Combat Mission: Final Blitzkrieg is a tactical wargame set on the Western front during the latter part of World War Two. Final Blitzkrieg is mostly about the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944-January 1945, but the game also has scenarios covering the earlier fighting in and around Aachen and the Hürtgenwald.
Munchkin Marvel is the 23rd core game in the Munchkin line sold by Steve Jackson Games. For those unfamiliar with Munchkin, it is a table top card game. You have an avatar. You can equip your avatar with armor, helmet, hand items, boots, and other items. You can obtain allies. However well or poorly equipped your character is you kick down the door. A trap may explode in your face. You may get free treasure. Or you may have a monster attack you. If you beat the monster you get its treasure. If you lose, you can try to run away. If you don’t run away successfully upon your loss, bad things happen. If you beat a monster you go up a level. Other things can help you go up levels. If you reach level 10 then you win. It is a pretty simple game.
What makes Munchkin such a fun game is the give and take between the players. Munchkin encourages both cooperation and back-stabbing. Many cards can be played to help your character, or can be played to strengthen a monster to defeat another player. There is a lot of wheeling, dealing, begging and whining within a munchkin game. You can split treasures, bribe, make promises, all in hopes of getting your lowly level one munchkin to level ten and victory.
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In June of 2015, I reviewed a unique board game called Quartermaster General. Ian Brody designed a rather unique game, in that where most World War II games add logistics almost as a second thought to their game’s mechanics, Quartermaster General instead made logistics the centerpiece. Players would draw and husband cards to play to place armies in connecting countries, and navies in connecting ocean spaces, to conquer and deny territory to the other players. It brought a lot of chess-like qualities to a World War II-themed game, and was quite enjoyable. The game is very easy to teach; the task of knowing the timing of card play is its most challenging aspect, and really the heart of the fun of the game (as you can play cards for yourself, but you can also interrupt others’ play, too!).
(Ed note: we also talked with the designer at Origins!)
Zones of Control is the book that wargaming has been waiting for. Seriously. And that’s a pretty grandiose statement, but the truth is, it’s a long-needed book from a hard-to-ignore-and-harder-to-impugn publisher that tries to comprehensively examine the breadth and depth of wargaming under one cover. 
Where previous ‘seminal’ works of wargaming – Simulating War or The Art of Wargaming or The Complete Wargames Handbook – were concerned with specific facets of wargaming (academic explorations, professional uses, or hobbyists, for example), Zones of Control brings them all into one giant melting pot, and then sprinkles in the occasional dose of aesthetics, role-playing, and digital design.
“Wargame”
Interestingly, Zones of Control is able to swing such a wide arc precisely by avoiding the overly-pedantic and never-solved argument about “what is a wargame?” It is conspicuously absent throughout the book, and there isn’t even a cursory attempt at it. Avoiding that discussion allows the editors a wide range of latitude to include discussions of Twilight Struggle, Tunnels & Trolls, and battlefield re-enactors. And truthfully, the book is much richer for it.
It is that very breadth that can make Zones of Control a challenge to review, however. To what are we comparing it? It’s scope alone puts the book in its own category among the wargaming literature. There’s no comparable volume in the pop music world, whose attempts at a broad-scope literary volume end up more an inventory of artists than an exploration of types of music. One might compare this book to something like a collected academic volume like the Communication Technology Update, but with technology and its markets moving as they do, that textbook is updated every 2 years. The collected essays of Zones of Control are almost “the greatest hits” of a year or two of erudite magazine articles from a flagship wargaming analysis journal, if such a thing ever existed. Spread over 5 years of quarterly issues, rather than collected into a consolidated volume, the essays of Zones of Control might have have become the catalyzing agent around which a comprehensive cross-domain association of wargaming might have coalesced – a worthy literary companion to the Connections wargaming conference. But to deconstruct the book and instead attempt to feature the writers over the span of several years would have cost the critical momentum needed to even publish the book at all. Instead, we’re forced to hope that someone picks up the baton and starts a recurring publication as a companion to this volume. But that’s putting the cart at least a mile or two before the horse that Kirschenbaum & Harrigan have saddled for us.
Originally published ~ July 2007
So you and your friends either slayed an evil beast, or conquered the local warlord? Both? Well done, you! Time to celebrate, quaffing pints and regaling your friends with tall tales of your exploits over at the Red Dragon Inn. 
You goal is to be the last one standing among the carousing adventurers at the inn, which is not an easy feat when you’re subsisting on a diet of Dragon Breath Ale.
Each player has a playmat that organizers the cards in play, and tracks both the character’s alcohol level, and fortitude. The goal is to keep the alcohol content low, and the fortitude high; should they meet, the character falls unconscious and the rest of the party splits the loot. Speaking of loot – should you run out of loot, the inn tosses you out on your heels. In either case, you’re out of the game. The last conscious player standing, with cash, is the winner.