Lestrades_Game

Pete and I ran our megagame on the Chosin campaign this weekend and things went well for the most part. Here are some post-mortem thoughts  - we lost about 30% of our bookings in the week running up to the game. From our experiences across Pennine Megagames this year, this seams to be about par for the course. There is a good reason that many Megagames have reserve lists, unfortunately the Chosin Reservoir campaign in North Korea was not quite a big enough draw to warrant a reserve list. - The game itself ran pretty smoothly, relatively simple mechanics, good game materials and a very experienced control team facilitated this. - Having fewer players actually benefited the game, the UN players lost all but one of their executive officers (XOs) meaning that it was one player per Marine regimental team. This actually helped as the game was streamlined enough that two players were not really required to write 3 sets of orders. The Chinese Commissars had a bit more latitude but ev...

I might be a Balkowski fan boi. There are things he does in his designs that just seem to work for me. I like good tables printed on the map, that are loaded with possibility, I like irregular turn sequences that don't use chit pulls, and I like the way he front loads his games with tense challenging decisions. He creates those smokey room nail brighter moments.  In 6th fleet this is done with your airforce. At the start of each three turn day you have to decide how many planes to allocate to strategic air missions and to which air zones they will be sent. Both players do this in secret. It is a mental game of chicken, as you need those fighters for CAP (combat air patrol) over your carriers and airbases but you also want to clear the Black Sea so your recon planes don't get downed by MIGs, but your opponent only has limited interceptors too, what will he or she do? It's a game about guessing and gambling and then watching the dice roll as a T16 bombers at...

Pete and I (of https://spprojectblog.wordpress.com/) are putting on a Megagame in Leeds UK next month! 15th October at the Swathmore centre. So I haven't been posting much recently, busy with that, busy with work etc. Hope to post more soon though. It is a double blind game, written to be accessible for non-military types whilst still having the depth for more experienced wargamers.  Already we've learned a few lessons from prepping this game. Coming up with the idea, the design, the map and rules is all a lot easier than actually putting the game on. We are attracting a good number of players right now, but a month back we were really struggling. It seems the market for wargames is quite small compared with diplomacy/risk style games unfortunately, even if there is more game beneath the hood. 

A run down of the COIN games I have played COIN (COunter INsurgency) is a series of games that GMT started publishing back in 2012 with Volko Runke's Andean Abyss. The first four games all focused on modern insurgency wars but in the past year the series has branched out into Republican Rome and the American Revolution. I've played a fair bit of COIN at this stage and thought a run down of my experiences with the series so far might be informative. First off, what of the series as a whole? Which one is should you buy? How hard are they to play? And other profound questions... The two foreign factions make good use of their domestic allies. The main strength of the series is their ability to naturally bring out the murky alliances and the shifting nature of factional relationships in these conflicts. Each game has four factions, usually one represents the government, one or two armed insurgents, one criminal syndicate or trade based faction, and sometimes one o...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B39t62uIctG3SHVBQXZwZmc3Q3M/view?usp=sharing I'm putting together some mapping tutorials for the Pennine Megagamers. Here a link to the first pdf.

On the last Saturday of this past June I enjoyed one of the best learning experiences I have had in wargaming to put a positive spin on it. The day did not start well in character as General von Ruchel I arrived to the field 3 hours late having boarded the wrong train. When I arrived I discovered that my colleagues had spread our forces in a long thin line between the Fulda gap and Gera with no reserve. Control's game map The Jena campaign megagame, designed by Rupert Clamp was devised as a double blind map game. Each side of 10-15 players wrote orders for each division ordering it about a large map of central Germany. When battle was joined a divisional commander collected his regimental level counters and played a simple face to face tactical game. A step up the chain of command it was the army commanders (generals) role to devise the overall strategy for then the divisional/corps commanders and their chiefs of staff teams to implement. Or if you were on the Pruss...

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...