Tag Archives: Board Games
Medieval – First Look!
As the Kickstarter start to arrive, we check out what’s inside ~
Vance Strickland, 23 June 2018
Relaunching an old classic, the new version of Medieval is starting to make its way to Kickstarter backers. What’s inside the box?
Big heavy box
Skull Tales: Full Sail! ~ Kickstarter
An exclusive look at the prototypes in action ~
GrogHeads Newsdesk, 23 May 2018
The guys over at Eclipse Editorial have an exploding Kickstarter that’s reeling in pledges like a pirate chases booty.
The Skull Tales: Full Sail! pirate-themed boardgame mixes a combination of naval adventures at sea with individual actions ashore, and crew & ship management in between. As of now, there’s over 3400 backers that have pledged almost $400,000 toward the game, including a couple of our own GrogHeads.
We’ve got an exclusive look at the game in action with some of the printing press prototypes, thanks to the guys at Eclipse, and Draco Designs.
Kriegsspiel That Would Never End™ – An AAR, part 2
The AAR takes waaaay less time than the game ~
Jim Owczarski, 16 May 2018
One of the great joys of the Kriegsspiel is the fog of war and command friction that results from any double-blind game. The Jena-Auerstedt campaign’s fights over 13 and 14 October made this point eloquently — and I am not only discussing the fact (alluded to in the videos) that during this period Napoleon lost Bernadotte’s I Corps for a fair amount of time and Brunswick lost contact with Blucher and Ruchel for several days.
While Murat, Lannes, and Davout were barrelling nigh Hell-fot-leather Northward along their western line of advance, Napoleon I himself could never quite figure out where the Prussians were. He kept punching forward hoping to hit something and never realized just how empty the battle space was. In the early marches, he failed to catch the divisions guarding the Hof gap and then both Marshals Soult and Ney kept nudging forward along the eastern routes trying to make contact with Hohenlohe’s men who scampered as fast as they were able.
Kriegsspiel That Would Never End™ – An AAR, part 1
What happens when you cram 10 days of battle into 18 months of forum posts? ~
Jim Owczarski, 12 May 2018
It took nine game days rather than the postulated six.
It took a tiny bit over a year and a half of real time.
It resulted in 568 forum posts and 33,553 forum views (as I write this).
The umpire sent out 825 dispatches.
And it is over.
Jokes to the contrary notwithstanding, the Kriegsspiel That Would Never End™ actually ended on 5 May 2018.
But that would be to begin at the ending, and no one wants that.
In the beginning, I was planning a trip to the Jena-Auerstedt battlefields and I had always had a love of Dr. Didier Rouy’s “The Flight of the Eagle” Napooleonic campaign system. I also enjoy the company of the crew from the GrogHeads forums and was delighted when a fair number of them responded to the idea of playing one of these Kriegsspiels with something other than derisive laughter or knowing dismissal.
RAF The Battle of Britain 1940 – The GrogHeads AAR, part 5 of 5
Will the climax of the AAR leave shots all over England? ~
Michael Eckenfels, 1 May 2018
0600 TIME SEGMENT
RAID ONE: HORNCHURCH (Airfield)
MAJOR RAID
This raid has the Decoy Raid card attached to it. I get to choose two Squadrons from the Enroute Sectors listed on the Target card and put them in the Inflight Box. I choose two of the three Spitfire Squadrons from 6/11 as we have a Major Raid coming in to take down the Radar Net at Foreness.
The two RAF Squadrons assigned by Fighter Command find that this was a Luftwaffe trick; the two Squadrons are now out of the picture for the time being, cursing their luck and good German ingenuity, no doubt.
