Tag Archives: Ancient
GrogHeads Reviews 7 Wonders Mobile Edition
The tabletop favorite packs up on the go for your phone ~
Brant Guillory, 26 January 2018
My love for 7 Wonders is pretty well-documented. My biggest gripe with it has always been that it’s pain to pull multiple people together for a game session, because the game plays pretty poorly with only two people (and hence the creation of 7 Wonders: Duel). But if you wanted to play the original as a digital game, without having to drag up three friends, clear a table, and shuffle a bunch of cards, you were stuck. There was a really crappy, borderline-illegal Game of Thrones/7 Wonders mashup that you could get through the Amazon app store, but that was it.
Deep Thoughts on Field of Glory 2
Are the roots of FoG2 found in tabletop minis? ~
Jim Owczarski, 11 November 2017
There’s not an awful lot of point in doing a straight review of a game like “Field of Glory 2” (hereafter FoG2) in a venue like this one. After all, we are a fairly aware lot and share information about the games we get, like, and dislike quickly. By now, you have all likely heard the game is the best of its kind in this generation (it is) and that it surpasses its only real competition — Interactive Magic’s much-admired “Great Battles” series. Were this the whole story I’d recommend slapping an “Order of the Hex” on the thing and moving on.
I think, though, many reviewers have missed the importance of FoG2’s roots in tabletop miniatures gaming, roots that have made this such a remarkably strong offering. Therefore, I would like, in place of a proper review, to point out five things that FoG2 took from the world of little lead men that make it so very special.
The Tuesday Interview – Bob Smith of Oriental Empires
Bob Smith pays GrogHeads a visit~
Lloyd Sabin (and Boggit!), 3 January 2017
You clearly have a long, proud history in historical PC gaming, which younger readers may not know about. Games like ‘Arnhem,’ ‘Desert Rats,’ and ‘Operation Vulcan’ are remembered very fondly. What is your favorite game of yours from that era and why?
Of the wargames, probably Desert Rats, because I like big sweeping games. Of all the games I did in my first stint as an independent developer, my favorite is probably Armada 2525, because I had so much fun playing it with my friends (who usually used to beat me).
What were some of the difficulties you faced in the 1980s when producing those early games?
The machines were very limited, you had to think about every byte of RAM. I remember being up at 3am trying to find 3 bytes of memory to finish Desert Rats, with a bike coming at 7 to take the master tape to the duplicators. The development environments were very limited too. I used to write everything out on paper, because the editors were so bad, and once your program got too big to fit into RAM with the assembler, it could take as much as an hour to make a new version.