Age of Wonders 3 – An AAR
In French! Courtesy of Vincent Kowolik ~
click images to enlarge
03/8/16
Tag: PC Games
03/4/16
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #89
GARPA returns for more pre-order goodies ~
HOLDFAST: North Africa 1941-42 (Worthington Publishing)
$21k of $2500, ends 15 March 2016
Worthington’s Holdfast series is back. After Russia and Korea, they guys head to North Africa. The standard Holdfast features are back, with fog of war, fast play times, and engaging turn sequences that keep players constantly guessing about what’s up next. Like every other North Africa game, you need a table that’s about 24 inches wide and 28374652938762 feet long, but you’ll be chasing panzers across the sands before you know it. Rumble over to their campaign page and you can fire off your pledge.
02/27/16
2015 Readers’ Choice Award Winners
The nominations came in all year long. The voting lasted a whole month. And now the results are here, and your voices have spoken! ~
Overall Digital Game of the Year ~ Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa
Overall Tabletop Game of the Year ~ Churchill
Digital Wargame of the Year ~ Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa
Digital RPG of the Year ~ The Witcher III: Wild Hunt
Digital Civ/City/Rail-Builder of the Year ~ Cities: Skyline
Digital Sports Game of the Year ~ Project Cars
Digital Action/FPS Game of the Year ~ XCOM Enemy Within
Digital Expansion/DLC of the Year ~ Attila TW: Age of Charlemagne
Tabletop Wargame Game of the Year ~ Churchill
Tabletop Strategy Game of the Year ~ Star Wars: Imperial Assault
Tabletop Adventure Game of the Year ~ Dead Of Winter
Tabletop Euro/Family Game of the Year ~ Pandemic Legacy
Tabletop Expansion of the Year ~ Spearpoint 1943: Eastern Front
Tabletop Reprint/Rerelease of the Year ~ Empire of the Sun
At GrogHeads, our readers have the final say on the best games of the year, as we unveil the 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards…
First off, this year saw a variety of well-loved games released, and others updated with some excellent expansions. And yet, even with an entire year to nominate games, we still had folks bemoaning “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.
Several categories were hotly contested, including at least one where we had a tie. A few were runaways. All of them were selected by you!
The GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2015 Digital Game of the Year was Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa, followed by Combat Mission:Black Sea, and XCOM Enemy Within in third.
GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Overall 2015 Tabletop Game of the Year was Churchill, which beat out Enemy Action: Ardennes. Triumph & Tragedy squeaked into third, mere votes ahead of Star Wars: Imperial Assault.
02/17/16
Prosciutto – Hamming it up with the di Parmas, Part 35
In Part 34 we saw Oberto gain and lose the Duchy of Genoa under the stewardship of a power hungry Emperor. Oberto turned his back on the Empire and looked west to further the di Parma cause, at the head of an 8000 strong army he invaded the Muslim controlled lands of Aragon. In this part – expansion, new enemies, old enemies, more enemies and the loss of two sons.
The Muslims attack just as Oberto and the Holy Army join forces – its a massacre, over 4000 Muslims are killed and the siege of Barcelona begins.
02/1/16
Tracer Rounds – Another “Resurgence” of Military Wargaming?
The military wants to ‘get back’ to wargaming. Are they serious this time? ~
There’s been a recent trend in the media covering some developments in the military that I hope or at least slightly heartening. I’ve started to see multiple articles here and there on well-respected online sites about the reinvigoration of wargaming in the military. 
I’ve written before about the way the professionals use wargaming and how it differs from hobby games and what is commercially realistic. That said, there is certainly some crossover between the two given that so many professionals are also hot scammers, or have been taught by them. (As an editor note, voice recognition just picked up “hobby gamers” as “hot scammers”; maybe Google knows something we don’t?)
There have been articles from the Marines, the Navy, think tanks, and high ranking DoD officials about ways in which the military can start using wargaming again. Part of this is being driven by budget constraints. My hope is that at least part of this trend is being driven by explorations of uncertainty in our future conflicts. This type of exploratory wargaming drove US naval innovations in aviation in the inter-war years, and has also been credited with the development of German blitzkrieg tactics around the same time. So the track record exists of using wargaming as a forward-looking tool for examining doctrine and concepts. It’s already known as a tool for training, even if a misunderstood one on a regular basis. Again, I’ve talked about the uses of wargaming in a previous column, so I won’t rehash too much here, just go read the earlier article.