With the recent launch of CGSC’s “Brown Bag” wargaming lunch program, we reached out to the guys at Ft Leavenworth to ask about how hobby wargaming is making its way (back) into the professional ranks ~
Brant Guillory, 07 February 2017
So there was mention of a “brown bag” lunch series of wargames for Army officers to come learn about this crazy hobby of ours, and – we’re assuming – learn how it can all tie into the profession of arms for their future benefit. Can you tell us a little bit about how the series got started, and what the expectations were for the initial ramp-up of the program?
The idea for the Brown Bag Gaming Program came from our desire to provide a wider array of games that we can fit into our Training with Simulations elective course. The more we thought about it, the more objectives we realized it might fill.
The core tenet of Brown Bag Gaming is that the development of simulations professionals requires the exploration and discussion of a wide variety of modeling and simulation approaches. The best means of accomplishing this is to experience the models and simulations in action. Less formally, that means playing games and thinking about them critically.
The nominations came in throughout 2016. After our annual January voting, we bring your the Readers’ Choice Award Winners for game-year 2016 ~
Congrats to our winners! OVERALL TABLETOP GAME – Star Wars: Rebellion OVERALL DIGITAL GAME – Twilight Struggle, digital edition Digital Wargame – Twilight Struggle, digital edition Digital RTS – Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak Digital RPG – Uncharted 4 Digital FPS – Battlefield 1 Digital Family / Sports Game – FIFA 17 Digital 4X Game- Civilization 6 Digital Expansion / DLC – Order of Battle: US Marines Tabletop Wargame – Wing Leader: Supremacy Tabletop Strategy Game – Star Wars: Rebellion Tabletop RPG – Star Wars: Force Awakens Tabletop Euro / Family Game – Terraforming Mars Tabletop Reprint – Silver Bayonet 25th Ed AAR of the Year – War in the Pacific AE – KyzBP & UCG
At GrogHeads, we give our readers the final say on the best games of the year, and here are the 2016 Readers’ Choice Awards…
We try to be as responsive as we can to our readers, and include every nomination, checking only for only one criteria: released in the correct year. We open the threads at the start of the year (2017 threads are already open!) and leave them up even into the first week of the next year. Somehow, even with an entire year to nominate games, we still get hate-mail from around the web asking “why wasn’t _____ on the list?” The answer is the same every time: no one nominated it! It’s your award, and you dear reader, get to pick your own choices.
This year’s winners? Here they go. And remember, all of them were selected by you!
GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2016 Tabletop Game of the Year was Star Wars: Rebellion, a game we discussed at length on the GrogCast last fall. Falling Sky, the latest in the COIN series, finished second. Ventonuovo’s visually stunning Moscow ’41 took third.
The GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2016 Digital Game of the Year was the adaptation of the excellent Twilight Struggle tabletop game. Second place was claimed by Strategic Command: WWII in Europe, and third overall was XCom 2.
In response to reader inquiries, we also added a new feature this year to recognize excellent After-Action Reports from games. Although we did not limit the category to those AARs that appeared on our site, it’s interesting to note that all three of the top finishers were in our forums, rather than on our front page, indicating that we clearly have to some talented writers in our forums. The overall winner of the inaugural AAR of the Year for 2016 was War in the Pacific AE, authored by KyzBP & Undercovergeekin the GrogHeads forums.
UNCLE ALBERT’S AUTO STOP & GUNNERY SHOP
2035 CATALOG
Ah, good ol’ Uncle Albert and his catalogs ‘o death. If the ‘basic’ Car Wars rules just didn’t have enough creative ways to destroy, maim, and otherwise disassemble, the Uncle Albert catalogs certainly helped pad those needs, and then some.
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.
