Lestrades_Game

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...

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...

I bought Napoleon's Triumph several years ago when it was cheap and life was easy. I found it pretty hardcore and only pulled it off the shelf once every six months so I sold it to some dude from Sheffield. Since then I've moved to Sheffield and that dude (James) is one of my main game opponents. Recently (relatively) we've been playing Napoleon's Triumph. Image by Mitte_70, borrowed from BGG. I think my initial feelings about this game have been validated. If you play it regularly there is some thing really unique here. With single sporadic games you have to relearn the un-intuitive rules and live through the same mistakes. It becomes a game of who makes biggest blunder first. In our most recent game James took me by surprise by effectively using his cavalry to screen. I know that this is the primary role of cavalry in most warfare but this was the first game I have seen it done effectively. It tied down my best infantry corps more or less taking it out of the ...

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...

The American Revolution (rebellion!) isn't really covered by the curriculum over here in o'l blighty, in fact I've never seen a documentary on it, nor a book on the shelf of a local library. In some respects this isn't unusual as you don't hear a lot about things that aren't Waterloo, World War 1&2, Henry the 8th's wives or the Romans in the UK. But it is  a significant piece of world history and a major blind spot for me, so when I saw a copy of 1776 going cheap on the geek I picked it up. Sometimes the notion gets kicked around that modern games are great, and old games are rather bad and best left to the collectors shelves. 1776 tells me that War game design was as good in back in 1974 as it is today. The pitch is roughly thus; The rebel scum need to be put down, every few turns for the first year you will get a fresh skill stack of troops landing along the coast. You must engage the enemy where you find him and spread out your forces to occupy ...

This is sort of similar to Shark vs Tornado or Batman vs Superman but with board wargames... Having played both Blocks in the East (BITE) and Eastfront, i thought I'd give a very brief comparison: > I love Eastfront, I did not like BITE. > Eastfront is design for effect game. It limits its rule complexity and trims down the number of components by rolling air power and supply all into HQ strength steps and brings out the severity of the conflict through its weather rules and map design. > BITE on the other hand goes the other way and has a more is more philosophy with more smaller hexes, probably three times the number of blocks and both air power and supply represented explicitly > The base rules for Eastfront are marginally more complex however in practice its much easier to play than BITE. BITES core rules could be mistaken for an Axis and Allies evolution but it layers on a tonne of chrome and lots of resource management with the advanced rules. The final...

It’s EastFront a 1991 Craig Besinque block game about the war on the EastFront and this is the winter of 1941. My friend Pete of https://spprojectblog.wordpress.com/ played the role of Uncle Joe, and my friend James of https://twitter.com/ConsimsSheffied   turned into Hitler. I played STAVKA and OKH interpreting their orders and soloing the game. Every few turns I sent both a photo and awaited strategic direction. Turn 1 From Der Fuhrer “ Guten morgen from the Fuhrer's headquarter. The Fuhrer is satisfied to hear that the invasion is going to plan and congratulates you on your progress so far. Your objectives are simple: Moswcow and Leningrad must fall. You will divert a portion of your forces to push towards Tula from the south to draw the Soviets away from the main thrust of the attack, which will come from the north. Do not waste the Fuhrer's best units on this diversionary attack - once the Fuhrer's armour is seen on the streets of Moscow the U...

I've played two slightly truncated games of the Korean War recently and it has quickly become my favourite hex and counter game. This is a mid 1980s design out of Victory Games an off shoot of the dying (or dead I forget which by this date) SPI games but based in New York under the Umbrella of Avalon Hill. It'd designed by Joe Balkoski and covers the first 12 months of the war, which is where all the action was in history, at the divisional and regimental scale. Each turn lasts a month and you have 12 turns taking around an hour each. It has two medium sized paper hex maps that put together will fill a typical dining room table. As it is a divisional scale game (to non war gamers that means most units represent a full division of an army which is a lot of dudes), you don't have that many counters, which means no big counter stats and not too much time sorting them out at the start of play. This scores big points in my book. Yesterday I played the Comm...

I think I remember Martin Wallace once criticizing war games, in particular battle based ones, for giving the players, commanders, too much control over the chaos that ensues. It was probably on a podcast, I forget which. Whilst I can definitely see where Wallace is coming from, having played two of Richard Berg’s battle field war games I can say that not all war games fit this mold. Blood and Roses covers seven battles in the English Wars of the Roses, a medieval dynastic study between two noble families. SPQR Deluxe has a ton of scenarios most involving the early Roman republic and its conflicts with it's ancient world rivals. Foolish Lancastrian mounted knights charge the Yorkist lines only to find out what longbows can do. I’m posting about both together because the two games have a lot of mechanical similarities. In each you will pull out a map sheet, arrange maybe 20-100 counters per side with some deployment decisions, then start activating and swinging yo...

No post for a month, then three in one night! Its 1977, Marc Miller has just released the Sci Fi RPG Traveller, which will set the standard for all Sci Fi games to follow, and GDW, the company Marc works for release Imperium. A board war game in the Traveller universe. I picked this up of a guy in the next city from mine for 5 wigwams. Deal since this sucker normally goes for at least four times that on ebay. Its a pretty mint game too. This is a space opera board game, and its very asymmetrical. One side is the Terrans, the earthlings, the future us. The other is the Imperium, a massive conglomerate of alien races. The Terrans are the upstarts rebelling against the Imperium, and the much embattled Imperial regional governor has to put down this insurrection. This is one thing you get from older games that seem less common in the new, genuine imagination. I like Twilight Imperium as much as the next nerd but the back story for that game is very old hat compared with Chadwick and M...

Well the blogging schedule I had convinced myself i was going to keep hasn't worked out. Too much thesis writing... I've had a slightly turbulent relationship with hex and counter war games. I've played several of the simpler ones; A Victory Denied (MMP), Hells Gate (VPG), Nuklear Winter 68 (LnL), Arnhem (SPI), and one a little more complex, It Never Snows (MMP). Of these games only It Never Snows really impressed me, and thats a sprawling monster that takes 17 hours to play and really at least 4 players (http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-it-never-snows/). Most of these games I found to be a combination of the fiddliness of hex and counter war games, and a little too simplistic in terms of the strategy they offered to be worth the effort. Bloody Hell: Operations Goodwood and Spring bucks this trend. This game is a two player Hex and Counter simulation of the British and Commonwealth forces fighting the Germans in Normandy in WW2. For those of you with s...