Category: Columns

Regular columns from the GH team

05/2/16

Tracer Rounds: The Local Game Store – Guild Hall, Saloon, and Crack Dealer, all in one

Your FLGS probably deserves more respect that you’re giving it ~

Brant, 02 May 2016

I had to take a few weeks off.  Sorry.  The fallout from the last Tracer Rounds column cost me a good friend who thought I was (indirectly) taking shots at him and I hope that in time, we can reconcile our differences and become friends again.  But while I’m sticking by everything that I said, the last 2-3 weeks have really reconfirmed why I was so reluctant to wade into the topic in the first place.  tr-flgs

There was another discussion that popped up on my online radar that wanted to explore, though, and it involved the role of the FLGS in our hobby.  The genesis of the discussion was a new policy by some companies to release certain games through brick-and-mortar stores before making them available to online retailers, or setting certain pricing minimums for online stores, to keep them from undercutting the physical stores too much and driving them out of business.

For those of us where the brick-and-mortar stores serve a vital social role in our hobby, this is a Good Thing™ to help keep the community cranking along.  It’s somewhere that gamers can discover new games, meet new gamers, casually watch games being played to gauge their own interest, and generally socialize with those that share the same hobby.  It also gives us a local business to support that’s almost always run by fellow gamers.

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04/4/16

Tracer Rounds: Attack of the Killer Poetry

What do you do with a backlog of reviews? ~

Brant, 04 April 2016

We get all kinds of games sent to us, along with the ones we pick up one our own.  Some good, some bad, some gorgeous, some not so much.  We try – we really do try – to get to all of them for review purposes, but it doesn’t always happen.  There’s a reason I’ve got a weekly blurb here called “What I’m doing this week when I should be playing games”.  Moreover, when I play a game for review, I want to play it multiple times to ensure that the review I’m writing is accurate based on how the game is balanced, and how it plays over time – especially if replayability is one of the key factors we want to discuss.haiku

Among the reasons I’ve made it a point to start republishing a bunch of the ‘classic reviews’ are that I don’t want my reviews to be dependent on someone else’s site continuing to exist, as well as wanting folks to be able to find opinions on older games that they may want to take for a spin.  Additionally, many of those older reviews (some of which I’m going to get to soon) were longer borderline-investigative-journalism pieces that really dug into the games through repeated plays.  That was a lot easier when I was in grad school.  Working 3 different teaching jobs, plus being the editorial director here, makes all that a lot tougher.

So, this episode of Tracer Rounds is designed to catch up on those reviews – with a twist.

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03/28/16

Tracer Rounds: Let’s Talk Education

How smart is too smart? ~

Brant, 28 March 2016

I’ve been thinking a lot about education lately, perhaps a little too much.  It’s no real secret that wargamers tend to be over educated, but let’s face it, for many of us school was more of a formality than anything. Most of us weren’t the most studious of pupils, and a lot of our classes were merely checking the box on something we could breeze through in our sleep.

Scribe_1But we’re not the key consumers in the American education system either. And that’s the struggle that I’m wrestling with right now as I have two kids in public schools and I am teaching at several very different colleges.  What this adds up to is that my thoughts on this are rather disjointed, but I don’t feel like writing a book to fully explore every one of them, so this is going to be a bit of a brain dump of several different concepts all related to education. Please bear with me and I hope it comes out to a coherent whole by the time I’m done (but let’s face it, the odds of that are pretty slim).

First off, I’m really wrestling with the issue of what we expect education to accomplish. There is certainly an underlying shared experiential component to our education system, as if it’s a massive continental-wide team building exercise for 12-year-olds. To that end, the shared pain and sacrifice somewhat makes sense.  Ostensibly, the public education system in the US is designed to turn out citizens with a minimal set of survival skills for the rest of their lives. That said, it’s hard to make the case that it’s succeeding in that regard.   There are so many minimally-necessary skills that are not taught, or even touched on (balancing a checkbook, typing, managing a credit score, how to be fucking polite in public!), that it’s not insane to wonder if we should completely jettison the current model and rebuild from the ground up.  However, if it’s all just skill building for future societal needs, then we are doing our students a serious service by failing to intellectually engage them. Subjects such as history and literature serve vital functions in providing context in today’s society, as well as important emotional engagement points for many students, even if they do not have an immediate tie into any future career endeavor.

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03/21/16

Tracer Rounds: Tactics vs Logistics, the Walking Dead Differential Model

What do you see when you’re watching TV “operations”? ~

A friend of mine – who might eventually read this column and recognize himself and then furiously email with a string of “that’s not what I meant and you know it”s – was posting on social media about The Walking Dead.  After the episode where they go room-to-room clearing the radar facility where they think Negan is holed up, he proclaimed “TWD is OAF”.TR-TWD

From the point of view of the room-clearing tactics, which our TWD heroes have perfected over several seasons, he’s probably right.  It jives with everything I’ve seen, and the limited amount I was taught. (Remember that I was a tanker back in the ‘90s, before all the MOUT/FISH ops of the past 15 years; if we had to ‘clear’ a house it involved pancaking the place with 55 tons of rolling steel.)  But the whole time I’m watching TWD my mind is usually back to the more practical matters.

Allow me to explain…

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03/15/16

Tracer Rounds: Origins Events!

Here’s what’s coming at the GrogHeads Central Command at Origins ~

Several years ago, we approached Origins with a simple idea: bring wargaming back to the convention.  It had been withering on the vine for a while.  The first year I attended as BayonetGames was in 2005.  We were across the aisle from MMP (who said about 4 total words to us the entire show), next to Columbia (where Ferkin said about 4 words to us every other second), and within sight of Avalanche Press, GMT Games, and Matrix Games, with Decision Games, and others, all in the hall as well.  By 2010, there were almost no wargamers left in the building.  There were some folks playing over in the CABS Board Room (after its consolidation with the War Room), but wargaming had evaporated, not out of malice, but out of neglect.  So I called GAMA.  I talked to them and asked what sort of parameters they had for us to operate within if we wanted to try and bring the wargamers back to the show.  And thus the GrogHeads Central Command was born.  We were able to bring some wargaming companies in that hadn’t been there before, as well as bringing back some others.  And now we’re getting ready to launch our third year working with Origins, and here’s what we’ve got in store for you:

  • Enterprise Games, a retailer out of Indiana, will be the official rep/sponsor of our GMT events.  That’s right, for the first time, the Central Command will include official GMT events – we’ve got scheduled events for both COIN series games and Wing Leader, as well as the opportunity for some pick-up games of other titles, like Combat Commander and Command & Colors.
  • Lock ‘n Load Publishing is coming in.  Since the ownership change, they’ve not come back to Origins, until this year.  David is planning on bringing in a (literal) boat-load of new games off the press, and we’ll be running events for LNLT, World at War, and Nations at War.
  • Lost Battalion Games is back!  They’re the only company that’s joined forces with us every year of the GrogHeads Central Command, so we probably ought to get them some t-shirts to celebrate or something.  They’re going to be running some large ‘rolling’ events for both Sergeants – Hell on Wheels! and Rally Round the Flag that’ll permanently occupy a pair of our tables for the entire show.
  • Flying Pig Games is making their Origins debut.  Mark has committed to the show and we’ll be running events for both Night of Man and Old School Tactical.
  • Proving Ground Games is bringing back their Origins Award-winning minis rules, and taking over a table of their own with their snazzy terrain boards for a weekend of minis-based wargaming, both WWII and modern.
  • The ever-enjoyable Command Post Wargaming, wherein you and the rest of the participants get a quick primer on military planning, and then get to develop your own plan for keeping the red horde from rolling over the inter-German border.  And then you get to execute your plan and watch it fall to pieces in the first 10 minutes as you scramble to adjust while the war goes on!  Seriously, though, it’s an exercise in wargaming with a far more realistic approach to planning, intel, and logistics than you get out of any other tabletop experience.  If we get enough participants, we sometimes run this one head-to-head, so bring your friends!
  • For those that want the Command Post Wargaming experience, but are short on time, we also have the more scaled-back Command Post Chess events, where the principles of planning, intel, and execution are very similar, but with a simplified game that everyone already knows – Chess!
  • Because I’m the guy that puts all this together, I also sneak in a few events of my own, so we’re going to make sure that BayonetGames‘ long-discussed-and-eventually-to-be-published game about modern-day war in Ukraine hits the table (Orange Crush) as well as one of BayonetGames’ Warfighter-series games, Asian Thunder.

We’ve got over 50 wargaming events spread across 5 days, including some drop-in game times and a stray seminar here and there.  There’s something for everyone, so come join us this summer at Origins.  Detailed day-by-day schedule breakdowns are below –

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