Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group
by Deborah Southwell 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 […]
This is a follow on from my previous piece about using an interactive map hosted by ConceptBoard. All the controls referred to here relate to features on ConceptBoard. I guess that these techniques will be easily recreated on other Interactive Whiteboards. Seize Warsaw – at Virtual COW 2021 I ran a slightly modified game of […]
I have been thinking how to enable the players to have their own interactive map and counters. I was disappointed how I facilitated the players’ map in my recent game “Seize Warsaw“. I had provided the players with a map and counters via a Google Slides (PowerPoint). James Kemp copied this and maintained his version […]
Many thanks to Nick Luft for putting on his game about a battlegroup of the 4th Panzer Div attacking Warsaw on 7 Sept 1939. I found it rather spooky in a couple of ways and they affect my initial impressions of the game as well as reflecting my status as an old person. Back in […]
Seize Warsaw was inspired by reading about a failed offensive of the 4th Panzer Division which attempted – on its own – to attack and take Warsaw. This event occurred during the collapse of part of the Polish Army, 6 and 7 September. The Panzer Division thought it could push into the gap formed by […]
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 […]
Or Where The Hell Is 3rd Div…? A Suggested Mechanism for Reflecting Line of March Efficiency. We’ve all presumably read loads of stuff about campaigns which develop into clashes/battles in which a key feature is the arrival of units off the line(s) of march. How well this is managed over the centuries seems as much […]
As part of a longer article on making logistics systems both fun and integral to games (no, really) without dedicated and very bored players and/or access to computational engines, I thought I would share something I came across in my on-going reading of the ACW. Apparently, it was a rule of thumb for Quartermasters in […]
A pre game report The German Army has ripped a huge hole on the road to Moscow. What is next, they decide to rip out another hole on the northern flank of the Moscow road. My inspiration was the very good book “The Defence of Moscow 1941: The northern Flank.” I presented a classic big […]
Altering supposedly ‘fixed’ criteria in games Given the difficulty of getting some players (and even umpires) to read rules with varying impacts, I have been experimenting in some of my system design models with adjusting the ‘big reality’ rather than adding loads more – sometimes occasional – factors. That may read as just gobbled-gook so […]