnets I was going to use to make some miniatures modular.  I broke them out and behold they make a perfect LED leg trap.  You could also drag this across your work surface to clean up any stray bits as these little guys are very strong.