I’ve been pretty slow on the hobby wargame front this month. I made some mild progress in painting my newest Battletech force, but stalled out as my month got busier and busier. Parents in town, home improvement to work on, books to read, etc.

This week I’ve managed to get a few rounds in with The Mog, the solo wargame I picked up late last year. I don’t have a review ready just yet, so call this “Impressions” or “Thoughts.” Maybe just call it “Getting back on the damn bike and writing a piece.”

The Mog covers Operation: Gothic Serpent—the operation that included the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. It presents a series of scenarios in which you need to rescue Americans or capture Somalis. I’ve played the first mission twice now to get the mechanics down and while I think there’s a good amount more to chew on, I have my first impressions.

The game runs smoothly enough, though there’s a lot of rolling for spawning enemy troops. You roll to see how many spawn, then roll to see where each one spawns. I’ve had turns where I spawn six enemy units, which is six 2D6 rolls each followed by scouring the map for the corresponding box to put down the marker. This gets faster as you go and it also keeps the game from being long to actually set up, which I find essential in solo gaming.

Enemy AI is simple and easy to follow, which goes a long way toward keeping the game running smoothly. The variation is minimal, coming down to the type of enemy. Snipers will always shoot, but Militia will try to engage in close quarters combat. They keep coming at you at a constant clip, but also die just as fast. It feels almost like staving off a zombie apocalypse—that’s a bit callous of me, but tactically that’s basically what it was: eighty to ninety men fighting off an entire city of poorly trained or untrained assailants with guns as they tried to escape.

I enjoy the tension in deciding when to shoot and when to keep moving. While the odds of losing someone as a casualty are slim, it’s always enough that you have to consider your decisions. Your forces wildly outmatch the enemy, but if they roll the iron dice enough times, sooner or later they roll a six and you roll a one.

This gets me to casualties, which are a concept I love in this game. When someone goes down, you need to get them out. This isn’t easy—it slows you down massively and really burdens you. Rescue is always coming, but it marches out randomly from bases around the map, so it isn’t reliable. Further, the longer you wait for rescue, the worse you score.

You end up feeling like you’re left to fend for yourself, making tough decisions about how to pull out. The whole city is trying to kill you and there’s little you can do but try to fire off a few shots and keep moving. The tension between waiting and moving is very omnipresent as things heat up and I love that.

All of that said, the game does feel pretty simple, but remember this is colored by me only playing the first scenario thus far (of five, I believe). I’ll update my thoughts as I play more—especially when I do a second pass and use the optional rules that give flexibility but can make each scenario harder! I very much look forward to that.

So there. Content drought over. I may not get much time to paint for another week or so, but I’ll at least find the time to play a few more rounds of The Mog and maybe even work on my personal Mogadishu ruleset. Ah! There’s some content! I can outline how I plan to handle the phone network in Mogadishu during the battle in my miniatures game.

Funny how that works—just start writing and more ideas come to you. Like riding a bicycle indeed…