Category Archives: Previews
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #89
GARPA returns for more pre-order goodies ~
HOLDFAST: North Africa 1941-42 (Worthington Publishing)
$21k of $2500, ends 15 March 2016
Worthington’s Holdfast series is back. After Russia and Korea, they guys head to North Africa. The standard Holdfast features are back, with fog of war, fast play times, and engaging turn sequences that keep players constantly guessing about what’s up next. Like every other North Africa game, you need a table that’s about 24 inches wide and 28374652938762 feet long, but you’ll be chasing panzers across the sands before you know it. Rumble over to their campaign page and you can fire off your pledge.
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #88
Here’s GARPA, our fortnightly bundle of pre-ordering goodness! ~
Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (GMT Games)
p500 $65, MSRP $95
It got funded in a few days, so it is going to press. The latest entry into the COIN series keeps giving us counterinsurgency warfare from off the beaten path – no Malaysia or Sri Lanka here. This entry brings in a greater level of economics, and boffo-keen (though ahistorical) castle meeples. Scots and Saxons are among the factions that vie for power and veterans of the COIN system already know how to play. Liberty or Death sold out in a hurry, and that’s after all the p500 orders were delivered. Get this now, or miss out and be the laughingstock of the forums when you look for sympathy.
GrogHeads Previews
Tom Clancy’s The Division
So with a first look inside the new Clancy-branded shooter, what does our guest author find? ~
Guest Contributor John J. Szucs, 25 February 2016
Like many of you here on GrogHeads, I have been a long-time fan of Tom Clancy’s work. His second book, Red Storm Rising, was a milestone in my life, taking me from an early-teenaged “Rambo is cool” level to life-long serious study of the art and science of warfare that helped shaped my career and given me some extraordinary experiences working side-by-side with our warfighters in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. While the books in Tom Clancy franchise went through a period of dilution and exploitation with ghost writers, UbiSoft has generally done right by the video game side of the franchise and looks to be on track to put out three very solid titles in the 2015-2016 gaming season. The recently-released Rainbow Six Shield is the deepest and most innovative tactical shooter of the past twelve months and Ghost Recon: Wildlands looks very promising.
The third title in this line-up is Tom Clancy’s The Division, an open-world, massively multi-player online (MMO), third-person tactical role-playing game. The game recently had a closed Beta test period and just completed an open Beta period that ran from Friday, February 19 through Monday, February 22, 2016. Xbox One players, like myself, had a one-day exclusive on the open Beta, starting on Thursday, February 18.
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #87
And on the Frith Day, he gave us GARPA! ~
7th Sea, Second Ed (John Wick)
$481k of $30k, ends 13 March 2016
Another project that blew through its funding goal so fast that it almost feels like they’re just making up stretch goals as they go. 7th Sea was a beloved RPG that was popular in the early 00’s, in large part because the world of Theah was such a fantabulous setting. The creator now has the rights to his game back, and is updating all the material for re-publication, and by the looks of it, there’s a few thousand people that can’t wait to get back on the train. Sail over to their Kickstarter page and marvel at the depths of their stretch goals and drop your doubloons on your own pledge.
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #86
An episode of GARPA full of un-funded projects. Don’t let that stop you 🙂 ~
Polyversal (Collins Epic Wargames)
$13k of $80k, ends 27 March 2016
We’ve been following Polyversal for a few years now. Yes, years. Here’s the photographic proof at Origins! (Heck, here’s another from 2013…) It’s 6mm sci-fi warfare, so you can play out a large battle over a medium-sized table. There’s a unique visual representation of the command structures based on hexagonal-shaped unit cards whose layout provides a quick look at the unit relationships. There’s even an online unit assessment tool that lets you bring your own minis to the game, so all those WH40K epic-scale minis that have been languishing in your garage can now come back to life. Teleport over to their campaign page, NOW!
