Category: Featured Posts

12/13/14

GrogHeads’ 2014 Holiday Buying Guide

The annual tradition returns – the holiday buying guide!

Once again the holiday season approaches, and once again gamers’ loved ones may be struggling to come up with a gift that goes deeper than a tie, sweater, or fruit cake. Relax. Grogheads is on it, and once again we are proud to present our Buying Guide for the hard-to-buy-for gamer/military historian. Once again our categories are broken down into approximate areas of interest. They’re not going to be perfect, but hopefully at least one will cover a sufficient area of interest that you can safely point a gift-giver to. And enough of the dangling prepositions. Let’s get on with it!

For The Electronic Gamer

At the top of the list have to come PC wargames. Many good ones have been released this year and hopefully at least one on this list will hit a sweet spot.Command Air Naval Ops GH Award Logo

Command Air Naval Ops BoxCommand: Modern Air Naval Operations Wargame of the Year Edition

Fans of modern naval warfare on the PC will find Command a must-have. Players can simulate battles from the 1950’s through the modern era and pretty much any nation with an ocean view can be dialed up for conflict in this game, if one of the pre-made scenarios doesn’t do it for you.

 

 

Battle Academy 2: East Front

Gamers playing on the iOS aren’t missing out on much of the action. Battle Academy 2 has been released and East Front leads the way for some light tactical wargaming on the iPad. Offering fun, scripted scenarios this is one of those games that is both enjoyable and challenging. And it covers the Eastern Front. What more is there to say?

Battle Academy 2 Eastern Front Logo

Continue reading →

12/11/14

Prosciutto – Hamming it up with the di Parmas… Entering Its 3rd Decade

When they talk about marathon games, this is what they had in mind…

In Part 29 Benvenuto left the field of battle over the Duchy of Apulia and province of Bari to his minions, in order to manage affairs of state at home. Once there he set about a plot to marry his son to Flandina, the beautiful heir of Apulia, imprisoned in the di Parma dungeons. It turned out that her brother, the Duke of Apulia refused to consent to the marriage. He was removed from power, di Parma style, now Flandina resides over the Apulia duchy and awaits our proposal. In this part, I honestly have no idea how to explain it

CKII - Pic 290

Turns out Flandina thinks she’s too posh for the di Parmas too – it’s a no from her

CKII - Pic 291

Having chosen the dress, the flowers, the horses and the fancy honeymoon Benvenuto broke off the previously arranged marriage to the di Luccas having seen Flandina’s perfect CV. Now he goes back cap in hand to get a wife for his son. Continue reading →

12/6/14

GrogHeads Reviews Wasteland 2

A post-apocalyptic American Southwest beckons…

Avery Abernethy, 6 December 2014

Load screen

 

Wasteland 2 is a party based RPG set in a post-apocalyptic American Southwest. The game is developed by Inxile Software headed by noted designer Brian Fargo. Mr. Fargo was lead designer on the original Wasteland released way back in 1988 and also lead designer on Fallout RPG series. This is one of the first RPGs to be largely funded through a Kickstarter campaign. I purchased this game from www.gog.com and played it for around two weeks completing approximately 90% of the game.

Although experience with the original Wasteland game is not needed to either enjoy or understand Wasteland 2, many of the game conventions and world design flow from the original. Your small, 4 person party belongs to the Desert Rangers. The Desert Rangers are attempting to bring civilization back to the Southwest after decades of post-nuclear war chaos. The player can either build their starting four party members or choose from predesigned characters bundled with the game.

Starting Party

 

Continue reading →

12/5/14

GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #59

With the impending arrival of the annual GrogHeads Holiday Buying Guide and/or List Of Things Your Family Will Never Get You™, we took a slightly different turn on GARPA this time, and tried to cover a variety of different bases, without repeating categories…

 

The wargame:  Liberty or Death: The American Insurrection (GMT Games)
P500, $57 pre-order, $82 MSRP – made the cut!

So the real question everyone has with the 4-headed COIN game set in the AWI is this : How do the French win?!  The latest COIN game brings in Indian raids, brilliant strokes, and the usual 4-headed multi-player madness that occasional devolves into players bribing each other with beer during the game.  The map might not be the prettiest of the COIN maps, but it does have one different feature – the cities of the colonies are called out as separate spaces distinct from the overall territories of the colonies themselves.  Many of the cards are named after historical actors in the AWI, and when the French enter, there’s no trumping it.  Check out their p500 page to get your pre-order in while they’re still taking them.

g59-LibertyDeath-P500-1 Continue reading →

11/29/14

GrogHeads Reviews Field Commander: Rommel (Deluxe)

tanksgivingheader

Published by DVG (Dan Verssen Games)

Michael Eckenfels, 29 November 2014

 

The career of Erwin Rommel was laced with brilliance and interspersed with disasters that didn’t quite come to fruition. It seemed that each time, the ingenuity and initiative of Rommel and his subordinates were just enough to bring about victory when defeat seemed inevitable. This played itself out across the Western Front in 1940, in North Africa over the following two years, and then in Normandy, but to a much lesser extent. Indeed, it seemed as time wore on, Rommel’s field fortunes ebbed and waned much the same as Germany’s as a whole.

Moving through the French countryside, conquering for the Fatherland (i.e. me).
Moving through the French countryside, conquering for the Fatherland (i.e. me).

Field Commander: Rommel is a solitaire game that puts you square into the same command halftrack (figuratively) to make the decisions he was faced with over three historical campaigns mentioned above. Faced with dwindling supplies and increasing Allied strength, your victory is never assured and hinges on your initiative and choices. Sounds like most games, doesn’t it? That’s nothing new. What is new, though, is creating a solitaire game that can use the same system for the player to manage, growing from a division-sized unit in the first scenario to an entire defensive network in the last. Continue reading →