Tim’s Task Force Admiral photo album
For a while it looked like my temperamental PC and Task Force Admiral’s press demo were never going to get along. My attempts to heal the rift with driver changes and dll feng shui having come to naught, I had…
Category Wargames
Review Reprise: Storm – Frontline Nations
I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may…
Unforgiving winter and untreated wounds kill in Khaligrad…
…a five-quid TBT from the team behind Orbi Universo (a game I once described as “Civ without bourgeois luxuries like maps and movable warriors”). Set in a gently fictionalised WW2 Stalingrad, this new release sandwiches thought-provoking force management sessions between…
The Lions of Lodowice: Turn 11
Dozens of the Narcissus for which Lodowice is moderately famous, have been thrown into confusion by the events of the past ten turns. In several spots in the grounds of Lodowice University and on the banks of the Vistula, subterranean…
Untapped Tussles: The Defence of Duffer’s Drift
Depending on your perspective, the small South African engagement I’m about to describe either never happened or happened six times. It either claimed the lives of hundreds of soldiers or it claimed the lives of none.
The Lions of Lodowice: Turn 10
Four of the eight AFVs that started this game of PvP play-by-comment Combat Mission: Red Thunder are alive and kicking at the start of turn 10, but, as two of the four – the IS-2 and the King Tiger –…
Peter Turcan’s Midway
After a morning of driver switching and dll juggling failed to persuade Task Force Admiral’s ‘vertical slice’ to run on my PC, I decided to assuage my disappointment by playing the closest thing TFA has to a spiritual antecedent. In 1994…
The Lions of Lodowice: Turn 9
“They say fortune favours the bold, but they never explain what fortune is likely to do when both sides display equal boldness.” (T. Stone, 2023)
Interview: Arrigo Velicogna
For today’s interviewee, wargames aren’t just entertainment founts, they are educational aids. Historian and wargame designer, Arrigo Velicogna has used interactive guerre sims to help War Studies students at King’s College London “understand the interplay between various dynamics in a…
Das Football Boot: Season 2
An analogue WW2 U-boat MMO that uses real football results instead of dice, Das Football Boot is capable of producing surprisingly plausible submarine sagas. The catch? Players need to be patient, conscientious, and willing to undertake a little bookkeeping or…
The Lions of Lodowice: Turn 8
The waypoints and ambush arcs I plot on behalf of the Comment Commanders at the start of Turn 8 promise fireworks. The Panther’s final path pyramid sits in map square a4W, a spot the IS-2’s commander and gunner plan to…
Review Reprise: Montjoie
I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may…