One of my long-standing hobbies is wargaming - here are some links to other useful gaming places and to some home-made games, scenarios and variants I have cooked up over the years.
4 March 2010
Gee, this is turning into an annual event!
Newest game, for free download: FINNISH CIVIL WAR For years I have been wanting to do a game on the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Chaotic, savage, balance tipping this way and that, and one more facet of the turmooil coming out of World War One. In September-October 2009 I finally got it together to make such a game - actually made it in two versions: one using the Freikorps/War Plan Crimson system with 280 counters, and one with only 60 counters using a modified FK/WPC system that I was going to send in to Victory Point Games, which does a lot of small fast games (http://www.victorypointgames.com). They use the same map. I finished them at the end of October 2009, then got sidetracked on writing a major article for Strategy and Tactics (on Dieppe 1942) and usual end-of-year stuff. And VPG's pipeline is seriously impacted, even if they were interested in thei obscure tussle and accepted the idea right away it would be 2-3 years before it came out. So, I decided just to upload it to my page - (GO GET IT!
Updates on new games: Summer Lightning: went up on P500 in June 2009, now has roughly 115 pre-orders which miiiiight be juuuuust enough for Lock n' Load to print it. It's excited some interest, and I hope it will come out soon. Greek Civil War and Balkan Gambit are both pretty much ready to go, and have been since the fall. Fiery Dragon, the publisher in Toronto, has been cutting way back on production of new items, especially wargames which have iffy sales. The publisher has a digital printing business which simplifies most of the production but he has of course had to concentrate on keeping that business afloat - if it goes under, then no one gets anything out of the deal. So, still looking for those tow to come out in 2010. Likely Green Beret will follow in 2011. VirtualiaI have had very little time to work on this, VASSAL (see below) looks to be the way to go but I haven't had the time to figure out how to make a workable module. I'm told that once you do, producing others is easy. Thinking of overhauling it (not much required) to handle Afghanistan situation. I recently read David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla and what he is saying seems to fit in with the game concepts of Virtualia. Even better if I can get that onto a computer screen.
Conventions and things: I haven't gone to anything. Had to spend $$$ repairing the sundeck last summer, so no Consimworld Expo, will miss this year's "Connections" conference in Dayton Ohio this March (I'm acting Boss at work, trying to put old house on the market again, and no money as we have to fix the roof siding on the new house), no MORS meetings (Irregular Warfare conference in February 2010 was classified, as is the annual Symposium in June in Quantico VA.
Republications: Arriba Espana was published in #8 of World at War magazine, and Battle for China in #259 of Strategy and Tactics magazine, both aroudn October/November 2009. Seemed to have been well received, not much comment. Will get around to posting China expansion kit to Boardgamegeek Real Soon Now.
24 April 2009
Well, a bit more of an update:
I came up with a title for what I had been calling The As-Yet-Unnamed Poland 1939 Game, as it enters the P500 process with Lock n' Load (http://www.locknloadgame.com/). I decided to call it Summer Lightning, as a tip of the hat towards the first "blitzkrieg" (lightning war) campaign and because it jived with Autumn Mist, my Bulge game that was the first to use the system. Now, Balkan Gambit also uses this same system, so no I'm thinking perhaps I should change the title to Fall of the Balkans. And the OCD in me thinks this means I have to design another game with "spring" in the title.
Greek Civil War and the Balkan game are putt-putting along, and will be out by the middle of the year I suppose - all other things being equal. The game publishing industry is not exactly recession-proof, but neither has it imploded - the $22 you would spend for a nice professionally printed copy of one of my games, which you would then own and could play forever, wouldn't get you two movie tickets and a popcorn to share these days. But the margins are never very wide, as with all things connected with publishing.
Green Beret has been returned to me. Todd of Cool Stuff Unlimited has not and will not be able to finish the art and produce it due to other and frankly more important commitments in a timely way, so I have arranged to bring it out through Fiery Dragon after the other two have come out. Maybe end of 2009, more likely 2010. I first designed this game in 1995; patience is indeed a virtue.
In early March I went to Orlando Florida to attend "Connections", an annual conference run by mostly Air Force folks that concentrates on professional gaming and support to the military. It was pretty interesting, I thought hard and talked hard for several days but I'm still afraid that much of what needs to be explored will have to go on a computer screen before anyone will look at it. Well, forget Visual BASIC, I am going to put a version of Virtualia together that can be played using VASSAL, a computer program that allows people to play the same game remotely in real time over the Internet. Looks good and versatile but I need time to figure it out - could not get it done in time to show at Orlando. Maybe at a future MORS conference - I won't be going to either the MORS symposium in June (not only classified, it's in Kansas) or the Consimworld Convention in Tempe (need to spend the $$$ repairing the sundeck of the new house). And Hugo Chavez had better stop being so nice to President Obama, or I won't have any pseudo-historical underpinning left for the game! I'll have to rewrite the scenario for someplace else, that's all.
Oh, and finally here is a sort of a reissue: Fiery Dragon will be printing up a limited quantity (100 to 150 copies) of Battle for China Deluxe, that will comprise the basic 1937-41 game and the expansions to allow play for 1942-45 (Pacific War), 1946-49 (Civil War), and 1937-49 (Campaign Game). Besides being able to have everything produced to the same graphic standards, this version of the game also includes a revised and harmonized set of rules that to me streamline the game significantly. I'll be making the combined rules and charts available as a free download after the game is published by Decision Games in October/November 2009, with some homemade extension maps, so anyone who wants to can make their own stat-of-the-art copy.
22 January 2009
I suppose I ought to check in here at least every year or so, but the last six months have been personally busy. But here is Vott Giffs, with new and old designs:
Konarmiya was published in September 2008.
I invoked the "no progress" clause of my agreement with Lock n' Load for Balkan Gambit, reclaimed the design, and it will now be published by Fiery Dragon some time in 2009.
Ditto for Greek Civil War, in fact they may come out at the same time and there is the possibility that it will have a decent sized (17x20") map.
However, Lock n' Load would not let me go without giving them another game, and I have done one up for them - it is another iteration of the Autumn Mist system, only this time taken to Poland in 1939. Haven't named it yet. LnL is playtesting it in-house but it seems to work fine - just have to tweak the victory conditions to make it a reasonable contest among players.
In the spring and summer of 2008 I worked on a counterinsurgency game I called Virtualia (should have checked out the name as this is also the title of a series of computer porn films), about a thinly disguised post-Chavez Venezuela. I took my Tupamaro game as a start, and plumped it up a lot, but the system still works and is pretty interesting. I will try and create a port of this to VASSAL or some other kind of computer-aided game playing software, and not try to recreate the wheel programming all kinds of things in Visual BASIC. Hope to get some Official Types interested in this as it is probably commercially unsaleable.
21 February 2008
Well, it has been another while hasn't it? Here's some news about what's been
going on, with new and old designs:
New games:
- Operation BOARDMAN: In summer 1943, the British 8th Army is sent to
liberate
- Operation ZEPPELIN: In summer 1944, the notional British 12th Army
attacks
- Operation GELIGNITE: Actual plans were drawn up to send the British 8th Army across the Adriatic in late 1944 or early 1945 to cut off the final retreat of German Army Group F and forestall any further Soviet advances towards northern Italy. The plan was shelved due to shortages of troops and landing craft.
- Operation SLIVA (PLUM): Between 1948 and 1955, the possibility of a
Soviet invasion to bring
The games uses the Autumn Mist system of formation activations and combat matrix, at a larger scale: 1 week/turn; 30 km/hex; division/brigade; 17x30" map and 280 counters. Many "chrome" rules to cover the fragmented human, political and physical terrain of the area, for example the very varied set of combatants: several flavours of Allies (Americans, British, Bulgarians, Canadians, Greeks, Poles, Soviets and Yugoslavs) including two flavours of partisans, and varied Axis types (Bulgarians again, Germans of course, Croat-Serb-Slovene collaborators, miscellaneous SS nasties). Supposed to be in P500 with Lock n'Load but has languished unknown with them.
Reissues and Retreads:
Other Interesting Bits:
15 November 2006
4 May 2005
6 October 2004 Well, it's been a while.
22 April 2004
On Monday I got a big heavy box in the mail, containing 20 copies of Arriba
Espana. It has been published by Fiery
Dragon Productions, a publishing outfit in
10 December 2002:
21 August 2002:
27 June 2002:
Another new game, submitted to the 2002 Microgame Design Contest and to come
out in August from Microgame Design Group. It's called OPERATION WHIRLWIND.
It is a historical game on street battles between Hungarian rebels and Soviet
invaders in November 1956. Area movement map of downtown
From the beginning, I had planned to include an abstract Political Game. In
the Political Game, the Hungarian player (representing the new revolutionary
government, committed to political reform) attempts to reduce or eliminate the
domination of
However, the abstract nature of the political game was the sticking point - I did develop a way to do it, but it seemed too abstract and gamey and so I have shelved it for his game. I might resurrect the idea for use in another design.
1 February 2002:
I've whipped up a quick variant for my
22 January 2002:
Short update - over the Christmas holidays I received my sample copies of both War
Plan Crimson and Battle for China, in #42 of Japanese Command. They
both look pretty darn good! War Plan Crimson is raising a few eyebrows
on ConsimWorld, if only because of the zaniness of the subject. Command did a
beautiful job on the graphics for Battle for China - one 16x24" map
and two 16x12" half-maps, 400 diecut backprinted counters, separate rules
booklet with nice illustrations, wrapped up in a glossy 84 page magazine. I
suppose this is as good as it gets... we'll see if we can't arrange more of the
same.
Rash promise: if you go to the trouble of paying 3,780 yen for the magazine (well, more than that since that's the domestic price, even so that is over US$32) and its spiffy components, contact me and I will send you the English-language rules and charts you need to play.
Pensees en passant: kind of stalled on my other game projects. I have decided to rethink Red Guard once more; it's not quite there yet.
13 July 2001: Well, a few things have happened.
Big in
Do-over: I've also gone back and done revisions to two of my earlier games, Red Guard and Tupamaro. These were two designs I liked but the systems just didn't seem to work out. I made a substantial revision to Red Guard in getting rid of the map and cleaned a lot of grit out of Tupamaro, as well as tightening up the rules language. I think I will also include short articles I've written on the Cultural Revolution and the Tupamaro movement with the games, as was done with Shining Path, due to the obscurity of the subjects (to Americans, at any rate).
New ideas, stupid moves: Other projects I have hatched in the last
2-3 months include an attempt at designing a four-player Barbarossa game where
the players are in limited competition with each other, still too much of a
numbers-and-hexes wargame so no chance of using those cute little "German
game" wood and plastic components. I'm stalled or to too busy to with
mundane things to make much progress with the Petrograd 1917 and
14 March 2001:
Gee, it's been a while but I have stayed busy.
I didn't have much time in 2000 to do much else besides
So what should I do in 2001? Here are some ideas I've been thinking about for games, normally to be done to Microgame Design Group physical standards:
30 August 00:
The Microgame Co-op has been forced to change its name. Basically, the Alberta
provincial government (the Co-op is based in Edmonton) has legislation
concerning the use of the term "co-operative" or derivatives thereof:
Kerry could have continued using the name but only if we got things together
like a ten member board of directors, annual general meetings, bylaws,
registered status, and hefty and expensive tax-related changes. The game wasn't
worth the candle so we renamed our organization the Microgame Design Group
(MDG). Perhaps not the most titillating name (there were many suggestions)
but this shouldn't get us in any more trouble. Too bad we had to give up on
five years of name recognition, though.
10 August 00:
Reorganized this page with anchors as it was getting a bit long to scroll down.
31 July 2000:
Peter Schutze of Schutze Games in
30 July 00:
posted Desert Leader and Steppe Leader, two comprehensive
variants for the Panzerblitz/Panzer Leader/ Arab-Israeli Wars series of
games, to cover the war in the desert 1940-43 and on the Manchurian steppe.
1 June 00:
Posted Battle of Seattle on the site for free download.
Irreverent and quarterly magazine for board wargame collectors and other obsessives. Edited by big buddy John Kula. I have written more reviews for this periodical than I have grasping members.
The Maverick's Classic Microgame Museum
Nice commentary on the Microgame fad of the 1980s, the precursor of DTP, and a good gallery of covers.
More stuff on Microgames. Some good links, too.
Probably the best all-around resource for gaming links, errata, sources, etc..
The home page of Joe Miranda, game designer and editor of Strategy & Tactics magazine.
A good place for discussions on many gaming topics, news, contacts and more.
Hey!
Lemme outta here, you warmonger!
