05/3/13

Wargame: AirLand Battle – AAR

Developer: Eugen Systems

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Author: Jim Zabek

The closed beta has been released for Wargame: AirLand Battle and I’m having a blast with it. The sequel to Wargame: European Escalation, it builds upon the strength of the land units and adds a robust air power component. Gameplay resembles a tactical RTS, but the units are modeled after historical NATO and Warsaw Pact units. This provides a great mix of real-time tactical action with hard-hitting Cold War units. The beta has only released the multiplayer part of the game, and in this one I jump into a six-player game in the last available slot as the Warsaw Pact. I select an East German force just to see how it plays. While I did play Wargame: European Escalation I didn’t spend much time with the multiplayer game and this aspect is new to me.

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05/1/13

Welcome to May-viation!

Today starts a new month and we here are GrogHeads never like to pass up the opportunity to talk about our two favorite pastimes: military history and gaming. One day Brant was playing solitaire on his Mac, bored out of his mind when the light went off. “May sounds like the start of the A in aviation. We’ll dedicate the month of May to military aviation!”

And so with little more than a poor alliteration and some concatenization we created May-viation.

Despite our lack of planning and vision we have managed to work up enough articles that we think we can manage to publish most of our content in May about military aviation, be it games, history, or both. Exceptions will take place. We can’t force everyone on Kickstarter to only create games that fit our theme, so while the boys at GARPA will be looking for air-based wargames we can’t promise they’ll find them. And variety is the spice of life, so expect a few non-aviation themed articles once in a while.

But rest assured that if you’ve been hankering for some air superiority, we’ll do our best to bring it to you throughout the month. We’re also going to launch a contest. Because March Mayhem was such a success we have decided to do something similar to it for May. We will publish a list of 16 early period World War II single-seat mono-engine fighters, and the first 16 guys to claim them in our forums will get to dogfight until the top aircraft, as voted on by our forumites, has been declared. Yes, there will be some legalese (set anchor to verbiage below) just to ensure anyone with insomnia has some reading material, but the good news is that we’ve got some prizes on the way from a number of companies. Not all of them have arrived yet and we don’t want to offer something we don’t have in-hand yet, but we’re wargamers and it is May-viation, so figure that the prizes should fit the theme.

With that in mind, allow me to introduce the 16 contenders for best early war fighter (single-seat, mono-engine, yada-yada):

Best Single-Seat Mono-engine Early Fighter Aircraft of WWII (nothing past 1941)

  Bell P-39 Airacobra
  Curtiss P-40 Warhawk
Dewoitine D.520
Focke-Wulf Fw 190
Grumman F4F Wildcat
  Hawker Hurricane
Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3
  Lavochkin La-5
  Macchi C.202
Messerschmitt Bf 109   
Mitsubishi A6M Zero
Nakajima Ki-43   
Reggiane Re.2001
Rogožarski IK-3
  Supermarine Spitfire
Yakovlev Yak-1

These aircraft were selected by yours truly. The decision to cut off with this list was based on the rough production year (or at least saw a prototype) of 1941, the fact that I wanted to have 16 planes – no more, no less – and that if we went much later we’d get ourselves into aircraft that ended up later in the war and really have an issue with apples-to-oranges comparisions (yes, I’d love a good discussion of the P-51D versus the Me-262, but we’ll save that for another time). So the choice of selecting these aircraft is mine and mine alone. Arbitrary? I hope not. Yell at me in the forums if you don’t like them, but there it is.

Contest registration will run from May 1 – May 9, 2013

follow the jump for the rules
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04/30/13

Tuesday Screenshot

Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai

It was almost poetic.

My clan, the last supporting the Shogunate, was being destroyed by the invasion of new cultural ways we fought so hard to resist. Overlooking the courtyard I did not feel sad but proud that we had survived as far as we did.

But then grief did overtake me…would Japan, or the world, ever see men like us again? Would we be totally snuffed out? It just couldn’t be true. I could not accept that this was the final battle of my kind. I hated to think that we would disappear forever. I could not accept it.

Then…from what must have been miles away…great deep-sounding, booming shots, like a volcano erupting, were fired at my keep from the great iron ships in the harbor, destroying one of the towers and killing dozens of my samurai in just one salvo. I jumped from the wall, landing in the high grass and ran uphill away from the inferno my fortress had become.

I never looked back.

04/27/13

Small General Eastern Front

Review by Jim Zabek, 27 April 2013

Publisher & Developer: Victor Reijkersz Games

Great gameplay on the go? Believe it! If you’re on an Android phone, you’ve got a new ‘must-play’ game.

About a year ago Grogheads published a review of Small General. Set in a generic World War II-ish environment it to offered a non-historical operational wargame to players with Android-powered devices. Developed by VR Designs, the same development house that recently won an Order of the Hex award for great historical gameplay and Third Place in our Readers’ Choice Awards, it should come as little surprise that a more historically-focused game for Android devices would soon follow.

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04/26/13

GARPA 17 – GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory

garpa

by Dan Pinkham and Lloyd Sabin, 26 April 2013

As April comes to a close we look forward to those May flowers, dancing around the Maypole and the much anticipated Mayviation here at GrogHeads. In the meantime, we bring you another installment of your favorite bi-weekly wallet emptying column.

Tabletop Gaming

Lincoln’s War by Brian Youse and MMP

$37,562 of a $40,000 goal funding ending May 2nd

In the midst of the 150th anniversary remembrances of the American Civil War comes a boardgame with a unique look at the conflict. Instead of focusing strictly on the battles and military operations, Lincoln’s War takes a look at the political and logistical side of the war. Opponents take on the roles of Davis and Lincoln and spend political currency (PCs) to lead their nations through the war and ultimately to victory. PCs are, “used to promote worthy commanders, purchase war material, restore confidence or be translated into direct support for commanders in the field. Driving an opponent to 0 PCs may bring on auto-victory, but most games rely on a variety of geographical objectives.”
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