Lestrades_Game

More Megagaming! It's been a while since I've actually played having been on the control team for the last few games. Rupert Clamp is running his game on the Jena campaign. It's a double blind campaign map game, a bit like a structured Kriegspiel but with his own system. It also has a face to face battle system, that takes place during campaign time, so a legitimate strategy is to tie an opposing division or corps down on a battle map whilst your allies march to the sound of the guns. In my view these are the best megagames. The more pure political megagames can go 'I do what I want because I say roleplaying'. By facing the players with the unknown of a hidden map and the harsh consequences of war people start to do something incredible, they think. You can pull of gambits that never work in open map games, and the chain of command and inter-team rivalry creates a whole lot of political fiasco on the side. The game starts fairly early in t...

This is a game for people who value narrative content over anything else in a wargame and will pay any price to get it. I can best illustrate this with a comparison between the French supply systems in this game against the supply system in the Operational Combat Series from Multiman publishing. To determine the amount of generic supply counters you get in in an OCS game you roll 2 dice and consult a chart and put that many tokens on the map at your supply point hex. These counters are then used to pay for ammo, artillery shells, aircraft refueling and sometimes food. They are generic abstracted supply, the detail is in how they are moved around the map. Gabrielle has fallen, this helps maintain the Vietminh moral for a few more turns. In Dien Bien Phu artillery ammo, food, fuel and medicine are all recorded on separate tracks. You spend meds to heal injured units and to keep malaria at bay, you spend ammo for each arty strike you carry out, you loose 4 food a turn or suffer fo...

Personally I think the term 'review' should only really be used if you have played a game through several times, ideally opposed, and feel qualified to make some comment on the games balance. Most games that don't work for me are never going to get played multiple times. In fact I probably won't play them right through even once if they are a lot of work. Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing two titles from Legion Games, Dien Bien Phu the Final Gamble and Quatre Batailles en Espagne. I really like Quatre Batailles but I didn't really get in to Dien Bien Phu. I going to start doing this new quick looks format for games I have only spent a few hours with and only played once. It allows me to give a general impression to the read of what the game is trying to do but falls short of a full review. Quatre Batailles en Espagne I played the Salamnque battle and it took me about 3-4 hours with just the base ruleset. The system plays a lot like La Batai...