University of Maryland Professor (and more importantly, wargamer!) Matt Kirschenbaum is on a European odyssey this summer. While in Switzerland for an academic conference, he made time to swing by a local museum and found an excellent display of wargaming history.
I was recently in Lausanne, Switzerland for a conference and, well, it rained the entire week. Looking around for something to do I noticed the Swiss Games Musuem, Le Musee Suisse du Jeu, was a short train ride away in the nearby town of La Tour de Pielz. Reading further, I discovered the museum was housed in a castle. A games museum in a castle? Let’s go! Upon arrival, I found two unexpected bonuses: first, the weather briefly cleared, *and* there was a special exhibition of WWI games on!
Great chips-and-soda game that is familiar in gameplay, but with just enough added complexity to keep players engaged throughout the game. Combat is nuanced but still fast-flowing, and players have to make serious strategic choices at every turn.
Review by Brant Guillory, about 7 years ago 🙂
This review originally appeared in Scrye Magazine
Number of players: 2-6
Designed for ages: 12 and up
Learning Curve: Low to Medium
Playing time: 1-3 hours
Pros: Visually grand; familiar mechanics; lots of choices for players
Cons: Backstory irrelevant to gameplay; some game effects not clearly explained
Dust, Fantasy Flight’s new “big box” game, is based on the comics of the same name, in which history was altered by the discovery of alien technology on a polar expedition early in WWII. You now know more than you need to know about the backstory of the game in order to play it. But don’t let that get you down, because Dust is a great game, regardless of the story behind it.
Players are trying to gain victory points by controlling power sources, conquering their opponents, and dominating certain numbers on the map. They do so by marshalling their armies, and balancing the manufacture of forces with the usage of them. Continue reading →
World at War: Blood and Bridges, Published by Lock ‘n Load Publishing
Review by Michael Eckenfels, 13 July 2014
INTRODUCTION
The fascination with the hypothetical balloon going up in Europe in the 80s doesn’t cease to amaze me. I think this is mainly because I am a child of the 80s and during that time, as I was getting into wargaming, a conventional NATO vs. Warsaw Pact ground war was a very real possibility. Gaming it out to bloody completion was compelling and riveting for me. And now, about a quarter century after the Berlin Wall fell and communism (more or less) has left Europe and Russia, it’s still something of a hot gaming topic. Whether you play it out on your PC or on your dining room table, there’s commie tanks looking to grind outnumbered Westerners under their treads, somewhere. Blood and Bridges is a Lock ‘n Load game that captures a slice of the West vs. East “war” in the 1980s. It is not a grand strategic game, but rather a tactical one, that focuses on platoon-level combat. If you’re looking to decide the fate of the entirety of Western Europe, you’re going to be disappointed. However, this game delivers, in a way, something better: a focal point battle (or series of battles) fought over the Rhine River Valley in the western part of West Germany. The premise is: the Soviets have taken something of a beating from NATO ground forces, but have doggedly ground their way forward, and are making a final, massive thrust towards this all-important geographic feature. In their way is the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), making a steadfast final stand of sorts – a very British thing to do! Continue reading →
Grogheads’ Corinne Mahaffey sat down to talk with Academy Games’ Uwe Eickert at Origins. In person, Uwe radiates a cheerful enthusiastic intensity; game design is clearly one of his passions!
Grogheads: What new games do you have coming up?
Academy Games: The Conflict of Heroes Solo Expansion, and Conflict of Heroes – Guadalcanal are shipping soon. We will have a Kickstarter for Conflict of Heroes: D-Day Airborne Battles this fall!
Academy Games
In addition, in 2015 we expect to publish the first game in our Civil War/Napoleonics series: Gettysburg – Day 1 Bloody Crossroads. This will be the first game in a 2 or 3 volume set based on this battle. The map boards and counters are big and incredibly beautiful! (Check our website for pictures [http://academygames.com/games/fight-for-the-colours/bloody-crossroads-gettysburg-day-1]) This is a new system that implements some of our newest and most advanced design mechanisms; there will be no dice, no numbers on the counters, and no charts to look up. You will be able to see the detailed state of each Regiment by quickly looking at its Brigade Command board. This will tell you its fatigue, morale, and current capabilities. The game can be played with 1 to 8 players and the decision cycle for each player is constant, with little to no down time.
We have been doing a great deal of research on the US Civil War, concentrating on the soldier’s fatigue and mental aspects of combat. We have factored these aspects into the game mechanism, so that brigades act more like they did in battle, often flowing forward and back towards the enemy. We’ve been working on this for 4 years and hope to publish it in 2015.
Grogheads: Could you compare how you build computer games versus board games? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each medium?
Academy Games: We always start with the board game because we find we have more subtlety when we design the board game. If we have no computing power, then we build a better, more intuitive, more streamlined game to begin with, which we can then move to the computer.
When we create board game mechanics, the results are transparent; we know why we came to the in-game result that we did, and we learn the strategy of the game.
Computer war game AIs are often designed with a biased advantage. They are often given limited, hard coded orders. However, human thought patterns are not limited in this way. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) that we have developed for Conflict of Heroes utilizes a unique Emergent Behavior and Agent Based Logic that evaluates Battlefield Situational Conditions. The AI then implements the best Tactical Response based on its available unit assets and resources. If the forces and logistics are available, the order is executed by the best available AI unit. If not, the secondary procedure order is implemented.
We think people will be surprised by the intuitiveness of our board game AI. Our AI does not “smooth” results or have arbitrary advantages. No matter which side you take, the AI will kick most players’ butts 60% of the time. This system has gone through several development cycles and we have had help from some of the most cutting edge computer programmers, active duty Army officers, and game designers.
So back when GMT had their sale-most-excellent at the beginning of the summer, Vance picked up their strategic WWII ETO game Unconditional Surrender, and has shared the photos of their unboxing.
I received GMT’s Unconditional Surrender! today that I ordered from their recent 50% off sale.
Here’s all the WWII in Europe goodness inside the box.
Full colour 48 page Rule book, with lots of designer notes spread throughout.
Also a full colour 52 page Play book, for scenario info and other goodies.
Not often that a 3 player games comes with enough player aid cards so each has their own copy!
Three sheets of 1/2″ counters. 840 in all.
Closeup of the fine art on the counters.
And the map! Two 22″x34″ un-mounted map sections with charts and turn track on thick glossy paper.
