By Mitch Reed
Recently the NDNG crew had a that emulated the NCAA Basketball championship where a team of four gamers selected our four favorite games and debated until there was only one left standing. The winner was Command & Colors Ancients, which is one of the many games under the C&C banner. This event motivated me to pick up the latest release in the series, Command & Colors: Samurai Battles.
I had a sit-down with Andy Rourke the designer of Coalitions from . The game is an open sandbox that covers the politics behind the entire Napoleonic period.
NDNG BattleVault Episode 19 – US Team Yankee Masters 2021 List Review
By Mitch Reed
I try not to mix my work on NDNG with my day job since despite them both having “wargame” in the title they are vastly different and done for very different reasons. Last summer I was asked by the USMC Warfighting Lab to help them playtest a game called Assassin’s Mace which is based on the Operational Wargame Series rules and is developed by the USMCWL. I was immediately impressed with the game system and felt that the hobby community would enjoy hearing about it.
By Mitch Reed
As a young wargamer, two of my most favorite games to play was and by Avalon Hill. The games portrayed the strategic naval campaigns in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans respectively and help me fall for naval war gaming as a pre-teen. In 2019 the developers at took both of these games and updated them into a single game called Admirals’ War: World War Two at Sea. Recently I invited my pod of vaccinated gamers over to play the four-player version of the game and Admirals’ War brought back the fun of the Avalon Hill games of my youth.
Join Glenn, Tyler and Tom as they continue their Blood and Plunder journey through a variety of topics. We continue to discuss the art of the sea battle and answer listener questions, make a big announcement about a joint Firelock, Blood and Pigment and No Dice No Glory Venture; A GLOBAL CAMPAIGN beginning on June 10th! Someone finally loses a bet, and will suffer the consequences. Glenn and Tom also announce a Trivia winner this week along with a new question for those with some solid googling skills. Thanks for joining us for our Tales of the Sail this month!
By Mitch Reed
Seems like I am playing a lot of games about Stalingrad recently. I recently wrote a review of the digital port of David Thompson’s Pavlov’s House and that got me to pull out a game in my collection that I have yet to get to the table. Stalingrad: Inferno on the Volga by was a game that was funded via Kickstarter in 2018 and received a lot of buzz. I missed the Kickstarter campaign, but I was able to get the deluxe Kickstarter version unopened from someone on Facebook of all places. I was not only glad to get this game to the table, but equally as pleased to find that the buzz behind it was well deserved.
By Mitch Reed
Hungarians recently were added to the late-war period with the release of the book for Following the Finnish we now have the Hungarians making an appearance for the mid-war period. The new expansion comes in a 36-page booklet and gives you a lot of options if you want to field a Hungarian MW force.
NDNG BattleVault Episode 18 – Bagration Axis Allies
By Mitch Reed
One of the greatest things about Blood & Plunder is the rich historical background the game recreates. The early colonial Americas features some amazing stories that centered around some larger-than-life characters who still hold our imagination today. The team at Firelock brings this history to you with their organized play kit which features unique missions and characters in a linked narrative campaign which is available for free from the website.
