By Mitch Reed

With Firelock Games release of Blood & Crowns which covers the period of the Hundred Years War, gamers now have the third game in the franchise as it joins Blood & Valor (Great War), Blood & Steel (era of black powder), and the flagship game Blood & Plunder which covers the early colonial Americas.

Gamers who play all three already know that each of these games shares a DNA that once you learn to play one of them, you understand how the others work. This design fungibility is a huge benefit to gamers who like to play multiple periods without having to learn many different rulesets.

“We are fighting a war with no front lines, since the enemy hides among the people, in the jungles and mountains, and uses covertly border areas of neutral countries. One cannot measure [our] progress by lines on a map.”—General William C. Westmoreland

By Patrick S. Baker

1965 was the year that, as one source puts it, “Vietnam Becomes an American War”. The massive bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, started. The first American ground combat units arrived “in country”. The Battle of the Ia Drang, the first major set-piece battle of the war (so well detailed in We Were Soldiers Once… and Young by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Hal Moore and Joseph L. Galloway) was fought in November that year.

It was also in 1965 that the bifurcated nature of the Vietnam War became clear. Part of the war was a conventional ground war with regular American military and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units fighting conventional battles against the communists’ guerrillas, called the Viet Cong, (VC or Charlie) Main Force units and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units.

The other part was a counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign with America and her South Vietnamese allies trying to win the  “hearts and minds” of the largely rural population with generous foreign aid, civic construction projects, and Special Forces (SF) deployed to train the local defense forces to battle the VC guerrillas.

By Troy Hill

A lot of interest is brewing about Warlord’s impending new arrival, the Achtung Panzer game. And rightly so.

I had the opportunity to lead members of our local gaming group through a (very) basic game this weekend. Reviews were positive from the players, post-game.

Rather than give a blow-by-blow of the battle, I’d like to look back at some of the rules, what we kept looking up, and how the game rules functioned as the players challenged my memory (like a rusty steel trap with a broken spring) and kept me looking up rules.

By Kreighton Long

As I work on improving my Bolt Action Italian army I found myself needing a little extra firepower and maneuverability by utilizing the Armored Car slot.  After looking through the options for the Italians I settled on an Autoblinda AB 41 and was lucky enough to stumble across one at a brick and mortar store I visit whenever possible.  While looking into different paint schemes for my new speedy-pew-pew I was inspired by photos of Italian armor painted in a three tone paint scheme with a base of tan with blotches of green and brown known as Continentale. 

The Continentale paint scheme was used on a few Italian vehicles predominantly in Italy as the Allies pushed the fighting from Africa to the Italian peninsula.   Gaps between the brown and green where the undercoat showed through created a unique looking vehicle camouflage pattern that I decided to reproduce.  After some trial and error I found a process that allowed me to reproduce the paint scheme I wanted in the least painful way possible.

Today we have Jack and Samuel Gassmann, the brothers behind Masterstroke Game’s  Force of Virtue, a 15th Century themed skirmish game that focuses on the Borgia period in Rome. This game is one that you will want to check out and when you listen to this episode you can hear the love of the period and the intimate knowledge the design team has for this period and which is evident in this game.

By Troy Hill

Images courtesy of Warlord Games

Warlord is doing it again!

What are they doing?

Creating another game that expands into an underserved niche. If you feel the need to run some tank on tank combat in 28mm without all that pesky infantry bogging you down, Achtung Panzer! could be the game for you. 

But we have a ton of WW2 games now!

I hear you. Warlord’s flagship is Bolt Action, WW2 level Skirmish platoon level combat on the tabletop. There’s also Flames of War in 15mm at the Company level. Not to mention the Too Fat Lardies range of WWII games, and countless others available via sites such at Wargame Vault.

Warlord even has their Tank Wars variant rules for Bolt action.

But this is not Bolt Action rehashed.

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 David Garvin

With the new year, many gamers across the land get excited for the annual Winter Offensive, hosted by the folks at Multiman Publishing (MMP). With over 150 attendees, this is one of the larger annual conventions, but it differs from many in that it does not focus on a wide variety of games.  The two major games here are Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) and the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War (GCACW).

There were some other games being played, but those two were the main ones.  Furthermore, the Winter Offensive is a charitable event, with the benefactor being the World War Two Foundation. Every year, MMP raises thousands for this important group, raising awareness of this important event in our shared history.

By Morten 

In Morten’s previous article he showed us how to paint Team Yankee Danish infantry. Now he will show us how to paint their vehicles.

In 1980, the Danish Army decided to paint all their operational vehicles in a two-tone camouflage pattern. Prior to this, all the vehicles was just painted green.

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.