Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group

The Scramble for Africa

This is the general briefing to all players.  There are also a very short individual brief for each player. THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA The Conference of Berlin November 1884 The reasons for the conference Following on from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 which resolved a number of issues in Europe, the German Chancellor Otto […]

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Wargaming with ‘present’ and ‘remote’ players by Brian Cameron

There are clearly good reasons to build on the ‘over-the-internet’ gaming that was around before the pandemic and which has grown enormously during the last 18 months.  Equally clearly there are problems about running games with a mix of players who are ‘present’ (a term I’ll use for those actually present in person at a […]

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Seize Warsaw Offside report by John Bassett

This is Nick Luft’s game of 4 Panzer Division’s attack on Warsaw on 7 September 1939. At VCOW Seize Warsaw occupied the same time slot as my GRAPPLE X, so I was glad to be able to take part in another run of the game that Nick put on for the Holborn group a few […]

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18Brass Online

18Brass This is a “blog post” pretending to be an onside report covering a possible railway investment game or megagame. I ran a session in October that I dimly remember. As I recall there was some scepticism over the need for such a game. We recognised that there were enough shenanigans and sharp practice involved […]

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Operation Water Cooler – A structured narrative card game

Game Aim I want to use a card game to assist my teaching Unit 32: Networked Systems Security to a Year 13 class (18 – 20 year olds). Educational aims a) familiarise the students with the 7 step model of a cyber attack b) engage the students with relevant cyber terms, concepts and keywords Teams […]

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Partir, c’est mourir un peu

(or how the French didn’t surrender after all, with a major twist at the end) The second game in what (spoilers?) now probably will be a series based on https://www.1940lafrancecontinue.org. An report of this game can be found at https://milmud.clwg.org/2020/06/france-fights-on-for-now. A quick recap of what went before: the French cabinet meets on June 16, 1940, […]

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STONK ONLINE – OPERATION BINGO V

Some our older readers will remember many WW2 battles fought on a tabletop with miniature tanks and, possibly, the origins of the wargame rules ‘STONK’. Over the years, these rules moved away from model terrain and toy tanks, and more towards a ‘real map’ and counter game, and from version 3 onwards was wholly designed […]

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Operation Bingo By Jim – Offside report by Terry Martin

I have always believed that the success of sessions can often be judged by how quickly time passes and in this game it was noticeable how nearly all the players’ first comments post game were along the lines of ‘where did the time go’. This was an online version of a traditional map based WW2 […]

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Who Will Win the Fight? – Offside report by Terry Martin

This was Deborah’s game about the surreal sounding but actual historical happening – the Emu Wars of 1932 in Australia. Just to set the scene, this was: “a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the later part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running […]

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EMU Wars: Onside Review – Deborah Southwell

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 […]

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Military Muddling

Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group

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