Wargame_[space]
Archive for May, 2014
Geryk Analysis: Rise of Legends
In order to get across today’s game design point, I need to tell you sort of a story. About boardgames. Or more specifically, about a boardgame. I promise it won’t be too long or excessively painful. The whole thing sort of dawned on me while I was playing Rise of Legends, which probably explains why […]
Geryk Analysis: Wargaming
I pulled a bunch of old wargames out of the closet recently. I was cleaning the house and finally decided to see if I could sell some old games that I was never going to play again on eBay. I have boxes and boxes of them, so I was only making a dent, but I […]
Geryk Analysis: Master of Orion 3
Now that the fiasco that is Master of Orion 3 is out, a lot of people seem to be asking how it could possibly have ended up as such a mess. The game is more than just micromanagement Hell – it’s micromanagement Hell where someone else (the AI) does the initial micromanagement and you then […]
Geryk Analysis: Reach for the Stars
The other day on “As It Happens,” I heard the head of some Canadian historical society complain about the latest outrage in Canada, which is apparently the impending desecration of some Canadian pioneer cemetery. But here’s the thing: the cemetery in question is already under a parking lot. Regardless, this guy kept going on and […]
Geryk Analysis: Odium vs. Shadow Watch
A long time ago, back when Quarter to Three was just in its conceptual stage as a comprehensive Majesty cheat/hint site, a couple of turn-based strategy games called Odium and Shadow Watch appeared out of nowhere – and then disappeared just as quickly. Like Keyser Söze. I played both, and have some pretty strong ideas […]
Rejuvenating an old rogue
A very accomplished game designer once told me his best ideas were mostly borrowed, but that he made them his own in the way he arranged and adapted them to a setting. Part of good design, he said, is knowing what works in a particular situation, and why. Good ideas keep coming around in new […]
Phantom Leader: Some day this war’s gonna end
Years ago, every boardgame was a solitaire game. I know that because I played a lot of them solitaire. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there weren’t a lot of ways to play board wargames against someone else unless you wrote your moves on a piece of paper and put them in the mail, […]
A text adventure for the ages
The Epilogue to my game of Awful Green Things from Outer Space is a series of completely random encounters driven by the ancient method of rolling a six-sided die and referring to a choose-your-own adventure book.* After the jump, you start at #1 1. The crew sets course straight for Snudl-1 (see #7) or for […]
Requiem for a starship
That’s the opening setup, I mean that’s how things looked on the actual Znutar when the crew discovered the Awful Green Things. The monsters started out in the Cockboat Bay (ha!) and spread out one per unoccupied space: 6 eggs, 4 babies, 2 adults. This was determined by the stars, or by 2d6. In the […]
The magic of Tom Wham
I tend not to be jealous of people who are good at things that I’m not. I figure that’s just the way it goes. I mean, I’m good at some things, too. However, I make a special exception for artists. I have a great aptitude for thinking of things with none whatsoever for drawing them, […]
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