Blog Report 24-02 ~ Di$ney Recovery

Having just returned from a Di$ney “vacation” I find myself a bit behind in my wargame / boardgame / tabletop roleplaying game / books / and wargame practitioner blogging.

Wargames

Panzer North Africa (GMT Games, 2024). Status: Need to get my Advanced Rules Game article complete to continue my “88 after 44” series.

Skies Above Britain (GMT Games, 2023). Status: Shelf of Shame. This game is a possible candidate for a History to Wargame feature using Len Deighton’s book Fighter.

When Did Rommel Get His Goggles? Operation Compass & Operation Sonnenblume (Banzai Magazine Nr. 20, 2024). Status: Unboxing Day for Armchair Dragoons submitted. Rules review and initial learning play planned for this week.

Boardgames

Heat: Pedal to the Metal (Days of Wonder, 2022). Status: Weekend Boardgame Night candidate. The new Formula 1 season has started so time to get Heat to the table more regularly.

Wyrmspan (Stonemaier Games, 2024). Status: Shelf of Shame. This title joins other Stonemaier titles like Expeditions and Apiary as “big” boardgames that I need to work into the rotation for a family gaming weekend.

Great Kingdom (Korea Board Game Co., 2023) / Nine Knights (Korea Board Game Co., 2023 ) / King’s Crown (Korea Board Game Co., 2023). Status: Shelf of Shame. These three abstract-style boardgames, all in a series called Wiz Stone, were a gift from my niece and her husband when they recently visited. Designed by former Go professional player Lee Sedol these games are apparently popular in Korea but remain unavailable here in the United States. Well, unavailable to you…

As a pleasant aside, when my nephew-in-law was visiting we made a stop at my FLGS, Huzzah Hobbies in Sterling, Virginia. We left with a few more games than he planned and I eagerly await the reports from his boardgame nights!

Tabletop RPG

Free League Publishing has sent digital previews for the next Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game adventure, Case Files No. 2: Fiery Angels which is now available for pre-order. Look for my article in the coming days over at Armchair Dragoons who sponsors me as a reviewer to Free League Publishing (thanks Brant!).

Books

Two new books took their place on my bookshelves recently. The first a title by the esteemed Paddy Griffith. Forward Into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future was first published in 1981 but this copy is the updated 1990 edition. The comments on the back of the book intrigued me where they claim, “It showed that Wellington’s infantry had won by their mobility rather than their musketry, that the bayonet did not become obsolete in the nineteenth century at is often claimed, and that the tank never supplanted the infantryman in the twentieth.” Is this some sort of early maneuver warfare treatise?

Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III by Harold Coyle is a replacement for a paperback copy that seems to have disappeared in a PCS move years back. I have a digital version but as World at War 85: Blood and Fury from Lock N’ Load Publishing (ever so slowly) inches closer to release I wanted to revisit this classic in a deadtree edition.

Wargame Practitioner

Via PAXsims:

SAGE DRAGON was a two day wargame conducted last year by the MITRE Center for Strategic Competition, focusing on the security challenges in the Pacific Island countries (PICs) in the context of competition between China and the US. You can find the full report here.

PAXsims

Of interest to me is how MITRE describes “wargames”:

Wargames are powerful tools for building understanding of unfamiliar intellectual terrain shaped by human decision-making, but they are not reproducible scientific experiments. The term “wargame” is not only widely used in the national security community but is also used in diverse public policy and business fields to educate participants and explore competitive problems. Single wargames such as SAGE DRAGON, and even wargame series, are not reliably predictive, nor are they intended to be. Instead, wargames are best employed as evidence-driven first cuts at complex problems that surface issues and insights worthy of further scrutiny. In keeping with these ideas, the points outlined below represent useful starting points for future gaming, analysis, and policy consideration rather than the permanent conclusions of SAGE DRAGON’s organizers. 

SAGE DRAGON Game Report, 4

Gaming Conventions

CircleDC 2024 organized by Kevin Bertram of Fort Circle Games is coming up on April 5-7 in downtown Washington, D.C. I have my tickets but, to be honest, I am not sure I want to attend given the crime problems in DC these days.

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Feature image “Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Disney World” by RMN.

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