Monthly Archives: January 2017
The Tuesday Interview – Ty Bomba
Longtime industry veteran Ty Bomba gives us the low-down on his upcoming projects ~
Brant Guillory, 31 January 2017
You’ve certainly been around wargaming for a while. At last check, your designer page on BGG goes about 4575454646386 pages deep. Of all the games you’ve worked on as a designer or developer, which one sticks out as one that just immediately ‘clicked’ as a smooth design, and what’s one that took some serious wrestling to get it into shape to get published?
To answer the last part of that question first, I tend to have trouble with naval designs unless the assignment allows me to use an evolution of the old-AH War at Sea system. I don’t know why that is. As to design projects that “immediately clicked,” that happened the first time for me with Dynamo: Dunkirk 1940, which I did for World Wide Wargames back in the early 1980s. Since then it’s happened a lot – so often I couldn’t enumerate all of them. As a matter of fact, it’s happening right now, as I’m working on volume three of my “Putin’s Wars Series” – Putin’s Silk Road War: The Coming Sino-Russian Conflict for Central Asia – for One Small Step Games. My feeling is, if you have a creative occupation and that kind of thing isn’t happening for you a lot, you need to ask yourself if you’re in the right career field.
Screenshot Feature – Enderal Mod for Skyrim
Oooooooh…. Aaahhhhhhhh… ~
Lloyd Sabin, 21 January 2017
I’ve been playing this third party mod for the last few days and am absolutely blown away by the high quality of the writing, the story, the graphics, everything. It is almost Witcher-like in its quality.
Designers of Napoleon 1806
From across the Atlantic, Julien & Denis join us for a chat ~
Jim Owczarski, 26 January 2017
It will surprise no one hereabouts that I’ve an interest in the struggle between Prussia and France in the Fall of 1806. I’ve already written two articles about my planned trip to the Jena-Auerstadt battlefields this year and have been gleefully running a kriegsspiel of the campaign since October 2016 over in the Grogheads forum.
So, I would have been hard put to be more pleased when the Kickstarter campaign for Shakos’ Napoleon 1806 crawled across my news feed. Reading the rules on-line and reading up on the backgrounds of the team behind all this, I backed quickly. I wanted, though, to find out more about the this new company, the game’s designers, and what inspired them to take up what is, let’s be honest, not the most conspicuous of Napoleon’s campaigns.
The storm clouds gather
Wow. Just… Wow.
So what happened 5 years ago today? ~
Brant Guillory, 26 January 2017
Five years ago, we opened our forums here at GrogHeads. Our front page followed shortly thereafter, and we’ve been talking games all along.
We wanted GrogHeads to be an independent voice in the strategy gaming world. We also wanted to make sure we covered strategy gaming across the entire spectrum of gaming – tabletop, digital, team, distributed, multiplayer, whatevs! – and follow the interests of our members.
Do we get it right every time? Nope.
Does that stop us from trying? Double nope.
By the end of February, we had over 100 members in our forums. Within 2 years, we were running a wargaming program at Origins. Along the way, we’ve podcasted, reviewed, pontificated, sarcasmed, photo’ed, gamed, AAR’ed, voted, and discussed all manner of strategy games, and more.
We’re on our 4th iteration of our Readers’ Choice awards, planning our 4th GrogHeads Central Command at Origins, and in March we’ll run our 5th college hoops Bracket Challenge (hey, don’t laugh – it’s a big hit every year). We’re a few dozen months, a few hundred reviews and a few thousand pictures into covering all sorts of games.
So how are you getting involved? Are you talking games in our forums? Sharing an AAR with the gang? Coming to Origins to join us for a weekend-plus of great gaming? Subscribing to the podcast? Following us on Twitter? Hanging with us on FaceBook? All of the above?
Whatever it is, we hope you have a great time doing it, just like we do.
So from all of us here at GrogHeads, to all of you strategy gamers everywhere, wherever you are and whatever you’re playing – thank you, from the bottom of our dice cup.
Here’s to a many more years to come.
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
2017 Convention Calendar
Your local convention… and plenty of national ones! ~
GrogHeads Staff, 25 January 2017
A few of these have already passed… sorry – we were trying to get the later-in-the-year dates together, but some of them have yet to be announced. We’ll update this all year long, so keep it bookmarked for reference!
If we missed your favorite – leave us a comment with the link at the bottom, and we’ll get it added.
Siege of Augusta
13-15 January, Augusta, GA
Winter Offensive
12-15 January, Bowie, MD
MMP’s key ‘local’ convention full of all things ASL, other MMP games, and late-night Eurogaming.
Game On!
9-12 Feb, Seattle, WA
An ASL tournament, along with the Hank Award and all sorts of hex-and-counter goodness.
