Tag Archives: European Theater
GrogHeads Analyzes Order of Battle: Kriegsmarine
Some thoughts on strategy for your naval battles ~
Avery Abernethy, 20 August 2017
Avoid purchasing battleships.
I have several strategy suggestions gleaned from three completed games. Avoid purchasing battleships. They are slower than cruisers and their firepower against surface ships are not worth the extra price. But the obsolete battleship you start with at Danzig is remarkably effective as an anti-aircraft platform. It is helpful to keep her alive. You need to stay with the Deutchland cruiser class for two reasons. First, they are less expensive. Second, they have a one hex greater firing range than the Admiral Hipper class. The extra firing range is much more important than slightly higher damage.
GrogHeads Reviews Order of Battle: Kriegsmarine
Battles in the North Sea at the Atlantic rage through WWII ~
Avery Abernethy, 19 August 2017
After the successful invasion of Norway in 1940, German naval combat was largely limited to submarine warfare, commerce raiders and costal defense. Order of Battle WW2: Kriegsmarine is the fifth supplement in the Order of Battle series. The Kriegsmarine single-player game puts you in the role of the commander in chief of the German Navy and provides extensive what-if options to WW2 German Naval operations. I purchased Kriegsmarine and played it through three times.
Tuesday Interview – Luke Hughes of Burden of Command
The main brain behind the forthcoming Burden of Command has a chat with GrogHeads ~
Brant Guillory, 11 July 2017
When I hear “Burden of Command” I start to flash back to my days as a company commander, and being buried under a pile of 15-6 investigations, dental cat-IVs, and guys who couldn’t qualify with their personal weapons. I’m assuming the newly-announced “Burden of Command” game isn’t a game of competitive administrative duties. Give us the thumbnail insight of what we can expect in the new game, and why this one is more focused on the ‘burden’ of command than other similar games on the marketplace?
Damn, I can run but now I can’t hide. A real company commander, I’d love to know when and where! (ed note: nothing exciting – it was a National Guard HHC while the rest of the battalion was mobilized)
Now you are so right, real command is a lot of administrative tedium puncture by rare moments of terror. However, maybe not such a great game. Though the game “Papers Please” might teach us differently. What you can expect in BoC is not only the command and control decisions you associate with classic wargames (directing fire and maneuver, and the 4 F’s: find, fix, flank, and finish) but the morale oriented decisions we might associate with a classic tactical board game (ASL, Combat Commander, Band of Brothers, Fields of Fire).
Finally, and more unusually, you must take responsibility for the “preserve” decisions around the men’s physical and psychological welfare on and off the battlefield. They will look to you for the right mindset to adopt in the face of war. Novelist Karl Marlantes, who dropped out of his Rhodes Scholarship to serve as a 1st Lieutenant in Vietnam wrote “What It is Like to Go to War.” He argued that, like it or not, when you go to war you enter a spiritual journey because you are in the presence of death. You have entered the “Temple of Mars” as he so eloquently put it. Whether or not you or your superiors have prepared you for that experience, and for making life or death decisions is a different question. But the burden will be yours, prepared or not.
In sum, leadership in BoC is “Direct, Motivate, and Preserve.” And the burdens are many.
GMT’s Fields of Despair – First Look!
A look inside GMT’s WWI game ~
Chris Paquette, 26 April 2017
Fields of Despair is part of our program at this Summer’s GrogHeads Central Command at Origins. What’s inside the box?
The box – the usual big GMT package
Impressions of Strategic Command 3
And… a comparison with Strategic Command WW1 Breakthrough ~
Boggit, 23 February 2017
Developed by Fury Software, and Published by Slitherine
About three years ago I did a detailed review of Fury Software’s Strategic Command WW1: Breakthrough and ended up recommending it as “not only highly playable but also a very deep, subtle and immersive game.” What, I wonder, has Fury Software been doing since? Well, they’ve spent a couple of years working on their new WW2 game – Strategic Command WW2: War in Europe, and have changed their publisher.
So what’s it like?
The first thing to hit me between the eyes is the artwork. In comparison to SCWW1: Breakthrough, Strategic Command WW2 looks like a different game. Of course it is, but in comparison the artwork is stunning, and that includes the map, the counters, and the event notifications. It is a dramatic improvement.
The old style artwork…
