Month: February 2016

02/27/16

2015 Readers’ Choice Award Winners

The nominations came in all year long.  The voting lasted a whole month.  And now the results are here, and your voices have spoken! ~

Gold Medals!
Congrats to our winners!
Overall Digital Game of the Year ~ Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa
Overall Tabletop Game of the Year ~ Churchill
Digital Wargame of the Year ~ Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa
Digital RPG of the Year ~ The Witcher III: Wild Hunt
Digital Civ/City/Rail-Builder of the Year ~ Cities: Skyline
Digital Sports Game of the Year ~ Project Cars
Digital Action/FPS Game of the Year ~ XCOM Enemy Within
Digital Expansion/DLC of the Year ~ Attila TW: Age of Charlemagne
Tabletop Wargame Game of the Year ~ Churchill
Tabletop Strategy Game of the Year ~ Star Wars: Imperial Assault
Tabletop Adventure Game of the Year ~ Dead Of Winter
Tabletop Euro/Family Game of the Year ~ Pandemic Legacy
Tabletop Expansion of the Year ~ Spearpoint 1943: Eastern Front
Tabletop Reprint/Rerelease of the Year ~ Empire of the Sun

At GrogHeads, our readers have the final say on the best games of the year, as we unveil the 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards…

First off, this year saw a variety of well-loved games released, and others updated with some excellent expansions.  And yet, even with an entire year to nominate games, we still had folks bemoaning “why wasn’t _____ on the list?”  The answer is the same every time: no one nominated it!  It’s your award, and you dear reader, get to pick your own choices.

Several categories were hotly contested, including at least one where we had a tie.  A few were runaways.  All of them were selected by you!

The GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2015 Digital Game of the Year was Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa, followed by Combat Mission:Black Sea, and XCOM Enemy Within in third.

GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2015 Tabletop Game of the Year was Churchill, which beat out Enemy Action: Ardennes.  Triumph & Tragedy squeaked into third, mere votes ahead of Star Wars: Imperial Assault.

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02/26/16

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.

g88-pendragon

 

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02/25/16

Civ5 AAR: Empires of the Smoky Skies, Part II

How Smoky are the Smoky Skies? Well, they’re starting to heat up ~

By Brant Guillory, GrogDude

Click images to enlarge

Last time, we kicked off the scenario and got our first city in the ground. This time, we’re going to poke around the area a bit, and put a few more cities down.

civv

Howdy Neighbor!
Pulias is just north of me.

civv

Swap Embassies
And poof! his capital is on the map.

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02/24/16

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.

TCTD-1

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