Facebook has established themselves as one of the leading social media giants of the 21st century. Mark Zuckerberg and his team have made it a top priority to purchase other companies and make acquisitions in ways they see benefiting the overall success of their company. This business mentality has led them to make some historic purchases – such as Instagram and Whatsapp that were bought for $1 billion and $19 billion, respectively. However, one of Facebook’s more recent acquisitions involving Oculus VR got them into a sticky lawsuit.
Mark Zuckerberg made a clear indication of Facebook’s future direction with the purchase of Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 billion. The technology company is known for their creation of Oculus Rift, a high-tech Virtual Reality simulator. What Facebook saw as a worthwhile investment has turned out to be nothing more than a thorn in their side.
With the recent launch of CGSC’s “Brown Bag” wargaming lunch program, we reached out to the guys at Ft Leavenworth to ask about how hobby wargaming is making its way (back) into the professional ranks ~
Brant Guillory, 07 February 2017
So there was mention of a “brown bag” lunch series of wargames for Army officers to come learn about this crazy hobby of ours, and – we’re assuming – learn how it can all tie into the profession of arms for their future benefit. Can you tell us a little bit about how the series got started, and what the expectations were for the initial ramp-up of the program?
The idea for the Brown Bag Gaming Program came from our desire to provide a wider array of games that we can fit into our Training with Simulations elective course. The more we thought about it, the more objectives we realized it might fill.
The core tenet of Brown Bag Gaming is that the development of simulations professionals requires the exploration and discussion of a wide variety of modeling and simulation approaches. The best means of accomplishing this is to experience the models and simulations in action. Less formally, that means playing games and thinking about them critically.
The nominations came in throughout 2016. After our annual January voting, we bring your the Readers’ Choice Award Winners for game-year 2016 ~
Congrats to our winners! OVERALL TABLETOP GAME – Star Wars: Rebellion OVERALL DIGITAL GAME – Twilight Struggle, digital edition Digital Wargame – Twilight Struggle, digital edition Digital RTS – Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak Digital RPG – Uncharted 4 Digital FPS – Battlefield 1 Digital Family / Sports Game – FIFA 17 Digital 4X Game- Civilization 6 Digital Expansion / DLC – Order of Battle: US Marines Tabletop Wargame – Wing Leader: Supremacy Tabletop Strategy Game – Star Wars: Rebellion Tabletop RPG – Star Wars: Force Awakens Tabletop Euro / Family Game – Terraforming Mars Tabletop Reprint – Silver Bayonet 25th Ed AAR of the Year – War in the Pacific AE – KyzBP & UCG
At GrogHeads, we give our readers the final say on the best games of the year, and here are the 2016 Readers’ Choice Awards…
We try to be as responsive as we can to our readers, and include every nomination, checking only for only one criteria: released in the correct year. We open the threads at the start of the year (2017 threads are already open!) and leave them up even into the first week of the next year. Somehow, even with an entire year to nominate games, we still get hate-mail from around the web asking “why wasn’t _____ on the list?” The answer is the same every time: no one nominated it! It’s your award, and you dear reader, get to pick your own choices.
This year’s winners? Here they go. And remember, all of them were selected by you!
GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2016 Tabletop Game of the Year was Star Wars: Rebellion, a game we discussed at length on the GrogCast last fall. Falling Sky, the latest in the COIN series, finished second. Ventonuovo’s visually stunning Moscow ’41 took third.
The GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2016 Digital Game of the Year was the adaptation of the excellent Twilight Struggle tabletop game. Second place was claimed by Strategic Command: WWII in Europe, and third overall was XCom 2.
In response to reader inquiries, we also added a new feature this year to recognize excellent After-Action Reports from games. Although we did not limit the category to those AARs that appeared on our site, it’s interesting to note that all three of the top finishers were in our forums, rather than on our front page, indicating that we clearly have to some talented writers in our forums. The overall winner of the inaugural AAR of the Year for 2016 was War in the Pacific AE, authored by KyzBP & Undercovergeekin the GrogHeads forums.
Longtime industry veteran Ty Bomba gives us the low-down on his upcoming projects ~
Brant Guillory, 31 January 2017
You’ve certainly been around wargaming for a while. At last check, your designer page on BGG goes about 4575454646386 pages deep. Of all the games you’ve worked on as a designer or developer, which one sticks out as one that just immediately ‘clicked’ as a smooth design, and what’s one that took some serious wrestling to get it into shape to get published?
To answer the last part of that question first, I tend to have trouble with naval designs unless the assignment allows me to use an evolution of the old-AH War at Sea system. I don’t know why that is. As to design projects that “immediately clicked,” that happened the first time for me with Dynamo: Dunkirk 1940, which I did for World Wide Wargames back in the early 1980s. Since then it’s happened a lot – so often I couldn’t enumerate all of them. As a matter of fact, it’s happening right now, as I’m working on volume three of my “Putin’s Wars Series” – Putin’s Silk Road War: The Coming Sino-Russian Conflict for Central Asia – for One Small Step Games. My feeling is, if you have a creative occupation and that kind of thing isn’t happening for you a lot, you need to ask yourself if you’re in the right career field.
Don’t forget to have your say about your favorite 2016 games! ~
GrogHeads Staff, 23 January 2017
It’s time to get your votes in for the Readers’ Choice Awards for game-year 2016.
The only required items are the overall digital / tabletop games, at the end of each of those categories.
This year we’ve made a few changes:
We’ve consolidated the overall number of categories within the tabletop/digital divisions, to try to keep them as consistent as possible year-to-year
We’ve added an “AAR of the Year” category, at the request of the readers and members of our forums
We received no nominations for miniatures rules/expansions, so we’re not doing away with them as a category, but we can’t give you what you don’t nominate!
Facebook has established themselves as one of the leading social media giants of the 21st century. Mark Zuckerberg and his team have made it a top priority to purchase other companies and make acquisitions in ways they see benefiting the overall success of their company. This business mentality has led them to make some historic purchases – such as Instagram and Whatsapp that were bought for $1 billion and $19 billion, respectively. However, one of Facebook’s more recent acquisitions involving Oculus VR got them into a sticky lawsuit.
