The siren song of pre-orders, begging for your wallet to open up and dispense your hard-earned shekels within.
Fog & Friction (Pondfoot Games) £2k of £14k, ends 31 May 2015
Another WWII card game? Why not?! Fog & Friction gets you into the battles of the Western front with a nifty two-battlefields-at-the-same-time mechanic that forces you to balance your efforts to keep your opponent guessing where the damage is coming from next. The artwork is period-evocative, and because the designers are based in the UK, the Commonwealth are not given second-shrift by the over-abundance of Yanks running around the game like they saved the world by themselves. Flip over to their campaign page and shoot off a few bucks. Half of our forum crew are already backing them, so you’ll have plenty of folks to play and discuss with.
Ron, thank you for agreeing to talk to Grogheads about World War 2 in Europe, and Middle East War. World War 2 in Europe is your latest game and has a lot of new features not found in earlier Schwerpunkt games like Anglo-German War, or Russo-German War.
The opening screen surrounded by key leaders of the war.
GrogHeads: Ron, tell us about yourself. What started your interest in gaming, and why did you decide to become a wargame developer?
Ron Dockal: I grew up in Houston, Texas in an area called the Heights. I had a group of friends who played Avalon Hill Wargames together. Spent many a lazy summer day doing this. Our group still gets together and our wives have become friends. I started building boardgames using white poster board at ten years old. I still have my first “attempt” at a boardgame called World War II Europe from 1963! During high school and college, I played these games once in a while and read history books about WWII. I became an electrical engineer, getting an MSEE in 1976 with a minor in programming. I met my wife on the job in 1987 and we married in 1991. She was a graphics expert in the aerospace business. Joining these things together set me on a path to start Schwerpunkt in 1995 with my wife.
After seeing a few discussions about Quartermaster General online – both positive and negative commentary included – I reached out to Ian Brody at Griggling Games to get a review copy for GrogHeads. I was looking forward to receiving this since it seems to simulate World War 2 in a very different manner than most games.
Here’s the box. I admit, in my eagerness, I removed the plastic shrink-wrap. I feel terrible that I didn’t capture a picture of it with the shrink-wrap. Why? Only because that’s what I’ve always done with all my unboxing articles so far.
The first expansion for BA2 Eastern Front is here. How does Kursk stack up?
Lloyd Sabin – April 20, 2015
Largess
Here in the West we tend to be a bit short-sighted when it comes to history. Take a look at the majority of American movies and books on World War II and the Western Front will almost always be the main focus. The Eastern Front, if discussed at all, is framed as a distant, alien component of World War II, not more than a sideshow because of its foreign nature to Americans.
As grogs, we know this is a huge mistake. World War II’s Eastern Front was the central land combat theater of the entire war, far larger and certainly more pivotal than the Western Front, dwarfing land combat operations anywhere else on the globe during World War II. It was on the Eastern Front that Adolf Hitler attempted to establish his concept of lebensraum for the Third Reich, where the Reich’s logistics and supply systems were severely tested by distance and weather, and, ultimately, where World War II was decided in a massive, bloody, total war to the death between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
And within this bloody total war, the central, deciding push was The Battle of Kursk (German offensive Operation Citadel), begun in July, 1943. It pitted almost 800,000 German troops under the command of Generals von Manstein, Kluge, Hoth, and Model (among others) against almost 2,000,000 Soviet troops led by General Zhukov and a cabal of other generals. In 2015 it’s almost impossible to conceive of these gigantic numbers of men, not including the thousands of tanks and heavy guns arrayed on both sides. In the end, The Battle of Kursk would further evolve beyond just being the most colossal battle on the most pivotal front of the war – it would also morph into the most gigantic clash of armor the world has ever seen.
Hard to resist the Kursk campaign now that is available, especially playing as the Germans.
