Lestrades_Game

I've been a little quiet here for much of early 2015 though I have posted a few things of interest on other sites; A review of the VPG boardgame Star Borders Humanity posted at boargamegeek, since thats the place I felt this style of review would be most useful; https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1324180/star-borders-humanity An opinion piece on why boardgames are closing in on mainstream entertainment status; http://fortressat.com/blogs-by-members/5252-why-board-games-are-now-becoming-popular And an obituary piece on the video game Planetside 2, a great game that perhaps fell short of its potential;  http://fortressat.com/blogs-by-members/5140-planetside-2-obituary

Computer wargames, as in computer milsims, generally aren't that great. They tend to either be overly simple or completely opaque with most of the best games being those that are really designed for video gamers such as Ultimate General Gettysbury or Wargame Red Dragon, rather than the games for the milsim crowd. A few years ago I bought a CD copy of Panther Games Airborne Assault: Conquest of the Aegean off Ebay for £5. I’ve always felt Matrix Games were overpriced (The old publisher for this series) and wanted to try the system before I threw real money at it. Here is the situation just after dawn of day 3. Last night the Safi and the Central Airfields got overwhelmed. Troops guarding the Victoria Line, the Western harbour and around Nignet had to be hastily redeployed for a counterattack, which as the sun rises appear to have been successful. Unfortunately I have to hold out for 6 more days and I have no idea if more German para regiments are in bound. This game is pre...

This is going to be a links post rather than a detailed explanation. The reason being is that there are a lot of good explanations already out there. There are a lot of programs on the internet you can create rpg maps with, I'm just going to talk the ones I've used. Lets start with the easiest Pyromancers http://pyromancers.com/dungeon-painter-online/ This is a flashed based website embedded tool that allows you to draw grid based dungeon maps. Its wiziwig, just click on the style of tile you want, select rectange, eclipse, custom polygon etc and draw some shapes. Its a very quick and easy way of producing room/dungeon layouts. The end result isn't very graphically distinct and creating unconventional shapes can be a bit of a pain but it works. You can export your creations as image files. I used Pyromancers quite a bit at first, as it was a very easy way to create excessively large dungeon maps. http://www.hexographer.com/ Hexographer comes with a free ware...

Other than AFS magazine, Chris over at the Hill Cantons blog is a big proponent of point to point rpg maps. http://hillcantons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html Another point to point map I created was for a climbing session. There is a 'flare' at the top of a column in the great cave that switches on and off irregularly. The players are sent to fix it. At the top if an ancient structure / device that is essentially a light house. A lot of the adventure involves climbing the column and choosing different paths up it. Makes more sense to use point to point for such a map. Hexes give granularity but sometimes it's too much. Some modern games like Dungeonworld recommend point to point maps / flowchart campaign structures. This got me wondering a bit. There are a lot of forum threads along the lines of; How do I actually run an rpg session? Part of the cause of these threads is in my view the move of rpgs away from something simulated and structured ...

Working on a new session/mini campaign for Hyperborea. I am creating a hand drawn style map for it. This cartographers guild post is a great help http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=10655.  Here is the progress so far. The Season of the Wolf. The concept is to bring together a number of ideas that have been kicking around in my mind. I intend to create a point to point style map and have the world simulated to a limited degree. Normally in rpgs stuff happens when NPCs show up, otherwise it does not. I plan on putting a time track into the game and having the werewolfs that the players are hunting move around and do things through time. Depending on how much time the players loiter things might happen ahead of them. A lot of the inspiration for this has come out of AFS magazine. http://hallsoftizunthane.blogspot.co.uk/ Issue 3 (i think) talks about using point to point maps over hexes, Issue 6 includes a new huntsman class and a great...

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...