Blog Archives
sWARGAME WEDNESDAY: Avalon Hill’s The Battle of the Bulge (1981) – Part I
Wednesday , 6, December 2017 Wargames 5 CommentsI’ve spent the last few months playing Avalon Hill’s The Battle of the Bulge, probably devoting more table-time to it than virtually any other game in recent memory. It’s one thing to want to play a hex and chit game twice, once to get a feel for each side, but really says something when you […]
Xbox One X: Totally Worth Some Painful Dentistry (Should You Find It Necessary)
Monday , 4, December 2017 Computer Games 5 CommentsSo I got an Xbox One X on Friday, and I won’t tell you how I managed to afford it except to say that—contrary to all rumors—getting $300 in store credit from Game Stop does NOT involve selling them a kidney. Just all your gold fillings. So was it worth all the impromptu in-store dentistry […]
I recently enjoyed listening to a talk by Scott Berkun, where he talked about how the use and revitalization of historically proven concepts are the building blocks of “new” ideas, and that got me thinking about Wargames and their generally poor reflection of tactics while on the tabletop. In so many historical scenes that are […]
The fear and awe are immortal, written onto our souls with scarlet ink, of some Great Thing coming for us or what we guard, too big to handle and too strong to fight as it shakes the ground with its coming, and the only hope is that it passes by. Welcome to playing Steve Jackson’s […]
After several sessions, we have now played through the careers of two American submarine captains. We both started in April 1942 and then went all the way to the end of World War 2. It never ceases to surprise me, but this game is completely different from the one covering the German U-boats. They fight […]
For the better part of the year I’ve been playing in a Mutant: Year Zero game. And, now, since I recently started playing a new game of Gamma World (run by and covered by Jeffro Johnson here) I reckon it makes some sense to do a short bit of compare and contrast. Thematically both games […]
In my last article, I championed fluff as a force vital to Wargames individually and corporately, but fluff is not all good. The best and most successful Wargame systems are nearly generic, and the more specialized they get, the more constrained they must be in order to be functional—often to the point where they need […]
Classic Traveller: Session Report 3
Thursday , 21, September 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 2 CommentsTaking up where the last session report left off. Session characters: Sir Percival Jones, 54577B, Age 30, Scout (3 terms, mustered out), Pilot 1, JOT 1, ATV 1, Vacc Suit 1 Elect 3. He’s cash poor, but, a lucky chap who’s survived 12 years as a scout and the service appreciates it by loaning him […]
I’ve done a lot of talking about numbers and satisfying mechanics and accuracy and all manner of game components in this space, but almost nothing about the fluff. Does it matter whether a Wargame is set in the grim darkness of the far future or the chivalric past, whether a world of magic or hard […]
Bethesda’s “Creation Club” Is a Dirty, Filthy Money-Grubbing Con Job
Monday , 11, September 2017 Computer Games 7 CommentsI swear this totally true and not at all made up story happened exactly the way I’m going to tell it. For real. I’m sick, so I calls up the boss. “I’m sick.” “I missed that part where that’s my problem. Also, don’t put this into the blog post, like that camping crap last week. […]
Around the beginning of the 20th Century there was a revolutionary painter entering the art world by the name of Pablo Picasso. His work is often studied on its own merit and looked at within the art world, but my favorite angle on his artwork is through the lens of the newest emerging art form […]