Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group
Emu Wars is a landscape (map) -based game derived from real life events. In 1932, over 20,000 emus, large flightless birds indigenous to Australia, broke through the rabbit-proof fence on their annual migration to the coast. The emus saw the recently established croplands as a ‘tucker basket’, and the farmers saw the emus as dangerous […]
As part of a course on game design, I was asked to critique a game. I thought it may be of interest to other Military Muddlers. Urban Nightmare: State of Chaos (Game designer: Jim Wallman) is a megagame exploring how government and city authorities in the USA might respond to an emerging zombie apocalypse. The […]
This is a review of a radio broadcast and a musing on the ideas it deals with. Review The radio broadcast was on the BBC World Service and is part of the series: The Cultural Frontline. The episode: Board games: The politics of play It starts by looking at the boardgame Pandemic, and its happenstance […]
Museum Review by Jim Wallman So, it being a bank holiday it was a good time to finally visit the Kent Battle of Britain Museum at Hawkinge. I’ve been through Hawkinge many times and always wondered what it was like. Today I found out. Described as the worlds [sic] largest Battle of Britain collection. I […]
Destructive and Formidable by David Blackmore analyses British infantry doctrine using period sources from the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century up to just before the American War of Independence. If anything you can see the constancy, which drove the success in battle of British forces, even when outnumbered. Development of British Infantry Doctrine […]
Onside Review by Nick Luft Game Aim My aim was to design a game about the command, control and communications aspect of modern warfare, integrating near-real-time surveillance and intelligence with a live boots-on-the-ground operation. As I pondered my design I realised that this game would be well suited to being played using a computer to […]
Khalsa Ji! First Sikh War (1846) (Apologies about the late arrival of these notes – I only managed to send them in August…) Background After the fall of the Mughal empire and the later establishment of the Sikh Empire in the Punjab, the Khalsa was converted into a strong, multi-religious and multinational fighting force, the […]
As a sort of pre-publicity for Divided Land next April (and as a quick fulfilment of my obligation to write at least one article for MilMud) I thought some of our members might be interested in my own view of what happened during the first playing of the megagame version, in Malmo earlier this year. […]
A book review – Jim Wallman Just reading “Tabletop Wargames – A Designers’ & Writers’ Handbook by Priestley and Lambshead. A well written book with lots of excellent photographs and interesting discussion about how to write better mainstream toy soldier games in particular on structure, presentation, writing style and layout. This aspect of writing rules […]