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I have gotten a tremendous amount of play out of Wizard Kings since picking it up a couple of weeks ago. As I’ve posted pics of this on social media, I’ve gotten feedback from people that are underwhelmed by it, so let me explain real quick here what’s going on with that and why this […]

Set up a scenario out on the table, and you have a scenario. Replay it a few times and it becomes familiar as you grow to understand that scenario. Tweak it, and you begin to understand the pieces which are present. Take control of the pieces and learn to use them after identifying them… Now […]

There is always a bit of a learning curve on the better tabletop game designs out there. But if you try to play things on instinct, you will invariably miss the sort of rules were engineered specifically to address issues that emerged from the early drafts of the game. How many times I’ve played a […]

The design notes for the classic TSR game Divine Right contain yet another data point regarding the literary inspirations of game designers during the late seventies: In the interim, we discovered the Chaosium game of White Bear, Red Moon. This game was something new in our experience – a game of heroic fantasy…. There was […]

If you haven’t been following The Player’s Aid over the past month, you’re really missing out. In addition to digging in to a number of games I haven’t even seen before, they have an excellent interview with Marc Gouyon-Rety, the designer of the upcoming Pendragon. Up until now the COIN series entries from GMT Games […]

I am probably going to make myself rather unpopular with this opinion, but I don’t really care for Panzer Leader. Avalon Hill’s Panzer series, beginning with PanzerBlitz, going on to Panzer Leader and eventually even being adapted to more recent tank warfare with The Arab Israeli War, is considered one of the pinnacles of tactical […]

DevGame has announced that the classic TSR fantasy wargame, Divine Right, is now being developed as a computer game. That may or may not be of interest to readers of this blog, but what will almost certainly be of interest is the last paragraph of the post. Castalia House also acquired the right to produce […]

History’s Voice in Gaming John Poniske, Game Designer by Bill Morgal “I’m John Poniske.” The words came from a lanky, crewcut man with a salt and pepper beard sitting across the gaming table from my son and I. His open outstretched hand was not the first thing I really noticed about the man. Nor was […]

As I mentioned in several of my previous articles, notably Complex Interactions  and Roles and Rolls , Wargames are typically played and supported by educated and rigorous people. In this article, I wish to point out that this is far deeper in origin than a simply complicated hobby: This draw is inherent to wargaming, certainly, […]

The golden age of wargaming is any age where you’ve got enough time to wargame. For those with overloaded by a combination of careers, kids, houses, church obligations, and unconscionable commutes, that golden age is certainly not in the present. While those priorities may make it impossible to get your wargame fix via a long […]

When I was little, one of my favorite wargames was Lewis Pulsipher’s Britannia. In it, players play out the successive waves of invaders conquering the Isle of Great Britain, starting with the Roman conquest and concluding with the Battle of Hastings. Tribes are divvied up between four players in such a way that they will […]

In wargaming news this week, the big surprise is that there is even more on the way for fans of The Hunters. The game was already enough of a hit that it merited a sequel that moved the action to the Pacific where American submarine captains could take their chances in duels with Japanese subs– […]