Lestrades_Game

 Into The Odd   Look at this book, it has these stupendous art house collage on its cover and strewn across the interior. It looks like a coffee table book or something you’d find in the back room of Ye Old Rare books shoppe. I wanted this book, it got it and now I am disappointed. A microcosm of our consumer society right there.   In to the Odd contains three things; a rule set, an adventure and some setting material. Two of these things are ok, but perhaps slightly miss the target, one is awful.   The rules system: There has been a trend in modern indie RPGs to take the husk of 70s D&D and strip it down to the essentials. The 70s game was many things, it was a resource management game, it was a maze exploration game, it was a combat game, it was a push your luck game and it was an improv encounter solution game. In to the Odd says this last element, the encounter shenanigans, is the game. The actual game rules are a few paragraphs on two pages. Ea...

  1918 / 1919 Storm in the West   Ted Racer is one of the elder statesmen of board war gaming and best known for rehabilitating WW1 as a gaming topic. In the early 90s the short lived Command Magazine by XTR Corp published three of his titles, two on 1914 and one on 1918. And so it begins Fast forward just under 20 years and GMT is in the market for republishing some older titles. In 2014 they republished the two 1914 titles in a dual pack and in 2020 they dressed up 1918 from a magazine game to a full boxed game and republished it. The dressing up here is updated graphics, a very clear rule book and the 1919 alt-history second scenario.   The system is very vanilla but very effective; igo-ugo, ratio CRT, fairly sticky ZOCs, reinforcement schedule. Unit scale is mostly corps, turns are two weeks, hexes 8 miles. Like many of Mark Simonitch's ‘4X WW2 titles the quality is in the execution and the tweaks to the system rather than core innovation.   Start of ...