Board Wargames

We are back with Joe Chacon and Evan Yoak where we talk about their upcoming game Decisive Action from GMT Games

Today we have Sean Druelinger, a designer of some great games such as Point Blank: V is for Victory and other designs for Lock N’ Load Publishing.  We talk about his games, games we love and about game design.

— Create a civilization to stand the test of time!

By Patrick S. Baker

(Read Part one here)

Moves: Legal and Business

In 1996, MicroProse released Sid Meier’s Civilization II (Civ II) for the personal computer (PC) and Avalon Hill then sued MicroProse over the use of the name, Civilization, asserting they had reclaimed the previously licensed copyright. As this lawsuit worked through the legal system, Activision released Civilization: Call to Power, also for the PC, in 1998. This set off a three-sided legal battle over the use of the name.  At the same time “the video game industry … was like the Wild West, with companies starting up, closing, buying and selling other companies, and also trading, assigning and purchasing Intellectual Properties (IPs) at a furious rate.”

By Patrick S. Barker

Civilization: The Board Game (1980)

– The Game of the Heroic Age

The first Civilization board game was created by Francis Tresham, a former British Royal Air Force radio instructor. Tresham first thought of the idea for the game while browsing a historical atlas at his base library. The idea was further sparked by Tresham’s experience playing strategy games like Risk and Diplomacy. Tresham found playing Diplomacy to be rather averse and thought to design a game that stressed winning through cultural and technological progress rather than military force.

Tresham’s game begins with the appearance of early farmers circa 8,000 BCE (approximately 4000 years before the start of recorded history) and ended with the rise of Rome in 250 BCE. Players controlled various real civilizations from around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.  As the turns and time passed, the players’ starting settlements grew and expanded into neighboring areas and generated additional resources. Designed for between two to seven players, the game could take up to eight hours to complete.

We are back and today we have Mike Denson the designer of GMT Games Last Hundred Yards.

By Mitch Reed

Another Connections Wargaming Conference is in the books and this last event was yet another benchmark performance. Held in Carlisle PA, the host Army War College Conflict Studies Laboratory exceeded what they did when they last hosted the event in 2019. We have covered this event over the last few years, and it is the premier event where wargamers from defense, industry, academia and the hobby community gather to talk about how to make wargaming better and what the next generation of wargaming looks like.

By Mitch Reed

I guess I am an old time wargamer, I started with Avalon Hill’s Tactics II in 1978, then Gettysburg by the same company. Soon after I purchased my first game from Simulations Publications Inc (SPI) which was their quad game, Blue and Gray II which contained four great battles of the American Civil War.

This purchase solidified me becoming a grognard, and now forty-plus years later I still wargame. Recently someone posted a picture of some of the quad games and I thought about how much these games probably brought so many people into the hobby such as it did for me. I also thought how much these games meant to our hobby and I wanted to revisit and discuss these great games.

Huge treat for you today in this long (but interesting) episode. We have Hermann Luttmann (A Most Fearful Sacrifice and many others) and Ryan Heilman (Brave Little Belgium and many others) and we talk about their new design “Into the Whirlpool” coming out from Blue Panther Games. We talk about so much more, such as game design and the gaming industry.

By Mitch Reed

One of the benefits of my day job is that I get to play games at work for research and recently some co-workers and I tried out Nineveh: We are coming from Nuts! Publishing (a company I really like).

Since I knew two members of the design team, Rex Brynen and Brian Train, I felt that the game would be something special and after we played it one afternoon, I saw how great designers can abstract a difficult concept and bring a solid game to the market.

Today we have Ian Brown, the designer of the game Maneuver Warfare that will be released in 2024 from the Dietz Foundation. Ian is a talented game designer and if I say myself an interesting guy. If you want to play a game about modern warfare by an “insider” then you will want to check out this podcast.