Tag Archives: GMT
Winterfest: Wargaming’s Mini-Mecca
Pull out of the winter doldrums with a heavy dose of hex-and-counter happiness ~
Gary Mengle, 28 February 2018
A small gathering of wargamers has met in Sandusky, Ohio for the last 21 years. While the Cedar Point amusment park sits frozen just up the road and Sandusky sleeps through its winters, the February weather is ideal for wargaming. The centerpiece is a small handful of monster wargames, with smaller titles played on the side and a variety of pickup games in the evenings, or throughout the day as folks shake loose from their bigger games.
This year the featured monsters were a playtest of OCS Third Winter and a combined La Battaille game of Ligny and Quatre Bras. The venerable Stonewall Jackson’s Way was also played throughout the event, as well as twin games of Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg. Smaller but nevertheless multi-day games included TCS Omaha, OCS Sicily: Triumph & Tragedy, OCS Tunisia II and a double-blind game of Flat Top. Short-format actions included Amateurs to Arms, The Napoleonic Wars, Close Action and Star Fleet Battles. It would be impossible to categorize the sole miniatures game of Teutoburger Wald as “small” but it only took a few hours in each of two playthroughs.
As you can see from the above list, titles from The Gamers and Multi-Man Publishing were very well-represented, but stuff from GMT, Avalon Hill, Clash of Arms and even ADB got busted out and played. Plans for next year’s games are already afoot. This was my first year in attendance – it won’t be the last. As one of the new guys I was made to feel very welcome, and there was always something available that I wanted to play. Even with an event-long attendance of less than 30, Winterfest is a great little event that you should take a look at if you’re in or near the Midwest or can’t make the annual pilgrimage to Tempe.
More Info:
Winterfest Wargaming
Ardwulf’s Lair
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GMT’s Next War: Poland – First Look!
What’s lurking inside the game about a we-hope-it-remains-hypothetical conflict? ~
Vance Strickland, 6 December 2017
Goodies contained in the latest installment of the Next War series – Poland
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
GrogHeads Central Command Origins Events 2017
What’s coming up at Origins this summer? ~
GrogHeads Staff, 8 April 2017
Per GAMA, event registration goes live on 3 May.
What’s on tap this year? Plenty!
- Tournaments! We’ve got afternoon/evening tournaments for Lock’n’Load Tactical, Quartermaster General, Spearpoint 1943, and Twilight Struggle
- Team / Group events! In addition to our Command Post Wargaming, we have a pair of Team COIN games back this year, plus big team games of Old School Tactical, Sergeants!, and Crucible of Force (Slaughter in the Snow).
- Kids! We’ve got a special wargaming program this year for the kids – yes, KIDS! We’ve got 4 games that we’ll be running all weekend, in shorter 1-hour sessions. And for any kid who plays all 4 games at least once each, we’ve got a special Junior General prize. These games are for kids age 7-14, and they must have an adult come to the table with them.
Which companies are here with us?
- Griggling Games! Quartermaster General, and some expansions
- Flying Pig Games! Mark’s got 5 (five! fünf! cinco! V!) different games over the course of the weekend with us
- Enterprise Games! With their support for our GMT events again this year, we’ve Fields of Despair, Wing Leader Supremacy, some COIN events, C&C Ancients for the kids, and the Twilight Struggle tournament
- Collins Epic Wargames! We’re running Spearpoint 1943 events (for the kids, too), but look for Polyversal, also
- Lost Battalion Games! The always-awesome Sergeants! games are back, and look for their award-winning tiles, too
- Proving Ground Games! Bringing the lead to the battle, with their minis wargaming, and a special movie-monster scenario for the kids
- Lock’n’Load Games! Nations at War, LNLT, and tanks for the kids
Over 65 events across 4 days, for all your wargaming goodness. Plus, show up Wednesday afternoon and see what the staff has on the table just for their own fun 🙂
When you’re looking for our events in the Origins master event grid, they all start with “GrogHeads Presents”. We did that to make it easier to find when sorting through a giant spreadsheet with over 6000 events, however we stripped it out of the names on our event grid here just to simplify the listings.
Don’t forget that everyone who plays in our events gets a discount with our vendor partners, and gets entered for some great Sunday-morning raffle prizes. There’s also at least one prize for one of the players at every one of our events.
Note that the kids’ events – as noted above – have a special prize for kids who check out all 4 of the different games, and do not have prizes for each individual event.
Click through for the sortable table of events
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.
