Boardgames
Played multiple solo sessions of the card-driven auto racing game Supercharged: Racing in the Golden Age of Cars (Mike Clifford & Mike Siggins, Dietz Foundation, 2021). Loved my solo plays, and then Circuit de Rocky went all family for a weekend race. Much mayhem ensued! Supercharged will likely make it into the summer lakeside vacation bag as it’s small, rules-light, relatively short to play, and lots of FUN! By the way, please look at The Dietz Foundation and their mission; like them I personally (and professionally) fully support gaming and education. Whether it’s boardgames or RPGs in a classroom or homeschool, or a “professional” wargame for business or government, we all have stories of how games and education mix together for the better.
Wargames & Books
Happy Birthday to Me – Thanks to Miniatures Market for remembering my birthday and sending a coupon. I decided to use it before it expires and it was enough to cover tax and shipping for Stalingrad ’42: Southern Russia June – December 1942 (GMT Games, 2019). This will be my second game in Mark Simonitch’s ZoC-Bond series to accompany Holland ’44: Operation Market Garden (GMT Games, 2017) in the wargame library.
This week, Compass Games charged for Indian Ocean Region: South China Seas Vol. II (designer John Gorkowski) so delivery should be getting close. Coincidentally, I’m reading 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Eliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis which makes for a nice tie-in.
Here is the dust jacket copy of 2034. Looks like the authors are trying to mix Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising (1998) with August Cole & P.W. Singer’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (2015):
On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt’s destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America’s faith in its military’s strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.
So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically out maneuvering America’s most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and literary, human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters–Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians–as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power.
Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors’ years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.
2034: A Novel of the Next World War, dust jacket
Speaking of books, the rest of my U.S. Naval Institute Press “Clear the Decks” sale books arrived. It looks like I will be able to get at least a few History to #Wargame or Rocky Reads for #Wargame postings (along with associated wargame plays) out of this group.
Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 