Tag archives for Games - Page 6
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What you missed at CLWG in September 2011
Three interesting games and a load of cake! We started with Peter Merritt's 1814 political game which looked at how Napoleon's Marshals dealt with the oncoming defeat of France and the transfer of power. Following that Andrew Hadley brought out his game about the Athenian invasion of Sicily. We then finished with Rob Cooper's game about the seizure of the Mecca Grand Mosque in 1979, complete with head-dress. 1814 and all that Peter put on this game to try out some ideas about how you could run a game about the decline of the French First Empire. The players were mostly Napoleon's Marshals (although Jim Wallman was Napoleon). There was an interesting mechanic of collecting cards to show which of the likely candidates for ruler of France you could evidence support for (five in total, including Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Bernadotte, Napoleon's…
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Ars Magica – Lumen
Recently Lumen has been on a trip to Waddenzee with several of her friends from the covenant at Triamore. (See for the write up). From her perspective the journey was mostly uneventful apart from: premonitions of the attack on the ship they were using (during which she mostly made attackers fall asleep); some searching on a swamp near Waddenzee where she realised that she could spontaneously cast to power the punt they were using; she also made a bird; the visit to Waddenzee itself, where she rescued one of the local women from ill use, employing her as a second maid; a night excursion just on the mainland on return where a lot of time was spent searching in the dark for a particularly unpleasant creature, which was later found to be called a Lamia. So what does Lumen take…
Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend
"In the West (Western campaign).- Panzer II and Panzer I in the woods; KBK Lw Kompanie Luftwaffe, "Luftwaffe war-reporting company" 4" (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The Blitzkrieg Legend: The Campaign in the West, 1940 by Karl-Heinz Frieser My rating: 5 of 5 stars As part of the planning for the megagame War in the West I bought myself a copy of Blitzkrieg Legend because it is the German Army’s official history (although it didn't get written until the 1990s). From reading the first couple of chapters and looking through the maps you can see the evolution of the German plan. You can see why the directive was written the way that it was in October 1939. The most interesting thing for me is that there is no concept of a lightning war, the general staffs & high command all believe that…
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Inspiration
Image via Wikipedia Today has been an unusually inspiring day, I had two separate ideas for games both of which I reckon could be pulled off in the space of a couple of days basic research and writing briefings etc. Tracy & I both woke up early and we got a couple of hours to do things before Alexander surfaced at the rather late (for him) 9am. In that time I unusually got to watch some TV of my own choice. The first idea came from a programme on the freeview channel 'Yesterday' about the Glencoe Massacre (or more accurately the events leading up to it and the aftermath. This is the follow on to the two games I've done about the revolution in 1689-90 in Scotland. There was a meeting between Albany and the Highland Chiefs where two secret…
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…