My last post was about AI done wrong, the generated box-art slop. This is the other side: AI done right.
When a new game lands, I don’t want a machine to tell me what to think about it. I want it to scout the ground fast, pull the sources I already own, and put them in front of me so I can bring my own judgment to the table. Here’s what that actually looks like:
Two games I just ordered from Legion Games – Huge sale. – Serious BIG discounts. I had four in the basket but trimmed to two…ya know don’t get silly.
One is Hill of Doves , a solitaire game on the First Boer War, 1881, the Laing’s Nek campaign. That period is almost never gamed, which is exactly why I grabbed it.
What it is. One player runs the Imperial British Army against a programmed Transvaal opponent, across three boards at once, strategic, operational, and tactical. The title is the meaning of *Majuba*, “hill of doves,” the hill where the campaign’s decisive British disaster played out on 27 February 1881.
What I want to know before I play:
– How the campaign actually ran, so I can tell whether the game delivers on that.
– Whether the programmed enemy gives me real decisions, or just rolls dice for the Boer.
What I already have to answer that. Inside a minute, the sourcing came back from my own library, page-cited:
– Osprey Campaign 045, Majuba 1881 the dedicated volume. Colley’s assault, 26-27 Feb (p.62), the battle itself viewed from the northwest (p.67), the campaign timeline (p.89). This maps straight onto the game.
– Osprey Essential Histories 052, Boer War 1899-1902 names the 1881 “First Boer War / Transvaal War” (p.13) for the wider context.
And it runs deeper than dates. The same source hands me the leadership, and that is where this game lives or dies. Osprey 45’s commander profiles set up a study in contrasts.
The British commander, Major-General Sir George Pomeroy-Colley, was the army’s finest military-theory brain. He finished the two-year Staff College course in nine months with the highest marks ever awarded, then became Professor of Military Administration. Sir Evelyn Wood called him “the best instructed soldier I ever met.” And he had never held a field command in his life [doah]. He wrote the Boers off as “an undisciplined rabble” who “would be unable to stand and face a regular force,” and held what one observer called “a dangerously high idea of what a few British soldiers can do.”
Across the hill stood the men he dismissed. Commandant-General Piet Joubert, “Slim Piet” to his own men (slim being the Boer word for guile), led a citizen militia of farmers. His second, Commandant Nicolaas Smit, was a farmer with “an unrivalled natural talent for military matters” whose “effective use of cover was second to none” – a judgment Colley made himself, before Smit’s marksmen swept him off the summit at Majuba.
That is the real test the game has to pass perhaps? Not the map, the leadership. Does the programmed Boer play like Smit, patient, using every fold of the ground, letting an overconfident theorist climb a hill and expose himself, or does it just roll dice for him? When I sit down, that is what I will be watching. The history tells me exactly what getting the Boer right would look like.
Sourced: Osprey Campaign 045, Majuba 1881, Opposing Commanders, pp.11-13.
That’s the point. The machine found the shelf and told me which pages matter. It did not read them for me, and it did not form the opinion. When I sit down, I’ll know the history well enough to judge the design in my own Bigboard special way 😊 : if the programmed system does a good enough job, I’ll say so, and if it’s just bookkeeping wearing an opponent’s coat, I’ll say that too.
What to read, what to trust, what to play, and what I think of it, that stays mine.
Authored, not generated. Even the prep. Just as we discussed earlier today.