Tag: card-driven

08/1/18
ODD SPLASH2

GrogHeads Reviews One Deck Dungeon

Small stature. Big fun? ~

Avery Abernethy, 1 August 2018

One Deck Dungeon is a simple one or two character dungeon exploration game.  The two character game can be played either cooperatively with another person or both run by the same individual.  The game centers around rolling a handful of color coded die to overcome encounters.  The more experience your character has the more dice they obtain and the more ways they have to increase die values, swap dice of different colors, or gain additional dice.

The game mechanics are simple.  You pick either one or two characters from five choices (Fighter; Mage; Thief; Paladin; Archer).   Each character has different starting attributes on four different variables (melee, magic, nimbleness and health).  Different colored dice represent each attribute.  Next you pick an opponent as the “boss” of the dungeon out of a set of choices.  Bosses are rated at different difficulty levels and each changes the characteristics of the overall dungeon challenges.

click images to enlarge

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03/18/17

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics – EPIC!

Jim descends further into his Napoleonic madness with massive-scale gaming ~

Jim Owczarski, 18 March 2017

I have been waiting for this one for a long time.

It’s almost unreal to me that Battle Cry, the first of Richard Borg’s “Commands and Colors” series, was released in 2000.  I like the American Civil War well enough, but, from the beginning, I hoped that the simple, elegant system evident in the game could be elaborated into the best of all periods, Napoleonics.

In the years since, I’ve bought and happily played Memoir ’44 (2004), Commands and Colors: Ancients (2006), Battlelore (also 2006), not to mention the remarkable array of expansions, special editions, and the like for all these systems.  I gave Zvezda’s Samurai Battles a miss if only because it’s the only era covered that doesn’t appeal to me.

True Napoleonic wargamers are obsessed with scope, spectacle, and sweep.

And then it came out.  In 2010, GMT Games gave the waiting world Commands and Colors: Napoleonics.  Sure, it was wooden blocks not lovely figures.  Yes, it was the British, Spanish, and Portuguese versus the French.  And, yes, for reasons known only to the grim gods of game production, the Prussians were excluded from the included Waterloo scenario.  But it was Napoleonics and that, at first, was enough.

This was no longer the simplified rule set found in Battle Cry.  There was the forming of square; different grades of horse, foot, and guns; and even elegant rules to differentiate leaders and national troop characteristics.  In the latter case, French troops, and their famous columns, fight better in melee, while the British lines do real damage with ranged fire, &c.

After much fun was had, though, it was ultimately not enough.  True Napoleonic wargamers are obsessed with scope, spectacle, and sweep.  It is this that leads us to do really, really dumb things like this: Historicon 2010 Part V Wagram (Shako II) and Outro

For the record this is my shaky-cam — I’ve become better — but this game had run 14 hours before I had to leave with it far from finished. Continue reading →

09/30/16

GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #97

GARPA! ~

GrogHeads Staff, 30 September 2016

The Russian Campaign, Designer’s Edition (GMT Games / Consim Press)
p500 $42 / MSRP $60

The Russian Campaign is an oft-revered game frequently mentioned among the ‘gold standards’ of classic wargaming.  It’s also been been mentioned with sputtered mutterings that vaguely sounds like “it costs how much?!?!”  Well, here’s your chance to get your hands on your own new, updated, corners-waiting-to-be-clipped copy of the classic.  You get 5 scenarios, counters with both NATO and icon artwork, full color rules & players aids, and 30 years of refinements and improvements to the rules, examples of play, game balance.  Blitz your way over to the p500 page to get your money down.

g97-rcbanner3a

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08/19/16

GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #95

Plenty of tabletop gaming goodness for you this time ~

GrogHeads Staff, 19 August 2016

Swords & Sails (VR Soft)
$3k of $42k, ends 16 September 2016

Not even close to making funding – yet – this campaign just launched and includes options for a pretty cheap print-and-play-only copy, as well as a pledge level just for the metal coins included in the game. Yep, metal coins. It’s set in 1000AD, and allows 2-7 players to tackle rewriting the history of Europe as the French, Byzantines, Germans, Russians, or others. There’s an espionage mechanic that’s rare in a game like this, as well as your usual 4x goodness that let you build armies, fleets, cities, and more. Explore your way through their campaign page and see what you think.

g95-swordsSails

 

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