The Velicogna Verdict: Bastogne
THC is lucky enough to have an ex-KCL Wargame Studies lecturer amongst its guest contributors. Today, Arrigo Velicogna assesses Bastogne, a snow-mantled solitaire board wargame that shuns hexagons and deifies dice.
Category Wargames
The Fight for Faire Bissone (Part 2)
I don’t envy the polygonal Canucks endeavouring to secure Faire Bissone’s bridge in this novel Combat Mission experiment. Commanded, during monthly wargaming sessions at Calgary Military Museums, by volunteers, some of whom have no previous CM experience, their promised Sherman…
Interview: Sir Nuno of Strategy and Wargaming
The days when THC dealt with competitors using polonium-laced IPA, booby-trapped sim hardware, or bouquets sprinkled with funnel-web spiders, are long gone. Nowadays we usually employ more humane methods like distracting our rivals with time-consuming interview questions.
Winless in War of the Austrian Succession
Night has fallen on squelchy Clifton Moor and once again it seems I’ve failed to stop the majority of Lord George Murray’s tartaned troublemakers retreating northward towards the Scottish border. My search for a win in the fascinating War of…
Nurture vs Torture: Thoughts on campaigning in Door Kickers 2
“F**k this for a game of soldiers”… “I didn’t sign up for this”… “The mission designer needs shooting”… Alpha One, my level 3 Rangers team, has turned mutinous! Having suffered heavy casualties during the first three days of Operation Subjugator…
Chastened Charioteers
The following two sentences appear connected but aren’t. I’m rather impressed by Tryphon 104, a new, twenty-turn recreation of the Second Servile War for Wars Across The World. I spent a portion of yesterday evening overseeing charioteers.
Bigger, better, browner: Door Kickers 2 is almost the perfect sequel
I don’t reach for the ‘m’ word – masterpiece – very often, but describing this top-down turnless tactics game without recourse to it would be perverse. Those fifty-one months of Early Access tinkering have paid off big time. If it…
More molehills, please
Simulatia and Grognardia can be awfully dour places. In realistic military and vehicular fare, frivolous details tend to be rare. While the lack of the whimsical and the extraneous arguably isn’t surprising given the development demands elsewhere, I love encountering…
Would you like a Door Kickers 2 review?
When a game’s Steam review graph looks like this (image link), reviews of said game can feel a tad superfluous. While I’d be more than happy to spend the next few evenings playing the endlessly entertaining Door Kickers 2 with…
In the Task Force Admiral demo you can task Wildcats AND pilot them
In addition to a choreographable Coral Sea clash between taskforces linchpinned by the Lexington and Yorktown, and Shokaku and Zuikaku, the due-out-early-next-week Task Force Admiral demo includes an Easter egg the size of a Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp. Courtesy…
Luck is important and Hougoumont is MIA in RBM Studio’s Waterloo
Where have Hougoumont, La Haye Saint, and La Belle Alliance got to? The hexagoned bit of Belgium you fight over in this new low cost, low complexity wargame, may disorientate at first. Because developer, Hexes of War, has decided to…
Rogue Conflict risks being overlooked
As Advance Wars’ fictional setting and bland title didn’t seem to handicap it commercially, I guess there’s no reason why Rogue Conflict’s should. That said, I can’t shake the feeling that this demo-blessed upcoming wargame would have benefited from a…