Month: April 2016

04/12/16

News! Hasbro Announces New Prez for WOTC

Check out the latest from Wizards of the Coast ~

GrogHeads Newsdesk, 12 April 2016

 

Hasbro, Inc. today announced that Greg Leeds has resigned as President of Wizards of the Coast, and will be replaced by Chris Cocks who joins the company from Microsoft. Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, offers games and entertainment under world-renowned brands such as MAGIC: THE GATHERING, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, and DUEL MASTERS. Leeds has served as the President of Wizards of the Coast since 2008, and started at Hasbro in 2001. He will stay on to ensure a smooth transition to Cocks, who will officially join the team in Seattle on June 6.

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04/10/16

Ground Branch!

This authentic look at modern special operations combat is making slow, but steady progress

Craig Handler, 10 April 2016

Ground Branch has been in development for a very long time, but it is finally starting to make some noticeable progress. It remains to be seen whether this will be a true successor to Rainbow 6.  At Grogheads, our fingers and toes are crossed!

Accessories will be expanded.

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04/10/16

News! Airfix Battles Coming Soon

Check out the latest from Modiphiüs ~

GrogHeads Newsdesk, 10 April 2016

Whether it’s British commandos, US Marines or Germany’s Afrika Korps, Airfix’s 1/72 scale soldiers have been fighting their wars across carpets, dining tables and gardens for decades.

Airfix_Bats_largeAirfix is a fondly remembered part of everyone’s childhood and the company are famous for their line of injection-moulded plastic aircraft, tanks and soldiers.  The Airfix brand has been synonymous with model kits for years and now it’s back with a vengeance, with Airfix Battles bringing those adventures to life and its campaigns to a tabletop near you.

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04/9/16

GrogHeads Interviews Dr Ezra Sidran

The master of artificial intelligence returns to hobby gaming after a sojourn into the professional gaming world ~

Jim Owczarski, 09 April 2016

I write about wargames because I love them and want to share them with others.  One of the added benefits is being able to meet some of the people who made the games that stole away entire years of my life as I imagined myself Alexander, Grant, or, most frequently, Berthier.  I’m very pleased to have now added Dr. D. Ezra Sidran, designer of the seminal Universal Military Simulator and Universal Military Simulator II.

He’s recently returned to commercial wargame production after a while away — some of the reasons for which he goes into in this interview — to begin work on a new game based on the classic Kriegsspiel.  Titled General Staff, it promises to take a typically Sidranian (neologism for “awfully damned different”) look at digital wargaming along with a level of A.I. that I myself had once described as chimerical.

He was kind enough to answer my questions, even those which were likely of interest only to myself, and along the way talk about his games old and new, digital wargames in the neolithic era (the 1980s), and what he’s been up to since companies like Firebird, Rainbird, and even Microprose closed their doors.

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04/8/16

GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #91

A hefty dose of groggy tabletop goodness from guys that are not the biggest publishers out there ~

GrogHeads Staff, 08 April 2016

Moscow ’41. Wargaming on the Eastern Front (Ventonuovo Games)
$15k of $5600, ends 1 May 2016

Scaling down from the theater-wide Blocks in the East, Ventonuovo’s latest offering focuses on the initial German campaign down Moscow. A block-unit and area-movement game, M’41 lets players re-fight the vital campaign that Hitler was sure would knock the Soviets out of the war. The graphics on the block stickers are fantastic, and the colors pop against the gorgeous map. The Germans are trying to seize Moscow as quickly as possible, while the Soviets are patching their lines with a mixture of remnant units and full-strength, but untested ones, leading a tense sequence of probing, responding, and exploiting on the battlefield. Rumble over to their Kickstarter page and help them get to their stretch goals.

g91-m41

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