Category: Reviews

02/7/14

Picket Duty: Kamikaze Attacks against U.S. Destroyers – Okinawa, 1945 – First Look!

Michael Eckenfels unboxes another recent discovery!

 

Legion Wargames’ Picket Duty is a solitaire game from Steve Dixon, a designer that had a hand in creating B-29 Superfortress and its expansion, Hell Over Korea. I’ve been watching this title for some time now and was quite eager to get a copy, even though I’ve read discussions over on BoardGameGeek about how the current version 1.0 of the rules are confusing and a newer version is due out soon. Regardless, what I followed in development looked like a game with a lot of potential and great components.
You can view the game on Legion Wargames’ page here.

 

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The box is a standard-sized wargame box, if a bit thinner than a ‘normal’ one.

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02/5/14

Book Review: Under a Graveyard Sky

A Review of Under a Graveyard Sky by John Ringo

Review by Avery Abernethy, 5 February 2014

John Ringo’s work is well known to many wargamers.  He has many bestselling books with large amounts of tactical and strategic combat including the popular Posleen series, the Council War Series, and even an “X-Files meets the deadly soccer mom from Mississippi series” (Princess of Wands and Queen of Wands).  A veteran of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, Ringo’s work has appealed to many readers interested in action-packed combat.

graveyard1Under a Graveyard Sky is a survivalist novel of a zombie apocalypse.   Although I like post-apocalyptic fiction, zombies have never held my interest., as they are the epitome of mindless, tactically brain-dead opponents.  The whole idea of a zombie apocalypse has always seemed so weird and boring that I bought the book in hardback and let it sit for five months unopened.  I shouldn’t have waited so long, as Ringo has actually written an interesting, post-apocalyptic zombie book.

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01/26/14

A Review of GMT’s A Distant Plain

Brant tackles GMT’s latest COIN series game, A Distant Plain, and reports from the front.

GrogHeads has covered A Distant Plain with an interview with the designers, and the photos of the unboxing.  All well and good, of course, but how does it play?

There are several reasons why A Distant Plain can be tough to review.  That said, they are all the same reasons that make it a compelling game.  How many multiplayer wargames have you played where the players are not simply extensions of a team, but rather working at cross purposes as often as not?  How many wargames have you played with an elastic time scale?  How many wargames eschew anything resembling unit factors or quantified values?  And now take all those tweaks and roll them into a single game, and drop into an ongoing conflict whose outcomes are not yet truly determined.

 

The Story

There are four players: The Coalition, The Government, The Taliban, and the Warlords.  Of these, the Taliban are the only one for whom you can draw a reasonably straight line directly from the real life organization in Afghanistan directly to a game role.  The Government essentially represents the Karzai administration, but there are game effects that seem to clearly outstrip the existing government’s capabilities.  The Coalition is a mix of ISAF, the US, some NGO capabilities, and other external actors attempting to influence actions in Afghanistan.  Finally, the greatest amalgam – the Warlords – are the ultimate ‘floater’ faction representing a collection of decidedly non-aligned ‘real’ actors who nevertheless represent a unified set of goals within the mechanics of the game.

The varying scenarios allow you start the war in 2002, 2005, or 2009, but all tend to end around 2013 or so.  Obviously, the 2009 scenario is the quickest of them, but any of them will take most of an afternoon, if not more.

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The setup for the “surge” scenario, starting in 2009.

 

Opening the Box

We’ve covered the unboxing before, but to save you jumping to the link, here’s what you get: a solid, 8-panel, mounted, folding map with a ton of useful marginal tracks, boxes, and record-keeping tools; a single sheet of mounted, die-cut counters that are virtually all administrative in nature; a bag of Euro-game-ish markers for the players, representing bases and forces; some dice and pawns; a bunch of plastic bags; the deck of cards used to drive the game along; and a ton of very clear, useful, and well-designed player cards that clearly lay out what players can do on any given turn. Continue reading →

01/24/14

World at War: Blood and Bridges and Operation Garbo – First Impressions!

Michael Eckenfels takes a look at two of Lock’n’Load’s key expansions to the World at War universe

Lock ‘N Load’s World at War series is a huge compendium of NATO vs. Warsaw Pack wargaming goodness, with several titles detailing that hypothetical conflict. In this First Impressions article, we’re taking a look at both Blood and Bridges and Operation Garbo as they are unboxed.

Click images to enlarge.  A lot.

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Blood and Bridges has what I’d think of as a ‘standard’ size wargame box, with Garbo being a bit smaller in both height and width. That’s a little annoying to someone as anal as I am when it comes to storing and displaying games (as well as books, actually), but that’s about the only bad thing I can say (and it’s not even THAT bad). The artwork, done by veteran artist Marc von Martial, is his usual high standard of excellence.

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01/10/14

RAF – Boardgame Review

Michael’s thorough and detailed look inside of Decision Games’ RAF gives you everything you need to decide if this excellent air combat game should be gracing your tabletop.

Michael Eckenfels, 10 January 2014

Designer: John Butterfield and Publisher: Decision Games

as always, click images to enlarge

While I am quite a World War II geek, I’m not much into the airpower aspects of it. Most of my interest in that regard is with the bombing campaigns (and with it, games like B-17 Queen of the Skies); indeed, I’m more taken in with tactical and strategic ground combat and the games that focus on that arena. That said, the Battle of Britain has always fascinated me as a true ‘turning point’ campaign that had so many fulcrums and angles that it wasn’t really a foregone conclusion that the RAF would have pulled off a victory.

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It was with great anticipation that, back in the late 80s, I found the first edition of RAF on my favorite hobby shop’s shelves. Solitaire games were big for me as it was hard back then to find opponents, and gaming fixes were sometimes few and far between. I was initially a little disappointed that I could only control the RAF in battle and not the Luftwaffe, but the game itself was solid, always different and therefore highly replayable, and even better, had quite a bit of tension to it.

 

I grabbed my copy of the second edition of RAF late this past summer and have been playing with it as often as I can in a chaotic house with a middle-schooler and a high-schooler and a wife who’s not all that big into games. No cats, fortunately.

 

Overview

RAF: The Battle of Britain 1940 is a simulation of the trying days of 1940 when the Luftwaffe sought to wipe the RAF from the skies of southern England, in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of England itself. In the original first edition, you could only play the RAF, as I mentioned above; however, in this second edition, not only can you run the RAF solo, but also the Germans solo, or even play a two-player game. All the angles are covered here, and the added ability to run the German campaign solitaire seems to make for a hit-in-the-making. Of course, one must first open the box and see which way their initial impressions will run…

Out of the Box

Initial impressions were highly favorable when I opened my copy. The counters are nice and thick, with clearly-delineated information; these counters are much easier on the eyes, actually, than the old white silhouette from the older version. Unfortunately, these nice counters are almost impossible to separate cleanly and require trimming to do so, which is a major pain in the tail section. Perhaps it is simply my OCD, but I believe that counters must be clean and have sharply-defined edges – no rabbit bushy tails sticking out from the corners, thank you.

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The cards are very nice as well, but I’m not sure they’re an improvement on the old version. While the older version was no-frills and was pretty much print on a card, they were legible and easy to read. The Second Edition’s cards are busy, with lots of background to decorate them. The fonts are similar, in that they’re sans serif, large, and sharp, but these new cards might be difficult to read for some people on a few of the cards.

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