Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group

New Deal

onside report by Dave Boundy Back in May, I played an online game with some people in Philadephia. It was a playtest of a Megagame that they planned to put on at Gen Con 2025. The game was based on the negotiations for Roosevelt’s “New Deal” – the package of legislation intended to revitalise the […]

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The Game What I Haven’t Yet Wrote

onside report by Dave Boundy Finding ourselves with time to spare at the October games weekend(as a game had been rescheduled), I organised an exercise to say which one game we would each like to develop or have developed that was entirely new, with no previous work on the topic. My intention was then to […]

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Triangle of Sadness: A simple RPG – Onside Review by Nick Luft

Unusually for me I was just trying to run a game and not try to reinvent or explore some new way of running a game mechanic. I have not run a role playing game (RPG) for many years. I have had some time on my hands this summer – those long Private School holidays – […]

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Operation Rupert and other disguised scenarios – onside report by Trevor Duguid Farrant

Disguised Scenarios For close friends For games clubs and the games holiday For paying customers, e.g., megagame I have run many roleplay scenarios with hidden agendas, especially morphing into Call of Cthulhu type adventures. Hidden objectives is one thing, but a hidden game… Roleplay is relatively easy, players are more likely to expect the unexpected […]

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Onside report – Rain of Drones: v2 – Ivanivka

This was my second try at a game about the military use of drones. I moved my scenario to the current Ukrainian Russian conflict from the Mexican / USA Drug Smuggling conflict. I did this because the use of drones in the “drug wars” had an additional layer of complexity in the civil use of […]

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I mean, it’s the official language since 1066, isn’t it?

J’avais promis (menacé?) sur Discord d’écrire un article en français sur la dernière session en ligne, celle du 21 mai; je vais essayer de faire suite à cette promesse, même si je dois d’emblée avertir les lecteur.rices que la dernière fois que j’ai dû écrire un texte relativement consistent en français (le résumé de ma […]

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The Rain of Drones – Onside Report by Nick Luft

“The basis of air power is its exploitation of height, speed, and reach within the air environment, which facilitates the four core roles of air power: control of the air; attack; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR); and air mobility. Control of the air underpins all air operations because it secures freedom of action in the […]

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FAAA – onside report by Jur

This starts with setting yourself up for a game in two months, having to start it from scratch. I had a list of 5 books I needed to get through to base the game on. So it was all a bit rushed and I could only decide pretty late into the reading stage what game […]

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Two Brush Strokes [Onside]

Two Brush Strokes ( ) Two Brush Strokes was my Megagame of the Nanking decade in China. I started the game at the end of 1928 and ran 1 hour turns representing a year of real time, so we got to 1934 in the game. The title derives from a speech by J F Kennedy: […]

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Lit By Another Sun Playtest/Design

Lit By Another Sun is the working title for a megagame that I intend to run in Scotland in 2025. It’s based on an early draft of a novel (titled Duke of Piraxis) and then worked up a bit with some mechanics based on ordinary playing cards. I’ve had one playtest with some of the […]

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