Lestrades_Game

  I have played a couple of games of this now and watched one more. Not an expert but enough to share my opinion.   It’s mixed   I have enjoyed my games and will enjoy several more but I would caution the general recommendation for this rule set that gets chucked out regularly on reddit when anyone asks for a medieval or ancients ruleset. Hannibal surveys the field from behind  his gallic infantry   I will stick the boot in first then end on the positives.   As a simulationist by preference this game is nonsense. A generalist ruleset is going to struggle to represent the nuances of warfare in a specific era. I should not be surprised that the way elephants are used is not that similar to their historical deployment, or that running three lines of republic romans is a bad idea however I’m not sure that these rules represent any ancient or medieval warfare in a particularly meaningful way.   Let’s start with the victory conditions. Yo...

Qwixx is a Dutch abstract dice game about filling out a scratch pad to get a score, Chain of Command is a WW2 platoon level miniature rule set. What do they have in common? Read on…   I played Qwixx as an after dinner game at some friends house this past week. It’s a quick dice gambling, even push your luck game. There is no theme, you are just trying to fill out four coloured rows of numbers by rolling those numbers sequentially. On your turn you roll 6 dice, 2 white, 4 of different colours matching your four rows; red, green, yellow, and blue. Once you have rolled you can add the two white dice for a number to fill any row in the pad, and then add one white die to one colour die to fill a number out of that colour. With me so far? Good. You have to fill out your numbers in sequence for each row. Two rows count down from 12 to 2 and two count up from 2 to 12. So, early in the game I want to roll 12s and 2s. If I roll a 4 I could fill it out in a row that starts at 2 but th...

 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 ...

Sometimes I have got to wargame! So I picked up a few titles recently including this magazine game from Vae Victis, a French language  periodical  that comes with a game. English rules translations can be downloaded from their website. It's good, within the expectations of what you get from a magazine game. 1914 depicts the east front of WW1 at Corps scale with two week turns in a small half mapper footprint and 16 pages of A5 rules. Like most magazine games it is fairly simple and most mechanisms are recognisable to hex and counter veterans. The rules translation and clarity is good enough to discern the designer's intent without quite being tight enough to eradicate all doubts and queries.  Each turn the central powers (Germany & Austria) and Russia will roll off to see who gets initiative (which can be very important and is entirely random). The  acting player will then chose a front to activate, the northern German front or southern Austrian and then they mov...

  Vaults of Vaarn – Leo Hunt ~2022   The following table tells you most of what you need to know about Vaults of Vaarn, an indie TTRPG released in limited edition hard back in 2022-23. The underlying chassis of the game is Ben Milton's  Knave rule set, a riff on D&D basic and modern gutted down to 7 pages of tables and a core system. My general view with short page count games is you get what you include pages for. You can strip down the rules but situations that occur regularly in game will need to be bridged by the GM and players. In short I think the modern trend of ultra-light games is with a few exceptions ill judged. Vaults of Vaarn is an exception for two reasons.   First it is loaded with great tables. Tables that bring its dying earth Vancian, Wolfe-ian setting to life more than any pages of background or lore could (why do people like lore so much?). Long-time RPG fans might say this looks like Gamma World, or even Metamorphosis Alpha, and the...

  Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Eidolon-Other-Fantasies/dp/0143107380   For my money Clark Ashton Smith is the best of the 30s and onward pulp writers. He has more variety than his two big Weird Tales contemporaries, Howard and Lovecraft and was more prolific than C.L. Moore. In a world where good fantasy is rare he is well worth your time. Ashton Smith didn’t want to be a story writer as he preferred poetry, but was driven to weird tales to earn a living and we are fortunate that he was. Dark Eidolon is easily available, being published by Penguin, and across 18 stories gives a good cross section of his works. Unlike the more famous Lovecraft, and to some extent Howard Ashton Smith was not tied to one or two genres or settings but his writing does have certain commonalities. He wrote occult horror, weird fantasy, historical fantasy, lost world fiction, science fantasy, ghost stories and psychological stories. The prose is often poetic wi...

 This is a play perspective rather than a book review. The majority of RPG 'reviews' are really book reviews and are generally not that helpful. Do you like pretty art? Do you expect chapters on character generation and background lore? Yes you will like this game, and almost every other RPG in print. I've played a few sessions of the One Ring with a fairly novice GM and skimmed the rule book. All sessions have been online. Its OK., there's your summary.  I'll layout my sandbox, then give the negatives and end with the positives in case anyone reads this wanting to justify their purchase, or future purchase. I have a wargamer mindset. This does not mean I think every game should have a CRT or crunchy minis rules for combat, quite the opposite, but it does mean I expect there to be a strategy game in an RPG book, and one that a GM of modest ability can bring out. My view is that the vast majority of RPG products completely fail to achieve what Gygax and Arneson did i...

The first hex and counter war game I bought and played was A Victory Denied, a follow up to AVL from about 10 years ago. I hated it, and wrote off hex and counter games for about another year. The victory conditions seemed off, the combat was ok but not that interesting and the whole thing just seemed to lack any hook. I assumed hex and counter games were only popular with nostalgic old men and I’d stick to card driven or block games. Sometimes I get this urge to East Front. Had it about 2 months ago, asked around and ended up picking up SCS Autumn for Barbarossa and A Victory Lost. A Victory Lost is actually great, and for good reason spawned a system that will soon include a reprint of Konigsberg, a game on Narwa and the whole of Barbarossa. This is operation Uranus through to Von Manstein’s vaunted back hand slap in the winter of 43, in Ukraine post Stalingrad. Units are divisional or bigger and the hook is the game uses chit pull. Chit pull has been around since t...

A question often asked of a boardgames is does its mechanics represent its theme? Or is the theme just art work over a set of dice rolls and cube trading? Whether a war game simulates its historical era would seem easier to determine. Today we have a quick look at an east front war game set in 1813 1945. 1813 Napoleon's Nemesis covers the Leipzig campaign following Italian publisher Europa Simulazioni's previous game on the ill fated 1812 Invasion of Russia. The napoleonic game of maneuver has long been the grail of wargaming for me. I looked for it in Zucker's Day's series and found a bumper cars CRT, I looked for it here and found something more akin to Red Storm. Turn 2 Lets look at some numbers. According to the Wiki (that venerable source of 'facts') there were 380,000 coalition vs 225,000 French Empire men on the field at Leipzig. According to the Nemesis rule book each infantry counter represents a division of ~8000 men and 6 unit counter...

I’ve played a fair amount of Empire of the Sun over the past 5 years and now there are two magazine games based on the same system; South Pacific which is effectively a trimmed down version of the 1943 (or is it 42) scenario from the original game, and Plan Orange, a variant that takes a pacific war in the 1930s that was war gamed and considered by both sides but never took place. I’m not going to discuss many of the games mechanics. Empire of the Sun is a very complex game and it is also rather unique. The core conceit is that you play cards from your hand to launch operations. An operation would be something like the battle of the Coral Sea, or the invasion of Guam. Based on the resources your cards give you, you would send out a fleet, your opponent may detect your move, either by die roll or card play) and counter with their own fleet. A battle or more may result perhaps followed by an amphibious landing. It’s a concise way for Mark Herman (the designer) to get you to jugg...

This game was originally developed as a training tool for French infantry officers and this shows through. The game is unforgiving of mistakes and seems to revolve around teaching you the by the book methods for assaulting strong points or clearing streets.  In Grozny I had to clear out about 12 Chechen rebel squads/sniper teams. The game gave me three platoons of infantry, two Shilkas, two T80s, some snipers, combat engineers and some off map rocket artillery and hello strikes. This is enough tools to do the job, but you are expected to know how to use each tool properly. For my part, the huge defensive bonus provided by the strong points proved costly to overcome.   Russians activated, moving on Chechen strong point In practice I did not know how to use these tools, or at least not for the first half of the game, later I did sort of start to figure things out, but only after the loss of one T80, the best part of a platoon and all my spetznaz and sniper teams. ...