Preparing For War – Onside Report
British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I had a design session titled 'Preparing for War' at the CLWG November meeting. Preparing for War was about training an infantry company in the UK after Dunkirk. Rather than a conversational design session I decided to try and do something that was playable. I'd been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could have been played. I'd felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real. Preparing for War I ran a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me). So I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I'd decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map…
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CLWG Design Conference 2009 Reports
Onside Report - WW2 Mechanisms I lead a discussion on whether an operational research article could be used to produce some mechanisms for running a WW2 wargame with resolution ( smallest unit represented) at somewhere between platoon and battalion. The article1 in question was first published back in 1987, so quite venerable. I came across a photocopy of it tucked into an old copy of British Army Training News from the saem time period. I have subsequently found PDFs of a slightly different version of it, along with a follow-up article looking at urban combat. Offside Report - Come One Come Eorl Andrew Hadley brought back the Scottish component of this game for another try having modified some of the mechanisms from the previous playtest. We didn't really play the game as we spent a lot of time talking about…
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Yet more drivel
Well this client seems to work in connecting to the server in a way that the others I have tried didn't. It isn't as richly featured as I might have liked. However it works, which has to be the most important of all features in any
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Drivel
Perhaps a fitting subject line, but in fact I'm testing out an offline blog posting app called 'drivel', so this is telling whether or not it can connect up to the webhost and get this short article onto the web!
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Absolute Friends
This is John Le Carre's latest book, a post-cold war spy novel about two of the cold warriors just over a decade on in the wake of 9/11. This is just a fantastic story, incredibly detailed and well researched (where it follows the historical/factual stuff). It starts off as a fairly normal story, told by flashbacks from 2003-4ish, about a chap who gets caught up in the 68-69 student protest movement in Berlin. After a gap of about ten years he eventually settles down and gets a job with the British Council. This draws him into a meeting with his old student protest chum who is now an East German security type. There follows a cold war double agent story, which in itself is excellent. The falling of the Berlin Wall brings an end to that episode and our protagonist…