Gaming

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.

Opinion Piece By Jim Naughton

DYNAMIC POINTS: IF ENOUGH CUSTOMERS WHINE, THEY’RE RIGHT

A recent FACEBOOK post called attention to a BF plan to introduce DYNAMIC POINTS into Team Yankee.  It referred the reader to the Team Yankee website.  Since then, there has been a lot discussion in the various TY Groups on social medium.  

Couple years back, dynamic points were invented for Flames of War. The ostensible ‘reason’ for this was FOW tournament players had reacted to the Army Point (AP) values of the bread-and-butter tanks of MIDWAR by choosing Lend-Lease Tanks for the Soviets and spamming armored cars. Armored cars worked because they had enough armor and lots of machine guns to tank-assault many infantry units. Lend-Lease tanks like the M3 medium had an extra shot compared to T34s.

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.

“Dominate the world through diplomatic finesse, cultural domination, and military prowess.” -Giant Bomb

By Patrick S. Baker

Introduction

After, shall we say, the mixed critical and commercial reception of 1999’s Civilization II: Test of Time, which has an aggregate of only 66% on Metacritic, famed game developer Sid Meier and his company, Firaxis, immediately set to work on another Civilization game. Originally, the development of the game that would become Civilization III (Civ III) was given to Brian Renyolds, the man behind the highly successful base Civilization II game. However, Renyolds left Firaxis before development really got rolling to start his own company, so the assignment was handed to game designer Jeff Briggs and game programmer Soren Johnson.

Briggs was an experienced game designer, and one of the three founders of Firaxis, along with Reynolds and Meier. Briggs had previously helped design such games as Colonization and Civilization II. He also held a PhD of Music Theory and had written the original music for many of Microprose games.

Johnson had gone to work at Firaxis after an internship at Electronic Arts (EA). He was assigned as the primary game programmer for Civ III under Briggs direction. Johnson joined the development team with just 16 months left to finish the game. Still, he rewrote much of the game’s code, with his main focus was on the its Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By Michael Rafferty

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of Operation Overlord and the Battle for Normandy. To commemorate this my local group, the Nerds of War, wanted to run a D-Day themed mega battle. It’s been a few years since we’ve run a mega battle at our FLGS The Game Room and not at AdeptiCon, so we wanted to start things off with something big and flashy.

We have a logo and a banner, we’re official!

I really enjoy running large games for people and I’ve always enjoyed playing in something larger and more cinematic. It’s a good feeling to be maneuvering whole tank companies about the battlefield instead of a platoon. That’s what got me started running big games a decade or so ago.

If other people weren’t going to run the kind of games I like, I would do it myself. These games also motivate me to complete modeling projects. Setting a date means I need to have things ready by then and I work better with firm, external deadlines. Big games both keep me recharged in the hobby and progressing along my projects, a win-win!

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.

By Paolo Paglianti

Just imagine the scene. It’s Friday morning at the Paglianti household, and we are getting ready to leave for our house on Lake Como. Suddenly, the phone rings: it’s my friend Etienne, one of the best Flames of War players in Europe, calling to tell me that he has a problem with his Lady of the Lake tournament. The tournament is a pairs event, Axis and Allied, and unfortunately, one player had to withdraw at the last minute. Three players might have to drop out if he doesn’t find a substitute.

If I ever needed confirmation of how awesome my wife is, I got it that morning: not only did she understand how much I would enjoy playing over the weekend in what is practically the Swiss Nationals, but she also knew how often I worry about organizing a tournament and facing such issues.

She said, “We’ll go to the lake next week!”. So, I packed my things and joined Stefano Regazzoni, who lives in Italian-speaking Switzerland, and together we headed to Lausanne, passing through the San Gottardo pass, which looked like the Ardennes with all the snow.

By Kreighton Long

Feeling adventurous, I set out to build a pigsty for my rural Bolt Action terrain.  Most of the materials were easy enough to order online.  The wattle fences came from Renedra Ltd; the mother pig from Warlord Games; and the balsa wood, match sticks, coffee stirrers, and green stuff from my hobby cache.

By Tom Gall

The 2023-2024 US competitive season as tracked by Battlerankings has ended for Team Yankee and as such it’s that time of the year for the top players to gather and duke it out to determine who is the best of the best.  A very big thank you to Battlefront for sponsoring this tournament!

As you might recall Battlerankings encourages tournament organizes to turn in the results from Flames of War and Team Yankee tournaments. Your standing in the tournament gives you a certain number of points (more is better). Your top 4 scores for the year are tallied up to determine your overall ranking as compared to all the others that had results turned in. It’s a US/Canada thing and is an added layer of competition.

By Kreighton Long

Slowly but surely I’ve been working on improving my terrain options with the focus on Bolt Action.  My primary army project for this year is overhauling my Soviet forces.  Accordingly, my terrain optics have been focused on the terrain pieces that will best fit the Eastern Front.