User Guide

Last updated 2006-11-02

This module is for playing Columbia Games' "Victory: The Blocks of War". At the moment, it contains Red and Blue units (both basic & Elite) and has all 16 of the maps available (plus a blank hex grid).

Player aids: Use the charts to keep track of terrain behavior, unit properties & firing order, etc. There is also a hotkey reference in the help menu.

Starting a game: Pick out the maps you want & arrange them accordingly. Add rows & columns to do a 2-map game (2 rows, 1 column), or a 4-map (2x2) game, or a big 3x3 game, etc. For irregularly shaped scenarios like "Centerpunch" (one central map with four surrounding maps in a 'plus' shape), use the "blank" map to fill in the corners.

Deploying units: Drag-n-drop units off of the 'Blue', 'Blue Elite', etc. boards onto the main playing field. They'll drop in an unhidden ("face up") state, so don't forget to 'hide' them if you don't want your opponent to see them. Hidden units have a little yellow triangle on the bottom to indicate they're invisible to your opponent.

Change the step value by incrementing or decrementing (Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+]). Reset to '1' by choosing Reset.

Moving units: When you move units, they'll leave a "movement trail". The primary idea is so your opponent can see which units were moved where. The design at the moment is, "let your opponent review your movements and then she'll 'mark all pieces as moved' before moving her own units."

Bug to be fixed or worked around... The movement trails are on the 'battle board' as well, that'll need to be tweaked.

You can send a unit back to the bag by using 'Send to pool'.

Combat: There is a "battle board" with spaces allocated for the different unit types in firing order. At the moment, the 'send units to battle' command drops them onto the black square and the players then need to drag-n-drop them to the appropriate spot (complete with the aforementioned movement trails). Likely, I'll eventually tweak this so that the command will be "send to attack" or "send to defend", with 'attack' and 'defend' spots defined for each unit type so they'll just drop automatically onto the correct spots, etc.

Other notes: I originally was cooking this as an aid for planning in-person games; reviewing map arrangements, planning setups, etc. At the moment, that's all it's been used for; it hasn't been playtested yet for game management.

Please send any and all feedback to stailinn@yahoo.com

Likely future features