Blog Archives

I’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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Okay, 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 […]

In 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 […]

After 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 […]