Every May, the good folks at the MHWA set up their long weekend of HUZZAH! It started as a minis-heavy gaming convention and has expanded to other tabletop games, as well. But lets face it, it’s the minis that look the best on the table.
click images to enlarge
And stay tuned for more convention coverage all summer long!
One of the great joys of the Kriegsspiel is the fog of war and command friction that results from any double-blind game. The Jena-Auerstedt campaign’s fights over 13 and 14 October made this point eloquently — and I am not only discussing the fact (alluded to in the videos) that during this period Napoleon lost Bernadotte’s I Corps for a fair amount of time and Brunswick lost contact with Blucher and Ruchel for several days.
While Murat, Lannes, and Davout were barrelling nigh Hell-fot-leather Northward along their western line of advance, Napoleon I himself could never quite figure out where the Prussians were. He kept punching forward hoping to hit something and never realized just how empty the battle space was. In the early marches, he failed to catch the divisions guarding the Hof gap and then both Marshals Soult and Ney kept nudging forward along the eastern routes trying to make contact with Hohenlohe’s men who scampered as fast as they were able.
Jokes to the contrary notwithstanding, the Kriegsspiel That Would Never End™ actually ended on 5 May 2018.
But that would be to begin at the ending, and no one wants that.
In the beginning, I was planning a trip to the Jena-Auerstedt battlefields and I had always had a love of Dr. Didier Rouy’s “The Flight of the Eagle” Napooleonic campaign system. I also enjoy the company of the crew from the GrogHeads forums and was delighted when a fair number of them responded to the idea of playing one of these Kriegsspiels with something other than derisive laughter or knowing dismissal. Continue reading →
Never have so many spent so much backing a game by so few that plays… so well? ~
Jim Owczarski, 31 March 2018
During the mad era when Lorraine Williams lead TSR, the company released, counter intuitively to some, a few of the most popular wargames ever created. Chief among these was The Hunt for Red October, but the list also includes bright lights like Red Storm Rising, A Line in the Sand, and, less brightly, Europe Aflame. This list was joined in 1990 by Battle of Britain (hereafter just BoB), a Richard Borg design that brought Mr. Borg’s love of light simulation and dice-heavy combat resolution to the skies over Britain and the English Channel in those early years of the Second World War.
More than 25 years later, the Plastic Soldier Company, which partnered with Mr. Borg to create the First World War iteration of his Commands and Colors system, launched a Kickstarter to re-release BoB and bring its production values up to contemporary wargame standards. The Kickstarter was well received, but, as with many of these endeavors, there were lots of delays, allegations of poor communication on the part of the company, and a fair amount of displeasure with the quality of some of the components. I received my own copy over a year after I backed it — about eight months after I expected it — and I’ve been having a go at the game with my son. What do I think of the re-boot? That would be telling; please read on.
