Lestrades_Game

I generally keep this blog for RPG and more complex war game material. I post more regular board gaming type content over @ Fortress Ameritrash.com. Here are some links to some recent produce review type posts for Brass by Martin Wallace, and Storm Over Dien Bien Phu from MMP Brass: http://fortressat.com/blogs-by-members/4784 Storm Over DBP: http://fortressat.com/blogs-by-members/4786 There are other posts on my members blog over there, some of them interesting, some of them with terrible English.

I've turned a corner of sorts with hex and counter war games, and probably war games in general. I can no longer be bothered to learn new rulesets. Or at least not rule sets of more than a few pages. Its probably unfortunate then that I tried to have a look at WW1 wargaming through the lens of Somme 1918 from Nuts publishing. WW1 games were long thought to be dull grind fests much like the years 1915-1917 were. Many deaths, few gains, valuable for historical insight but little else. My limited experience of Somme 1918 is similar to this. I say limited because i packed it in after slightly under 1 turn (turns can have three mini turns within them), so take what I say with a dose of salt. Look at all them counters! Somme 1918 is a two counter sheet game, so not that bad. But, it took me about 2 hours after I had punched and clipped them to sort them. It is normal in wargames for a counter to have information on what army or formation it belongs too as well as its a...

I've been in a war game mood lately. Not really done a great deal of RPG or regular board game. The urge to push counters across hexes is too strong. Having made a trade for Reluctant Enemies, the new Operational Combat Series title, I've taken the plunge and learnt OCS. It wasn't as hard as I expected. Heres a link to the playlist of videos I made on it; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOxW5J6nEiueeqLZUYQ5ek4395qFfL-jk The quality of the videos is a bit ropey early on. I had to learn the ropes with the camera, focusing and lighting etc. heres a later video that is a little better; I don't cover everything in these vids, and there might be some rules mistakes, but they are enough to help anyone understand OCS and get playing.

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...

My world building with Gimp continues. I've had a couple of cracks at putting together a city map and now having something that will probably get into my campaign. It is still a work in progress but it at least looks interesting. The concept is to have a city built on the back of a giant crab. This has some novelty to it, evokes the weird fantasy vibe im shooting for and allows for lots of interesting rationals in the world detail. For instance the city has a massive rain collection system to generate the needed water. To put this together I got a photo of some spiny species of crab, used the magic wand to select everything non crab in the image and remove it. I then dragged the contrast way up and darkened the crab to get a silhouette of the crab. I then used the path tool to design in the roads and then the buildings. I added in some of the spines in grey as these will be hollowed out to form some of the bigger buildings in the city. The background is a bi...

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...

Making good maps is an easy way for someone with little to know art talent like me to make ones adventures look good, and perhaps even publishable (Will send some to fanzines at some point).  I've been steadily learning the ropes with GIMP. This is a bath house I'm constructing for my current Astonishing Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea game. I need to create a good pattern fill for the pools, and probably design some more objects to give the map a more populated feel but the structure is there. I very loosely model it on some historical floor plans;