In 1982, I joined a bunch of my 13-year-old friends for a birthday party. We went to see a new movie, one we seemed certain to like. After all, it starred Harrison Ford, known to us as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, as a detective chasing down androids in a future world of vertiginous skyscrapers and flying cars.
As it turned out, I did like "Blade Runner," though the movie was considerably different than what I'd expected. There were gleaming skyscrapers and flying cars, but most of the movie took place either indoors or on crowded streets awash in rain and noise. Mr. Ford's character, Deckard, sure didn't seem much like Han or Indy: While he wasn't exactly the bad guy, he shot two women (one in the back) and spent much of the movie all but leveled by exhaustion, pain or both. Meanwhile, the villain -- Rutger Hauer's platinum-blonde replicant Batty -- wound up striking us as a sort of hero. In fact, the replicants seemed more caring, and more human, than the humans hunting them. For a 13-year-old it was at first confusing, then very interesting.
Now "Blade Runner" is back, in a recut, restored edition billed as director Ridley Scott's "final cut." Last week I watched the DVD, curious to see what changes had been made, if they'd improve a movie I vividly remembered in its original incarnation, and how the future imagined in "Blade Runner" holds up in an age of ubiquitous computing and communications.
Of course, "Blade Runner" never really left. It became a cult classic, appearing in a puzzling array of versions, and an Internet favorite. Not long after I first went online, I discovered newsgroup FAQs recounting the movie's troubled production, the tug-of-war between Mr. Scott and others over the story, and arguments about what the movie really "meant." I was fascinated: I hadn't known that Mr. Ford had disliked the movie, or that his Sam Spade voiceover and the oddly happy ending had been tacked on after test screenings. And I'd never seen the odd "unicorn scene" added in later releases, or read how it "proved" Deckard was also a replicant.
All this Net lore made "Blade Runner" a richer experience, but it was also frustrating: I wanted to see the movie I remembered again, but I wanted to see it the way Mr. Scott had intended it. That kept getting pushed off, though; for years Web chatter suggested a new edition would be on the way … soon.
Now, the wait is over and "Blade Runner" and I are at last reacquainted. The restored movie is beautiful, with superb sound, but I'd expected that. While it's possible the voiceover helped me get my bearings as a 13-year-old, I didn't miss it now -- particularly not in the film's powerful final minutes, with a battered Deckard left to ponder Batty's sacrifice in silence. I enjoyed following the clues about Deckard possibly being a replicant, and found the less-happy ending more satisfying. (Some of the continuity bloopers and special-effects flubs have also been cleaned up, and of course there are all manner of intriguing extras, from Mr. Scott's commentary to a exhaustive, occasionally exhausting warts-and-all documentary.)
How did the movie hold up for me? "Blade Runner" is set in Los Angeles in 2019, and some parts of that vision do now seem more derived from the early 1980s: Darryl Hannah's evil-doll replicant looks like she stepped out of first-wave MTV, Deckard wears a digital watch, and nobody has a cellphone.
And then there was one of my favorite scenes. Deckard uses a voice-activated computer to delve deep into a snapshot, zooming in until he finds the reflection of a face in a mirror in the background. It remains a startling piece of movie-making, one I often think about when working with high-resolution digital photos. But this time I found myself distracted. Why doesn't Deckard's software zoom in smoothly, like every program does today? This would be a real pain to use, I thought -- and was disappointed to think so.
But these are quibbles. I was still drawn in by the look and feel of "Blade Runner," slipping easily into the world it imagines. Yes, that world includes space colonies and attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. But we never see them, which is good -- because even in the best science fiction, everything from gadgetry to clothing typically strikes us as fantastic, and therefore fake. "Blade Runner" is different: We see a transformed but still-recognizable world, with odd but not-unfamiliar fashions, a familiar urban divide between conspicuous wealth and grinding poverty, and people trying to get by as best they can on crowded, chaotic streets.
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As a forerunner of cyberpunk, "Blade Runner" helped strip science fiction of starships and space wars, though it just pushes them offscreen instead of doing away with them entirely. (Another cyberpunk pioneer, William Gibson's "Neuromancer," also comes with the trappings of conventional sci-fi, with orbiting space stations and a self-aware supercomputer.) But "Blade Runner" also continues to speak to our hopes and fears. In 1982, it channeled fears of overpopulation and pollution, as well as American worries about Asia's rise. If some of those worries have subsided, new ones have replaced them: The weather has changed by 2019, and real animals have all but disappeared.
And the fear of being ceaselessly stifled and jostled and overwhelmed remains with us, though transferred from the real world to the virtual one. "Blade Runner" is full of noise and overrun by gadgetry, its buildings choked by the technological kudzu of advertisements and infrastructure. Yet peeking out amid the babble and clutter, we recognize things from our time -- old cars, photos, the books and piano in Deckard's apartment. They seem fragile and vulnerable, as if a few more rainy nights might leave them rotted and replaced, and we want desperately to hold onto them. Even without replicants or advertising zeppelins, that's a fear we've felt as well, watching with mingled excitement and anxiety as the digital age sweeps away old ways and familiar things.
Nearly 19,000 Americans died in 2005 of invasive infections caused by drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria—more than were killed by AIDS, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The report, written by experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the latest research to note the alarming spread of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus in communities across the U.S. and to document the bacteria's deadly impact.
MRSA is a superbug that does not respond to treatment with common antibiotics such as penicillin. More than 94,000 Americans contracted life-threatening MRSA infections in 2005, including blood and bone infections, pneumonia and inflammation of the heart's lining. Most appear to be traceable back to hospitals, nursing homes or medical clinics, the new CDC report found.
"This is really a call to action for health-care facilities to make sure they're doing everything they can to prevent MRSA," said R. Monina Klevens, the lead author of the report and a medical epidemiologist at the CDC.
This year, Illinois became the first state in the nation to require hospitals to report infection rates, test patients in intensive-care units for the bacteria and to take specific measures to prevent its spread.
Nancy Foster, vice president of patient safety at the American Hospital Association, called the study an "eye-opener" and said hospitals across the country will need to evaluate whether current strategies for combating MRSA are effective.
But a growing number of MRSA cases are also arising at community gyms and schools, and these, too, can be deadly. On Tuesday, a high school senior in Moneta, Va., died after being hospitalized for a week with an infection that spread to his kidney, liver, lungs and heart.
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"I've never heard of a bacterial invasive disease with an attack rate anywhere near this high in children and the elderly," said Dr. Robert Daum, a specialist in MRSA and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago.
It's not known how the Virginia student contracted the infection, but officials ordered all 21 schools in the district closed for cleaning Wednesday. The bacteria can live on common surfaces, such as a table, for days or weeks and can be transmitted when someone touches it.
The CDC study found 32 of every 100,000 people in the communities studied contracted invasive MRSA infections. Rates were twice as high for African-Americans (66 per 100,000) and four times higher for the elderly (128 per 100,000). For infants younger than 1, the rate for blacks was four times that of whites.
African-Americans may be more vulnerable because they have higher rates of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, which require more visits to health-care providers, Klevens said. Infected individuals may then unwittingly spread the bacteria to other household members.
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The new CDC report is the most reliable overview of serious MRSA infections prepared to date. The data came from nine sites: Connecticut; Baltimore; the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta and Portland, Ore.; and three counties in Minnesota, Tennessee and New York.
Instead of using administrative data, researchers checked medical records to confirm cases of invasive MRSA infections and double-checked laboratory results. An earlier CDC study that relied on administrative data had estimated 5,000 people die each year of dangerous MRSA infections.
Dr. William Jarvis, former acting director of the hospital infections program at the CDC, called upon the agency to strengthen recommended measures for preventing MRSA's spread in light of the new report's findings.
"The CDC recommends routine screening for HIV for everyone who goes to a doctor, but it doesn't even recommend routine screening for all hospital patients for MRSA," he said.
Dr. John Jernigan, deputy chief of prevention at the CDC, defended recent agency guidelines that call for health-care facilities to lower MRSA infection rates. The guidelines are voluntary and there is no timetable or national reporting of the data. But Jernigan said the recommendations will work if health-care facilities are serious about following them.
By day, David Lassiter's view of his surroundings is confined to what he can see from the cab of a ready-mix concrete truck.
By night, it is as vast as the universe.
On clear nights, Lassiter is in his backyard observatory, viewing planets, comets and other deep-space objects or photographing them with a computer-controlled camera designed for astrophotography.
His photographs have appeared in Astronomy Magazine and on its Web site. His photograph of Comet Holmes was recently a "Photo of the Day."
Lassiter, 59, of Fishing Creek Valley Road in Middle Paxton Twp., said he has always been interested in astronomy but didn't acquire his first telescope until about six years ago.
That was a 41/2-inch Newtonian reflector he bought for about $350.
"I always wanted to buy a telescope," Lassiter said. "I would look up at the night sky and wonder what is out there."
Today, a 14-inch research-grade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope is the heart of his observatory, which is in a 10- by 12-foot wooden shed with a roll-off roof. Lassiter has invested more than $10,000 in equipment.
Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes use mirrors and a lens. The size of Lassiter's telescope refers to the size of its mirror.
The larger the mirror or lens, the more detail one can see, he said.
"I love astronomy and the beauty of it," Lassiter said. "After a long, stressful day, there is something about being able to roll back that roof, focus on some distant object in the universe, and mellow out.
"You are looking in the face of God, looking at God's amazing creation."
Michael Bakich, the photography editor for Astronomy Magazine, said he gets 100 to 200 photographs a week from backyard stargazers such as Lassiter.
"We love to get pictures from David and other amateurs," he said. "They are taking photographs of deep-space objects that rival those major observatories were making 25 or 30 years ago.
"The equipment that amateur astronomers are using today is much better than anything a large observatory was using 25 years ago," Bakich said.
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Digital imaging allows amateur astronomers to get more detail in their photographs.
Once he had the ability to view even the smallest and faintest celestial object, Lassiter wanted to photograph them.
He uses a computer-controlled digital camera that controls the focus of the telescope and the length of the exposure.
"I can photograph things with it, like the Horsehead Nebulae in the Constellation Orion, that I can't even see through the eyepiece of my telescope," he said.
Sky charts help him find the objects, much like Mapquest helps drivers find the best route to grandma's house.
Photographs show brilliant colors and details that can't be seen with the unaided eye, Lassiter said.
"The light cones in the human eye are too weak to pick the colors up, and it may take an exposure of several minutes for them to show up," he said. "When the live image finally comes up on your computer, you can see all these beautiful colors."
While he enjoys astrophotography, Lassiter also makes sure to leave time for plain old visual observation on rare perfect nights.
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"All these beautiful objects are out there, just waiting to be seen," he said.
"People call me a stargazer, but I don't spend any time looking at stars. All you see when you focus on a star is a bright point of light."
Monday, December 31, 2007
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Louis J Sheehan 63448 H18
Published on Monday, March 20, 2000 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Art Attack: Gene Stilp Uses Props And A Wicked Sense Of Humor To Focus Media Attention On Public Policy Issues
by Ralph Nader
Imagine a public interest artist using the town square as a canvas. Now comes Gene Stilp, a 49-year-old lawyer with a keen advocacy sense, a nose for news, and the creativity and skills to communicate a complicated public policy initiative with a prop that's guaranteed to generate media coverage and capture hearts and minds. Gene is more at home in the workshop than the courtroom.
Stilp's gallery includes some unusual works:
A 30-foot ear of corn. This mutant vegetable greeted the participants at a Food and Drug Administration hearing on genetically modified foods in Washington, D.C. in late 1999. With about $400, Stilp and his activist associates assembled the enormous ear of corn out of chicken wire, 1,000 recycled milk cartons, and twine. The prop was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and a myriad of electronic and print sources throughout the country
A 24-foot SUV. Stilp supplied the Public Interest Research Group with a 24-foot-long, 14-foot-high, 10-foot-wide inflatable SUV to help the group call attention to the gas-guzzling SUVs that are crowding the nations' highways. The SUV prop is hard for the media to avoid and it helps jolt the public into thinking about the consequences of wasting energy on oversized vehicles
The Peco burnt-toast toaster. In 1998 the Pennsylvania state legislature debated electric deregulation. In order to call attention to a proposed bailout of the nuclear industry, Stilp refashioned a 1963 Airstream Trailer into a 20-foot-long, 12-foot-high toaster. Two 10-foot-long, 4-foot-high pieces of blackened toast were popping out. With the flick of a remote switch, smoke poured out of the top of the toaster to replicate burning toast. Signs adorning the toaster proclaimed, "Don't Get Burned By PECO."
Stilp has been a an outspoken activist for more than two decades on issues ranging from hunger to nuclear safety. He is always ready to help concerned citizens make their voices heard in the corridors of power.
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Stilp's motivation to build props stems from his desire to help groups that can't afford to buy television time or newspaper ads. Most Stilp creations start with a creative impulse followed by a quick trip to the hardware store or junkyard. With bailing wire and two-by-fours, he begins the job of making an issue move from the mimeograph machines of local and national activists to daily newspapers and evening news shows.
Capitalizing on the national attention generated every February by Groundhog Day, Stilp used Feb. 2 to launch the first official Global Warming Forecasting Ground Hog. With the U.S. Capitol as a backdrop, "Globbie," a small, but effective, groundhog sculpture, predicted adverse climate changes for the coming year.
The corrupting influence special-interest money has on politics is an important matter. Stilp's approach to this issue prompted him to spend about $200 to build a full-scale replica of the Lincoln Bed. (The Lincoln Bedroom was made notorious as a result of President Clinton's campaign contributors being offered a chance to sleep in the real Lincoln Bedroom in the White House.)
As the U.S. Congress gathered in Hershey, Pennsylvania for a "civility retreat" in 1997, they were greeted by the prop – with an attached meter that recorded donations for time spent in the bed. This prop focused attention on campaign finance reform and the congressional and presidential campaign finance abuse investigations, and resulted in national media coverage of the need for campaign finance reform.
Stilp was interviewed by a host of national correspondents while he lounged in the "Lincoln Bed." In the coming year, Stilp hopes to transform his lifelong passion for building props for causes into an enduring institution called the National Prop Shop. This nonprofit enterprise will help public interest groups make use of creative props and incorporate props into their campaign efforts. Stilp wants the activist community to use the National Prop Shop, but ultimately he would like to see every community have the ability to assemble local talent to build the props they might need to dramatize local issues.
People interested in contributing ideas, materials, or funds for this unique public institution should contact Stilp at The Prop Shop, 1550 FVCR, Harrisburg, PA 17112.
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The Insurance Hoax
Property insurers use secret tactics to cheat customers out of payments--as profits break records.
By David Dietz and Darrell Preston
Bloomberg Markets September 2007
Julie Tunnell remembers standing in her debris-strewn driveway when the tall man in blue jeans approached. Her northern San Diego tudor-style home had been incinerated a week earlier in the largest wildfire in California history. The blaze in October and November 2003 swept across an area 19 times the size of Manhattan, destroying 2,232 homes and killing 15 people. Now came another blow.
A representative of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the largest home insurer in the U.S., came to the charred remnants of Tunnell's home to tell her the company would pay just $220,000 of the estimated $306,000 cost of rebuilding the house.
"It was devastating; I stood there and cried," says Tunnell, 42, who teaches accounting at San Diego City College. "I felt absolutely abandoned."
Tunnell joined thousands of people in the U.S. who already knew a secret about the insurance industry: When there's a disaster, the companies homeowners count on to protect them from financial ruin routinely pay less than what policies promise. Insurers often pay 30-60 percent of the cost of rebuilding a damaged home--even when carriers assure homeowners they're fully covered, thousands of complaints with state insurance departments and civil court cases show.
Paying out less to victims of catastrophes has helped produce record profits. In the past 12 years, insurance company net income has soared--even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Property- casualty insurers, which cover damage to homes and cars, reported their highest- ever profit of $73 billion last year, up 49 percent from $49 billion in 2005, according to Highline Data LLC, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm that compiles insurance industry data.
The 60 million U.S. homeowners who pay more than $50 billion a year in insurance premiums are often disappointed when they discover insurers won't pay the full cost of rebuilding their damaged or destroyed homes. Property insurers systematically deny and reduce their policyholders' claims, according to court records in California, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Tennessee. The insurance companies routinely refuse to pay market prices for homes and replacement contents, they use computer programs to cut payouts, they change policy coverage with no clear explanation, they ignore or alter engineering reports, and they sometimes ask their adjusters to lie to customers, court records and interviews with former employees and state regulators show. As Mississippi Republican U.S. Senator Trent Lott and thousands of other homeowners have found, insurers make low offers--or refuse to pay at all--and then dare people to fight back.
"It's despicable not to make good-faith offers to everybody," says Robert Hunter, who was Texas insurance commissioner from 1993 to '95 and is now insurance director at the Washington-based Consumer Federation of America. "Money managers have taken over this whole industry. Their eyes are not on people who are hurt but on the bottom line for the next quarter."
The industry's drive for profit has overwhelmed its obligation to policyholders, says California Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, a Democrat. As California's insurance commissioner from 2002 to '06, Garamendi imposed $18.4 million in fines against carriers for mistreating customers. "There's a fundamental economic conflict between the customer and the company," he says. "That is, the company doesn't want to pay. The first commandment of insurance is, 'Thou shalt pay as little and as late as possible.'"
Although the tension between insurers and their customers has long existed, it was in the 1990s that the industry began systematically looking for ways to increase profits by streamlining claims handling. Hurricane Hugo was a major catalyst. The 1989 storm, which battered North and South Carolina, left the industry reeling from $4.2 billion in claims. In September 1992, Allstate Corp., the second-largest U.S. home insurer, sought advice on improved efficiency from McKinsey & Co., a New York-based consulting firm that has advised many of the world's biggest corporations, according to records in at least six civil court cases.
State Farm, based in Bloomington, Illinois, and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group Inc., the third-largest home insurer in the U.S., also hired McKinsey as a consultant, court records show.
McKinsey produced about 13,000 pages of documents, including PowerPoint slides, in the 1990s, for Northbrook, Illinois-based Allstate. The consulting firm developed methods for the company to become more profitable by paying out less in claims, according to videotaped evidence presented in Fayette Circuit Court in Lexington, Kentucky, in a civil case involving a 1997 car accident.
One slide McKinsey prepared for Allstate was entitled "Good Hands or Boxing Gloves," the tape of the Kentucky court hearing shows. For 57 years, Allstate has advertised its employees as the "Good Hands People," telling customers they will be well cared for in times of need. The McKinsey slides had a new twist on that slogan. When a policyholder files a claim, first make a low offer, McKinsey advised Allstate. If a client accepts the low amount, Allstate should treat the person with good hands, McKinsey said. If the customer protests or hires a lawyer, Allstate should fight back.
"If you don't take the pittance they offer, they're going to put on the boxing gloves and they're going to batter injured victims," plaintiffs attorney J. Dale Golden told Judge Thomas Clark at the May 12, 2005, hearing in which the lawyer introduced the McKinsey slides.
One McKinsey slide displayed at the Kentucky hearing featured an alligator with the caption "Sit and Wait." The slide says Allstate can discourage claimants by delaying settlements and stalling court proceedings. By postponing payments, insurance companies can hold money longer and make more on their investments-- and often wear down clients to the point of dropping a challenge. "An alligator sits and waits," Golden told the judge, as they looked at the slide describing a reptile.
McKinsey's advice helped spark a turnaround in Allstate's finances. The company's profit rose 140 percent to $4.99 billion in 2006, up from $2.08 billion in 1996. Allstate lifted its income partly by paying less to its policyholders. Allstate spent 58 percent of its premium income in 2006 for claim payouts and the costs of the process compared with 79 percent in 1996, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The payout expense, called a loss ratio, changes each year based on events such as natural disasters; overall, it's been decreasing since Allstate hired McKinsey.
Investors have noticed. Allstate's stock price jumped fourfold to $60.95 on July 11 from its closing price on June 3, 1993, the day of its initial public offering. During the same period, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose threefold. State Farm's profits have doubled since 1996 to $4.8 billion in 2006. Because State Farm is a mutual company, meaning it's owned by its policyholders, it doesn't have shares that trade publicly.
"This is about as good a stretch as I've seen," says Michael Chren, who manages $1.5 billion at Allegiant Asset Management Co. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and has followed the property-casualty industry for 20 years. The industry's performance during the past five years has been superb, even with payouts for Katrina, he says. "All the stars have been in alignment. There has been decent pricing of products and an extremely attractive and very low loss ratio."
Reducing payouts is just one way the industry has improved profits. Carriers have also raised premiums and withdrawn from storm-plagued areas such as the Gulf Coast of the U.S. and parts of Long Island, New York--to lower costs and increase income, says Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based group that advises consumers on insurance claims. "What this says is that the industry has been raking in spectacular profits while they're getting more and more audacious in their tactics," she says.
Allstate spokesman Michael Siemienas says the company won't comment on what role McKinsey played in lowering the insurer's loss ratio and boosting its profits. Allstate did change the way it handles homeowners' insurance claims, he says. "In the early 1990s, Allstate redesigned its claims practices to more efficiently and effectively handle claims and better serve our customers," he says.
"Allstate's goal remains the same: to investigate, evaluate and promptly resolve each claim based on its merits," Siemienas says. "Allstate believes its claim processes support this goal and are absolutely sound."
McKinsey doesn't discuss any of its work for clients, spokesman Mark Garrett says.
Jerry Choate, Allstate's chief executive officer from 1995 to '98, said at a news conference in New York in 1997 that the company's new claims-handling process had reduced payments and increased profit, according to a report in a March 1997 edition of National Underwriter magazine. Insurers can't make significantly more money just from cutting sales costs, he told reporters. "The leverage is really on the claims side," Choate said. "If you don't win there, I don't care what you do on the front end. You're not going to win."
The more cash insurers can keep from premiums, the more they can invest. This pool of assets--most of which the companies invest in government and corporate bonds--is known as float.
"Simply put, float is money we hold that is not ours but which we get to invest," billionaire Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this year. "When an insurer earns an underwriting profit, float is better than free," he wrote in 2006. Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway generated 51 percent of its $11 billion profit in 2006 from insurance.
Claims payouts for the entire property-casualty industry have decreased in the past decade. In 2006, carriers paid out 55 percent of the $435.8 billion in premiums collected, according to the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. That compares with a 64 percent payout ratio on $267.6 billion in premium revenue in 1996. As companies pay less to policyholders, their investment gains are growing, according to the trade group and research firm A.M. Best Co. in Oldwick, New Jersey. The industry has increased profits by an annual average of 46 percent since 1994, Institute data show. In 2006, carriers invested $1.2 trillion and recorded a net gain of $52.3 billion, up from $713.5 billion invested for a gain of $39.1 billion in 1994.
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Insurance companies are no longer following their mandate to take care of policyholders' money and then pay it out when needed, says Douglas Heller, executive director of the nonprofit Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, California. "The whole purpose of insurance is evaporating before our eyes as we continue to send checks to the companies," Heller says. "Insurers are looking to shed their purpose as a risk bearer and become financial institutions."
That kind of criticism is unwarranted, says Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute. He says about 1 percent of policyholders contest what they're offered. "The insurance industry can be justifiably proud of its performance," Hartwig says. "It's in the insurance industry's best interests to settle claims as fairly and as rapidly as possible."
Companies have sharpened the use of technology in the past 20 years to help tighten claims payouts. Insurers following McKinsey's advice on claims processing have adopted computer programs with names such as Colossus and Xactimate. Colossus, made by El Segundo, California-based Computer Sciences Corp., calculates the cost of treating people injured in auto accidents, including the degree of pain and suffering they'll endure and any permanent impairment they may have, according to Computer Sciences' Web site. Xactimate, made by Xactware Solutions Inc. of Orem, Utah, is a program that estimates the cost of rebuilding a home.
Insurers sometimes manipulate these programs to pay out as little as possible, lawsuits have asserted. "Programs like Colossus are designed to systematically underpay policyholders without adequately examining the validity of each individual claim," former Texas insurance commissioner Hunter told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on April 11. He also criticized Xactimate. "If you don't accept their offer, which is a low ball, you end up in court," Hunter said. "And that was the recommendation of McKinsey." Computer Sciences and Xactware declined to comment.
Farmers Group, a subsidiary of Zurich Financial Services AG, agreed in 2005 to stop using Colossus to evaluate claims filed by policyholders who have accidents with uninsured or underinsured drivers. The move was part of a $40 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit in Pottawatomie County District Court in Oklahoma in which the plaintiffs claimed the company had repeatedly and wrongly failed to pay enough for crash injuries.
An internal e-mail introduced in the Farmers lawsuit shows the company had pressured its adjusters, whom it calls claims representatives, or CRs, to pay out smaller amounts--and rewarded them when they did.
"As you know, we have been creeping up in settlements," David Harding, a Farmers claims manager, wrote in an e-mail to employees on Nov. 20, 2001. "Our CRs must resist the temptation of paying more just to move this type file. Teach them to say, 'Sorry, no more,' with a toothy grin and mean it." Harding praised a worker for making low settlements. "It can be done as Darren consistently does," he wrote. "If he keeps this up during 2002, we will pay him accordingly."
Farmers said in court papers that it didn't seek to pay less than customers were due. "The e-mail speaks for itself," Farmers wrote. "Plaintiff's characterization of it is denied."
Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm, testified in a 2006 civil case that his company revamped its claims handling through a project called ACE, or Advanced Claims Excellence. McKinsey suggested the use of ACE, according to evidence presented in the district court of Grady County, Oklahoma.
"Technology has allowed us to really streamline our claim organization to be more efficient and responsive," Rust testified. He said the company wanted to cut expenses for claims. In the Oklahoma case, Bridget and Donald Watkins, whose Grady County house was destroyed during a tornado in 1999, accused State Farm of misrepresenting the damage from the storm and won a $12.9 million judgment in May 2006. Watkins and State Farm agreed to an undisclosed settlement after the judgment.
Hunter, who also headed the federal flood insurance program under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, told Congress that Allstate, with McKinsey's guidance, gave the name Claim Core Process Redesign to its strategy to change payout practices.
As pervasive as computers have become in insurance, the key actor in settling claims is still the adjuster, the person who talks to policyholders and decides how much they should be paid. Allstate has asked adjusters to deceive customers, says Jo Ann Katzman, who worked as a claims adjuster for Allstate in 2002 and '03. She says managers regularly came to her office in Farmington Hills, Michigan, to give pep talks on keeping claim payments down. They awarded prizes such as portable refrigerators to adjusters who tried to deny claims by blaming fires on arson without justification, she says. "We were told to lie by our supervisors," says Katzman, 49, who quit by taking a company buyout in 2003. "It's tough to look at people and know you're lying."
Katzman says an adjuster at Allstate, on orders from a supervisor, told an 89- year-old Detroit fire victim that Allstate wouldn't replace cabinets in her home even though the insurance policy said they were covered. In another case, Katzman says Allstate wouldn't replace a fire-damaged refrigerator--an appliance she says was covered. Katzman now runs Accurate Estimating Services, an independent adjusting company in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Allstate's Siemienas declined to comment on Katzman's statements.
Insurers sometimes order employees to offer replacement cost settlements that have no connection to actual prices of home contents, according to testimony in a civil trial. A jury in November 2005 awarded Larry Stone and Linda Della Pelle $5.2 million in punitive damages and $616,000 to construct a new house after finding that Fidelity National Insurance Co. of Jacksonville, Florida, had underpaid the couple by $183,000 when it offered them $433,000 to rebuild their two-story Claremont, California, residence.
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During the trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, Ricardo Echeverria, the couple's attorney, questioned Kenneth Drake, president of Canyon Country, California- based RJG Construction Inc., who had been hired by Fidelity's lawyers to evaluate damage estimates.
"Are you telling us that sometimes, because the insurance carriers dictate what amounts they are willing to allow for unit costs, estimators then have to comply with that?" asked Echeverria, according to the court transcript.
"That's absolutely true," Drake said.
"Do you think that's fair?" Echeverria asked.
"Fair or not, it's the name of our business," Drake said.
Drake declined to comment on his testimony. Fidelity is appealing the award.
A New Hampshire case involving a home destroyed in a fire exposed another insurance company tactic: changing a policy retroactively. In April 2003, the Rockingham county attorney in Kingston, New Hampshire, found that a unit of Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. had deleted the replacement cost portion of the homeowner's policy of Terry Bennett after his five-bedroom house burned to the ground in 1993. Bennett, a physician, sued Twin City Fire Insurance Co., claiming his home and its contents--including antiques and fine art--were worth $20 million, not the $1.7 million the insurer paid him. After an 11-year battle, he settled with Hartford in 2004 for an undisclosed amount. "Fighting an insurance company is like staring down the wrong end of a cannon," Bennett says.
An unprecedented number of people stared down that cannon after Hurricane Katrina. The August 2005 storm killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi, left 500,000 people homeless and cost insurers $41.1 billion. More than 1,000 homeowners sued their insurers in the wake of the storm--the largest- ever number of insurance lawsuits stemming from a U.S. natural disaster.
For insurers, the multibillion-dollar question regarding Katrina was how much of the destruction was caused by wind and how much by water. Property insurance policies don't cover damage caused by flooding; homeowners have to purchase separate insurance administered by the U.S. government. The wind/water issue has spurred allegations that insurers manipulated the findings of adjusters and engineers.
Ken Overstreet, an engineer based in Diamondhead, Mississippi, who examined destroyed Gulf Coast residences, says someone altered his findings on the cause of the damage to at least four homes. "We were working for insurance companies, and they wanted certain results," says Overstreet, who has been a licensed civil engineer since 1981. "They wanted to get a desired outcome, and that's what they did."
Overstreet, who was working for Houston-based Rimkus Consulting Group Inc., prepared a report on the Gulfport, Mississippi, home of Hubert and Joyce Smith for Meritplan Insurance Co. The engineer found that both wind and water had damaged the house. "The winds out of the east would have racked the entire structure to the west and simply lifted the footings up," he wrote.
Meritplan declined to pay anything to the Smiths, telling them that all of the damage was caused by water. The company sent the Smiths what it said was Overstreet's engineering report. "Due to the extent of the structural damage to the residence, the storm surge accounted for the damage," the report they got said. The Smiths called Overstreet and asked him to look at what Meritplan had sent them. Overstreet says he looked at both reports side by side and then told the couple that someone had changed his conclusion after his inspection.
"If they defrauded me, how many more did they defraud?" asks Hubert Smith, 88, a retired chiropractor. "There's a lot of crap going on."
Six lawsuits against Rimkus allege the company altered engineering reports. "Those allegations are absolutely false," says Arch Currid, a Rimkus spokesman. "There's no fact to those claims. We're going to vigorously defend ourselves in court, and we're confident we will prevail."
Ed Essa, a spokesman for Calabasas, California-based Countrywide Financial Corp., the parent of Meritplan, says the company confidentially settled a lawsuit with the Smiths in March.
Another engineer involved in Katrina, Bob Kochan, CEO of Forensic Analysis & Engineering Corp., says State Farm asked him to redo his reports because the insurer disagreed with the engineers' conclusions. Kochan sent an Oct. 17, 2005, e-mail to his staff saying State Farm executive Alexis "Lecky" King asked for the changes. "Lecky told me that she is experiencing this same concern with other engineering companies," Kochan wrote. "In her words, 'They are all too emotionally involved and working too hard to find justifications to call it wind damage.'"
Kochan says he complied so State Farm didn't cut its contract with his company. "They didn't like our conclusions," he says. "We agreed to re-evaluate each of our assignments."
Randy Down, an engineer at Raleigh, North Carolina-based Forensic, wrote this Oct. 18, 2005, e-mail response to Kochan: "I have a serious concern about the ethics of this whole matter. I really question the ethics of someone who wants to fire us simply because our conclusions don't match theirs." The e-mails were made public in a civil case against State Farm in Jackson, Mississippi.
State Farm spokesman Phil Supple says Kochan's e-mail comments are out of context. He says sometimes information in engineering reports doesn't support the conclusions.
One State Farm policyholder in Mississippi was Senator Lott, who lost his home in Katrina. He sued State Farm for fraud in U.S. District Court in Jackson, after the insurer ruled that his home had been damaged by water and refused to pay him anything. "It's long overdue for this industry to be held accountable," Lott, 65, says. Lott and State Farm agreed to a confidential settlement in April.
Lott has introduced legislation to have insurers regulated by the federal government. That would supplant a patchwork system of regulation by states. Insurance has no body analogous to the SEC, which can refer cases to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. That doesn't happen with insurers. The most that state insurance departments typically do is impose civil fines when companies mistreat customers. Such sanctions are weak and infrequent, says Hunter, the former Texas insurance commissioner. Before Katrina, no state or federal prosecutor had ever investigated a nationally known property-casualty company for criminal mistreatment of policyholders. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood says a federal grand jury is probing insurance company claims handling after the hurricane.
There was no criminal investigation after State Farm offered just 15 percent of replacement costs to Michele and Tim Ray, whose house was wrecked by a tornado in April 2006. A contractor estimated the cost to rebuild the Hendersonville, Tennessee, home at $254,000. State Farm made three inspections of the property, Ray says, and sent the Rays a check for $36,000, which the couple returned. A year after the twister, the couple remained in the damaged home, with their tattered roof covered by tarpaulins. In April, after Bloomberg News submitted questions to State Farm about the Ray case, the company inspected the house again. This time, it gave the Rays $302,000. "We decided to call it a total loss and agreed to pay the policy limits after deciding the damage was caused by the storm," State Farm spokesman Shawn Johnson says.
State Farm won't discuss what role McKinsey played in helping the insurer shape its approach toward customers. Similarly, no official at any insurer that hired McKinsey is willing to talk about the consulting firm.
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Privately held McKinsey, which has 14,000 employees in 40 countries, has worked for many of the largest companies in the world, according to its Web site. "We take pride in doing what is right rather than what is right for the profitability of our firm," Managing Director Ian Davis says in a quote posted on the site.
McKinsey pioneered the overhaul of the property casualty industry at Allstate. The company hired McKinsey in 1992 after the insurer was spun off from what's now Sears Holdings Corp. of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, says David Berardinelli, a Santa Fe, New Mexico, lawyer who won access to view the McKinsey documents for a limited time during a lawsuit involving an auto accident. McKinsey advised the insurer to pay claims quickly at low amounts while delaying payments for as long as possible for those who wanted large settlements, Berardinelli says. "They're capitalizing on the vulnerability of people," he says.
Berardinelli says McKinsey suggested that Allstate hold so-called town hall meetings with claims adjusters to urge them to pay less to customers.
Shannon Kmatz, a former Allstate claims adjuster, says she attended some of those sessions. She says managers told employees to keep claim payouts as low as possible. "The leaders of those town hall meetings were always concerned that we were doing our part to help the stock price by keeping claims down," says Kmatz, 34, who worked for Allstate for three years in New Mexico in the late 1990s and is now a police officer. "It was obvious from the get-go that all they were concerned about was the bottom line."
Just once, at the May 2005 hearing in Lexington, Kentucky, the PowerPoint slides McKinsey prepared for Allstate were made public. William Hager and his wife, Geneva, who suffered neck and back injuries after the family's car was rear- ended in a 1997 accident in Lexington, sued the insurer, claiming the company failed to cover her medical expenses. The case is scheduled to go to trial in October.
One McKinsey slide prepared for Allstate was called "Zero-Sum Economic Game," a videotape of the court hearing shows. The slide explains that there are winners and losers, and the insurance company can win by paying out small amounts. "There is a finite pool of money," Golden, the plaintiffs attorney, told the judge at the hearing. "Either it goes to the injured victim or it goes to Allstate's pocket as surplus."
Allstate's attorney at the hearing, Mindy Barfield of Lexington, didn't say anything about the McKinsey slides. She didn't return phone calls seeking her comments.
Former federal flood insurance commissioner Hunter says the McKinsey approach exploits policyholders. "McKinsey presented it as a zero-sum game in which the winners would be Allstate and the losers would be the claimants," Hunter says. "I don't think a claims system should be viewed in that light. It's against any principles on how you should settle insurance claims. They should be settled on their merits."
Allstate convinced the judge to seal the McKinsey slides before and after the Lexington hearing. The insurer has resisted attempts to make the consulting firm's work public in courts across the U.S., arguing it contains trade secrets. In 2004, the company was sanctioned by the Bartholomew Circuit Court in Indiana and fined $10,000 for refusing to turn over the records to attorney Richard Enyon, representing an auto accident victim. Allstate held on to the documents and appealed the punishment. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the sanction. Allstate then appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which hasn't yet made a decision.
Lawsuits in California, Florida and Texas have asserted that McKinsey's work for Allstate helped the insurer cheat claimants. Records show that through the company's Claim Core Process Redesign project, Allstate encouraged policyholders to accept small settlements on the spot.
The redesign also became a blueprint for fighting more claims in court as Allstate increased its legal staff, according to a 1997 company newsletter obtained by David Poore, a Petaluma, California, attorney who has represented homeowners in lawsuits against carriers. "The bottom line is that Allstate is trying more cases than ever before," the newsletter said. "If the offer is not accepted, Allstate will go to court, if necessary, to prove the evaluation process is sound."
McKinsey-style tactics have spread to insurers large and small--as homeowners discovered after three wildfires ravaged Southern California in 2003, including the one that hit northern San Diego. While Katrina struck thousands of low- income families in New Orleans, the San Diego fire affected mostly affluent homeowners, who fared no better with their insurance companies.
The fire obliterated large sections of Scripps Ranch, a community of 30,000 that sits atop a sagebrush and eucalyptus mesa, where homes can cost more than $1 million. After flames swept through the area on winds of up to 50 miles per hour, residents say they expected their insurance companies to live up to coverage promises and pay the full cost to rebuild. The Southern California fires led to 676 formal complaints to the state saying insurers offered payouts that fell far short of actual costs and delayed on paying claims.
One of the Scripps Ranch houses that went up in flames, a four-bedroom, gray- stucco home on a sloping cul-de-sac, belonged to J.P. Lapeyre, a division director at JDS Uniphase Corp., a Milpitas, California, maker of telecommunications equipment.
Lapeyre, 41, who is married and has two children, says he had no inkling as he viewed the remains of his house that his insurance would leave him $280,000 short of what he would need to rebuild. Representatives of Pacific Specialty Insurance Co. of Menlo Park, California, told him the most the firm would pay out was $168,075, not even half of the estimated reconstruction cost of $448,000.
The Pacific Specialty representative told Lapeyre in November 2003 that the insurer would pay $75 a square foot (0.09 square meter) to rebuild his 2,241- square-foot house. "What frustration," Lapeyre says. "I had to try to prove to them that it would cost $200 a square foot." That figure came separately from two builders, Norton Construction and TLC Contractors, both of San Diego. In February 2005, Lapeyre filed suit in San Diego County Superior Court against his insurer and the independent broker who sold him the policy, alleging negligence, breach of contract and fraud for leading him to believe that he was properly covered. After a fight of 19 months, Lapeyre dropped the suit when Pacific Specialty told a mediator assigned to the case it wouldn't raise its offer, he says. "We decided it was time to get on with our lives and move forward," says Lapeyre, who borrowed money to build a new house.
Karen and Bill Reimus, both lawyers, fought their carrier, Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., when it told them it wouldn't pay the couple enough to rebuild their burned Scripps Ranch house. Karen, 40, says an agent for Boston-based Liberty Mutual assured her and her husband when they bought their house four months before the 2003 fire that their insurance would replace the home if it were destroyed.
In a December 2003 letter, two months after the fire, Liberty Mutual offered to pay $40,000 less than the limit of the couple's policy, Karen says. In early 2004, San Diego-based Gafcon Construction Consultants determined the cost to rebuild was well above the limits of the couple's policy.
The Reimuses began a phone and letter campaign to convince the company its offer was too low, Karen says. "It has now been almost seven months since the loss and we are still not agreed as to the numbers," Karen wrote in a May 13, 2004, letter to Liberty Mutual.
Two weeks later, Liberty Mutual agreed to raise the couple's limits by $100,000, Karen says. "This is clear evidence that the original estimate was a low ball," she says. Liberty Mutual spokesman Glenn Greenberg says the company won't discuss the case because its dealings with policyholders are private.
"The system is set up to take advantage of people when they're at their weakest," Karen says. "We went to one of the most-expensive companies in the country because we wanted to be ready for a rainy day. We asked for coverage that would replace the house. We thought replacement meant replacement." Scripps Ranch couple Leslie Mukau and Robin Seaberg sued Allstate for alleged fraud and negligence for failing to pay the $900,000 that contractors estimate it would cost to replace their two-story home. Allstate offered the Seabergs $311,000, according to the 2004 San Diego County Superior Court suit. Allstate says in court papers the couple hasn't shown the company was negligent and asked for dismissal of the suit, which is pending.
The California Department of Insurance examined the practices of Allied Property & Casualty Insurance Co., AMCO Insurance Co. and Allstate in connection with the California fires. It fined Allied and AMCO, both based in Des Moines, Iowa, a total of $20,000 for misleading nine policyholders into believing they were insured for full value. The regulators cited Allstate for six rule violations, including that it ignored complaints that it underinsured homeowners. The state didn't fine Allstate, which told the department it had done nothing wrong.
"Fines by state regulatory agencies have been far too small and infrequent to deter unfair business practices," United Policyholders' Bach says. "It's clear that cheating by insurers is a big, profitable business and regulators can't muster the will or political strength to stop them."
Most homeowners take what insurers offer because they don't realize they're being deceived or conclude that fighting is too costly and difficult, Bach says. "Virtually everyone who settles for what the insurer offers is taking less than they're owed," she says.
Homeowners across the U.S. have found themselves in the same situation. Kevin Hazlett, a lawyer, sued Farmers Group after an April 2006 tornado struck his home in O'Fallon, Illinois. Farmers had offered to pay him $470,000 to rebuild the house. Royal Construction Inc., based in Collinsville, Illinois, estimated the cost at $1.1 million. Hazlett, 52, accepted a settlement for an undisclosed amount.
Hazlett says Illinois Farmers, a subsidiary of Farmers, used the Xactimate software program to first determine what it would pay out. "They're just pulling numbers out of thin air," he says. "There's no rhyme or reason." Farmers spokesman Jerry Davies didn't respond to requests for an interview.
Bo Chessor, owner of Royal Construction, says he sees insurers refusing to pay coverage limits all the time. "Most people just roll over and take it because they don't have the money to fight it," Chessor says. "What the insurance companies are doing is purely robbery."
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It may be robbery, but it's rarely a crime. State insurance departments don't prosecute insurance companies, and the federal government has no oversight. The insurance industry wants to keep it that way. To make their voice heard on federal regulation and other government decisions, insurers spent $98 million on lobbying in Washington in 2006, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a unit of Congressional Quarterly. That's the second-largest amount spent on lobbying by any group, behind $114.4 million by pharmaceutical companies.
Property-casualty companies do want something from the government: bailouts. Insurers beseech states and the federal government to foot more of the bill for rebuilding private homes after natural disasters. Florida has a catastrophe fund that insures some homes to reduce payouts by carriers. The fund paid out about $8.45 billion for storm damage in 2004 and '05, according to its annual report. The federal flood insurance program covers $800 billion of property nationally, which helped the industry increase profits by 25 percent in 2005, the year of Katrina.
Homeowners whose properties have been destroyed by catastrophes contend with low payouts, higher premiums, software programs that underestimate rebuilding costs and sudden changes in policy values--all of which have been calculated methods for insurers to increase profits.
Tunnell, the San Diego accounting teacher whose home burned to the ground, says she thought State Farm had adequately insured her family when they bought their three-bedroom house in 1992. She says the policy, destroyed in the fire, provided for "full replacement coverage." It guaranteed to rebuild the house, no matter the cost, she says. The company offered to pay $220,000--which was $121,600 less than a $306,000 figure her family got from State Farm's own estimator, Hersum Construction Inc. of San Diego, for rebuilding the 1,700- square-foot house.
State Farm spokesman Supple says the company sent letters in 1997 to the Tunnells and other policyholders saying that it would no longer offer full replacement coverage. "Policyholders, by regulatory order, were sent prominent notices of the coverage change at that time," he says. Tunnell says she doesn't recall being notified. She says her family debated hiring a lawyer and suing, and eventually decided the battle would be too stressful. The Tunnells took the $220,000 and borrowed money to build a new house.
"Why is this happening to people over and over again?" Tunnell asks. "State Farm keeps underinsuring people, and they get away with it. This is unthinkable." As long as insurers make the rules and control the game, Tunnell and homeowners across the U.S. won't know whether their homes are fully insured, no matter what their policies say.
Art Attack: Gene Stilp Uses Props And A Wicked Sense Of Humor To Focus Media Attention On Public Policy Issues
by Ralph Nader
Imagine a public interest artist using the town square as a canvas. Now comes Gene Stilp, a 49-year-old lawyer with a keen advocacy sense, a nose for news, and the creativity and skills to communicate a complicated public policy initiative with a prop that's guaranteed to generate media coverage and capture hearts and minds. Gene is more at home in the workshop than the courtroom.
Stilp's gallery includes some unusual works:
A 30-foot ear of corn. This mutant vegetable greeted the participants at a Food and Drug Administration hearing on genetically modified foods in Washington, D.C. in late 1999. With about $400, Stilp and his activist associates assembled the enormous ear of corn out of chicken wire, 1,000 recycled milk cartons, and twine. The prop was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and a myriad of electronic and print sources throughout the country
A 24-foot SUV. Stilp supplied the Public Interest Research Group with a 24-foot-long, 14-foot-high, 10-foot-wide inflatable SUV to help the group call attention to the gas-guzzling SUVs that are crowding the nations' highways. The SUV prop is hard for the media to avoid and it helps jolt the public into thinking about the consequences of wasting energy on oversized vehicles
The Peco burnt-toast toaster. In 1998 the Pennsylvania state legislature debated electric deregulation. In order to call attention to a proposed bailout of the nuclear industry, Stilp refashioned a 1963 Airstream Trailer into a 20-foot-long, 12-foot-high toaster. Two 10-foot-long, 4-foot-high pieces of blackened toast were popping out. With the flick of a remote switch, smoke poured out of the top of the toaster to replicate burning toast. Signs adorning the toaster proclaimed, "Don't Get Burned By PECO."
Stilp has been a an outspoken activist for more than two decades on issues ranging from hunger to nuclear safety. He is always ready to help concerned citizens make their voices heard in the corridors of power.
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Stilp's motivation to build props stems from his desire to help groups that can't afford to buy television time or newspaper ads. Most Stilp creations start with a creative impulse followed by a quick trip to the hardware store or junkyard. With bailing wire and two-by-fours, he begins the job of making an issue move from the mimeograph machines of local and national activists to daily newspapers and evening news shows.
Capitalizing on the national attention generated every February by Groundhog Day, Stilp used Feb. 2 to launch the first official Global Warming Forecasting Ground Hog. With the U.S. Capitol as a backdrop, "Globbie," a small, but effective, groundhog sculpture, predicted adverse climate changes for the coming year.
The corrupting influence special-interest money has on politics is an important matter. Stilp's approach to this issue prompted him to spend about $200 to build a full-scale replica of the Lincoln Bed. (The Lincoln Bedroom was made notorious as a result of President Clinton's campaign contributors being offered a chance to sleep in the real Lincoln Bedroom in the White House.)
As the U.S. Congress gathered in Hershey, Pennsylvania for a "civility retreat" in 1997, they were greeted by the prop – with an attached meter that recorded donations for time spent in the bed. This prop focused attention on campaign finance reform and the congressional and presidential campaign finance abuse investigations, and resulted in national media coverage of the need for campaign finance reform.
Stilp was interviewed by a host of national correspondents while he lounged in the "Lincoln Bed." In the coming year, Stilp hopes to transform his lifelong passion for building props for causes into an enduring institution called the National Prop Shop. This nonprofit enterprise will help public interest groups make use of creative props and incorporate props into their campaign efforts. Stilp wants the activist community to use the National Prop Shop, but ultimately he would like to see every community have the ability to assemble local talent to build the props they might need to dramatize local issues.
People interested in contributing ideas, materials, or funds for this unique public institution should contact Stilp at The Prop Shop, 1550 FVCR, Harrisburg, PA 17112.
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The Insurance Hoax
Property insurers use secret tactics to cheat customers out of payments--as profits break records.
By David Dietz and Darrell Preston
Bloomberg Markets September 2007
Julie Tunnell remembers standing in her debris-strewn driveway when the tall man in blue jeans approached. Her northern San Diego tudor-style home had been incinerated a week earlier in the largest wildfire in California history. The blaze in October and November 2003 swept across an area 19 times the size of Manhattan, destroying 2,232 homes and killing 15 people. Now came another blow.
A representative of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the largest home insurer in the U.S., came to the charred remnants of Tunnell's home to tell her the company would pay just $220,000 of the estimated $306,000 cost of rebuilding the house.
"It was devastating; I stood there and cried," says Tunnell, 42, who teaches accounting at San Diego City College. "I felt absolutely abandoned."
Tunnell joined thousands of people in the U.S. who already knew a secret about the insurance industry: When there's a disaster, the companies homeowners count on to protect them from financial ruin routinely pay less than what policies promise. Insurers often pay 30-60 percent of the cost of rebuilding a damaged home--even when carriers assure homeowners they're fully covered, thousands of complaints with state insurance departments and civil court cases show.
Paying out less to victims of catastrophes has helped produce record profits. In the past 12 years, insurance company net income has soared--even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Property- casualty insurers, which cover damage to homes and cars, reported their highest- ever profit of $73 billion last year, up 49 percent from $49 billion in 2005, according to Highline Data LLC, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm that compiles insurance industry data.
The 60 million U.S. homeowners who pay more than $50 billion a year in insurance premiums are often disappointed when they discover insurers won't pay the full cost of rebuilding their damaged or destroyed homes. Property insurers systematically deny and reduce their policyholders' claims, according to court records in California, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Tennessee. The insurance companies routinely refuse to pay market prices for homes and replacement contents, they use computer programs to cut payouts, they change policy coverage with no clear explanation, they ignore or alter engineering reports, and they sometimes ask their adjusters to lie to customers, court records and interviews with former employees and state regulators show. As Mississippi Republican U.S. Senator Trent Lott and thousands of other homeowners have found, insurers make low offers--or refuse to pay at all--and then dare people to fight back.
"It's despicable not to make good-faith offers to everybody," says Robert Hunter, who was Texas insurance commissioner from 1993 to '95 and is now insurance director at the Washington-based Consumer Federation of America. "Money managers have taken over this whole industry. Their eyes are not on people who are hurt but on the bottom line for the next quarter."
The industry's drive for profit has overwhelmed its obligation to policyholders, says California Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, a Democrat. As California's insurance commissioner from 2002 to '06, Garamendi imposed $18.4 million in fines against carriers for mistreating customers. "There's a fundamental economic conflict between the customer and the company," he says. "That is, the company doesn't want to pay. The first commandment of insurance is, 'Thou shalt pay as little and as late as possible.'"
Although the tension between insurers and their customers has long existed, it was in the 1990s that the industry began systematically looking for ways to increase profits by streamlining claims handling. Hurricane Hugo was a major catalyst. The 1989 storm, which battered North and South Carolina, left the industry reeling from $4.2 billion in claims. In September 1992, Allstate Corp., the second-largest U.S. home insurer, sought advice on improved efficiency from McKinsey & Co., a New York-based consulting firm that has advised many of the world's biggest corporations, according to records in at least six civil court cases.
State Farm, based in Bloomington, Illinois, and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group Inc., the third-largest home insurer in the U.S., also hired McKinsey as a consultant, court records show.
McKinsey produced about 13,000 pages of documents, including PowerPoint slides, in the 1990s, for Northbrook, Illinois-based Allstate. The consulting firm developed methods for the company to become more profitable by paying out less in claims, according to videotaped evidence presented in Fayette Circuit Court in Lexington, Kentucky, in a civil case involving a 1997 car accident.
One slide McKinsey prepared for Allstate was entitled "Good Hands or Boxing Gloves," the tape of the Kentucky court hearing shows. For 57 years, Allstate has advertised its employees as the "Good Hands People," telling customers they will be well cared for in times of need. The McKinsey slides had a new twist on that slogan. When a policyholder files a claim, first make a low offer, McKinsey advised Allstate. If a client accepts the low amount, Allstate should treat the person with good hands, McKinsey said. If the customer protests or hires a lawyer, Allstate should fight back.
"If you don't take the pittance they offer, they're going to put on the boxing gloves and they're going to batter injured victims," plaintiffs attorney J. Dale Golden told Judge Thomas Clark at the May 12, 2005, hearing in which the lawyer introduced the McKinsey slides.
One McKinsey slide displayed at the Kentucky hearing featured an alligator with the caption "Sit and Wait." The slide says Allstate can discourage claimants by delaying settlements and stalling court proceedings. By postponing payments, insurance companies can hold money longer and make more on their investments-- and often wear down clients to the point of dropping a challenge. "An alligator sits and waits," Golden told the judge, as they looked at the slide describing a reptile.
McKinsey's advice helped spark a turnaround in Allstate's finances. The company's profit rose 140 percent to $4.99 billion in 2006, up from $2.08 billion in 1996. Allstate lifted its income partly by paying less to its policyholders. Allstate spent 58 percent of its premium income in 2006 for claim payouts and the costs of the process compared with 79 percent in 1996, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The payout expense, called a loss ratio, changes each year based on events such as natural disasters; overall, it's been decreasing since Allstate hired McKinsey.
Investors have noticed. Allstate's stock price jumped fourfold to $60.95 on July 11 from its closing price on June 3, 1993, the day of its initial public offering. During the same period, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose threefold. State Farm's profits have doubled since 1996 to $4.8 billion in 2006. Because State Farm is a mutual company, meaning it's owned by its policyholders, it doesn't have shares that trade publicly.
"This is about as good a stretch as I've seen," says Michael Chren, who manages $1.5 billion at Allegiant Asset Management Co. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and has followed the property-casualty industry for 20 years. The industry's performance during the past five years has been superb, even with payouts for Katrina, he says. "All the stars have been in alignment. There has been decent pricing of products and an extremely attractive and very low loss ratio."
Reducing payouts is just one way the industry has improved profits. Carriers have also raised premiums and withdrawn from storm-plagued areas such as the Gulf Coast of the U.S. and parts of Long Island, New York--to lower costs and increase income, says Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based group that advises consumers on insurance claims. "What this says is that the industry has been raking in spectacular profits while they're getting more and more audacious in their tactics," she says.
Allstate spokesman Michael Siemienas says the company won't comment on what role McKinsey played in lowering the insurer's loss ratio and boosting its profits. Allstate did change the way it handles homeowners' insurance claims, he says. "In the early 1990s, Allstate redesigned its claims practices to more efficiently and effectively handle claims and better serve our customers," he says.
"Allstate's goal remains the same: to investigate, evaluate and promptly resolve each claim based on its merits," Siemienas says. "Allstate believes its claim processes support this goal and are absolutely sound."
McKinsey doesn't discuss any of its work for clients, spokesman Mark Garrett says.
Jerry Choate, Allstate's chief executive officer from 1995 to '98, said at a news conference in New York in 1997 that the company's new claims-handling process had reduced payments and increased profit, according to a report in a March 1997 edition of National Underwriter magazine. Insurers can't make significantly more money just from cutting sales costs, he told reporters. "The leverage is really on the claims side," Choate said. "If you don't win there, I don't care what you do on the front end. You're not going to win."
The more cash insurers can keep from premiums, the more they can invest. This pool of assets--most of which the companies invest in government and corporate bonds--is known as float.
"Simply put, float is money we hold that is not ours but which we get to invest," billionaire Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this year. "When an insurer earns an underwriting profit, float is better than free," he wrote in 2006. Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway generated 51 percent of its $11 billion profit in 2006 from insurance.
Claims payouts for the entire property-casualty industry have decreased in the past decade. In 2006, carriers paid out 55 percent of the $435.8 billion in premiums collected, according to the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. That compares with a 64 percent payout ratio on $267.6 billion in premium revenue in 1996. As companies pay less to policyholders, their investment gains are growing, according to the trade group and research firm A.M. Best Co. in Oldwick, New Jersey. The industry has increased profits by an annual average of 46 percent since 1994, Institute data show. In 2006, carriers invested $1.2 trillion and recorded a net gain of $52.3 billion, up from $713.5 billion invested for a gain of $39.1 billion in 1994.
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Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
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Insurance companies are no longer following their mandate to take care of policyholders' money and then pay it out when needed, says Douglas Heller, executive director of the nonprofit Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, California. "The whole purpose of insurance is evaporating before our eyes as we continue to send checks to the companies," Heller says. "Insurers are looking to shed their purpose as a risk bearer and become financial institutions."
That kind of criticism is unwarranted, says Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute. He says about 1 percent of policyholders contest what they're offered. "The insurance industry can be justifiably proud of its performance," Hartwig says. "It's in the insurance industry's best interests to settle claims as fairly and as rapidly as possible."
Companies have sharpened the use of technology in the past 20 years to help tighten claims payouts. Insurers following McKinsey's advice on claims processing have adopted computer programs with names such as Colossus and Xactimate. Colossus, made by El Segundo, California-based Computer Sciences Corp., calculates the cost of treating people injured in auto accidents, including the degree of pain and suffering they'll endure and any permanent impairment they may have, according to Computer Sciences' Web site. Xactimate, made by Xactware Solutions Inc. of Orem, Utah, is a program that estimates the cost of rebuilding a home.
Insurers sometimes manipulate these programs to pay out as little as possible, lawsuits have asserted. "Programs like Colossus are designed to systematically underpay policyholders without adequately examining the validity of each individual claim," former Texas insurance commissioner Hunter told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on April 11. He also criticized Xactimate. "If you don't accept their offer, which is a low ball, you end up in court," Hunter said. "And that was the recommendation of McKinsey." Computer Sciences and Xactware declined to comment.
Farmers Group, a subsidiary of Zurich Financial Services AG, agreed in 2005 to stop using Colossus to evaluate claims filed by policyholders who have accidents with uninsured or underinsured drivers. The move was part of a $40 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit in Pottawatomie County District Court in Oklahoma in which the plaintiffs claimed the company had repeatedly and wrongly failed to pay enough for crash injuries.
An internal e-mail introduced in the Farmers lawsuit shows the company had pressured its adjusters, whom it calls claims representatives, or CRs, to pay out smaller amounts--and rewarded them when they did.
"As you know, we have been creeping up in settlements," David Harding, a Farmers claims manager, wrote in an e-mail to employees on Nov. 20, 2001. "Our CRs must resist the temptation of paying more just to move this type file. Teach them to say, 'Sorry, no more,' with a toothy grin and mean it." Harding praised a worker for making low settlements. "It can be done as Darren consistently does," he wrote. "If he keeps this up during 2002, we will pay him accordingly."
Farmers said in court papers that it didn't seek to pay less than customers were due. "The e-mail speaks for itself," Farmers wrote. "Plaintiff's characterization of it is denied."
Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm, testified in a 2006 civil case that his company revamped its claims handling through a project called ACE, or Advanced Claims Excellence. McKinsey suggested the use of ACE, according to evidence presented in the district court of Grady County, Oklahoma.
"Technology has allowed us to really streamline our claim organization to be more efficient and responsive," Rust testified. He said the company wanted to cut expenses for claims. In the Oklahoma case, Bridget and Donald Watkins, whose Grady County house was destroyed during a tornado in 1999, accused State Farm of misrepresenting the damage from the storm and won a $12.9 million judgment in May 2006. Watkins and State Farm agreed to an undisclosed settlement after the judgment.
Hunter, who also headed the federal flood insurance program under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, told Congress that Allstate, with McKinsey's guidance, gave the name Claim Core Process Redesign to its strategy to change payout practices.
As pervasive as computers have become in insurance, the key actor in settling claims is still the adjuster, the person who talks to policyholders and decides how much they should be paid. Allstate has asked adjusters to deceive customers, says Jo Ann Katzman, who worked as a claims adjuster for Allstate in 2002 and '03. She says managers regularly came to her office in Farmington Hills, Michigan, to give pep talks on keeping claim payments down. They awarded prizes such as portable refrigerators to adjusters who tried to deny claims by blaming fires on arson without justification, she says. "We were told to lie by our supervisors," says Katzman, 49, who quit by taking a company buyout in 2003. "It's tough to look at people and know you're lying."
Katzman says an adjuster at Allstate, on orders from a supervisor, told an 89- year-old Detroit fire victim that Allstate wouldn't replace cabinets in her home even though the insurance policy said they were covered. In another case, Katzman says Allstate wouldn't replace a fire-damaged refrigerator--an appliance she says was covered. Katzman now runs Accurate Estimating Services, an independent adjusting company in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Allstate's Siemienas declined to comment on Katzman's statements.
Insurers sometimes order employees to offer replacement cost settlements that have no connection to actual prices of home contents, according to testimony in a civil trial. A jury in November 2005 awarded Larry Stone and Linda Della Pelle $5.2 million in punitive damages and $616,000 to construct a new house after finding that Fidelity National Insurance Co. of Jacksonville, Florida, had underpaid the couple by $183,000 when it offered them $433,000 to rebuild their two-story Claremont, California, residence.
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During the trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, Ricardo Echeverria, the couple's attorney, questioned Kenneth Drake, president of Canyon Country, California- based RJG Construction Inc., who had been hired by Fidelity's lawyers to evaluate damage estimates.
"Are you telling us that sometimes, because the insurance carriers dictate what amounts they are willing to allow for unit costs, estimators then have to comply with that?" asked Echeverria, according to the court transcript.
"That's absolutely true," Drake said.
"Do you think that's fair?" Echeverria asked.
"Fair or not, it's the name of our business," Drake said.
Drake declined to comment on his testimony. Fidelity is appealing the award.
A New Hampshire case involving a home destroyed in a fire exposed another insurance company tactic: changing a policy retroactively. In April 2003, the Rockingham county attorney in Kingston, New Hampshire, found that a unit of Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. had deleted the replacement cost portion of the homeowner's policy of Terry Bennett after his five-bedroom house burned to the ground in 1993. Bennett, a physician, sued Twin City Fire Insurance Co., claiming his home and its contents--including antiques and fine art--were worth $20 million, not the $1.7 million the insurer paid him. After an 11-year battle, he settled with Hartford in 2004 for an undisclosed amount. "Fighting an insurance company is like staring down the wrong end of a cannon," Bennett says.
An unprecedented number of people stared down that cannon after Hurricane Katrina. The August 2005 storm killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi, left 500,000 people homeless and cost insurers $41.1 billion. More than 1,000 homeowners sued their insurers in the wake of the storm--the largest- ever number of insurance lawsuits stemming from a U.S. natural disaster.
For insurers, the multibillion-dollar question regarding Katrina was how much of the destruction was caused by wind and how much by water. Property insurance policies don't cover damage caused by flooding; homeowners have to purchase separate insurance administered by the U.S. government. The wind/water issue has spurred allegations that insurers manipulated the findings of adjusters and engineers.
Ken Overstreet, an engineer based in Diamondhead, Mississippi, who examined destroyed Gulf Coast residences, says someone altered his findings on the cause of the damage to at least four homes. "We were working for insurance companies, and they wanted certain results," says Overstreet, who has been a licensed civil engineer since 1981. "They wanted to get a desired outcome, and that's what they did."
Overstreet, who was working for Houston-based Rimkus Consulting Group Inc., prepared a report on the Gulfport, Mississippi, home of Hubert and Joyce Smith for Meritplan Insurance Co. The engineer found that both wind and water had damaged the house. "The winds out of the east would have racked the entire structure to the west and simply lifted the footings up," he wrote.
Meritplan declined to pay anything to the Smiths, telling them that all of the damage was caused by water. The company sent the Smiths what it said was Overstreet's engineering report. "Due to the extent of the structural damage to the residence, the storm surge accounted for the damage," the report they got said. The Smiths called Overstreet and asked him to look at what Meritplan had sent them. Overstreet says he looked at both reports side by side and then told the couple that someone had changed his conclusion after his inspection.
"If they defrauded me, how many more did they defraud?" asks Hubert Smith, 88, a retired chiropractor. "There's a lot of crap going on."
Six lawsuits against Rimkus allege the company altered engineering reports. "Those allegations are absolutely false," says Arch Currid, a Rimkus spokesman. "There's no fact to those claims. We're going to vigorously defend ourselves in court, and we're confident we will prevail."
Ed Essa, a spokesman for Calabasas, California-based Countrywide Financial Corp., the parent of Meritplan, says the company confidentially settled a lawsuit with the Smiths in March.
Another engineer involved in Katrina, Bob Kochan, CEO of Forensic Analysis & Engineering Corp., says State Farm asked him to redo his reports because the insurer disagreed with the engineers' conclusions. Kochan sent an Oct. 17, 2005, e-mail to his staff saying State Farm executive Alexis "Lecky" King asked for the changes. "Lecky told me that she is experiencing this same concern with other engineering companies," Kochan wrote. "In her words, 'They are all too emotionally involved and working too hard to find justifications to call it wind damage.'"
Kochan says he complied so State Farm didn't cut its contract with his company. "They didn't like our conclusions," he says. "We agreed to re-evaluate each of our assignments."
Randy Down, an engineer at Raleigh, North Carolina-based Forensic, wrote this Oct. 18, 2005, e-mail response to Kochan: "I have a serious concern about the ethics of this whole matter. I really question the ethics of someone who wants to fire us simply because our conclusions don't match theirs." The e-mails were made public in a civil case against State Farm in Jackson, Mississippi.
State Farm spokesman Phil Supple says Kochan's e-mail comments are out of context. He says sometimes information in engineering reports doesn't support the conclusions.
One State Farm policyholder in Mississippi was Senator Lott, who lost his home in Katrina. He sued State Farm for fraud in U.S. District Court in Jackson, after the insurer ruled that his home had been damaged by water and refused to pay him anything. "It's long overdue for this industry to be held accountable," Lott, 65, says. Lott and State Farm agreed to a confidential settlement in April.
Lott has introduced legislation to have insurers regulated by the federal government. That would supplant a patchwork system of regulation by states. Insurance has no body analogous to the SEC, which can refer cases to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. That doesn't happen with insurers. The most that state insurance departments typically do is impose civil fines when companies mistreat customers. Such sanctions are weak and infrequent, says Hunter, the former Texas insurance commissioner. Before Katrina, no state or federal prosecutor had ever investigated a nationally known property-casualty company for criminal mistreatment of policyholders. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood says a federal grand jury is probing insurance company claims handling after the hurricane.
There was no criminal investigation after State Farm offered just 15 percent of replacement costs to Michele and Tim Ray, whose house was wrecked by a tornado in April 2006. A contractor estimated the cost to rebuild the Hendersonville, Tennessee, home at $254,000. State Farm made three inspections of the property, Ray says, and sent the Rays a check for $36,000, which the couple returned. A year after the twister, the couple remained in the damaged home, with their tattered roof covered by tarpaulins. In April, after Bloomberg News submitted questions to State Farm about the Ray case, the company inspected the house again. This time, it gave the Rays $302,000. "We decided to call it a total loss and agreed to pay the policy limits after deciding the damage was caused by the storm," State Farm spokesman Shawn Johnson says.
State Farm won't discuss what role McKinsey played in helping the insurer shape its approach toward customers. Similarly, no official at any insurer that hired McKinsey is willing to talk about the consulting firm.
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Privately held McKinsey, which has 14,000 employees in 40 countries, has worked for many of the largest companies in the world, according to its Web site. "We take pride in doing what is right rather than what is right for the profitability of our firm," Managing Director Ian Davis says in a quote posted on the site.
McKinsey pioneered the overhaul of the property casualty industry at Allstate. The company hired McKinsey in 1992 after the insurer was spun off from what's now Sears Holdings Corp. of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, says David Berardinelli, a Santa Fe, New Mexico, lawyer who won access to view the McKinsey documents for a limited time during a lawsuit involving an auto accident. McKinsey advised the insurer to pay claims quickly at low amounts while delaying payments for as long as possible for those who wanted large settlements, Berardinelli says. "They're capitalizing on the vulnerability of people," he says.
Berardinelli says McKinsey suggested that Allstate hold so-called town hall meetings with claims adjusters to urge them to pay less to customers.
Shannon Kmatz, a former Allstate claims adjuster, says she attended some of those sessions. She says managers told employees to keep claim payouts as low as possible. "The leaders of those town hall meetings were always concerned that we were doing our part to help the stock price by keeping claims down," says Kmatz, 34, who worked for Allstate for three years in New Mexico in the late 1990s and is now a police officer. "It was obvious from the get-go that all they were concerned about was the bottom line."
Just once, at the May 2005 hearing in Lexington, Kentucky, the PowerPoint slides McKinsey prepared for Allstate were made public. William Hager and his wife, Geneva, who suffered neck and back injuries after the family's car was rear- ended in a 1997 accident in Lexington, sued the insurer, claiming the company failed to cover her medical expenses. The case is scheduled to go to trial in October.
One McKinsey slide prepared for Allstate was called "Zero-Sum Economic Game," a videotape of the court hearing shows. The slide explains that there are winners and losers, and the insurance company can win by paying out small amounts. "There is a finite pool of money," Golden, the plaintiffs attorney, told the judge at the hearing. "Either it goes to the injured victim or it goes to Allstate's pocket as surplus."
Allstate's attorney at the hearing, Mindy Barfield of Lexington, didn't say anything about the McKinsey slides. She didn't return phone calls seeking her comments.
Former federal flood insurance commissioner Hunter says the McKinsey approach exploits policyholders. "McKinsey presented it as a zero-sum game in which the winners would be Allstate and the losers would be the claimants," Hunter says. "I don't think a claims system should be viewed in that light. It's against any principles on how you should settle insurance claims. They should be settled on their merits."
Allstate convinced the judge to seal the McKinsey slides before and after the Lexington hearing. The insurer has resisted attempts to make the consulting firm's work public in courts across the U.S., arguing it contains trade secrets. In 2004, the company was sanctioned by the Bartholomew Circuit Court in Indiana and fined $10,000 for refusing to turn over the records to attorney Richard Enyon, representing an auto accident victim. Allstate held on to the documents and appealed the punishment. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the sanction. Allstate then appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which hasn't yet made a decision.
Lawsuits in California, Florida and Texas have asserted that McKinsey's work for Allstate helped the insurer cheat claimants. Records show that through the company's Claim Core Process Redesign project, Allstate encouraged policyholders to accept small settlements on the spot.
The redesign also became a blueprint for fighting more claims in court as Allstate increased its legal staff, according to a 1997 company newsletter obtained by David Poore, a Petaluma, California, attorney who has represented homeowners in lawsuits against carriers. "The bottom line is that Allstate is trying more cases than ever before," the newsletter said. "If the offer is not accepted, Allstate will go to court, if necessary, to prove the evaluation process is sound."
McKinsey-style tactics have spread to insurers large and small--as homeowners discovered after three wildfires ravaged Southern California in 2003, including the one that hit northern San Diego. While Katrina struck thousands of low- income families in New Orleans, the San Diego fire affected mostly affluent homeowners, who fared no better with their insurance companies.
The fire obliterated large sections of Scripps Ranch, a community of 30,000 that sits atop a sagebrush and eucalyptus mesa, where homes can cost more than $1 million. After flames swept through the area on winds of up to 50 miles per hour, residents say they expected their insurance companies to live up to coverage promises and pay the full cost to rebuild. The Southern California fires led to 676 formal complaints to the state saying insurers offered payouts that fell far short of actual costs and delayed on paying claims.
One of the Scripps Ranch houses that went up in flames, a four-bedroom, gray- stucco home on a sloping cul-de-sac, belonged to J.P. Lapeyre, a division director at JDS Uniphase Corp., a Milpitas, California, maker of telecommunications equipment.
Lapeyre, 41, who is married and has two children, says he had no inkling as he viewed the remains of his house that his insurance would leave him $280,000 short of what he would need to rebuild. Representatives of Pacific Specialty Insurance Co. of Menlo Park, California, told him the most the firm would pay out was $168,075, not even half of the estimated reconstruction cost of $448,000.
The Pacific Specialty representative told Lapeyre in November 2003 that the insurer would pay $75 a square foot (0.09 square meter) to rebuild his 2,241- square-foot house. "What frustration," Lapeyre says. "I had to try to prove to them that it would cost $200 a square foot." That figure came separately from two builders, Norton Construction and TLC Contractors, both of San Diego. In February 2005, Lapeyre filed suit in San Diego County Superior Court against his insurer and the independent broker who sold him the policy, alleging negligence, breach of contract and fraud for leading him to believe that he was properly covered. After a fight of 19 months, Lapeyre dropped the suit when Pacific Specialty told a mediator assigned to the case it wouldn't raise its offer, he says. "We decided it was time to get on with our lives and move forward," says Lapeyre, who borrowed money to build a new house.
Karen and Bill Reimus, both lawyers, fought their carrier, Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., when it told them it wouldn't pay the couple enough to rebuild their burned Scripps Ranch house. Karen, 40, says an agent for Boston-based Liberty Mutual assured her and her husband when they bought their house four months before the 2003 fire that their insurance would replace the home if it were destroyed.
In a December 2003 letter, two months after the fire, Liberty Mutual offered to pay $40,000 less than the limit of the couple's policy, Karen says. In early 2004, San Diego-based Gafcon Construction Consultants determined the cost to rebuild was well above the limits of the couple's policy.
The Reimuses began a phone and letter campaign to convince the company its offer was too low, Karen says. "It has now been almost seven months since the loss and we are still not agreed as to the numbers," Karen wrote in a May 13, 2004, letter to Liberty Mutual.
Two weeks later, Liberty Mutual agreed to raise the couple's limits by $100,000, Karen says. "This is clear evidence that the original estimate was a low ball," she says. Liberty Mutual spokesman Glenn Greenberg says the company won't discuss the case because its dealings with policyholders are private.
"The system is set up to take advantage of people when they're at their weakest," Karen says. "We went to one of the most-expensive companies in the country because we wanted to be ready for a rainy day. We asked for coverage that would replace the house. We thought replacement meant replacement." Scripps Ranch couple Leslie Mukau and Robin Seaberg sued Allstate for alleged fraud and negligence for failing to pay the $900,000 that contractors estimate it would cost to replace their two-story home. Allstate offered the Seabergs $311,000, according to the 2004 San Diego County Superior Court suit. Allstate says in court papers the couple hasn't shown the company was negligent and asked for dismissal of the suit, which is pending.
The California Department of Insurance examined the practices of Allied Property & Casualty Insurance Co., AMCO Insurance Co. and Allstate in connection with the California fires. It fined Allied and AMCO, both based in Des Moines, Iowa, a total of $20,000 for misleading nine policyholders into believing they were insured for full value. The regulators cited Allstate for six rule violations, including that it ignored complaints that it underinsured homeowners. The state didn't fine Allstate, which told the department it had done nothing wrong.
"Fines by state regulatory agencies have been far too small and infrequent to deter unfair business practices," United Policyholders' Bach says. "It's clear that cheating by insurers is a big, profitable business and regulators can't muster the will or political strength to stop them."
Most homeowners take what insurers offer because they don't realize they're being deceived or conclude that fighting is too costly and difficult, Bach says. "Virtually everyone who settles for what the insurer offers is taking less than they're owed," she says.
Homeowners across the U.S. have found themselves in the same situation. Kevin Hazlett, a lawyer, sued Farmers Group after an April 2006 tornado struck his home in O'Fallon, Illinois. Farmers had offered to pay him $470,000 to rebuild the house. Royal Construction Inc., based in Collinsville, Illinois, estimated the cost at $1.1 million. Hazlett, 52, accepted a settlement for an undisclosed amount.
Hazlett says Illinois Farmers, a subsidiary of Farmers, used the Xactimate software program to first determine what it would pay out. "They're just pulling numbers out of thin air," he says. "There's no rhyme or reason." Farmers spokesman Jerry Davies didn't respond to requests for an interview.
Bo Chessor, owner of Royal Construction, says he sees insurers refusing to pay coverage limits all the time. "Most people just roll over and take it because they don't have the money to fight it," Chessor says. "What the insurance companies are doing is purely robbery."
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It may be robbery, but it's rarely a crime. State insurance departments don't prosecute insurance companies, and the federal government has no oversight. The insurance industry wants to keep it that way. To make their voice heard on federal regulation and other government decisions, insurers spent $98 million on lobbying in Washington in 2006, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a unit of Congressional Quarterly. That's the second-largest amount spent on lobbying by any group, behind $114.4 million by pharmaceutical companies.
Property-casualty companies do want something from the government: bailouts. Insurers beseech states and the federal government to foot more of the bill for rebuilding private homes after natural disasters. Florida has a catastrophe fund that insures some homes to reduce payouts by carriers. The fund paid out about $8.45 billion for storm damage in 2004 and '05, according to its annual report. The federal flood insurance program covers $800 billion of property nationally, which helped the industry increase profits by 25 percent in 2005, the year of Katrina.
Homeowners whose properties have been destroyed by catastrophes contend with low payouts, higher premiums, software programs that underestimate rebuilding costs and sudden changes in policy values--all of which have been calculated methods for insurers to increase profits.
Tunnell, the San Diego accounting teacher whose home burned to the ground, says she thought State Farm had adequately insured her family when they bought their three-bedroom house in 1992. She says the policy, destroyed in the fire, provided for "full replacement coverage." It guaranteed to rebuild the house, no matter the cost, she says. The company offered to pay $220,000--which was $121,600 less than a $306,000 figure her family got from State Farm's own estimator, Hersum Construction Inc. of San Diego, for rebuilding the 1,700- square-foot house.
State Farm spokesman Supple says the company sent letters in 1997 to the Tunnells and other policyholders saying that it would no longer offer full replacement coverage. "Policyholders, by regulatory order, were sent prominent notices of the coverage change at that time," he says. Tunnell says she doesn't recall being notified. She says her family debated hiring a lawyer and suing, and eventually decided the battle would be too stressful. The Tunnells took the $220,000 and borrowed money to build a new house.
"Why is this happening to people over and over again?" Tunnell asks. "State Farm keeps underinsuring people, and they get away with it. This is unthinkable." As long as insurers make the rules and control the game, Tunnell and homeowners across the U.S. won't know whether their homes are fully insured, no matter what their policies say.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
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The decline in home prices accelerated and spread to more regions of the country in October, according to a series of private indexes released Wednesday.
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Prices fell 6.1 percent from October 2006 in 20 large metropolitan areas, according to Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller indexes, compared with a 4.9 percent decline in September. All but three of the 20 regions saw real estate values fall, and even the three places — Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Charlotte, N.C. — where prices were up from a year ago saw prices fall from a month earlier.
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Prices fell 6.1 percent from October 2006 in 20 large metropolitan areas, according to Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller indexes, compared with a 4.9 percent decline in September. All but three of the 20 regions saw real estate values fall, and even the three places — Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Charlotte, N.C. — where prices were up from a year ago saw prices fall from a month earlier.
Louis J Sheehan 63379 H18
The decline in home prices accelerated and spread to more regions of the country in October, according to a series of private indexes released Wednesday.
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Prices fell 6.1 percent from October 2006 in 20 large metropolitan areas, according to Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller indexes, compared with a 4.9 percent decline in September. All but three of the 20 regions saw real estate values fall, and even the three places — Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Charlotte, N.C. — where prices were up from a year ago saw prices fall from a month earlier.
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
Prices fell 6.1 percent from October 2006 in 20 large metropolitan areas, according to Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller indexes, compared with a 4.9 percent decline in September. All but three of the 20 regions saw real estate values fall, and even the three places — Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Charlotte, N.C. — where prices were up from a year ago saw prices fall from a month earlier.
Louis J Sheehan 63378 H18
Board gaming is a hobby that has always been dear to me. My interest in the field is wide, ranging from simple and straightforward “social” games such as the relatively recent “Carcassonne” to far more complex rule monstrosities like the 1990 Avalon Hill game “Republic of Rome”.
Therefore, when I recently learnt about the existence of a samurai warfare game called “Ran”, which borrows its name from the Kurosawa movie (even acknowledging its source) and comes in a box whose cover is clearly inspired by Kagemusha, I knew that I had to get the game. And get it I did.
In fact, to be completely fair to the reader, I must mention that when I contacted the manufacturer of the game, they kindly offered to send me a review copy. You may judge yourself the impact that this may or may not have had on what follows.
In any case, I have now had the opportunity to sit down for a couple of games of “Ran”, and I think that my early impressions of the game are enough to warrant writing a review. For those who are either too busy or too lazy to read the whole piece, let me give you the opportunity to skip the details by saying that I really like the game. The rest of you, read on.
A note: While playing, I took a series of pictures with which to illustrate this article, but it seems that I have lost the cable with which to transfer those pictures from my camera to the computer. As for now, I will publish this without the illustrations, and anyone interested in checking how the game actually looks like can check Board Game Geek’s Ran picture gallery.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
On the surface of things, the board game “Ran” has very little in common with the movie “Ran”, or indeed with any of Kurosawa’s movies. This is of course understandable, considering that the game is about military strategy, whereas none of Kurosawa’s movies really centrally deal with warfare, but rather, when it is present, use it as a backdrop and a metaphoric device. “Ran”, therefore, is not “based on” or even “inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran”, and neither does it claim that.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the battles available in “Ran” the strategy game in no way correspond with the ones in Kurosawa’s “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. ( “Samurai”, an earlier game by the same maker, includes the Battle of Nagashino, which is the final battle in “Kagemusha”.) The connection is therefore in some ways very superficial, indeed almost accidental.
Yet, while playing “Ran”, you will probably sooner or later catch yourself humming the theme of either “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. Even without any actual one-to-one correspondence between the game and the movies, each can help to better understand the other. The movie helps you visualize the game, while by playing the game you come to understand the mechanics behind Japanese warfare depicted in the films. There is also something quite epic, or as the box text puts it “Homeric” about the board game, on a level similar to Kurosawa’s endeavors.
Consequently, while “Ran” the board game is not exactly a “Kurosawa item”, it is certainly something that I would imagine might interest a number of devoted Kurosawa fans.
Introduction
“Ran”, published in 2007, is the 12th volume in the “Great Battles of History” series by the well-known game publisher GMT Games. The company is perhaps best known for its war games that strive for historical accuracy, often with the result of added complexity in the rules. “Ran” is in fact the second samurai warfare game in the series, following the 1996 game that was simply titled “Samurai”.
The battles included in the box range in printed playing time from roughly two to “more than five” hours. My impression is that these figures are fairly realistic for someone already familiar with the rules. Your first battle, however, will most probably take about a double the estimated time. As for the complexity of the game, I have seen both more complex, as well as far simpler games. I would say that as board games go, “Ran” is somewhere towards the lower end of the “high” complexity games.
I have previously not played “Samurai”, or any of the other “Great Battles of History” games, so I had to approach “Ran” with only my previous experience as a gamer to fall on.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us/
The game
“Ran” comes with seven scenarios, each representing a battle from the late 16th and early 17th century feudal Japan, which was part of the so-called “Warring States” period. Because of it being the second samurai war game in the GMT series, the battles on offer are somewhat lesser known than are the ones in its predecessor “Samurai”. This, of course, in no way makes the scenarios themselves less interesting to play, and in any case I wonder how many people actually are more familiar with, say, the Battle of Sekigahara (not included) than for example the Battle of Mimigawa (included).
Based on the scenarios that I have tried alone and with a friend, the rule system in “Ran” seems well balanced and certainly faithful enough to the historical reality that was feudal Japanese warfare. In fact, since I cannot claim to be an expert in this particular field, I enlisted for the testing purposes a board gaming friend who is a trained historian working in a library of military science, and thus capable of bringing some relevant knowledge and authority to the table. The game clearly received his seal of approval, for as I am typing this review, he keeps harassing me with messages about when the next session is to take place. Which, by the way, will probably be quite soon, as I am just as eager to try the game again – not least to attempt to have my revenge after being so miserably crushed in Nagakute!
“Ran”, as the name suggests (“ran” is Japanese for “chaos”), employs a turn system that does away with strict linearity. Rather than each player moving all of his units and then passing the turn to the next player, the system allows for frequent changes of initiative, and a single game turn may easily see both players moving different parts of their army at very different times.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
How this work is that, without going into unnecessary details, the more skilled your commanders, the better hold of the flow of the battle you will have. In gaming terms, this means that capable and lucky generals (who each command individual parts of your army) may be able to move up to three times in a single turn, giving them a clear edge in the battle. In fact, in our early test games this sometimes felt like too much of an edge, although this may only be me complaining against my friend’s amazingly good luck with the so-called Momentum dice-rolls.
http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan.blogspot.com/
While the above is a slight variation of a relatively standard war gaming practice, “Ran” is somewhat different from your typical tactical war game in that it incorporates individual combat into a system otherwise concentrating on units comprised of a few hundred men. The way the game does this is fairly interesting, and something that I still need to experiment with to make a full tactical use of. On the basic level, however, what happens is that individual samurai or busho (generals) can enter into head-to-head fights with each other in the midst of the chaos around them. With a little luck, these individual feats may then change the direction of the whole battle, if they happen to take place at the right moment.
My only real complaint about the individual combat system is that while the idea itself is very intriguing, the rules behind its execution are somewhat less so. You basically compare the fighting characters’ abilities and throw dice, the one with the lower total suffering a wound. If a character’s stamina runs to zero, he dies, although you can withdraw before that. This, I feel, could have been made more tactical and interesting by extending the rules somewhat, allowing for different types of attacks (perhaps ranging from all-out defense to all-out attack) and maybe even mapping the hits to different body parts to make the fight more visual. But maybe I come here too strongly from my background as someone who has practiced kendo (“Japanese fencing”) and plays role playing games with systems similar to the above – perhaps it might, in fact, be taking the individual combat too far in a game that is, after all, a tactical war game.
Individual feats are important also outside of the immediate head-to-head combat. As mentioned before, each part of your army has its own commander, and the commander’s personal skills reflect how well he will be able to maneuver his troops. Similarly, your whole army – including the commanders – sit under your main commander, whose stats again have an influence over the proceedings.
These commanders also take personal responsibility over their (your) decisions in a way that the game designers have tried to tie with the bushido (warrior’s “code of conduct”) culture that is at the centre of medieval Japanese warfare. For example, when ordering a withdrawal of his troops, a commander may in some cases have to, as a result of losing face, commit seppuku (ritual suicide). This is, in fact, how our Battle of Nagakute ended, with my commander-in-chief Ieyasu Tokugawa being forced to take his own life after ordering a tactical withdrawal with the idea to save and rest his troops. His death then caused panic within the lines, and large parts of the army left the battle field, handing the victory to my opponent.
All in all, “Ran” is a very interesting mixture of troop and individual level warfare that is in some ways very traditional (which is good), but also unique (which is also good). As a result, it seems like a safe bet for anyone enjoying tactical war games, while a determined newcomer may also find the game a good introduction to the genre. I am certainly hooked, myself.
If, however, the most tactical war game that you have ever played and ever want to play is Risk, read into the rules before you fork out the money to buy “Ran”, as it may not quite be your cup of tea. Then again, it may also turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby, for which “Ran” can in fact serve as a relatively good and quite straightforward introduction.
The components
If you have never played board war games before, you may on your first impression of “Ran” be overwhelmed by the number of components that the box contains: seven maps printed on two large sheets of paper, over a thousand counters marking your units and their various states, a rule book and a scenario book, plus a number of charts and table cards littered with information. GMT also provides you with Ziploc bags to hold the counters in, which is extremely nice of them, considering that one will need those bags anyway, yet always forgets to buy any for a new game.
The maps in “Ran” predictably serve as the gaming board, and are of relatively good quality paper. Card board maps would, of course, be superior, but including seven cardboard maps the size of these babies would obviously raise the manufacturing and printing costs considerably.
One of the biggest problems that hex based games which work with a large variety of counters have is that the hexagons provided on the map are too small to actually comfortably hold all the counters. The problem is present also in “Ran”. For, even if a single hex in the game can only have one unit in it, it will ultimately also have to house a number of non-unit counters along with it, thus creating stacks (or in our case piles) of chits on the map. Furthermore, since the facing of the units is important, moving the counters around without accidentally changing the facings of surrounding units is difficult. Especially so, if you have fingers the size of Southern Europe, as I do.
One possible solution to this could be to keep the non-unit markers out of the actual map, referencing them on a separate sheet. Since the units, however, have no individual IDs, this is impossible without actually drawing something on the unit counters, which again is something that I am not going to do purely for aesthetic reasons.
The 24-page rule book starts by noting that the rule system in “Ran” is less complex than in the games that have preceded it in the series. It even goes as far as to suggest that a total newcomer to the genre of historically accurate war games will in 20-30 minutes be able to learn the rules to the point where “you’ll be just as good at this sort of thing as we are”.
Now, either this latter statement is a downright lie, I am a poor learner, or the guys over at GMT actually have no idea how their rule system works. For, at least in my case, it took almost two hours of flipping through the rule book until I reached the point where I was comfortable setting up the first scenario to test the game. In the end, it wasn’t until about four hours into active gaming that I started to feel like I mastered the basic rules in a way where I wasn’t making all that many mistakes.
Sadly, in fact, it is the rule book that is the weakest link in the “Ran” package. By this I do not mean the rules themselves, but the way that they are explained. The rule book lacks a real index, and the order in which the rules are presented seems fairly illogical to me. Add to this the high number of typos, grammatical errors and a few completely missing words here and there, and your initial enthusiasm towards the system is somewhat lessened as you try to make head or tale of it.
What I personally felt was most importantly missing from the rule book was a stronger historical background to many of the rules. Quick, short notes about why things work as they do would have helped at least me to remember the rules faster. Similarly, I often found myself wishing for more examples for rules that felt unclear for a long time. Perhaps GMT could even have considered adding to the package a book in which the reader is taken through a sample battle move by move, thus explaining the rules with real examples.
All this being said, once you actually get to the point where the system starts to make sense to you, you discover that the effort has easily been worth it.
Longevity
One big question that always hangs in the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how interesting can such games be for the players?
Since I have only had a couple of weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play – especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”. Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.
I also doubt that the battles will get repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game that depicts historical battles.
“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.
Closing remarks
I admit that my experience with “Ran” has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those interested in the hobby.
As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before, while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking, people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Availability and more information
Ran is available directly from GMT Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.
As always with board games, if you are interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.
Therefore, when I recently learnt about the existence of a samurai warfare game called “Ran”, which borrows its name from the Kurosawa movie (even acknowledging its source) and comes in a box whose cover is clearly inspired by Kagemusha, I knew that I had to get the game. And get it I did.
In fact, to be completely fair to the reader, I must mention that when I contacted the manufacturer of the game, they kindly offered to send me a review copy. You may judge yourself the impact that this may or may not have had on what follows.
In any case, I have now had the opportunity to sit down for a couple of games of “Ran”, and I think that my early impressions of the game are enough to warrant writing a review. For those who are either too busy or too lazy to read the whole piece, let me give you the opportunity to skip the details by saying that I really like the game. The rest of you, read on.
A note: While playing, I took a series of pictures with which to illustrate this article, but it seems that I have lost the cable with which to transfer those pictures from my camera to the computer. As for now, I will publish this without the illustrations, and anyone interested in checking how the game actually looks like can check Board Game Geek’s Ran picture gallery.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
On the surface of things, the board game “Ran” has very little in common with the movie “Ran”, or indeed with any of Kurosawa’s movies. This is of course understandable, considering that the game is about military strategy, whereas none of Kurosawa’s movies really centrally deal with warfare, but rather, when it is present, use it as a backdrop and a metaphoric device. “Ran”, therefore, is not “based on” or even “inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran”, and neither does it claim that.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the battles available in “Ran” the strategy game in no way correspond with the ones in Kurosawa’s “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. ( “Samurai”, an earlier game by the same maker, includes the Battle of Nagashino, which is the final battle in “Kagemusha”.) The connection is therefore in some ways very superficial, indeed almost accidental.
Yet, while playing “Ran”, you will probably sooner or later catch yourself humming the theme of either “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. Even without any actual one-to-one correspondence between the game and the movies, each can help to better understand the other. The movie helps you visualize the game, while by playing the game you come to understand the mechanics behind Japanese warfare depicted in the films. There is also something quite epic, or as the box text puts it “Homeric” about the board game, on a level similar to Kurosawa’s endeavors.
Consequently, while “Ran” the board game is not exactly a “Kurosawa item”, it is certainly something that I would imagine might interest a number of devoted Kurosawa fans.
Introduction
“Ran”, published in 2007, is the 12th volume in the “Great Battles of History” series by the well-known game publisher GMT Games. The company is perhaps best known for its war games that strive for historical accuracy, often with the result of added complexity in the rules. “Ran” is in fact the second samurai warfare game in the series, following the 1996 game that was simply titled “Samurai”.
The battles included in the box range in printed playing time from roughly two to “more than five” hours. My impression is that these figures are fairly realistic for someone already familiar with the rules. Your first battle, however, will most probably take about a double the estimated time. As for the complexity of the game, I have seen both more complex, as well as far simpler games. I would say that as board games go, “Ran” is somewhere towards the lower end of the “high” complexity games.
I have previously not played “Samurai”, or any of the other “Great Battles of History” games, so I had to approach “Ran” with only my previous experience as a gamer to fall on.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us/
The game
“Ran” comes with seven scenarios, each representing a battle from the late 16th and early 17th century feudal Japan, which was part of the so-called “Warring States” period. Because of it being the second samurai war game in the GMT series, the battles on offer are somewhat lesser known than are the ones in its predecessor “Samurai”. This, of course, in no way makes the scenarios themselves less interesting to play, and in any case I wonder how many people actually are more familiar with, say, the Battle of Sekigahara (not included) than for example the Battle of Mimigawa (included).
Based on the scenarios that I have tried alone and with a friend, the rule system in “Ran” seems well balanced and certainly faithful enough to the historical reality that was feudal Japanese warfare. In fact, since I cannot claim to be an expert in this particular field, I enlisted for the testing purposes a board gaming friend who is a trained historian working in a library of military science, and thus capable of bringing some relevant knowledge and authority to the table. The game clearly received his seal of approval, for as I am typing this review, he keeps harassing me with messages about when the next session is to take place. Which, by the way, will probably be quite soon, as I am just as eager to try the game again – not least to attempt to have my revenge after being so miserably crushed in Nagakute!
“Ran”, as the name suggests (“ran” is Japanese for “chaos”), employs a turn system that does away with strict linearity. Rather than each player moving all of his units and then passing the turn to the next player, the system allows for frequent changes of initiative, and a single game turn may easily see both players moving different parts of their army at very different times.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
How this work is that, without going into unnecessary details, the more skilled your commanders, the better hold of the flow of the battle you will have. In gaming terms, this means that capable and lucky generals (who each command individual parts of your army) may be able to move up to three times in a single turn, giving them a clear edge in the battle. In fact, in our early test games this sometimes felt like too much of an edge, although this may only be me complaining against my friend’s amazingly good luck with the so-called Momentum dice-rolls.
http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan.blogspot.com/
While the above is a slight variation of a relatively standard war gaming practice, “Ran” is somewhat different from your typical tactical war game in that it incorporates individual combat into a system otherwise concentrating on units comprised of a few hundred men. The way the game does this is fairly interesting, and something that I still need to experiment with to make a full tactical use of. On the basic level, however, what happens is that individual samurai or busho (generals) can enter into head-to-head fights with each other in the midst of the chaos around them. With a little luck, these individual feats may then change the direction of the whole battle, if they happen to take place at the right moment.
My only real complaint about the individual combat system is that while the idea itself is very intriguing, the rules behind its execution are somewhat less so. You basically compare the fighting characters’ abilities and throw dice, the one with the lower total suffering a wound. If a character’s stamina runs to zero, he dies, although you can withdraw before that. This, I feel, could have been made more tactical and interesting by extending the rules somewhat, allowing for different types of attacks (perhaps ranging from all-out defense to all-out attack) and maybe even mapping the hits to different body parts to make the fight more visual. But maybe I come here too strongly from my background as someone who has practiced kendo (“Japanese fencing”) and plays role playing games with systems similar to the above – perhaps it might, in fact, be taking the individual combat too far in a game that is, after all, a tactical war game.
Individual feats are important also outside of the immediate head-to-head combat. As mentioned before, each part of your army has its own commander, and the commander’s personal skills reflect how well he will be able to maneuver his troops. Similarly, your whole army – including the commanders – sit under your main commander, whose stats again have an influence over the proceedings.
These commanders also take personal responsibility over their (your) decisions in a way that the game designers have tried to tie with the bushido (warrior’s “code of conduct”) culture that is at the centre of medieval Japanese warfare. For example, when ordering a withdrawal of his troops, a commander may in some cases have to, as a result of losing face, commit seppuku (ritual suicide). This is, in fact, how our Battle of Nagakute ended, with my commander-in-chief Ieyasu Tokugawa being forced to take his own life after ordering a tactical withdrawal with the idea to save and rest his troops. His death then caused panic within the lines, and large parts of the army left the battle field, handing the victory to my opponent.
All in all, “Ran” is a very interesting mixture of troop and individual level warfare that is in some ways very traditional (which is good), but also unique (which is also good). As a result, it seems like a safe bet for anyone enjoying tactical war games, while a determined newcomer may also find the game a good introduction to the genre. I am certainly hooked, myself.
If, however, the most tactical war game that you have ever played and ever want to play is Risk, read into the rules before you fork out the money to buy “Ran”, as it may not quite be your cup of tea. Then again, it may also turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby, for which “Ran” can in fact serve as a relatively good and quite straightforward introduction.
The components
If you have never played board war games before, you may on your first impression of “Ran” be overwhelmed by the number of components that the box contains: seven maps printed on two large sheets of paper, over a thousand counters marking your units and their various states, a rule book and a scenario book, plus a number of charts and table cards littered with information. GMT also provides you with Ziploc bags to hold the counters in, which is extremely nice of them, considering that one will need those bags anyway, yet always forgets to buy any for a new game.
The maps in “Ran” predictably serve as the gaming board, and are of relatively good quality paper. Card board maps would, of course, be superior, but including seven cardboard maps the size of these babies would obviously raise the manufacturing and printing costs considerably.
One of the biggest problems that hex based games which work with a large variety of counters have is that the hexagons provided on the map are too small to actually comfortably hold all the counters. The problem is present also in “Ran”. For, even if a single hex in the game can only have one unit in it, it will ultimately also have to house a number of non-unit counters along with it, thus creating stacks (or in our case piles) of chits on the map. Furthermore, since the facing of the units is important, moving the counters around without accidentally changing the facings of surrounding units is difficult. Especially so, if you have fingers the size of Southern Europe, as I do.
One possible solution to this could be to keep the non-unit markers out of the actual map, referencing them on a separate sheet. Since the units, however, have no individual IDs, this is impossible without actually drawing something on the unit counters, which again is something that I am not going to do purely for aesthetic reasons.
The 24-page rule book starts by noting that the rule system in “Ran” is less complex than in the games that have preceded it in the series. It even goes as far as to suggest that a total newcomer to the genre of historically accurate war games will in 20-30 minutes be able to learn the rules to the point where “you’ll be just as good at this sort of thing as we are”.
Now, either this latter statement is a downright lie, I am a poor learner, or the guys over at GMT actually have no idea how their rule system works. For, at least in my case, it took almost two hours of flipping through the rule book until I reached the point where I was comfortable setting up the first scenario to test the game. In the end, it wasn’t until about four hours into active gaming that I started to feel like I mastered the basic rules in a way where I wasn’t making all that many mistakes.
Sadly, in fact, it is the rule book that is the weakest link in the “Ran” package. By this I do not mean the rules themselves, but the way that they are explained. The rule book lacks a real index, and the order in which the rules are presented seems fairly illogical to me. Add to this the high number of typos, grammatical errors and a few completely missing words here and there, and your initial enthusiasm towards the system is somewhat lessened as you try to make head or tale of it.
What I personally felt was most importantly missing from the rule book was a stronger historical background to many of the rules. Quick, short notes about why things work as they do would have helped at least me to remember the rules faster. Similarly, I often found myself wishing for more examples for rules that felt unclear for a long time. Perhaps GMT could even have considered adding to the package a book in which the reader is taken through a sample battle move by move, thus explaining the rules with real examples.
All this being said, once you actually get to the point where the system starts to make sense to you, you discover that the effort has easily been worth it.
Longevity
One big question that always hangs in the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how interesting can such games be for the players?
Since I have only had a couple of weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play – especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”. Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.
I also doubt that the battles will get repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game that depicts historical battles.
“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.
Closing remarks
I admit that my experience with “Ran” has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those interested in the hobby.
As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before, while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking, people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Availability and more information
Ran is available directly from GMT Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.
As always with board games, if you are interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.
Louis J Sheehan 63377 H18
Board gaming is a hobby that has always been dear to me. My interest in the field is wide, ranging from simple and straightforward “social” games such as the relatively recent “Carcassonne” to far more complex rule monstrosities like the 1990 Avalon Hill game “Republic of Rome”.
Therefore, when I recently learnt about the existence of a samurai warfare game called “Ran”, which borrows its name from the Kurosawa movie (even acknowledging its source) and comes in a box whose cover is clearly inspired by Kagemusha, I knew that I had to get the game. And get it I did.
In fact, to be completely fair to the reader, I must mention that when I contacted the manufacturer of the game, they kindly offered to send me a review copy. You may judge yourself the impact that this may or may not have had on what follows.
In any case, I have now had the opportunity to sit down for a couple of games of “Ran”, and I think that my early impressions of the game are enough to warrant writing a review. For those who are either too busy or too lazy to read the whole piece, let me give you the opportunity to skip the details by saying that I really like the game. The rest of you, read on.
A note: While playing, I took a series of pictures with which to illustrate this article, but it seems that I have lost the cable with which to transfer those pictures from my camera to the computer. As for now, I will publish this without the illustrations, and anyone interested in checking how the game actually looks like can check Board Game Geek’s Ran picture gallery.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
On the surface of things, the board game “Ran” has very little in common with the movie “Ran”, or indeed with any of Kurosawa’s movies. This is of course understandable, considering that the game is about military strategy, whereas none of Kurosawa’s movies really centrally deal with warfare, but rather, when it is present, use it as a backdrop and a metaphoric device. “Ran”, therefore, is not “based on” or even “inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran”, and neither does it claim that.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the battles available in “Ran” the strategy game in no way correspond with the ones in Kurosawa’s “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. ( “Samurai”, an earlier game by the same maker, includes the Battle of Nagashino, which is the final battle in “Kagemusha”.) The connection is therefore in some ways very superficial, indeed almost accidental.
Yet, while playing “Ran”, you will probably sooner or later catch yourself humming the theme of either “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. Even without any actual one-to-one correspondence between the game and the movies, each can help to better understand the other. The movie helps you visualize the game, while by playing the game you come to understand the mechanics behind Japanese warfare depicted in the films. There is also something quite epic, or as the box text puts it “Homeric” about the board game, on a level similar to Kurosawa’s endeavors.
Consequently, while “Ran” the board game is not exactly a “Kurosawa item”, it is certainly something that I would imagine might interest a number of devoted Kurosawa fans.
Introduction
“Ran”, published in 2007, is the 12th volume in the “Great Battles of History” series by the well-known game publisher GMT Games. The company is perhaps best known for its war games that strive for historical accuracy, often with the result of added complexity in the rules. “Ran” is in fact the second samurai warfare game in the series, following the 1996 game that was simply titled “Samurai”.
The battles included in the box range in printed playing time from roughly two to “more than five” hours. My impression is that these figures are fairly realistic for someone already familiar with the rules. Your first battle, however, will most probably take about a double the estimated time. As for the complexity of the game, I have seen both more complex, as well as far simpler games. I would say that as board games go, “Ran” is somewhere towards the lower end of the “high” complexity games.
I have previously not played “Samurai”, or any of the other “Great Battles of History” games, so I had to approach “Ran” with only my previous experience as a gamer to fall on.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us/
The game
“Ran” comes with seven scenarios, each representing a battle from the late 16th and early 17th century feudal Japan, which was part of the so-called “Warring States” period. Because of it being the second samurai war game in the GMT series, the battles on offer are somewhat lesser known than are the ones in its predecessor “Samurai”. This, of course, in no way makes the scenarios themselves less interesting to play, and in any case I wonder how many people actually are more familiar with, say, the Battle of Sekigahara (not included) than for example the Battle of Mimigawa (included).
Based on the scenarios that I have tried alone and with a friend, the rule system in “Ran” seems well balanced and certainly faithful enough to the historical reality that was feudal Japanese warfare. In fact, since I cannot claim to be an expert in this particular field, I enlisted for the testing purposes a board gaming friend who is a trained historian working in a library of military science, and thus capable of bringing some relevant knowledge and authority to the table. The game clearly received his seal of approval, for as I am typing this review, he keeps harassing me with messages about when the next session is to take place. Which, by the way, will probably be quite soon, as I am just as eager to try the game again – not least to attempt to have my revenge after being so miserably crushed in Nagakute!
“Ran”, as the name suggests (“ran” is Japanese for “chaos”), employs a turn system that does away with strict linearity. Rather than each player moving all of his units and then passing the turn to the next player, the system allows for frequent changes of initiative, and a single game turn may easily see both players moving different parts of their army at very different times.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
How this work is that, without going into unnecessary details, the more skilled your commanders, the better hold of the flow of the battle you will have. In gaming terms, this means that capable and lucky generals (who each command individual parts of your army) may be able to move up to three times in a single turn, giving them a clear edge in the battle. In fact, in our early test games this sometimes felt like too much of an edge, although this may only be me complaining against my friend’s amazingly good luck with the so-called Momentum dice-rolls.
http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan.blogspot.com/
While the above is a slight variation of a relatively standard war gaming practice, “Ran” is somewhat different from your typical tactical war game in that it incorporates individual combat into a system otherwise concentrating on units comprised of a few hundred men. The way the game does this is fairly interesting, and something that I still need to experiment with to make a full tactical use of. On the basic level, however, what happens is that individual samurai or busho (generals) can enter into head-to-head fights with each other in the midst of the chaos around them. With a little luck, these individual feats may then change the direction of the whole battle, if they happen to take place at the right moment.
My only real complaint about the individual combat system is that while the idea itself is very intriguing, the rules behind its execution are somewhat less so. You basically compare the fighting characters’ abilities and throw dice, the one with the lower total suffering a wound. If a character’s stamina runs to zero, he dies, although you can withdraw before that. This, I feel, could have been made more tactical and interesting by extending the rules somewhat, allowing for different types of attacks (perhaps ranging from all-out defense to all-out attack) and maybe even mapping the hits to different body parts to make the fight more visual. But maybe I come here too strongly from my background as someone who has practiced kendo (“Japanese fencing”) and plays role playing games with systems similar to the above – perhaps it might, in fact, be taking the individual combat too far in a game that is, after all, a tactical war game.
Individual feats are important also outside of the immediate head-to-head combat. As mentioned before, each part of your army has its own commander, and the commander’s personal skills reflect how well he will be able to maneuver his troops. Similarly, your whole army – including the commanders – sit under your main commander, whose stats again have an influence over the proceedings.
These commanders also take personal responsibility over their (your) decisions in a way that the game designers have tried to tie with the bushido (warrior’s “code of conduct”) culture that is at the centre of medieval Japanese warfare. For example, when ordering a withdrawal of his troops, a commander may in some cases have to, as a result of losing face, commit seppuku (ritual suicide). This is, in fact, how our Battle of Nagakute ended, with my commander-in-chief Ieyasu Tokugawa being forced to take his own life after ordering a tactical withdrawal with the idea to save and rest his troops. His death then caused panic within the lines, and large parts of the army left the battle field, handing the victory to my opponent.
All in all, “Ran” is a very interesting mixture of troop and individual level warfare that is in some ways very traditional (which is good), but also unique (which is also good). As a result, it seems like a safe bet for anyone enjoying tactical war games, while a determined newcomer may also find the game a good introduction to the genre. I am certainly hooked, myself.
If, however, the most tactical war game that you have ever played and ever want to play is Risk, read into the rules before you fork out the money to buy “Ran”, as it may not quite be your cup of tea. Then again, it may also turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby, for which “Ran” can in fact serve as a relatively good and quite straightforward introduction.
The components
If you have never played board war games before, you may on your first impression of “Ran” be overwhelmed by the number of components that the box contains: seven maps printed on two large sheets of paper, over a thousand counters marking your units and their various states, a rule book and a scenario book, plus a number of charts and table cards littered with information. GMT also provides you with Ziploc bags to hold the counters in, which is extremely nice of them, considering that one will need those bags anyway, yet always forgets to buy any for a new game.
The maps in “Ran” predictably serve as the gaming board, and are of relatively good quality paper. Card board maps would, of course, be superior, but including seven cardboard maps the size of these babies would obviously raise the manufacturing and printing costs considerably.
One of the biggest problems that hex based games which work with a large variety of counters have is that the hexagons provided on the map are too small to actually comfortably hold all the counters. The problem is present also in “Ran”. For, even if a single hex in the game can only have one unit in it, it will ultimately also have to house a number of non-unit counters along with it, thus creating stacks (or in our case piles) of chits on the map. Furthermore, since the facing of the units is important, moving the counters around without accidentally changing the facings of surrounding units is difficult. Especially so, if you have fingers the size of Southern Europe, as I do.
One possible solution to this could be to keep the non-unit markers out of the actual map, referencing them on a separate sheet. Since the units, however, have no individual IDs, this is impossible without actually drawing something on the unit counters, which again is something that I am not going to do purely for aesthetic reasons.
The 24-page rule book starts by noting that the rule system in “Ran” is less complex than in the games that have preceded it in the series. It even goes as far as to suggest that a total newcomer to the genre of historically accurate war games will in 20-30 minutes be able to learn the rules to the point where “you’ll be just as good at this sort of thing as we are”.
Now, either this latter statement is a downright lie, I am a poor learner, or the guys over at GMT actually have no idea how their rule system works. For, at least in my case, it took almost two hours of flipping through the rule book until I reached the point where I was comfortable setting up the first scenario to test the game. In the end, it wasn’t until about four hours into active gaming that I started to feel like I mastered the basic rules in a way where I wasn’t making all that many mistakes.
Sadly, in fact, it is the rule book that is the weakest link in the “Ran” package. By this I do not mean the rules themselves, but the way that they are explained. The rule book lacks a real index, and the order in which the rules are presented seems fairly illogical to me. Add to this the high number of typos, grammatical errors and a few completely missing words here and there, and your initial enthusiasm towards the system is somewhat lessened as you try to make head or tale of it.
What I personally felt was most importantly missing from the rule book was a stronger historical background to many of the rules. Quick, short notes about why things work as they do would have helped at least me to remember the rules faster. Similarly, I often found myself wishing for more examples for rules that felt unclear for a long time. Perhaps GMT could even have considered adding to the package a book in which the reader is taken through a sample battle move by move, thus explaining the rules with real examples.
All this being said, once you actually get to the point where the system starts to make sense to you, you discover that the effort has easily been worth it.
Longevity
One big question that always hangs in the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how interesting can such games be for the players?
Since I have only had a couple of weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play – especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”. Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.
I also doubt that the battles will get repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game that depicts historical battles.
“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.
Closing remarks
I admit that my experience with “Ran” has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those interested in the hobby.
As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before, while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking, people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Availability and more information
Ran is available directly from GMT Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.
As always with board games, if you are interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.
Therefore, when I recently learnt about the existence of a samurai warfare game called “Ran”, which borrows its name from the Kurosawa movie (even acknowledging its source) and comes in a box whose cover is clearly inspired by Kagemusha, I knew that I had to get the game. And get it I did.
In fact, to be completely fair to the reader, I must mention that when I contacted the manufacturer of the game, they kindly offered to send me a review copy. You may judge yourself the impact that this may or may not have had on what follows.
In any case, I have now had the opportunity to sit down for a couple of games of “Ran”, and I think that my early impressions of the game are enough to warrant writing a review. For those who are either too busy or too lazy to read the whole piece, let me give you the opportunity to skip the details by saying that I really like the game. The rest of you, read on.
A note: While playing, I took a series of pictures with which to illustrate this article, but it seems that I have lost the cable with which to transfer those pictures from my camera to the computer. As for now, I will publish this without the illustrations, and anyone interested in checking how the game actually looks like can check Board Game Geek’s Ran picture gallery.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
On the surface of things, the board game “Ran” has very little in common with the movie “Ran”, or indeed with any of Kurosawa’s movies. This is of course understandable, considering that the game is about military strategy, whereas none of Kurosawa’s movies really centrally deal with warfare, but rather, when it is present, use it as a backdrop and a metaphoric device. “Ran”, therefore, is not “based on” or even “inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran”, and neither does it claim that.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the battles available in “Ran” the strategy game in no way correspond with the ones in Kurosawa’s “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. ( “Samurai”, an earlier game by the same maker, includes the Battle of Nagashino, which is the final battle in “Kagemusha”.) The connection is therefore in some ways very superficial, indeed almost accidental.
Yet, while playing “Ran”, you will probably sooner or later catch yourself humming the theme of either “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. Even without any actual one-to-one correspondence between the game and the movies, each can help to better understand the other. The movie helps you visualize the game, while by playing the game you come to understand the mechanics behind Japanese warfare depicted in the films. There is also something quite epic, or as the box text puts it “Homeric” about the board game, on a level similar to Kurosawa’s endeavors.
Consequently, while “Ran” the board game is not exactly a “Kurosawa item”, it is certainly something that I would imagine might interest a number of devoted Kurosawa fans.
Introduction
“Ran”, published in 2007, is the 12th volume in the “Great Battles of History” series by the well-known game publisher GMT Games. The company is perhaps best known for its war games that strive for historical accuracy, often with the result of added complexity in the rules. “Ran” is in fact the second samurai warfare game in the series, following the 1996 game that was simply titled “Samurai”.
The battles included in the box range in printed playing time from roughly two to “more than five” hours. My impression is that these figures are fairly realistic for someone already familiar with the rules. Your first battle, however, will most probably take about a double the estimated time. As for the complexity of the game, I have seen both more complex, as well as far simpler games. I would say that as board games go, “Ran” is somewhere towards the lower end of the “high” complexity games.
I have previously not played “Samurai”, or any of the other “Great Battles of History” games, so I had to approach “Ran” with only my previous experience as a gamer to fall on.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us/
The game
“Ran” comes with seven scenarios, each representing a battle from the late 16th and early 17th century feudal Japan, which was part of the so-called “Warring States” period. Because of it being the second samurai war game in the GMT series, the battles on offer are somewhat lesser known than are the ones in its predecessor “Samurai”. This, of course, in no way makes the scenarios themselves less interesting to play, and in any case I wonder how many people actually are more familiar with, say, the Battle of Sekigahara (not included) than for example the Battle of Mimigawa (included).
Based on the scenarios that I have tried alone and with a friend, the rule system in “Ran” seems well balanced and certainly faithful enough to the historical reality that was feudal Japanese warfare. In fact, since I cannot claim to be an expert in this particular field, I enlisted for the testing purposes a board gaming friend who is a trained historian working in a library of military science, and thus capable of bringing some relevant knowledge and authority to the table. The game clearly received his seal of approval, for as I am typing this review, he keeps harassing me with messages about when the next session is to take place. Which, by the way, will probably be quite soon, as I am just as eager to try the game again – not least to attempt to have my revenge after being so miserably crushed in Nagakute!
“Ran”, as the name suggests (“ran” is Japanese for “chaos”), employs a turn system that does away with strict linearity. Rather than each player moving all of his units and then passing the turn to the next player, the system allows for frequent changes of initiative, and a single game turn may easily see both players moving different parts of their army at very different times.
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
How this work is that, without going into unnecessary details, the more skilled your commanders, the better hold of the flow of the battle you will have. In gaming terms, this means that capable and lucky generals (who each command individual parts of your army) may be able to move up to three times in a single turn, giving them a clear edge in the battle. In fact, in our early test games this sometimes felt like too much of an edge, although this may only be me complaining against my friend’s amazingly good luck with the so-called Momentum dice-rolls.
http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan.blogspot.com/
While the above is a slight variation of a relatively standard war gaming practice, “Ran” is somewhat different from your typical tactical war game in that it incorporates individual combat into a system otherwise concentrating on units comprised of a few hundred men. The way the game does this is fairly interesting, and something that I still need to experiment with to make a full tactical use of. On the basic level, however, what happens is that individual samurai or busho (generals) can enter into head-to-head fights with each other in the midst of the chaos around them. With a little luck, these individual feats may then change the direction of the whole battle, if they happen to take place at the right moment.
My only real complaint about the individual combat system is that while the idea itself is very intriguing, the rules behind its execution are somewhat less so. You basically compare the fighting characters’ abilities and throw dice, the one with the lower total suffering a wound. If a character’s stamina runs to zero, he dies, although you can withdraw before that. This, I feel, could have been made more tactical and interesting by extending the rules somewhat, allowing for different types of attacks (perhaps ranging from all-out defense to all-out attack) and maybe even mapping the hits to different body parts to make the fight more visual. But maybe I come here too strongly from my background as someone who has practiced kendo (“Japanese fencing”) and plays role playing games with systems similar to the above – perhaps it might, in fact, be taking the individual combat too far in a game that is, after all, a tactical war game.
Individual feats are important also outside of the immediate head-to-head combat. As mentioned before, each part of your army has its own commander, and the commander’s personal skills reflect how well he will be able to maneuver his troops. Similarly, your whole army – including the commanders – sit under your main commander, whose stats again have an influence over the proceedings.
These commanders also take personal responsibility over their (your) decisions in a way that the game designers have tried to tie with the bushido (warrior’s “code of conduct”) culture that is at the centre of medieval Japanese warfare. For example, when ordering a withdrawal of his troops, a commander may in some cases have to, as a result of losing face, commit seppuku (ritual suicide). This is, in fact, how our Battle of Nagakute ended, with my commander-in-chief Ieyasu Tokugawa being forced to take his own life after ordering a tactical withdrawal with the idea to save and rest his troops. His death then caused panic within the lines, and large parts of the army left the battle field, handing the victory to my opponent.
All in all, “Ran” is a very interesting mixture of troop and individual level warfare that is in some ways very traditional (which is good), but also unique (which is also good). As a result, it seems like a safe bet for anyone enjoying tactical war games, while a determined newcomer may also find the game a good introduction to the genre. I am certainly hooked, myself.
If, however, the most tactical war game that you have ever played and ever want to play is Risk, read into the rules before you fork out the money to buy “Ran”, as it may not quite be your cup of tea. Then again, it may also turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby, for which “Ran” can in fact serve as a relatively good and quite straightforward introduction.
The components
If you have never played board war games before, you may on your first impression of “Ran” be overwhelmed by the number of components that the box contains: seven maps printed on two large sheets of paper, over a thousand counters marking your units and their various states, a rule book and a scenario book, plus a number of charts and table cards littered with information. GMT also provides you with Ziploc bags to hold the counters in, which is extremely nice of them, considering that one will need those bags anyway, yet always forgets to buy any for a new game.
The maps in “Ran” predictably serve as the gaming board, and are of relatively good quality paper. Card board maps would, of course, be superior, but including seven cardboard maps the size of these babies would obviously raise the manufacturing and printing costs considerably.
One of the biggest problems that hex based games which work with a large variety of counters have is that the hexagons provided on the map are too small to actually comfortably hold all the counters. The problem is present also in “Ran”. For, even if a single hex in the game can only have one unit in it, it will ultimately also have to house a number of non-unit counters along with it, thus creating stacks (or in our case piles) of chits on the map. Furthermore, since the facing of the units is important, moving the counters around without accidentally changing the facings of surrounding units is difficult. Especially so, if you have fingers the size of Southern Europe, as I do.
One possible solution to this could be to keep the non-unit markers out of the actual map, referencing them on a separate sheet. Since the units, however, have no individual IDs, this is impossible without actually drawing something on the unit counters, which again is something that I am not going to do purely for aesthetic reasons.
The 24-page rule book starts by noting that the rule system in “Ran” is less complex than in the games that have preceded it in the series. It even goes as far as to suggest that a total newcomer to the genre of historically accurate war games will in 20-30 minutes be able to learn the rules to the point where “you’ll be just as good at this sort of thing as we are”.
Now, either this latter statement is a downright lie, I am a poor learner, or the guys over at GMT actually have no idea how their rule system works. For, at least in my case, it took almost two hours of flipping through the rule book until I reached the point where I was comfortable setting up the first scenario to test the game. In the end, it wasn’t until about four hours into active gaming that I started to feel like I mastered the basic rules in a way where I wasn’t making all that many mistakes.
Sadly, in fact, it is the rule book that is the weakest link in the “Ran” package. By this I do not mean the rules themselves, but the way that they are explained. The rule book lacks a real index, and the order in which the rules are presented seems fairly illogical to me. Add to this the high number of typos, grammatical errors and a few completely missing words here and there, and your initial enthusiasm towards the system is somewhat lessened as you try to make head or tale of it.
What I personally felt was most importantly missing from the rule book was a stronger historical background to many of the rules. Quick, short notes about why things work as they do would have helped at least me to remember the rules faster. Similarly, I often found myself wishing for more examples for rules that felt unclear for a long time. Perhaps GMT could even have considered adding to the package a book in which the reader is taken through a sample battle move by move, thus explaining the rules with real examples.
All this being said, once you actually get to the point where the system starts to make sense to you, you discover that the effort has easily been worth it.
Longevity
One big question that always hangs in the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how interesting can such games be for the players?
Since I have only had a couple of weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play – especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”. Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.
I also doubt that the battles will get repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game that depicts historical battles.
“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.
Closing remarks
I admit that my experience with “Ran” has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those interested in the hobby.
As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before, while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking, people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Availability and more information
Ran is available directly from GMT Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.
As always with board games, if you are interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.
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