The long-awaited modern urban warfare game from the artistic geniuses over in France, the guys at Nuts! have finally put Urban Operations up on preorder. A combination of blocks and cards, with over a dozen scenarios to keep you challenged, Urban Operations is looking to fill that modern tactical niche that ranges from Cold-War-goes-hot through the 90s world of “peacekeeping” up to today’s counter-terror operations. Why are you still reading? Go order it already.
So the shrink-wrap is cracked and pieces are out. Is it Jar-Jar Binks, or Boba Fett?
It was with GREAT anticipation that I received a copy of Star Wars Imperial Assault by Fantasy Flight Games. This and Star Wars: Armada are two of three games I’ve really wanted for the last year or so (Fortune and Glory being the third), and when the heavy box arrived from Amazon, it felt like Christmas morning. Don’t get me wrong – I love getting games, and goodness knows I get lots of them in the course of the reviews and AARs I write, but this is Star Wars, man.
The box, in all its shrink-wrapped glory. It is almost six inches thick and weighs a ton, which just testifies to the goodies loaded inside.
The back of the box. Hard to believe that there used to be a time where this backside of a box was pretty much your only source of knowledge when you came across a game on a shelf somewhere.
The siren song of pre-orders, begging for your wallet to open up and dispense your hard-earned shekels within.
Fog & Friction (Pondfoot Games) £2k of £14k, ends 31 May 2015
Another WWII card game? Why not?! Fog & Friction gets you into the battles of the Western front with a nifty two-battlefields-at-the-same-time mechanic that forces you to balance your efforts to keep your opponent guessing where the damage is coming from next. The artwork is period-evocative, and because the designers are based in the UK, the Commonwealth are not given second-shrift by the over-abundance of Yanks running around the game like they saved the world by themselves. Flip over to their campaign page and shoot off a few bucks. Half of our forum crew are already backing them, so you’ll have plenty of folks to play and discuss with.
The first expansion for BA2 Eastern Front is here. How does Kursk stack up?
Lloyd Sabin – April 20, 2015
Largess
Here in the West we tend to be a bit short-sighted when it comes to history. Take a look at the majority of American movies and books on World War II and the Western Front will almost always be the main focus. The Eastern Front, if discussed at all, is framed as a distant, alien component of World War II, not more than a sideshow because of its foreign nature to Americans.
As grogs, we know this is a huge mistake. World War II’s Eastern Front was the central land combat theater of the entire war, far larger and certainly more pivotal than the Western Front, dwarfing land combat operations anywhere else on the globe during World War II. It was on the Eastern Front that Adolf Hitler attempted to establish his concept of lebensraum for the Third Reich, where the Reich’s logistics and supply systems were severely tested by distance and weather, and, ultimately, where World War II was decided in a massive, bloody, total war to the death between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
And within this bloody total war, the central, deciding push was The Battle of Kursk (German offensive Operation Citadel), begun in July, 1943. It pitted almost 800,000 German troops under the command of Generals von Manstein, Kluge, Hoth, and Model (among others) against almost 2,000,000 Soviet troops led by General Zhukov and a cabal of other generals. In 2015 it’s almost impossible to conceive of these gigantic numbers of men, not including the thousands of tanks and heavy guns arrayed on both sides. In the end, The Battle of Kursk would further evolve beyond just being the most colossal battle on the most pivotal front of the war – it would also morph into the most gigantic clash of armor the world has ever seen.
Hard to resist the Kursk campaign now that is available, especially playing as the Germans.
Matrix Games just released their new game of the American Civil War, Brother Against Brother. Here’s a play-by-email AAR of the First Battle of Bull Run.
by kwhitehead (of the Matrix Forums), 17 April 2015
Turn 34c – 1620
And even better opportunity presents itself on the Ball’s Ford side of the line. One of those greased pigs didn’t quite make it far enough. I have an opportunity to surround the 29th NY.
