Gaming

By Patrick S. Baker

“Peace, impudent and shameless Warwick, peace, Proud setter up and puller down of kings!” – William Shakespeare – Henry VI, Part III, Act III, Scene 3.

Besides being a great background for some of Shakespeare’s best plays, the Wars of the Roses make a fantastic setting for a great game: Kingmaker. Developed by Andrew McNeil and released in the United Kingdom in the fall of 1974 by Ariel Productions Ltd, a division of Philmar, Ltd. The front page of the rule book read in part: “

…. The game takes as its basis the concept that the dynastic struggle between the royal houses of Lancaster and York (called the Wars of the Roses) was, in reality, a series of brutal and bloody power struggles between factions of self-interested noble families, with the Yorkist and Lancastrian princes the pawns in a greater game of gaining control of the country in the name of one or the other monarch. Players control pieces representing the noble families as they seek power by a combination of military, political and diplomatic skills.”

By Tom Gall

As someone that bought into the Cruel Seas rules and range by Warlord when it came out back in 2018, I was sad to hear that Warlord has paused the Cruel Seas system. We had been hoping for a second edition of the rules and repointed forces to help with balance. With that not happening in the near future, our local group started looking for a different ruleset to test the waters with.

Where does one with a range of 1/300 WWII MTBs look for a simple ruleset to play? Too Fat Lardies, of course. This article is about Coastal Patrol by James Schmidt. This was our local game group’s first experiment away from Cruel Seas while still using the line of boats from Warlord.

By Howard West

The next new army book for Team Yankee has made it to our bunker in West Virginia and it is called WWIII Warsaw Pact. This review is one of several that NoDiceNoGlory will be doing on this latest arrival Battlefront. This new book adds new units and upgrades to some of the existing Warsaw Pact formations. In addition, it upgrades your legacy formations to the same V2 standard we saw for the US, USSR, West Germany, and the British.

By Paolo Paglianti

The last Team Yankee tournament we had in Italy was more than two years ago, so I was super happy that Livio Tonazzo, one of the best FOW – TY players in Italy, created the event we had last weekend, March 12th. While we normally play Team Tankee at 75 or 85 points, this time we decided “to go big” and have 105 points lists, with a massive amount of tanks, vehicles, and infantry bases.

The idea was to allow the deployment of the “new” super tanks, like the Challenger or the M1A1HC Abrams: these tanks cost up to 54 points for a platoon of three, so it’s mathematically impossible to field them under 75 points. However, we knew 105 points can also mean lots of spam of light vehicles and transports, but with a missile AT 19 or 21 on top of them – an entirely new meaning for the “spam” of scouts we see in FOW, as in Team Yankee they are both numerous and lethal.

By Patrick S. Baker

Master of Orion III

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

During the six years between the release of Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares and the release of Master of Orion III, the PC gaming world proved to be something of a Hobbesian trap for game developers and publishers, that is to say: “…. poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In 1993, MicroProse Software had merged with Spectrum HoloByte, to form MicroProse, Inc.. This merger was called “a great marriage” because “Spectrum Holobyte had a lot of cash and very few products, while Microprose had a lot of products and no cash.”

By Mitch Reed

The makers of Blood & Plunder leave the high seas behind to immerse players in some of the most interesting fights that have ever taken place in North America. The new Fire on the Frontier book from Firelock Games takes the game in a new direction and now you can play with many of the forces that were seen in King Phillip’s and King William’s War that took place between 1675 and 1697.

By Howard West

Photos By Rich Baier, and Michael Schwille

Videos By Donald Skovira

In the Greater Pittsburgh and Western PA area we have several groups of players that play Flames of War and Team Yankee at geographically dispersed stores and the players seldom get together other than for tournaments. So after reading about how other groups have run escalation leagues we decided to try a Team Yankee Escalation League here in Western PA.

By Andy Allcock

Greetings, today I want to talk about how sometimes historical gaming can help others to discover more about their past.

Mid-February a new gamer to our group reached out to me for assistance. He hoped that my being prior service, would give me some insight to assisting in find out what unit his grandfather served in during Vietnam. Lucky for him it did.

It started with a Facebook message and asking if I would help.  Who am I to reject the pleas of help from a newbie gamer? with that out of the way he sent me what little information he had. Most of that information came in the forms of photographs.    At first, he sent me what he thought were unit photos, unfortunately, they were photos from basic and advanced training.

By Mitch Reed

On a windy President’s day weekend, a group of 24 gamers gathered in a northern Virginia hotel to play three days of Combat Commander, a game series from GMT and Hexasim. The event run by Steve Gibson and Art DeFilippo was a smashing success, with over 70 individual games being played and a lot of new gamers (me included) becoming quick converts to this excellent game system.

By Tom Mullane

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a competitive game of Flames of War (FOW). The last major event I participated in was back in 2018 when I was competing in the MidWar Nationals. And I was less interested in winning than snagging that sweet custom objective (the Back to the Future Car).

After that, I drifted off to other games, and with the tournament and tabletop scene in much of my area vanishing, I tried to find other ways to spend my hobby time. Blood and Plunder, terrain building, and organizing my local gaming club with my high school students took up much of my time.

But then an opportunity presented itself. Pastor Pete Zerphy, competitive tournament player, kind soul, and man of many talents has been running an active series of events in Delmarva, DE.

Up until this past month, the stars didn’t align, and I never had the time off I needed to make the drive worth it. But this time, it coincided with the February break that teachers in NY get some time in the middle of the month. I dusted off my models and made the trip.