Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The (Board) Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management Part IV: Castle Panic


Some games are so fiendishly clever, so devilishly difficult, the players must join forces and fight against the very game itself … because, in the end, we will either all win, or we will all be sitting on the couch of shame.

I’m euphoric to continue this one-of-a-kind summer series that will help you whether you are just interested in finding out about this new and exciting career opportunity, or ready to take your Supply Management career to the next level. Not only is it more fun than watching the defragmentation bar in Windows 95 on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM and an almost full 1 GB hard drive (which boots up in a day and a half), but when you can grasp a lot of the basic concepts by playing the right mix of strategic (and sometimes tactical) board games with your friends, it’s two blasts and a half!

While we still have to tackle the economic games (like Puerto Rico) at some point, we’re going to make use of the fact that, thanks to unprecedented generosity of Wil Wheaton (@wilw) and Geek & Sundry, we have another fantastic TableTop episode where Wil Wheaton introduces us to the game. Until we run out, we are going to take advantage of the priceless gifts that Mr. Wheaton has granted us with this series.

Wil Wheaton gives us a very succinct introduction to Castle Panic, a classic castle defence game (of which there are thousands on the internet and at least dozens for your iPhone) turned into an exceptionally well crafted team-based board game:


The board is divided into three areas called arcs. There’s a blue arc, a green arc, and a red arc. Each arc is further divided into three zones that are targetable by archers, knights, and swordsmen. … The bad guys are trolls, orcs, and goblins. They’re coming out of the forest, advancing towards our castle, trying to ruin our lives. Every turn, the active player will draw cards and then trade a card with another player so that they’re in a position to fight the bad guy most effectively. This is how we work together. We have to get useful cards to the active player so they can target one of the guys coming in to knock down one of our castle walls. After all that happens, the bad guys will advance towards the castle and then we will do the entire thing all over again. … If the bad guys come in and knock down all of our towers, we lose the game. If we manage to defeat all the bad guys, even if there is only one tower left standing, then we win the game.

In TableTop Episode 6, we learn that Castle Panic teaches cooperation, not co-opetition, in the face of almost insurmountable risks as a result of unexpected disasters. Think of goblins as environmental disasters, orcs as socio-technological failings, and trolls as geopolitical-economic crisis that could smash your supply chain into pieces if not properly addressed. And just like in reality, depending on what the risk is, and where it is, only a certain type of mitigation can be brought to bear. An environmental disaster that destroys a production plant and wipes out a source of supply can only be countered by finding a new source of supply, which, in supply chains, may often mean trading with your competition who has locked up excess supply but needs something else that you have more immediate access to. Similarly, in Castle Panic, staying alive often means trading archers, knights, swordsman, heroes, and even barbarians with other players to insure you have the resources you need to take out the immediate threats.

Just like each monster begins with a different number of hit points in castle panic, each disaster has a different degree of severity and requires and may require multiple actions to resolve. If a geopolitical uprising or economic sanction all of a sudden makes your suppliers in Vietnam inaccessible, whom you were depending on for raw materials and production, you will have to find a new source of raw material supply and a new manufacturing partner.

In Castle Panic, just like in your supply chain, the risks, and the disasters they represent, keep coming. At the end of very turn, players must draw 2 tokens from the monster pile (until all 49 are exhausted). These may be run of the mill goblins, trolls, and orcs or they may be special tokens that move monsters around the board; advance them closer to the castle you have to protect (such as the Orc warlord or Troll Mage); force you to draw additional monsters (including the Goblin King); kill your defenders (by way of plagues), or that unleash a giant boulder that, while having the benefit of squashing all monsters in its path, doesn’t stop until one of your walls or towers are destroyed. (The same way that a new piece of legislation, a trade barrier, or other unexpected turn of events can cut off a market for your organization.)

Furthermore, in Castle Panic, just like in your supply chain, your resources are limited. Players draw to replenish their 5-card hand at the beginning of their turn, and once those resources are spent, they are not replenished until the beginning of their next term (just like your budget is only replenished once a year). While most cards take the form of defenders (archers, knights, swordsmen, barbarians, and heroes), some are special cards that will allow a player to draw 2 extra cards, rebuild a wall (with brick and mortar), slow monsters down (with tar), drive monsters back (into the forest), or even scavenge the discard pile and reuse an already played card.

It’s a great team-building game, and one you should play internally with your cross-functional teams to get them thinking strategically and to help them understand that you stand together, or you fall together. Because, just like in real life supply chains,

we will live together, or die alone — in Castle Panic.

I Write Alone

I write alone, yeah
with nobody else
I write alone, yeah
with nobody else
You know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

Every morning just before breakfast
I don’t want no bad company
Just me and good buddy lonesome
That’s all I ever need
‘Cause I write alone, yeah
with nobody else
You know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

The other night I laid sleeping
And I woke up with inspiration
So I fired up my trusty Macbook
And I turned off dication
And I wrote alone, yeah
with nobody else
You know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

The other day I got invited to a circle
But I stayed offline instead
Just me and my trusty text edit
Spinning up a brand new thread
And I wrote alone, yeah
with nobody else
You know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

My fellow bloggers done give up on me
But I don’t feel inadequate
That the only ones hanging out with me
Are my dear old LOLCats
And we write alone, yeah
with nobody else
You know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

 

Can the US Post Office Be Fixed?

As chronicled in SI’s winter post that decided it was Too Bad the US Post Office Did Not Follow Royal Mail’s lead (before we got wind of the Royal Mail Fiasco), it’s old news that the US Post office is in dire straits. (No, no, not this Dire Straits. The US Post office definitely are not The Sultans of Swing.)

When you have more debt than 50+ countries have capita, that’s a bad thing, and not something a single (barrel) of sourcing projects is going to fix overnight. (Any operation hemorrhaging cash that bad should have hemorrhaged management years ago!) A drastic Supply Management-led transformation is required, but what should it look like? Obviously, Saturday service can be eliminated (as we Canucks do without it just fine), and obviously the sorting centres should be more efficient, but that’s a small drop in the labour and overhead categories relative to the 20 Billion the US Post Office needs to save (if it doesn’t want a good excuse to be shuttered).

Where should it start? Damn good question. Obviously, a technological transformation is a great place to start, but even the doctor is at a loss at how you cut 15 Billion when the bigger problem is obviously that you lost it in the first place! However, a few people are taking stabs at it, and this recent piece over in Progressive Railroading, on how Intermodal rail [is] a ‘sensible’ transportation option for U.S. Postal Service, that quoted a report recently issued by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General‘s Risk Analysis REsearch Office, showed someone has a head on their shoulders.

In “Strategic Advantages of Moving Mail by Rail”, shifting a portion of mail volume from tuck to intermodal rail could yield $100 Million in annual cost savings without requiring changes to the postal service’s network. Wow! Imagine how much could be saved if the network was optimized. I’m guessing double that, or more. If I’m right, that could yield 1 Billion in five years. With almost no effort!

They have to do something. As CNN notes, it’s a “summer of discontent at [the] Postal Service” (CNN Money, Jul 19, 2012). But given that it’s on the verge of defaulting on a $5.5 billion payment covering retiree health care due August 1, what can we expect?

At this point, I have to agree with Bob Ferrari, who, in his recent Friday Rant*, said that solving the problems of this agency involves a number of structural changes as well as an infusion of modern supply chain management practices related to efficiency and productivity. We have been clear that the U.S. needs a vibrant and efficient postal service and that may not necessarily equate to wholesale privatization. And, most important, there is an obvious need for a non-partisan, independent commission to oversee the process of re-structuring the USPS. Instead of audit agencies reacting to the obvious and pointing to required management changes, an independent commission should be tasked with a comprehensive look at how the USPS can be transformed to a highly efficient agency that instills modernized physical distribution and information management practices. Hear, hear! Let’s face it — 3.3 Billion is an awful lot for highway transportation contracts, even if you are the USPS.

* What’s with S.M. bloggers and Friday Rants anyway? Haven’t they figured out yet that any day is a good day for a rant!