02/14/14

GARPA 38 – GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory

This week’s GARPA? A truckload of new games on Kickstarter, and some wargaming, too!

Board Games

GBACW: Twin Peaks (GMT Games)
p500 – not there yet! Pre-order price $41

Building off of one of wargaming’s most enduing game systems (TSS first rolled out in 1976), Twin Peaks govers the battles of Cedar Mountain and South Mountain, in the fall of 1862. It’s two games in one, and both part of the series that all ACW gamers already know and love. There’s a high level of complexity in the system, but that’s the tradeoff you make for the high degrees of realism and fidelity you get. It’s the seventh GMT game in this series, so you know what you’re getting into for art and design. Jump into the GBACW series with this while it’s on pre-order; hit GMT’s site to make your pledge.

Storm over Dien Bien Phu (MMP)
p500 – 156 of 520 needed, preorder price $33

The last gasp of the French in Southeast Asia, the decisive 1954 battle set set the stage for dramatic shifts in warfighting for the next half-century. MMP’s game gives players the familiar “Storm Over ____” system to jump into their game quickly, and augments gameplay with a deck of cards. The world was shifting from a WWII warfighting mindset ot something much more recognizably “modern” and you can game it out on your table if you pop over to MMP and place a pre-order for the game.

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02/13/14

Birth of the Federation, an AAR, Part 2

Part 2: Terraformin’

Fortunately there are no alien life forms in the Tohvun system. While this is a sad little system with tiny little planets (two Barren, one Desert, one Jungle, and one Arctic), the Jungle planet has a food bonus for its fertile soil, and the Desert planet has some great angles or something to it so it catches lots of rays for solar energy absorption. Or something. It’s pretty scientific, you probably wouldn’t even understand.

Those brave colonists immediately began to terraform the planets in the Tohvun system. Meanwhile, I took a look at how things were here in the Sol system. That’s where Earth is, don’cha know.

We’ve managed to terraform Mars, but not Venus, Mercury, or Pluto. Right now we have room for about another 80 population, but if we terraformed those three planets we’d have a shot at really growing our britches off.

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02/7/14

Picket Duty: Kamikaze Attacks against U.S. Destroyers – Okinawa, 1945 – First Look!

Michael Eckenfels unboxes another recent discovery!

Legion Wargames’ Picket Duty is a solitaire game from Steve Dixon, a designer that had a hand in creating B-29 Superfortress and its expansion, Hell Over Korea. I’ve been watching this title for some time now and was quite eager to get a copy, even though I’ve read discussions over on BoardGameGeek about how the current version 1.0 of the rules are confusing and a newer version is due out soon. Regardless, what I followed in development looked like a game with a lot of potential and great components.
You can view the game on Legion Wargames’ page here.

The box is a standard-sized wargame box, if a bit thinner than a ‘normal’ one.

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02/5/14

Book Review: Under a Graveyard Sky

A Review of Under a Graveyard Sky by John Ringo

Review by Avery Abernethy, 5 February 2014

John Ringo’s work is well known to many wargamers. He has many bestselling books with large amounts of tactical and strategic combat including the popular Posleen series, the Council War Series, and even an “X-Files meets the deadly soccer mom from Mississippi series” (Princess of Wands and Queen of Wands). A veteran of the U.S. Army’s 82^nd Airborne Division, Ringo’s work has appealed to many readers interested in action-packed combat.

Under a Graveyard Sky is a survivalist novel of a zombie apocalypse. Although I like post-apocalyptic fiction, zombies have never held my interest., as they are the epitome of mindless, tactically brain-dead opponents. The whole idea of a zombie apocalypse has always seemed so weird and boring that I bought the book in hardback and let it sit for five months unopened. I shouldn’t have waited so long, as Ringo has actually written an interesting, post-apocalyptic zombie book.