Category: Tracer Rounds

Brant’s Weekly Column

01/4/16

Tracer Rounds – The Inaugural Column

A new weekly column ~

Brant Guillory, 4 January 2016

 

So it’s a new year, with an updated look in our forums, and the continuing evolution of our community overall here at GrogHeads.  And with the new year, we’re launching a few new ideas, starting with this one, a new weekly column.  I’m going to have some regular things I’ll hit each week, but first, I wanted to take a few moments and talk about where this comes from.

GHLogoTextFirst, this needs come clarifying:  I’m not “the guy that runs GrogHeads”.  There’s a partnership of several of us.  We had a few other founders who have left the team for their own personal reasons over the years, but there’s more than just me here steering the ship, and always has been.  I’m just the most visible one, because I’m the editorial content guy here, and that also translates into making sure we distribute the content through social media channels.  But anyone that thinks that les GrogHeads c’est moi is mistaken.

When we decided we wanted to include ‘front page’ content – regular columns, reviews, AARs, etc – the hope was to recapture some of the intelligent, erudite, and insightful commentary we’d previously been a part of elsewhere.  It was a high bar to shoot for, and it would be foolish to claim we’ve cleared it regularly, though not for lack of trying.  Personally, I was hoping for the front page to become the “Grantland of wargaming” which is crazy-hard to do with our budget, which consists of a handful of free games, some pocket lint, and about 11¢.  But there’s another reason why it’s so hard.

Continue reading →

04/16/14

The Joy of Discovery, or A Love-Letter to a Bygone Era of Gaming

Brant waxes nostalgic.  For no good reason, we might add.

16 April 2014

One of the great tragedies that the internet has brought about in the gaming world is the loss of a sense of wonder and discovery of a brand new game that no one else has heard of. One of my first tasks whenever I would get to a new town was to find a local game shop. Back then, things were all very different. There were no chain stores, unless you counted the book stores in the mall (though to be fair, there still aren’t any in the gaming world). Every game store in every town was different. They all had their own different unique games in stock that catered to the whims of the staff.

Since there was very little uniformity from store to store , and the gaming marketplace was much more fragmented, you never knew what you would find in those local game stores. Moreover, if you found something off the wall, it was almost guaranteed that no one back in your gaming group had heard of it, because there was no internet for everyone to hop on and find out about the same games all at the same time.

In my own explorations, I ran across all sorts of interesting nuggets and obscure games that would hardly be categorized as obscure today, because someone would’ve already read about them online. It’s not that they have any wider appeal than they did before, but they almost certainly have wider distribution and knowledge of that distribution thanks to the web. Continue reading →