Lestrades_Game

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...

This blog has been pretty dry for the past few months. A new job with long hours and a lot of mega-game mapping. So lets talk shop mega-game mapping. I've started doing maps for the Pennine Mega-gamers, a group formed last year that intends to run about 5 mega-gamers a year. You can find us here http://www.penninemegagames.co.uk/. I've done one map for Sengoku; Liberated from my friend  Pete Sizer's blog: https://spprojectblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/sengoku-a-samurai-megagame/ I am currently just rounding off the map for a Very British Civil War, and I am working on map for the Jena Campaign and will soon start work on an update to the Urban Nightmare game map. I have also more or less completed the map for a Chosin Reservoir campaign game Pete and I will run later on this year. Starting with this one I'm going to throw together a couple of posts of the things I have learned from doing these maps. 1. Size Mega-games are mega. The maps have to be pretty ...

The creative project that has swallowed most of my time recently is map making for the Pennine Megagames. At some point I will put together some posts on how do large maps in inkscape (free vector graphics software). Learning to do things in vector has been an interesting experience, but necessary to deal with large maps (4 A0). If you are interested in posts / how to's on large maps drop a comment. on the 28th we run the Jim Wallman design Sengoku, a political diplomatic war game set in Feudel Japan. If you live in Northern England, its £30 for the day (this just about covers our costs, which is mostly room hire). You can book by clicking the paypal link on this page. http://www.penninemegagames.co.uk/sengoku.html make sure you click on the player link and not control!

The quest for a strategy East Front game continues. This is more of a product review, as I only played 3 turns out (almost the complete short Barbarossa scenario) and decided I wasn’t motivated enough to go on. BITE is not a good example of professional graphic or product design. A pretty good indicator of this is the box cover which has nice art, but you can see the pixels as it is not 200dpi. It looks slightly cheap and this is my general feeling with this game. The map art is garish and in some areas and some parts such as the Siberia box look downright terrible with clashing colours and badly placed icons. Not only does it fail the form test, but also the function. Key charts are printed on the board. Often this is fine, but here they are not facing either player, and are difficult to see from a sitting position. The end result will be playing standing with a craned neck until you have them memorised. Finally, and probably the biggest health warning on this game is the blo...

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 ...