Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 1

I started trolling the boys again with fake medals and citations. They ran with it and it’s gotten out of hand. Somebody up the chain wants an explanation as to what the Lord Quincy Entertainment III decoration is for and why it has been awarded to a nonexistent flyer, a “Capt. Rarginalt.” They fired off a press release to some goof they went to the Academy with and now it’s all over CENTCOM.

What’s this? New intel? Surrounded? It’s good timing in one sense, but have the Pakistanis gone mad? Who let us get flanked and cut off? All of a sudden me and my impish flyers are out of the administrative spotlight and into the furnace.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Setup

It’s the ceremony, pre-dawn. Only six hours of sleep despite how I timed everything and drugged myself up. Plenty of work to do today. I don’t know about you, but a raft of tasks and nothing else isn’t a day worth living for; some have stolen moments of endorphin checking the Instagram feed, some have love and a natural way with being with others; I have a Cut-Off situation in Pakistan. Usually waking up pre-dawn sours me, but this process — setting up the conditions, composing the terrain hex pool and enemy divisions, is a trill of bright-calm-excited.

Including the imagined space where I think I can survive a Cut-Off, which I never have. The usual pattern: Commit at least one deep strike on Day 1 to blunt the persistent effect of the most annoying Support or Command battalion, let the lesser craft slow down the most aggressive frontline Assault elements…then send flurries of parrying attacks out in a panic over the next three days with increasingly split forces, degrading craft and pilots, until I’m overrun about Day 3, or I wake up one day, look at the board and just pack it up. I’m losing my appetite for grinding out an extra day, wriggling and bleeding for an ounce of maneuver room, just for honor.

And here we are again: Two battalions that accelerate battalion movement, and the first part of the puzzle: What’s the craft mix?

Not overthinking it this time. Modest-cost sluggers in quantity: Two A-10 As and two AH-64 As.  And we’re doing concentration of force. After all, the game is Thunderbolt Apache Leader, not Carnival of Esoteric Decisions (a medal I won after sending an amusing, if ineffective, mix of craft into some imbroglio in Libya; somebody had an algorithm or something that awarded you a ribbon if you wasted exactly $50M each from the Northrup Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin piles. Stand up, stupid, you hit the Imperial Bingo!)

So what if the annoying and surprisingly sophisticated Pakistani command battalions—check you out, Pakistan, I see you—can push everything at me at double speed. I’m going to fix on one thing: Making sure they have less and less stuff to push each day. Go ahead. Force march your shot-full-of-holes ragtag bullshit my way. I’m going to try to turn the Front Line and Friendly Transit zones into a buzzsaw into which they can push all the crappy particle board they want. 

Wish me luck. If this works, I could end up with a shiny Order of the Malted Milk Falcon.

My, my, aren't we frisky.

***

What have we learned since Thunderbolt Apache Leader pulled us singlehandedly from an intractable late-winter depression? I’ve now filled 14 mission sheets out since learning this game in late winter ‘24. In service of not being a monophagous slouch — the world already has enough twats who just want to hunch over one title with the same people week after week, year after year — I’ve added several new titles to my collection: Final Girl, Wingspan, Cascadia, Vale of Eternity and Star Wars Outer Rim.

But the test is this: What do I regularly crave? What am I going to reach for? Along with all these new arrivals — some of which I have played heavily — I still need TAL on the table at least once a month. What sticks is its own testament.

Missions to Date (Personal Surrender Notes Sometimes Substitute for Formal Rating)

• Pakistan, Cut-Off Outcome: Tap-out - Untenable by Day 3

• Libya, Cut-Off Outcome: Day 6 Tap-out

• North Korea, Show of Force Outcome: Dismal

• North Korea, Surge Outcome: Good*

• North Atlantic, WWIII Outcome: Failure. Overrun.

• Iran, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Are you kidding me with these attack rolls?!!

• Iraq, Show of Force Outcome: Good

• Libya, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Good

• Pakistan, Holding Action Outcome: NOPE

• Pakistan, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Poor

• Iraq, Cut-Off Outcome: Good

• Israel Defense, Cut-Off Outcome: Mission failure.

• Iraq, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Good

• Pakistan, General War Outcome: i can’t take it any more

*Even my best efforts are marred here. There are a couple things I was playing incorrectly. 1) You get ONE auxiliary pilot for every craft TYPE, not every CRAFT. I was playing with too deep a bench. 2) I thought I was being clever and economical by collapsing all the Arm Aircraft steps for the day into one umbrella move. I was cheating. It’s a separate step for each mission, I believe, so my SO expenditure was also padded. Whoopsie.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 1, Mission 1
Target: Fast Assault Battalion 
Pilot: Viper, A-10A

The enemy — none of whose vehicles have ranged attacks — obligingly clusters in key points along neat reverse-S pattern on flat ground between ridgelines, offering themselves up to at least be halved in strength with one low-altitude pass. Viper seizes this opportunity by knocking out a grand total of three points worth of vehicles, missing hilariously with every kind of armament on the craft. He tops off this gobsmacking display by getting the HUD damaged and biffing a 6+ Bingo check, accruing three Stress on homebound approach. What an asswipe. This was a weak battalion that he could have cratered and should have halved at the very least. My opening gambit is already sideways. Concentration of farce. With the exception of one late APC kill, I have a string of something like six attacks where I didn’t generate more than a natural three on the d10. That is discouraging.

Award: Medal of Defecation

***

Experimentation: In my rookie outings I anchored on the Fast ability to make the variables less dizzying. Then I ease my way into the charms of other abilities, figuring out the nifty trick of having Slow dudes enter low-altitude under heavy ridge cover, wait out the enemy’s fire step, then burst onto the scene in a breathtakingly destructive, patiently timed counter. It takes more Loiter time, but it slaps.

Experimentation: The possibility vibrates. What happens, for instance, if I requisition myself a Specter gunship and then spam a cluster of choppers? Let the Specter, with its free ammo pass and giddy lack of weight restrictions, hit the enemy deep to take out far-away divisions who think they can sit back there between three bands of friendly cushion and just fuck with me? Then we dispatch our cheapo choppers — two AH-1s and an AH-64A—in a cluster to knock out the most menacing frontline assault battalions.

It turned out pretty good because I challenged another habit: Stewing about three delicate complicated entry points onto the battle hex map. What if I just bunched them up for a cavalry charge? It was not only effective, it was devastating. Riding low and dispensing generous ladles of Hellfires for Stand-Off strikes and LAUs for close-in work, they would scour their hex, pound the next one and glide easily over the smoking bric-a-brac. Sometimes I had chopper pilots who had nothing to do on their turn except throttle forward, hoping they could at least dump a bird or two before their mates slagged everything. It was glorious.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 2, Mission 1
Target: Tank Leader Battalion
Pilot: Halo, A-10A

With Viper’s loose stool being pressure-washed out of seams in the cockpit previously thought impermeable, I give the stress-resistant Halo the nod. The Tank Leader battalion that was halved on Day 1 by yeoman work from my AH-64 operators—Rock and Eagle—has rumbled into my rear band. Halo has to mop it up post-haste. I decide we don’t have the luxury of running fewer than three missions today, as the Friendly Transit zone now has three assault battalions jostling for our necks—including the Fast Assault Battalion that so baffled Viper. The Apache duo is going after that. I repaired nothing, so hopefully that compromised engine gets the bird to the zone. I don’t even want to detail what I have asked Rebel to do. The bandsaw has to start whirring, missing teeth and all. I’m not diverting to rear-line attacks and I’m not sparing the horses.

Halo starts off with a bad break: Bad Coordinates. But he caught a good one earlier: Four HVTs are clustered in two hexes, which allows him to rip across the board in two turns and unload obscene amounts of munitions into each. He comes home with three Stress and a much lighter aircraft. There are two hellacious missions left to go before I could dare call what I see daylight.

Award: The Timely Mop-Up. It’s a watch glued to a mop I found. Just take it to your billet. Yes, I thought you would appreciate the googly eyes. What’s that? You’re going to fuck the mop. That’s fine. I’m very proud of you and you’re a very good pilot and would you please go away.

***

The brown bear that digs through my trash must be hitting some insane pre-hibernation caloric requirements. I took a full-on whiz in the remains of a Safeway rotisserie chicken, hoping to dissuade it. Every scrap was gone the following morning. I was awestruck.

I’m paralleling that path in anticipation of what I call the Awful 90: November, December, January. I’m laying in calorie-dense stores at all costs. My table will be a bonfire of crackling new endeavors. A deep black-and-red coal bed of Roman, German, American, and Russian goings-on, aiming for that March day when—probably drunk—I will realize the evening sun is stretching and stretching, hanging there like it’s stuck, and I’ve made it.

I now own GMT’s Storm Above the Reich. By Thanksgiving I hope to add Pavlov’s House and Hadrian’s Wall. When the sun starts setting at 4:43 p.m. and I feel hollowed out by 6, I hope to remember in November what I learned in March. Just take the game out. Set it up. Take Ambien and fall asleep with the rulebook on your chest. Bank the fires and grind through. Dream of bears, their stomachs full of chicken bones and piss.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Sitrep, End of Day 2

It’s been a day of valiant flying. Rebel executed a simply brilliant run, halving a full-strength infantry battalion singlehanded. He found a seam somehow, clearing two AAAs his first turn with a well-placed one-two of a Maverick and a GBU-16. His Evasive ability and ECM then kept him aloft as he plied his way west over scads of APCs and infantry with MANPADs, blessing the occupants—which included both enemy command units—with a judicious sprinkling of cluster bombs and Mk. 83s. He even somehow returned a useable craft.

It’s the kind of thing you could put your feet up and savor over a whiskey if it weren’t for the sirens and the fact that there’s no whiskey. The remains of the enemy Infantry Force and the Fast Assault battalions — along with a full-strength Air Defense Unit — have all barreled into the Friendly Rear band.

There’s one play. It’s the same play as Day 1. Lash out at the nearest antagonists with the best-placed shots you can muster. I have eight SO points, most of which I assume I’ll need to reserve for the penalties for extreme encroachment. But those infantry and assault elements are half-strength. If I go at those with two craft each, pitiable state though they may be in, I’ll knock them off for a three-SO kicker. That will keep us in it. The craft will be armed with stuff my adjutants found at Lowe’s*, but we’ll be in it, and the Pakistanis will only have two operational assault battalions left. Maybe just few enough that my tattered squad can gang up on and neutralize on Days 4 and 5. Maybe.

Award: The 7 Seconds Clenched-Fists, Black-Eyes Medal of Being Hardcore as Hell

*You have not had a true retail experience until you’ve visited the Lowe’s in Kandahar. Haggling for cart food in the front alone is worth the trip, the most fun you’ll have on this side of the Durand Line.

Rebel's in the arena. He's trying stuff.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 3, Mission 2
Target: Infantry Battalion
Pilot: Halo, A-10A

Today Warthogs and Apaches were paired off with each other for our desperate sweep of the back porch. There was much hooting on comms as we confirmed Rebel and Rock had finally crushed the Fast Assault Battalion that had been flooring it through our fire for the last 72 hours. They spotted a surviving truck or two hauling ass to comical banjo music, but those discombobulated lees will never be a coherent fighting force again. If Halo and Montana can do the same to the remnants of the Infantry Battalion, we can likely weather it when the Air Defense Unit enters our tender rear zone, regroup and make them pay on Day 4.

My gamble with Montana’s engine block craps out. He plummets into scrub and rock en route to the attack zone. Halo pushes on, his A-10 laden with with the fruits of one of the last SO points I can justify spending. He opens with a classic: busting a command unit wide open with a Maverick and simultaneously knocking out an AAA in his approach path with a GBU-16 shot. He banks back, switching to high altitude. His strike ability is compromised, but the three Mk. 20s and two Mk. 83s should be enough to hollow out the remnants of the battalion bunched across three hexes in the middle of the board. With a little luck.

There’s no more luck. He calls in the ping from the helicopter that materializes at six o’clock low. And the Sidewinder that issues from it. That’s the last we hear.

Two enemy battalions will be hammering the base by evening, with a third due to arrive before we’re reinforced. I’ll have one SO point left on Day 4 with which to send out two chewed-up craft, with pilots that are all about to go on tilt. No sense in throwing them away; we’re beat.

I think of Halo’s freshly widowed mop. For some reason that’s really getting me down.

Award: Order of the Nice Try, Cowboy

***

Day 4 of running 2-3 missions a day on Total War in Pakistan. This isn’t turning out much better than the Cut-Off debacle. I quit. This has been on the table for two or three days now and I’m just tired. The last run was my two AH-1s on a hopeless bid…I was begging for the Killed chit. 

It was a miracle even in its failure: Gator (a replacement for another KIA Cobra jockey) and Grandpa were running the gauntlet, surviving just enough damage draws not to get killed, but not enough to remain effective. HUDs were knocked out. Stress levels were spiking. Depending on the ad hoc targeting, one or the other were drawing three hits per turn as they barreled for the other edge of the map. I did a count. They were one point shy of halving the battalion…but the penalties from damage were so severe, the few birds they had left in the rack wouldn’t do anything. 

The fact that they made it home was just another in a desert full of such. I speed-ran the Close Support Old and New Testaments in two days and I didn’t even care what happened next. Please let it be the Apocalypse. Do I get to at least put my head down on the desk for 15 minutes if it’s the Apocalypse?

On the second mission, I lost the F-16 and Dart — one strike short of finishing the remains of Infantry Battalion 1A. I wasn’t worried about mortgaging my score and blowing the VPs for a new bird. It was the psychic energy and focus I didn’t have.

Each mission had the emotion of a movie. The solo flights, last-chance shots closing up and opening again with a miraculous Enemy Cover roll and then the pilot missing on the last possible try with the last possible missile. Anticipation and rage. Despair and resignation. And the overlap of unnameable alloys that should be added to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I was relieved to set it down, but still happy to savor it. Although I’m wondering if the eight-day missions just aren’t a bit protracted for me.

If you’d have told me two years ago that a solitaire boardgame about close air support would be my muse, I wouldn’t have believed you. This is a categorically unique being on my shelf, a private and exhausting and thrilling second life on my table — not exactly spiritual, but undeniably transcendent and engrossing.

I can only say to those who have made that AGM-114 strike at the last possible moment before the tanks run dry and your tailbone chakra disappears down a black flume, thank you for reading. And good hunting.

Award: It’s for you, my fellow Special Option-point spenders and pilot allocators: the  Gen. Johneld B. Dubious Patient Reader Award. I can only thank you for indulging me. I am currently lobbying BGG to get you some profile flair for this one. Should happen any day now. Count your mops before you shut down the house tonight. This century is freaky as hell.

Further Recommended Reading: Here’s Part One of my four-part series about my freshman season as a TAL commander.

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 4

I packed the game away after my first-ever play, looked at the box for a few minutes, then took it all back out again for a second play. Following is a collection of notes and observations on my sophomore experience.

Setup: A random draw presents me with a Cut-Off situation in Iraq. I scour the cards to find the name of who’s responsible for letting a whole-ass airbase get encircled. As usual, there’s no accountability, just rigid parameters: I’m getting most of my Special Options points up front and there are very few ways to get any more. I’ve got five days to punch a hole in the approaching enemy forces that’s big enough to reopen supply lines.

Let’s Try it Again from the Top, But With More Killing This Time, Work With Me, People, Work With Me: During my rookie mission I fielded a tiny squadron and sent them all at one target for the first few days to make game management simpler and just focus on mechanics. This time I want to have more craft that I can combine for separate strikes starting on Day 1. I end up with five: a Harrier, an F-16, an A-10A, and two AH-64s.

I want to commit Day 1 just to strikes on the enemy’s front-line assault elements: Degrade their ability to project force, then practice equipping missions that reach support and command elements in the rear range band — exotic regions I never saw during my inaugural game.

Looks like this scenario will penalize me for using craft or pilot replacement options. Looks like the only way to earn more SO points — there is no daily income in this episode — is to knock the hell out of stuff. You want resources? Let’s see some blowed-up stuff. The enemy’s hand is already closing around your windpipe.

Beginner’s Strategy Heuristics: To simplify the strategic puzzle, I’m carrying over the basic approach I settled on during my first game: Low and fast. My Day 1 crew is comprised entirely of pilots with the Fast ability (they get to fire before enemy units do). I don’t care if they’re good at other things, just give me the ones whose DNA helixes spell out K-I-L-L. These are the guys who you don’t turn loose anywhere but places like these, because they’ll pick off a civilian airliner or two out of restless hunger if you’re not constantly feeding them live target data.

Keeping the mission at low altitude means I can focus on zooming through selected lanes where they can do their dirty business in between ridgelines. No fancy Ridge Evasion checks for me. And no Pop-Up units (for each craft that starts a Loiter Turn at high altitude, you have to do a blind pull from a bag of Special Surprise Jerk Counters that might appear on the map). During my first game, Pop-Ups offended me to an almost pathological degree. I don’t like being interrupted. So we’re not doing any of that.

Privation, The Great Teacher: Having nearly all of the SO points given to me at once turned out to be an instructive limitation: With SO points desperately low as the mission days went on, I got a lot more familiar with each type of munition and what it does. I was setting tight budgets for each sortie and finding out how very much I could do with a little. I didn’t have to go grab my Xanax if there were damage markers on my craft; I got a lot better at picking which kinds of dings I had to deal with right away and which I could just let ride. (“Oh, waaah, your display is damaged. Just don’t shoot stuff from real far away, stupid. Get right up on ‘em, it’ll be fine.”)

Still Learning: When I teach others new games, I always remind them that they’re going to get major stuff wrong and to not be too upset about it. I got anxious enough to forget my own bromides. I was applying the Evasive ability wrong. I wasn’t applying Battalion notes correctly. I was routinely forgetting basic steps. I still got chewed to pieces, even with the little accidental advantages I gave myself through blithe incompetence. But as I re-read the fan-compiled FAQ on Boardgame Geek, I remembered that I was just one of hundreds of dudes effing stuff up, getting stuck, re-reading, and figuring it out in a distributed fraternity of souls siloed in thrill and despair.

Speaking of which: The several days I ran my first few games were a carousel of confusion and insight, joy and rage. I noticed last week my left eye looked a bit cloudy. I tell you in all candor that I think I popped a blood vessel in my eye screaming at Tex. He went down in his AH-64A, killed on impact from a SAM hit. His job was to take it out with LAU-61 rockets. It was important to clear this hex out, so I committed two rocket pods to the attack. Two chances to produce a four on a ten-sided die. He had some diabolical talent for avoiding the plainly achievable. Whatever came out of my mouth next would have been Q.E.D. in any divorce proceeding in any court in the U.S.

But I was already already divorced anyway, so fuck it. My hygiene suffered during these days. I hadn’t been happier in recent memory.

***

By Day 5, I can tell I’m en route to a failing grade: There are no more SO points, and despite getting pounded to half strength, my Day 4 mission troubles must have emboldened the armored spearhead battalion I tangled with the day previous. They’re advancing.

But I have rested pilots who I’m going to pile into these once-gleaming craft for one more run. Fuck mission ratings. Fuck victory points. It’s you and me, assholes, one last time. The damage markers on these craft are comically dense, but it’s late in the day and we have murder in our hearts.

I love this fucking game so much. I don’t rue the days of the old Colorado Springs crew when this is on the table. When the board has the glow of morning catchlight, I can’t even remember their faces. My eyes narrow as I sip some scalding coffee, look at the distribution of the new target battalion’s units over the terrain hexes and start planning attack lanes. I want for nothing.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
New Series: Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 1

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 3

Mohawk’s inaugural high-altitude pass in his F-16 resulted in a cratered enemy AAA unit — that guided 1,000-lb. GBU-16 is a hell of a drug. 

Then rookie mistakes set in: Mohawk wasted a cluster bomb trying to take out two tanks, then I blithely ended his movement right in the sights of an enemy chopper, which would have shot him down had I not equipped the bird with an ECM unit. Mohawk chuckled his way through several attempts at reprisal.

Thor swooped in with his A-10’s cannons to shred the chopper soon after. All this time, Grandpa was tasked with hunting a pair of command units, one of which he eliminated with a tidy volley of Hellfires. But owing more neophyte sloppiness in the commander’s chair, I’ve also exposed the craft to costly potshots from another enemy chopper and AA unit: Thor and Grandpa have accumulated Stress points and taken hits to their pylons, which compromise the amount of effective weight they can carry in ordnance. 

This matters less to Thor, who still has a Wal-Mart distribution center’s worth of boom-boom slung under the wings of the A-10, but Grandpa’s little Cobra only has two big-punch munitions left and his cannon efficacy isn’t good enough to bank precious attack turns on….

As I age, the more painful the gap between complexity and desire becomes. Bouncing around between three different applications and four different source docs to harvest some sliver of Boring out of 15 different shards of Boring for some boring-ass project makes my mind claw for Elsewhere like a mouse trying not to drown in a jar. 

But last night, driven by the building tickle of finally feeling all the game’s information and steps start to gel, I fought through it until I got into something resembling a flow. I was still doing stuff wrong — LOS, figuring out who can shoot and who and when and with what — still had me bouncing back and forth between the rulebook and BoardGameGeek forums every few minutes. But the mound of stats and chips was starting to take the shape of a game. And now I’m hungry and I want more. I’m finally feeling the thrill, the quiet pride and accomplishment of figuring it out.

Building odd monuments with a single viewing chair in a protean gallery of your own learning experiences is one of the things you learn to treasure as a solo gamer. I believe these little triumphs and insights enrich the inner life.

So Day 2 of the mission looms, and per the restrictions of the Rapid Deployment scenario, I can’t switch any pilots out. Just to see how it goes, I’m going to split my trio of flyers into two separate groups and see if I can effectively harass two enemy battalions.

Are ya winnin’, son? Grandpa and Mohawk barely made it back from the Day 2 foray vs. an enemy recon battalion. Thor’s Stress is pushing Shaken range even before he’s in the air. Feels irresponsible to send him out, but I’ve explained to him that this is a learning experience for all of us.

My expectations for this experiment are low: Grandpa was a mess after Day 1. He’s one more hit from crashing after failing a Ridge Evasion check that put his Stress levels close to the Unfit range. Also now there’s a Munition Shortage, so I’m trying to find a few missiles he can fire off while hovering and hopefully exit before he gets shot down, which almost feels like an inevitability. Mohawk, his craft still undamaged, will be hunting the rest of the hexes vs. an assault battalion, while Thor—whose Stress levels have also crept up dangerously—is heading after a separate target to see what he can get away with.

Quibble: I think I’m going to ignore the step where the rules say to strip damage and stress counters off of the pilot and craft cards, then log them all on the sheet during the bookkeeping steps. Why not just track them with the counters on the cards? It’s a better dashboard for me. Maybe this doesn’t work when you have bigger squadrons and more damage to track, but it feels like an efficient workaround for now.

Part One
Part Two
Part Four

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 2

It’s about to get hot: Thor’s A-10A and Mohawk’s F-16 are poised to criss-cross the 10-hex tactical map—at low altitude and high altitude, respectively—and knock out as many surface-to-air threats as they can on their first pass. The hexes are sprinkled with 10 units from an enemy armor battalion, including tanks, anti-aircraft units and choppers.

Between them is Grandpa, hovering menacingly in his AH-1 over a hex that contains an enemy mobile command vehicle, all plump and dumb and gunless. The plan is to have Grandpa mop up these high-point targets while Thor and Mohawk swoop over ridgelines and across desert, hunting targets that can shoot back.

My armament strategy was, “A little of this, a little of that.” I used three SO points against the weight allowances of the craft. The strategy? Buy munitions that had a lot of different names: “GBU-16, you say? Oh, that sounds lovely. Let’s bring along a bit of that.”

The boys went shopping and found some stuff they liked

Which brings us to a consideration of the imaginative space where these bombs, in a split-second of game time, will fall. I’m no fan of the last few decades of the U.S.’ actual desert escapades. There doesn’t seem to be an option for even voting against them anymore. Think about it too much and you’ll crawl atop your wargame collection in despair, doused in lighter fluid, for a fiery penitence.

But since I’m secretly 12, I still can’t resist the “toys” themselves—or the games that allow a 54-year-old to go “PEW! PEW! BRRRRT!” in tactical systems with a toothsome degree of verisimilitude and no stakes outside the pebbled plastic of my Wal-Mart folding table.

But shit, you know what time it is: I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some version of this hardware I’m playing with isn’t falling on Palestinian families right now. What one person considers an escapist shoot-em-up will be the next person’s depression spiral. Who can settle in for a night at the opera when you can hear Napoleon’s artillery rumbling at the outskirts of town?* 

Immersing myself in the world of Thunderbolt Apache Leader as a private exercise takes some delicate bargaining with the imagination and the conscience. While I like games with militaries and combat, I get why people would rather play in arenas with anthropomorphic badgers building point systems on riverbanks, or trading buttons, or seeing who can make the fastest abstract bowl of noodles in a fictional restaurant. It’s an age of crisis. The theater walls and our psyches are paper-thin. The Worst of Everything is heaved from the wings directly onto center stage with volcanic fury. Play how you will, and when you can.

But back to my table and its accepted boundaries: I’m at the step where my pilots’ thumbs quiver angrily over the Fire buttons while I double-check attack rules, line of sight, altitude, target, and armament stats. Because all hell’s about to break loose. (P.S. I love this rulebook. There’s a lot of information, but it’s fastidious and procedural; crisp examples and well-chosen illustrations abound. I sense now—as I did when I first heard about it in 2012—that once the bookkeeping and engagement steps become second nature, this game will pack the perfect balance of engrossing detail and propulsive action.)

Frankly, it’s a godlike feeling and one of the most beautiful things about of the tabletop medium. The luxury of feeling the anticipation of a decision stretch in time. Seeing how it’s a node in a living story, part of a vivid diorama of tense action, partly under my control. Just maybe in a universe without an American God, one where flying sorties into Pakistani airspace is just a wacky thing that happens, and is forgotten in an afternoon.

*Every night for a year I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of Toby Longworth narrating Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 books. It’s been a long day. Time to drift off to the sounds of a hive city being shelled into fragments. To mangle the famous Josef Stalin quote: “10 million deaths is a tragedy, 100 million is hysterical.”

Part One
Part Three
Part Four

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 1

From a production and budget standpoint, I completely get why a scrappy, independent publisher of wargames would get a couple of pilot illustrations done and then duplicate that across several characters. You switch out the name and stats and keep going because it’s not like the margins are huge in this business.

But in the early going, I find these dudes hilarious; it’s like I’m in charge of an army of hale and doughy vat-cloned yahoos who all were past winners on some military reality show called Top Jerk. (How much post-discharge therapy would you need if you woke up in quarters at 3 a.m. and three identical dudes like this were massing at your cot for some kind of coprophilic prank? These portraits are bursting with grim comedic potential.)

Genius, Divot and Pro are preparing a variety of Midwestern surprises for you

That aside: my plucky All-American homonculi and I, according to the draw of the cards, are off to Pakistan, where we face a Rapid Deployment scenario in the variable setup. Special Options points—your “money” for equipping the squadron and its fliers, among other vital functions—are at a premium. Whatever it is we’re going to do, we’ve got four mission days to do it and twelve enemy divisions to do it to.

What else do I know so far? I love the granular “Now put this here, dummy” steps in the meticulous rulebook. I’ve blown 16 of my 25 initial Special Options points on a squadron consisting of an F-16, an AH-1, an A-10A (if I can’t go BRRRRRRT on my first go, I don’t see the point of any of this) and a scout unit.

I’ve got a roster of six flyers: Mohawk, Dart, Freak, Grandpa, Thor and Gumby. All rated Average in the cockpit, even if they’re exceptionally terrifying while chewing in unison at mess behind wraparound shades. I love filling out the player log, it feels like I’m doing a TTRPG bolted onto very solid rails. I promoted none of my guys in anticipation of point expenditure on armaments. You pick out and “pay” for all your air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance, following the aircraft data cards for which craft takes what kind of bomb or missile. I’m not worried about strategy at this point: These MFers are probably going to die. I will get sent to another post and apply their sacrifice to my continued improvement. I’ve never felt more patriotic than while typing the previous sentence.

According to the Special Condition card I pulled, I’ve got satellite recon data on my side, which will increase my Loiter ability by 1. I’m not sure what this means yet. I’m just going to assume it’s like stoned and vicious HS sophomores hanging out at 7-11s in the mid-’80s—the more they Loiter, the more damage they can do. Right?

There are also 12 enemy battalions—a mix of Assault, Support and Command—waiting for me in the Pakistani hills, which I have to metrically knock the shit out of, and quickly. I’m not counting on it. For now, I’m going to make some fairly arbitrary and stingy decisions about munitions mix in hopes of eventually using my SO points to cushion the bravura series of rookie commander fuckups that is about to occur.

I’ll hit you up once the boys have scattered a few payloads about.

Part Two
Part Three
Part Four