Month: December 2014

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

 

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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.

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12/3/14

Eurofront II – First Look!

So what’s inside Columbia’s big ol’ Eurofront II box, anyway?

Cyrano, 3 December 2014

As much as I’ve defended the rituals of electronic gaming elsewhere on this site, I know in my soul that I will always love the monster board game.  I shall always love, for I am now too old to change, the pages of rules, piles of pieces, and the maps, the lovely, lovely maps over which I can pore like Berthier, imagining myself to have responsibility for the fates of armies of men.

Columbia Games’ Grant Dagleish took advantage of this when we talked at Origins about the company’s Eurofront II.  He lured me with talk of battles lasting days, if not weeks, and of near-sighted men waging the whole of World War II from beyond the Urals to the mountains Pyrenee.  I wound up angry-buying the Ogre Designer’s Edition at Origins, but, by the time GenCon rolled around — and Grant made the company’s usual generous convention discount offer, it was all too late.  I offer, then, this unboxing to the splendid excess of this monster.

The first thing to note is that Eurofront II is actually a bridge between the updated West Front II and East Front II, adding much to both and allowing the whole of the war to be played out simultaneously.  Here they stand together:

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