By Troy Hill

I didn’t realize how much I missed other gamers until I had to go about 18 months without seeing them.

True, we stayed connected on social media. And a lot of us used TableTop Simulator, or Roll20 to get in virtual games.

But there is nothing like being back in person. Seeing friends (for me, new friends that I barely got to know last winter. I forget if we had a March game day (maybe?)

This technically wasn’t my first game back from the great distancing. We had one of those in June. Back then we had four players at our North-east Indiana Bolt Action day. Our group gets together once a month for Bolt Action on the second Saturday of the month, and again on the fourth (occasionally the fifth weekend if there is one). This Saturday we had five players for Bolt Action. Not bad. We’d had a few drift off to other games, or still ensconced in catching up with family. Five is a good number. Except someone has to take on two opponents…

Yep. That someone was me. And mistakes were made.

By Tyler Stone

We have had our first full week of campaign gaming in July, and the latest results are flooding in! The Brethren of the Coast have widened their lead, claiming 22 of the more than 100 games played. They’re not ahead by much though, and the English are doggedly pursuing the unruly pirates with 20 games to their name. Hot on their heels are the Spanish and French, each claiming 19 games.

Glenn, Tom, and Tyler take a dive into Oak and Iron. Tune in to see what the game is about, what you get in the starter, and what to expect when you’re trying it out. We also update the community about the current state of affairs in the Blood and Plunder Campaign. Glenn and Tom make their bets for July, and finally, we give away our biggest Trivia prize yet with a question about a Pirate King from Madagascar.  Thanks for listening!

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.

By Tom Burgess

My good friend Ed and I have been playing the campaign for the last couple of months.  With our sixth game of the campaign we matched up for the River Crossing mission from the Bagration: Soviet book.  Ed had bought which would give us the special pieces we needed for this mission. We played at 105 points.

The River Crossing Mission is much like the No Retreat…with a wide river down the board center. To balance the attacker’s difficulty of having to force a river crossing, the defender does not have an ambush in this mission and instead of having immediate reserves, they are delayed.

By David Garvin

With the 1977 release of , the wargaming world experienced an earthquake. The virtual tectonic plates didn’t just rattle; they shattered the gaming world!

The late , designer of Squad Leader, had developed a game like none other. Now gamers could re-fight various battles of the Second World War at such low tactical levels like never before! Not only did players get to move squads around, but also some individual and even key leaders!

Squad Leader spawned three successive games, (called gamettes by the designer); , and . These were later supplanted by Advanced Squad Leader, developed in great part by and .

By 1986, Advanced Squad Leader had released its revolutionary rule book as well as the first module in the system, . With the 2013 release of , pretty much every nation that fought in the war had a module covering its actions. And in 2017 with , the ASL universe had expanded into the Korean War.

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 Tom “Cap’n Chairborne” Mullane

As we enter week two of the Global Campaign for Blood and Plunder and Oak and Iron, things are tightening up for the many major powers participating. For those who have been checking things out from the sidelines, there is no better time than now to join the fight.

the full update on global events can be found in this on Blood and Pigment’s site.

And a full accounting of the rules can be found .

Bottom line, we want as many battle reports as possible submitted, that means an email, and some pictures! Send them along to:

By Tom Burgess

Bagration Axis-Allies, along with the Finns and Hungarians, brings the Romanians to Late War for Flames of War V4. As a wargamer who always prefers Red vs. Blue match-ups, the fact that the Romains fought for then against the Axis in World War 2 makes them very appealing to me.  The Romans lists are solid  with a lot of decent options. The Romanians seem to combine some of the best aspects of axis and allied armies into a force that can fight on either side.

Bagration Axis-Allies gives us three tank and one infantry formation to choose from. These are expanded by command cards options with an additional Pioneer, Cavalry Squadron, Mountain Rifle Company, and T-38 Tank Company formations. We end up with far more options and variations then we ever had from Version 3 for the Romanians.

By Patrick S. Baker

The mid-1990s was the Axial Age for personal computer games. Titles like Civilization, Steel Panthers, Panzer General and X-COM: UFO Defense (known outside North America, as UFO: Enemy Unknown) were released with staggering success. These seminal games essential created a whole entertainment genre of PC strategy games.

Perhaps the most important of all these was the first X-COM game. X-COM: UFO Defense is still considered to be one of the most influential games ever made. Further, some have argued that X-COM is not just a franchise, but is actually its own genre. In short, to say “X-COM game” is to define a game type, like “first person shooter” or “real-time strategy game”.

The first X-COM game was created by the Gollop brothers, Julian and Nick, under the auspices of the game design studio they founded, Mythos Games, in partnership with game publisher, MircoProse.  Julian had been developing games since the early 1980s, two of his earlier games are direct precursors to X-COM.