Blog Archives
sOkay, yeah… I took a solitaire game to board game night. I think this one’s so neat people need to see it, even if it’s just to try a couple of patrols. I have to say though, The Hunters is kind of unique in that people will ask you to bring it back for an […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Marc Gouyon-Rety Interview at The Player’s Aid
Wednesday , 16, August 2017 Tabletop Games, Wargames Leave a commentGMT Games’s much-anticipated Pendragon takes the battle-hardened COIN-system that’s been used to tackle wars in Vietnam and Afganistan… and takes it back in time to the bad old days of Roman Britain when Scotti and Saxons were plundering the land. I got to try out a playtest copy at Prezcon and let me tell you: […]
Veins of the Earth and the Monster of Gravity
Thursday , 10, August 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Uncategorized 7 CommentsIn an earlier column, I discussed a means to add tension to climbing and swimming in OSR type games by modeling gravity as a grappling monster using Douglas Cole’s Dungeon Grappling rules. I have refined that approach a bit and you can download the revised version here: Monster of Gravity. But, today I’d like to […]
Let me tell you what’s mystifying about Dragon Age: Inquisition—it’s not a fun game. It’s not an interesting game, not an entertaining game, not an evocative or moving game. It’s a boring game. But it SHOULDN’T be. It has all the hallmarks of a real computer RPG. There’s companion NPC’s holding conversations and arguments while […]
Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, and Railroads
Thursday , 27, July 2017 Game Design, Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 13 CommentsJeffro has been covering the Call of Cthulhu game he’s been participating in and using it as an opportunity to discuss railroading and his various frustrations with the extent of player agency in the game as played. This has gotten me thinking about the topic since I have started running a Classic Traveller game but, […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Elements of Wargaming: The Illusion of Equality (Part 1)
Wednesday , 26, July 2017 Wargames 1 CommentIn several of my previous articles in this space I have discussed how often war is fought on unequal terms, yet Wargames, especially tabletop Wargames, play things out with even forces. From the simple Risk to the more complex tournament games, the essentials of the Wargames which keep hobby shops alive through sales and events represent this navel-gazing viewpoint on […]
I caught wind of a rather interesting game in production by Perry Miniatures: A travel-oriented Wargame, creatively called Travelbattle that is available now. The news has elicited a mixed reaction, as with any product which is neither completely new to the genre nor groundbreaking in a highly-significant way. The reason I chose to examine Travelbattle is that […]
Classic Traveller: Scout Ship Economics
Thursday , 29, June 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 4 CommentsThe Traveller role playing game is named Traveller because characters tend to be people at loose ends bumming around the galaxy. Large chunks of the game mechanics revolve around the mechanisms of, well, travelling — including how to pay for all that travel. Unless a character is lucky enough to get drafted into a service […]
Electronic Arts (video game publishing superpower) is a pretty scummy company—voted “Worst Company in America” 2 years running!—but in the quest to milk every single dollar out of an increasingly alienated and cynical fanbase, they occasionally do something not completely horrible. (Or at least something marginally useful for the purposes of researching one of my […]
Classic Traveller: Freetrader Economics
Thursday , 15, June 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 31 CommentsIn two posts I’ve outlined my Classic Traveller setting: first by rolling up an entirely random subsector and secondly by musing on the nature of one of the polities with a focus on its capital and its location within the polity it leads. The capital of the Empire of Reason is the Ladfaus system which […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Fifth Corps: The Soviet Breakthrough at Fulda – Central Front Series, by SPI
Wednesday , 14, June 2017 Wargames 5 CommentsAfter The Red Storm, my dad and I continued our WW 3 series with Fifth Corps, part of the Central Front Series. Let me tell you – this game was a slog. I don’t think I’ve ever played game more stressful for the offensive player. The map is impressively large, and we actually had one […]
I had a terrible weekend. How about you? For my part, I spent almost four hours watching E3 press conferences, first EA’s, then the Xbox’s, then Bethesda’s. And after seeing presentation after presentation, and trailer after trailer, my response is this: Utter and complete stupefied boredom. Nothing excited me at all.