By Mitch Reed
Recently I was invited to play Angola a great four player game from Multi-Man Publishing. The covers the conflict in Angola from July 1975 until the following April and features the four main factions that were involved in the conflict. I have always been interested in picking up with game due to the topic but after playing it I really came to see what a great game Angola is.
By David Garvin
In the many wargames I’ve played, most countries’ soldiers were treated fairly equally. Some units were stronger than others, and some were faster than others, but in , units do not only differ by nation, but also by class and type. Section 25 of Chapter A of the rule book is dedicated to the various nations; however, there are other parts of the rule book that lay out the various characteristics of the many countries that fought in the Second World War and the Korean War.
Chapter A covers the nationalities that fought in Europe, Chapter G expands into the Pacific and Chapter W covers Korea. In order to maximize your forces in ASL, a complete understanding of your national characteristics is vital. Before getting into the meat of the characteristics and traits, a note from the authors of the rule book is in order. As they say, “Nationality Distinctions vary troop capabilities from one nation to another, and while patently unfair in their application of stereotyped and over-simplified traits to all troops of a country without exception, nonetheless do serve to give the game much of its flavor.”
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.
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.
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.
Phil and I sit down with the prolific game designer Herman Luttmann. We talk about his latest game “A Most Fearful Sacrifice”, game design and all of his amazing previous titles.
We are back with the Final 4 games of our contest. Part one can be found
