Monthly Archives: May 2016
Tracer Rounds: How Screwed Up Are American Sports?
Yep, we’re talking sports… ~
Brant, 9 May 2016
Since last Monday, Leicester City have won the Premier League title and Newcastle have all but consigned themselves to being relegated. And right there, I just lost 2/3 of my usual audience, so what the hell, who cares what I say next, right? I mean, seriously, just fuck wargaming and why bother and who cares and lets turn GrogHeads into a sports blog! Still with me? OK, cool.
The Leicester City story is the one that’s resonating more around the world, because it’s the upstart underdogs sticking around and kicking the tails off the big boys all year. It’s also remarkable because this isn’t a flash-in-the-pan run through an end-of-year tournament that we call the “playoffs” here in the US. This is a season-long sustainment of excellence in the face of some pretty daunting odds, not UConn getting hot and winning the six games they needed to win the NCAA title.
Here in the US, we’re used to talking about “who can get into the playoffs” and “who gets hot at the right time” and we even devote endless hours of argument at the end of the college football season to “who is playing best right now?” as though September never happened. We focus so much on the 3 rounds of playoffs, or 3 games of playoffs in football, that we lose sight of the sustained excellence over 4-6 months of continual games.
Perspective in Wargames: Who Exactly Are You?
When you’re “playing” the game, who are you “playing”? ~
Derek Croxton, 07 May 2016
You are Napoleon. You have a chance to remake the map of Europe with your Grande Armée. You are Robert E. Lee, trying to fend off the Union until foreign aid arrives. You are Patton, dashing through France with your Third Army.
These statements are typical of the sort of advertising used to sell wargames, and are indicative of why gamers play: they like assuming the role of an historical figure and get a vicarious thrill out of making the same sort of decisions, only trying to make better ones. 
Gaming is thus a form of role-playing, and a lot of the pleasure hinges on what historical figure one plays. Some people would never play the Union in Civil War games, others refuse to play the Confederacy: they are identifying with the historical actors in more than an intellectual sense. There are, of course, games that are entirely or almost entirely abstract, such as chess, which are also fun to play. While they provide the same sort of intellectual challenges, however, they do not provide the same kind of fulfillment as a chance to remake history.
The fun of gaming, then, is in part based on accepting historical limitations. There is always a desire to transcend these limitations – to have Napoleon win at Waterloo, for example – but certain restrictions have to be accepted. If one wants to be Napoleon, one has to accept the fact that France’s navy will probably not be a match for Britain’s and that one will be fighting a whole coalition of forces, just as one will benefit from having a nation in arms and well-disciplined, loyal, and courageous soldiers. History consists of a virtually infinite number of forces, of which an individual – the player – can only control a very few. This is precisely what drives a game: deciding how to act within the constraints of the historical situation. This article investigates the problems of trying to put players in historical roles: first of identifying proper historical figures to simulate, and second of creating the possibilities and limitations that those figures historically faced. I contend that a game is usually more fun and more realistic where a designer has given thought to these issues.
Gaming Nostalgia – Castle Creations Figures
#TBT at GrogHeads!
Remember the old magazine ads with sketches of the figures? How many of them did you trace with light paper to sketch over top of with your own character creations in the lunchroom at school?
click images to enlarge
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B-29 Superfortress: Bombers Over Japan, 1944-1945
– First Look!
The shrink comes off the box~
Michael Eckenfels, 04 May 2016
ed note: Michael sent this to us a looooooong while ago, and we misplaced it. Totally not his fault.
Obviously, the box, but what’s cool is it is new and still in shrink-wrap. That’s cool, considering the game is a few years old at this point.
Tracer Rounds: The Local Game Store – Guild Hall, Saloon, and Crack Dealer, all in one
Your FLGS probably deserves more respect that you’re giving it ~
Brant, 02 May 2016
I had to take a few weeks off. Sorry. The fallout from the last Tracer Rounds column cost me a good friend who thought I was (indirectly) taking shots at him and I hope that in time, we can reconcile our differences and become friends again. But while I’m sticking by everything that I said, the last 2-3 weeks have really reconfirmed why I was so reluctant to wade into the topic in the first place. 
There was another discussion that popped up on my online radar that wanted to explore, though, and it involved the role of the FLGS in our hobby. The genesis of the discussion was a new policy by some companies to release certain games through brick-and-mortar stores before making them available to online retailers, or setting certain pricing minimums for online stores, to keep them from undercutting the physical stores too much and driving them out of business.
For those of us where the brick-and-mortar stores serve a vital social role in our hobby, this is a Good Thing™ to help keep the community cranking along. It’s somewhere that gamers can discover new games, meet new gamers, casually watch games being played to gauge their own interest, and generally socialize with those that share the same hobby. It also gives us a local business to support that’s almost always run by fellow gamers.
