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)
“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)
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 conflict”.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, and online tools such as MAPfrappe work out my location.
A small band of industrious content creators keeps giving me new reasons to revisit free eleven-year-old R/C flight sim PicaSim. Although the executable has remained unchanged since September 2019, new user-made aerodynes and venues arrive pretty regularly.
Every Friday at 1300 hours, Tally-Ho Corner’s cleverest clogs come together to solve a ‘foxer’ handcrafted by my sadistic chum and colleague, Roman. A complete ‘defoxing’ sometimes takes several days and usually involves the little grey cells of many readers. All are welcome to participate.
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 those sagas have no chance of developing. Last season, I found myself wishing for emailed match reminders (captains must choose a Caution setting prior to every match their chosen team plays) and automatic log updates (after a match, it’s up to you to alter your sub’s stats appropriately). Several decades of intensive video gaming have made me workshy, it seems.
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 watch like hawks as they roll forward onto North Bridge. Better still from the blue team’s perspective, the Panther intends to arrive at its destination arse-first.
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 appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Today’s paragraphs were penned in 2008 and refer to a likeable board game port that vanished from shop shelves and online market places far too quickly.