Gaming

By Glenn VanMeter

On 17 September our Tales of the Sail podcast was fortunate enough to partner with the Calvert Marine Museum to put on a Blood & Plunder tournament at their Talk Like a Pirate Day family event. This was an unusual gaming event for us as it was not held at a game store or a convention, but at an attraction open to the general public.

The tournament was also quite a distance away from most of the participating gamers, which is why we gave it the label of a “Destination Tournament”.

Due to the planning this event required, we needed participants to sign up ahead of time. Fourteen brave souls decided to make the trip to the museum, located in Solomons Island, Maryland. Tom Mullane came down from Connecticut to run the event with me. Most players were from the Maryland and Virginia area, but one or two came from Pennsylvania. We even had a four-player group come from as far as North Carolina complete with team shirts.

By Kreighton Long

With my Bolt Action Romanian army built and bloodied on the table, it’s time, once again, to look forward to a new project. Scrolling through my mental list of armies I aspire to paint and field I felt temporarily at a loss. While discussing my dilemma with a friend over a mid-war game of Bolt Action, he suggested I try something in the early-war period, so as to pair against his own early-war armies.

The suggestion was well received and we spent a good portion of the remainder of the game discussing my options. A combination of desiring to get the most mileage out of my next project and to build a less common army brought me to the stoop of the Italian Army.

The recent releases of Warlord’s Bolt Action: Campaign Italy: Soft Underbelly and plastic Italian Army opened the door and ushered me inside. As all my terrain is themed around European battlefields I decided to focus my research on the Italian participation in European campaigns and battles. Some quick online research into the campaigns fought by the Italian Army in Europe gave me some quality gaming options to consider including campaigns in Southern France, Greece, and Russia.

by Dennis ‘Matt Varnish” Campbell

I have been blessed to live in Ottawa for a few reasons, but one is the strong gaming community we have here. I think ours is larger than Montreal and is definitely larger than Toronto’s, cities with 2x and 5x our population.

I know back when I played WHFB and 40K back in the golden era (1996-2006) we had a very strong showing of Ottawa-based gamers at tournaments including the Grand Tournament. When my group of players switched over to Flames of War and started hosting tournaments, we organized a decent following and hosted the Canadian Nationals for many years.

Now that I have dipped my toes into Ancients and other historicals (Napoleonics) I find that, yet again, we have a strong following, this time in the form of the Ottawa Miniatures Gamers (OMG) some of whom are consistent Art de la Guerre (ADLG) rankings, players. So, I have started attending club nights which are held typically twice a month, and as luck would have it, their rotation of games had ADLG so I tidied up some of my Romans in 28mm and showed up to get trounced!

Today we are live at Labyrinth Games in Washington DC with their first Wargame Wednesday event. We speak with the event director and then with Stephen Rangazas about his COIN game “The British Way”, that looks at end of the British colonial empire   We wrap with  Kevin Bertram from Fort Circle Games. 

By Robert Kelly

This is part two of my Grand Tour of Europe museum reports. We booked a Baltic Cruise out of Copenhagen with stops in Stockholm, Tallinn, Helsinki, and Saint Petersburg and sailed in mid-May.  Due to the war in Ukraine, the cruise company offered us an extra day in Stockholm instead of stopping in Saint Petersburg. We took them up on the offer but were disappointed we couldn’t visit Russia.  After the first day in Stockholm, we were glad to have an extra day in town.  There is so much to see that if we hadn’t had the second day, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the Swedish Army Museum.

The museum is located in the downtown core and is not far from the harbour. I was able to walk there in no time. Stockholm is an expensive place to visit and fortunately, the museum offered free admission. A rare bargain indeed.

Here is everyone’s favourite Swedish tank, the S Tank on gate duty. Unfortunately, it was the only armoured vehicle out front. And there was room for more. That seems to be a trend in Europe.  You find very few large vehicles at the downtown museums, but they usually have separate tank museums.

By Jim Naughton

PART III – (part 2 here) Now we’ll take a look at the complications – the effect of shifting targets, larger batteries, and Krasnopol. Refer to Battlefront’s source books World War III Soviet https://www.flamesofwar.com/hobby.aspx?art_id=7154 and World War III Warsaw Pact https://www.flamesofwar.com/hobby.aspx?art_id=7455 for details.

RANGING IN
The big weakness of artillery comes when your forces close in for the kill. ‘DANGER CLOSE’ makes you move the template, stop shooting or switch to smoke. PACT artillery suffers less than that of the Soviets. In fact, with an observer, it’s more likely to range in on the first attempt than the other two attempts combined.

By Robert Kelly

I retired from the Canadian Public Service in early April.  Within a few days my wife and I were on our way for the “Retirement Grand Tour of Europe”.

As my wife is from Denmark, we set up our Forward Operating Base in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. Besides a one-week Baltic Cruise out of Copenhagen with stops in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Tallinn, our plan was every week or so we would see what deals Ryanair had. 

If we could find cities with good hotel deals at the same time, we would make our bookings. My wife had always wanted to go to Paris so that was our first trip “outside the wire”.

As we went in May, the tourist season hadn’t fully started, so prices were still reasonable. But then coming from Denmark, everywhere else in Europe is reasonably priced. 

By David Garvin

One of the many reasons I play Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) is because I am a self-professed amateur historian. The history of the Second World War is not only fascinating but is rich and has even to this day many surprises awaiting anyone who wants to dig deep enough. I intend to do a blog post on how ASL is part history teacher.

For example, it is through ASL that I learned of a battle in early 1942 to the west of Moscow, The Battle of the Kholm Pocket. I discovered this epic battle through the purchase of a Historical ASL (HASL) product from a 3rd party producer, le franc tireur. Based in France, this HASL was designed by Andrew Hershey of Virginia. Before doing a blog post about learning history through gaming, I reached out to him and interviewed him.  That interview follows now.

By Jim Naughton

PART I gave an introduction to the subject and cataloged the seven weapon systems available to Soviet/PACT Team Yankee players.  Today we’ll take a close look at the math that allows comparing weapons. Battlefront’s source books World War III Team Yankee Soviet and World War III Team Yankee Warsaw Pact are invaluable references.

Always remember, a Scientific Wild Ass Guess (SWAG) is a Wild Ass Guess (WAG) done with slide rules, calculators, and spreadsheets. Now for our SWAG:

Team Yankee uses D6 for combat resolution. In an artillery bombardment, you roll to range-in up to three times, and the number of range-in attempts adjusts the to-hit number for stands under the template. Then comes a save for each stand hit, and finally the artillery rolls a firepower test (if required) to kill the target. That’s a lot of die rolls, each with six possible outcomes. Up to three range-in attempts, then up to four more for each team under the template (to-hit, save, reroll save if brutal, firepower). 216 possible outcomes for the range-in procedure and 1,296 possible outcomes for each team.

“This game is so out of date, anybody who plays it would have to wear a leisure suit.”

• Al Lowe- Game Designer

By Patrick S. Baker

The husband-and-wife team of Ken and Roberta Williams founded Sierra Entertainment as On-Line Systems in 1979 to develop and market business software for the TRS-80 and Apple II. But the couple soon discovered text adventure games and Roberta had the brainwave of adding graphics to such adventure games.

Thus, with Roberta designing and Ken doing some programming, they developed Mystery House, the first graphic adventure game. Released in 1980 Mystery House sold 15,000 copies sold and earned some $167,000 (about $565,000 today). Buoyed by this success On-line Systems shifted from business software to adventure games.