Wargame_[space]
War in the East
Race to the Finnish
Finland’s involvement in World War II includes one of the great David vs. Goliath stories of all time. Invaded in November 1930 by Stalin’s Red Army, the woefully outnumbered and outgunned Finns humiliated the Russians, inflicting heavy casualties, and initially thwarting all their objectives. The lightly armed Finns conducted a clinic in mobile winter warfare, […]
Gaia ex machina
If you’ve been following the series up to this point, you’ve undoubtedly been waiting patiently for something which up until now I’ve avoided doing, and I don’t mean taking unsolicited cheap shots at Tom Chick. That comes later. I mean talking about the AI. I’ve avoided making any real comments about the AI because I’m […]
1-2-3 leader check, check, check
I’m pretty sure everybody reading this has at one time or another had the experience of overpromising something, only to underdeliver in the end. Whether it’s a competitive game of League of Legends or a magical presidency of hope and change, we all know what it’s like to make commitments we’re just not able to […]
Diablo is in the details
Victory conditions are wargames’ great balancers. Without them, you’d have to play many games for fun, because one side would have little chance of winning. No one thinks that the Germans had any chance of winning the Battle of the Bulge, in the sense of achieving their strategic objective, which was the capture of Antwerp. […]
Baba Yaga’s hut
The German crossing of the Dnepr River and the subsequent battle for Smolensk has been the subject of relatively few wargames. Probably the best-known among people who know about that kind of stuff is PanzerGruppe Guderian, published by Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) in 1976 and republished by Avalon Hill in 1984. It had some interesting […]
State of siege
The battle for Leningrad was one of the more horrific episodes in a war full of horrific episodes. At the same time, it’s a fascinating drama, full of intriguing angles. There’s the Finnish angle, where the Finns first declared war and then Carl von Mannerheim’s army basically stayed put for three years north of the […]
Eastern Front protips
In the interests of continuing to keep it real, I am going to be straight-up honest with you and admit that I have no idea how the part of the game we’re going to talk about today works. At all. I’m not even going to pretend to understand by finding some scholarly quotes and then […]
Heinz Guderian’s Railroad Tycoon
A lot of people might not have realized it, but railroads used to be pretty important. Without them there would have been no hoboes in Bugs Bunny cartoons, and without the ability to sit around and build track, sell goods, and upgrade trains, a lot of college students would probably have passed their physics midterms. […]
The rout report
The biggest obstacle to playing a wargame for people who haven’t played wargames is understanding what the game expects of you. Yeah, you need to capture Moscow or whatever, but the whole in-between part is so opaque I think people just don’t even bother. Part of the appeal of games is being given tasks which […]
Shklov’s labors lost
Every war has to start somewhere. Because mine is turn-based, it starts with XXVIII Corps attacking across the Niemen River into Lithuania. The opposing Soviet rifle division immediately routs. The game tells me they lost 2999 soldiers. Seems like a lot. (more…)
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