Category: Reviews

08/26/15

Classic Reviews: Enchanted Locations

Brant Guillory, 26 August 2015

Flip through it, and compare your needs to the price tag. But don’t just drop $30 on a book full of maps, because the B&W maps aren’t as useful as you might think, and the supporting information is sparse.

Yeah, it’s several years old, but I got it one summer at Origins. And there’s no review of it in the archives (ed note: “the archives” of the original site), so for a lot of you, Enchanted Locations may be new to you, too.

This book is from Fast Forward Entertainment, and was put together by James Ward, one of the “grandfathers” of the game. It is d20 compatible.

First Impressions

This book looks good. It chock full of maps, which gamers love. In truth, that’s one of the main reasons I grabbed it. I’m a map geek – a seriously cartography-addicted gamester. These maps are black and white, but detailed. There’s no index, but it really isn’t needed, since the table of contents covers all the big entries. However, an index might have been helpful to find specific treasures and/or encounters.

Digging In

Reading through the table of contents, you notice an imbalance of maps and encounters. Although there are about 75 maps spread across levels 2-21, there are very few low-level maps. I happen to like lower-level games; the balance of survival and heroism to me is more entertaining than power-blasting your way through every encounter. Continue reading →

08/15/15

Attila: Total War – The Last Roman 

Developed by Creative Assembly and Published by SEGA

By Lloyd Sabin 15 August 2015

click images to enlarge

Let’s Be Honest with Each Other

I love Attila: Total War, but I’m not very good at it to be honest. I’ve played campaigns as the Geats, Langobards and the Huns in the standard game and after many, many false starts and immediate ass-whuppings, the best I could come up with so far is ‘not getting slaughtered at the very beginning.’ Even then, my Geat campaign ended in piles of ash where my capital city once stood and I don’t think I made it to 50 turns as the Huns. My Langobard campaign is ongoing…fingers crossed. I suppose that’s not too bad considering the main goal of these campaigns is to simply survive until a certain date but still…not a very stellar performance.

Cue the Last Roman campaign, featuring the Last Roman himself, Belisarius. The campaign is set on a mini-map which is virtually identical to the map that Creative Assembly produced for the Hannibal at the Gates campaign for Rome 2: Total War…it’s just set much later, obviously, in the 6th century AD. Playable factions include the Roman Expedition led by Belisarius (not the Eastern Roman Empire, led by an AI Justinian), the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths and the Franks. I chose to play the Roman Expedition first.

Excellent, I am 'losing decisively!' Wait a minute...
Excellent, I am ‘losing decisively!’ Wait a minute…

 

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07/18/15

Why I Love Diplomacy

The venerable classic timelessly soldiers on.

by Brant Guillory

The original Diplomacy board game has a huge following, even among non-wargamers, despite being sold as a wargamer for its thirty-year lifespan. Why?

Well, it’s a wargame that abstracts battlefield prowess to the point that it’s almost irrelevant. Tactical ability is nothing – I repeat, nothing – in this game. It matters not how well you can anticipate the moment for the cavalry charge, plan the artillery bombardment, or outflank your enemy with your panzer corps. In this game, all armies, and generals, are created equal, and numerical superiority is the only relevant statistic.

In fact, the only ability of note is your ability to successfully negotiate your way through the intrigue of the game as the leader of a country. In this respect, Diplomacy has succeeded, and continues to succeed, in a class all it’s own.

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07/11/15

GrogHeads Reviews DVG’s Hornet Leader

Does Hornet Leader take flight?  Michael buzzes in to let us know.

Michael Eckenfels, 11 July 2015

In Hornet Leader (this version is the recent remake), the player controls a squadron of either U.S. Navy or Marine Corps aircraft through one of several campaigns, which include both real-world historical events and hypothetical ones (more hypothetical, though, than real-world). There’s tons of cards and counters you use to record, fight, and try to keep your squadron alive long enough to earn enough victory points to get a good enough rating for your campaign.

HL-Rev-001

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06/21/15

GrogHeads Reviews Quartermaster General

Euro wargame?  Card-driven Diplomacy?  The first fun game of logistics?  Michael reveals all.

Review by Michael Eckenfels, 20 June 2015

Click images to enlarge

Quartermaster General is a board game focused on World War II. “Oh great,” you’re probably thinking, “another World War II board game.” The issue with thinking like that, though, is that you might think that for just about any game coming out about World War II, especially one named “Quartermaster General.” It’s not exactly a name that inspires fascination or even interest. For me, the title itself might be somewhat uninspired, but this is precisely why it caught my eye.

QMG-un001

The name alone indicates there’s much more to this game than what its title is letting on to. It sounds like it’s more a game about supply and logistics, which is not something that’s covered solely in any board game I’ve ever heard of (feel free, though, to correct me in the forum’s Feedback page for this review, as I’d love to learn more about them). To me, though, the idea of a game solely revolving around logistics sounds incomprehensibly boring, compared with pushing minis or cardboard counters about a map in a struggle for supremacy!

And that’s precisely what this game says it is about, though – supply. As a player in this game, you are one (or more) of six countries involved in the planet-engulfing conflict that was World War II, and the game’s system revolves around spreading your control via Armies and Navies and trying to keep intact lines of supply to keep them operating. The six countries are divided evenly between the Axis and Allies – Germany, Italy, and Japan on one side, and the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union on the other. The game is for two to six players, with players doubling up on countries if there’s less than six.

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