Lestrades_Game

  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 ...

Won by the Sword went down like Fat Man over Nagasaki on most wargame forums when released by GMT back in 2014. Lots of misprints on the components and errors in the rules gave it a bad rep to such an extent that GMT decided to bail it out with a patch. James and I have played a couple of games reworked version, it still rides like a bike with two missing gears but its probably the most innovative and insightful design to hit the scene in the past 10 years. The rules; they work fine for the most part, James is clearer on the gaps than me, he reads them, I'm the opponent. What I will say is that they work if you can put the daddy pants on and make common sense decisions to fill any minor gaps. Forage; Some games are about movement, some about concentration of fire, some moral, others unit composition, some bluff or even supply routes. Won by the Sword is about burning peoples villages and taking all their food, mostly just to stop your opponent doing it. This is the 30 year...

If there is a series for hex and counter hipsters at the moment it is Next War games by Mitch Land and Gene Billingsley. Kev Sharp's been blogging it 1 , 3MA have been talking about it 2 , these drunken reprobates have been playing it 3 , two of my friends have picked up Next War India Pakistan 4 , one of whom as his first hex and counter game. When I first saw the GMT Next War series with Next War Korea a few years back, I passed on it because it was pricey and I thought future wars were boring. I thought these things because I was a fool. I'm not entirely sure why the series has become popular, as speculative future wars seems like a hard sell but the continued releases (now three soon four) and the quality of the product seem to have carried it into the wargamer consciousness if not the popular. Initial Taiwanese deployment around Taichung, not as well defended as it first looked. Next War Taiwan depicts an invasion of Taiwan by mainland China sometime in the near fut...

A run down of the COIN games I have played COIN (COunter INsurgency) is a series of games that GMT started publishing back in 2012 with Volko Runke's Andean Abyss. The first four games all focused on modern insurgency wars but in the past year the series has branched out into Republican Rome and the American Revolution. I've played a fair bit of COIN at this stage and thought a run down of my experiences with the series so far might be informative. First off, what of the series as a whole? Which one is should you buy? How hard are they to play? And other profound questions... The two foreign factions make good use of their domestic allies. The main strength of the series is their ability to naturally bring out the murky alliances and the shifting nature of factional relationships in these conflicts. Each game has four factions, usually one represents the government, one or two armed insurgents, one criminal syndicate or trade based faction, and sometimes one o...

One attribute of a good war game is that it opens up rather than narrows down the more you play it. Each time you play you see there is more strategic depth than you thought there was. When I first started playing Wilderness War, a card driven wargame design (CDG) on the French Indian War by Volko Runke, I thought it was simply a case of the British building a large kill stack and marching it up the Hudson and the French trying to get enough victory points (vps) from raiding to win before the inevitable. The outcome would likely be decided by card play and who got the reinforcement cards when they needed them. The game is afoot.  Four games later I have realised that this is not the case. Yes the British will sometimes win by marching a big army up the Hudson and sieging out Montreal, but a lot of the time things will play out quite differently. Maybe the French strike first, perhaps the British realise that going up the Hudson is going to be a slog try another route...

I've played 3 games of this recently, two of the Galicia campaign game and one of the 1st Ypres (reverse side of map sheet) and thought I'd give a quick review. WW1 is generally an less gamed conflict, and in my view rightly so to some extent. A lot of war games that I play feel like they have been crowbarred into being a competitive or interesting game where the historical situation was rather straight forward, attritional or one sided. However WW1 can work in 1914 or 1918, and hence most non strategic games on the topic focus on these two time periods. Clash of Giants is a lot lot simpler and easier playing than the previous reviewed Somme 1918. Its a simple hex and counter that uses a chit pull activation system to create command and control chaos and simple but effective supply and combat systems that are evocative of the period. The command and control system divides the map into areas with each area activated when its chit is drawn. Coupled with this you ...