Happy TANKSgiving!
From our Grogs to yours – Happy TANKSgiving ~
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11/23/17
Tag: Staff
11/21/17
Tuesday “Interview”: The Grogs’ Favorite Tank Games
We asked the Grogs to give us their favorite tank-heavy game ~
The GrogHeads Team, 21 November 2017
Cyrano
This one’s not even close: Combat Mission in its various iterations.
These are games played with a merciless physics engine that feel every bit as gritty and grand now as they did nearly two decades ago.
I remember getting hooked on the WEGO gameplay and the ability the 3D environment gave you to peek over the shoulders of your digi-troopers and guess at what war must have been like for them. Multi-player randomized battles to the wee hours of the morning were pretty great too. What made both x1 and x2 really special, though, was the incredible variety of, yep, AFVs. I’m not an WWII rivet-counter — I save my O.C.D. for Napoleonic games — but the fellows who designed Combat Mission are and it shows every time you pan around their products; not to mention the remarkable array of modifications available on-line. There are no CRTs or bog charts here. These are games played with a merciless physics engine that feel every bit as gritty and grand now as they did nearly two decades ago. They’ve let me play with some of the most famous tanks of the war and some I never even knew existed.
Others have come for her throne, but CMx1 and x2 are still queen of the battlefield for me when it comes to tank warfare.
06/22/17
Origins – Thoughts from the GrogCrew
What did our guys bring home from #Origins2017? What was the coolest thing they saw? ~
GrogHeads Staff, 22 June 2017
We asked our crew at the GrogHeads Central Command (AKA Fort Kickass) to chime in with the coolest thing they saw at Origins that wasn’t GrogHeads-related. Most of them dropped us a line or so. One of them expanded his thoughts. And one of them wrote a bunch.
First, the loot, as photographed by some of our GrogHeads
Bullet points!
- Coolest non-Grogheads thing…discussing and/or playing three in-development wargames with the designers.
- The coolest thing I saw was Rogue Cthulhu gaming group. All of their events were very good and it was well organized.
- Coolest thing I saw this trip was a 6′ x 3′ rubber backed carpet, that was the game board for Quartermaster General!
Some longer thoughts:
Ian won the kid’s section of the Costume contest with his Dwemer Armor (made by Ian, Corinne, plus additional help from grandma and grandpa.) And Edward Owczarski took third place in the same event! Yes! 😀
02/4/17
2016 Readers’ Choice Award Winners
The nominations came in throughout 2016. After our annual January voting, we bring your the Readers’ Choice Award Winners for game-year 2016 ~
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 & Undercovergeek in the GrogHeads forums.
01/26/17
Wow. Just… Wow.
So what happened 5 years ago today? ~
Brant Guillory, 26 January 2017
Five years ago, we opened our forums here at GrogHeads. Our front page followed shortly thereafter, and we’ve been talking games all along.
We wanted GrogHeads to be an independent voice in the strategy gaming world. We also wanted to make sure we covered strategy gaming across the entire spectrum of gaming – tabletop, digital, team, distributed, multiplayer, whatevs! – and follow the interests of our members.
Do we get it right every time? Nope.
Does that stop us from trying? Double nope.
By the end of February, we had over 100 members in our forums. Within 2 years, we were running a wargaming program at Origins. Along the way, we’ve podcasted, reviewed, pontificated, sarcasmed, photo’ed, gamed, AAR’ed, voted, and discussed all manner of strategy games, and more.
We’re on our 4th iteration of our Readers’ Choice awards, planning our 4th GrogHeads Central Command at Origins, and in March we’ll run our 5th college hoops Bracket Challenge (hey, don’t laugh – it’s a big hit every year). We’re a few dozen months, a few hundred reviews and a few thousand pictures into covering all sorts of games.
So how are you getting involved? Are you talking games in our forums? Sharing an AAR with the gang? Coming to Origins to join us for a weekend-plus of great gaming? Subscribing to the podcast? Following us on Twitter? Hanging with us on FaceBook? All of the above?
Whatever it is, we hope you have a great time doing it, just like we do.
So from all of us here at GrogHeads, to all of you strategy gamers everywhere, wherever you are and whatever you’re playing – thank you, from the bottom of our dice cup.
Here’s to a many more years to come.
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