Tag Archives: Strategic
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #97
GARPA! ~
GrogHeads Staff, 30 September 2016
The Russian Campaign, Designer’s Edition (GMT Games / Consim Press)
p500 $42 / MSRP $60
The Russian Campaign is an oft-revered game frequently mentioned among the ‘gold standards’ of classic wargaming. It’s also been been mentioned with sputtered mutterings that vaguely sounds like “it costs how much?!?!” Well, here’s your chance to get your hands on your own new, updated, corners-waiting-to-be-clipped copy of the classic. You get 5 scenarios, counters with both NATO and icon artwork, full color rules & players aids, and 30 years of refinements and improvements to the rules, examples of play, game balance. Blitz your way over to the p500 page to get your money down.
GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory #96
GARPA comes back with a couple of new pre-order offerings for you ~
GrogHeads Staff, 16 September 2016
HOLDFAST: ATLANTIC and HOLDFAST: PACIFIC (Worthington Games)
$33500 of $10k, ends 24 SEP 2016
Worthington takes their popular block-based Holdfast series from big land wars (Korea, Russia) and heads to sea, as WWII comes back to life on your tabletop with this new pair of games. The influence of the classics War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific is obvious, but with the fog of war that block games can give you. Big region-based maps, and low-complexity gameplay get gamers into the action as fast as possible, and let armchair admirals focus on the war and not the rulebook. Steam over to their pledge page and fire your salvo at their Kickstarter campaign.
Mare Nostrum Empires (Academy Games) – First Look!
Picked up over the summer at Origins ~
Brant Guillory, 30 August 2016
Following a massively successful Kickstarter, and some shipping delays as the manufacture of components needed some tweaking, Academy’s reprint of Mare Nostrum, along with the expansions, finally started to get delivered. Folks who attended Origins were able to pick them up there. Hot damn!
This gallery includes both the base game Empires (on the right) and the Atlas expansion (left)
Tracer Rounds: The C2E2
Revisiting an older concept to reinvigorate the re-conversation ~
Brant, 29 August 2016
So, about 5-6 years ago, I started playing with an idea for a game/system. The idea was a basic unified set of rules for current events conflicts, with regularly-released updates that would provide unit information and updated map details for the current world situation. This would allow any player to just grab the current update, and “play forward” from there, to see how the various conflicts might shape up over the next few months or years. When the next update rolled around, the players would have the option to either reset to the current world situation, or adapt the update to their own ongoing conflicts and continue an “alternate future” using the update components.
It’s not like I was breaking any really new ground with the idea, but I had a pretty high-minded concept for how I wanted it to happen, but got quite bogged down in the actual execution of it all.
What I’d like to do here is reopen the discussion and attempt to reinvigorate the participation in the development of the rules and current updates, in the hopes that many minds are smarter than mine, and we can collaboratively move forward on an open-source set of rules and initial process for putting these kinds of tools in the hands of gamers with an interest in current events.
GrogHeads Reviews Tidal Effects from Andrew Heller
Airboy reviews Heller’s follow-up to Gray Tide in the East ~
Avery Abernethy, 03 August 2016
Tidal Effects is the sequel to Gray Tide in the East. In the previous book the Kaiser orders the German Army in 1914 to respect Belgium’s neutrality after Imperial Russia and France declare war on Germany. The British Empire never enters World War 1. Germany and Austria-Hungary crush Russia and annex large portions of European Russia including all of Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltics. France is bled white trying to attack in unfavorable terrain. Germany gives France favorable peace terms taking several relatively useless colonies including Martinique in the Caribbean Sea. At the end of Gray Tide in the East Germany is the dominant land power in Europe.
Tidal Effects contains two novelettes: High Tide and Rip Tide. In High Tide several members of the Imperial German Foreign Service and a high ranking Naval officer manage to start building a substantial naval base in Martinique. 
Substantial progress on this naval base is accomplished without the knowledge of the Kaiser and the rest of the Imperial Cabinet. The USA learns of the base and must decide if they want to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. Tidal Effects includes basics of naval espionage, isolationist politics of the USA early in the 20th century and foreign policy. The central conflict centers on the ability of the US President to get enough political support to keep the hugely powerful Germany from getting a foothold in North America without starting a major naval war. The Kaiser is maddened that his subordinates put him in this position but also wants to maximize the political and military gains possible from this situation. The entire story is plausible given the military, economic, political and foreign policy situation in this alternate history.
