Get shot at on a quarterly basis

www.battlesmagazine.com/

I ordered this, so if you guys want to wait until May I'll give you a review of the first issue. For those of us in the US it comes in at $33.89 delivered at current exchange rates.

Fair warning -- the order process works, but it's not pretty. Nothing slicky here.

Sag.

It looks amazing and at a 124 PAGES it fucking unbelievable! I've been considering it for the last couple of days.

Looks good. I'll wait until may.

hancock.tom wrote:

Looks good. I'll wait until may.

With the way Vae Victis seems to be declining and Alea hardly ever making it to print, I have a hard time believing that the world can actually support another European consim mag. I hope I'm wrong as it does look interesting...

Wow, there are still gaming magazines getting published? I've never had a subscription for one in my life, but I my dad used to get White Dwarf and it was always fun to look through. I also got a bunch of the old Dragon Magazines in .pdf, and aside from all the cool full games in there, those old mags are still great to read. I love the old ads.

Sorry, digression. This one looks pretty cool, but with a landscape as crowded as wargaming is, I can't imagine a magazine would be as useful to me as the internet. They can only cover so much, y'know?

If they include a magazine game in every issue I can see them surviving, if the games are playable. $40 for a subscription isn't bad if includes 4 games.

I used to subscribe to white dwarf back when they used it to cater to the veterans in their hobby instead of using it to get new people involved...

A full game attached with each issue steps up the game a bit, even at the higher price. I agree on the level of risk though -- they almost need to run a pre-order page for each issue.

I'm curious about the page format -- they appear to be oriented landscape?

I have Ares magazine with a copy of Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora in it sitting next to me on my nightstand. That gives me a bit of hope for this effort.

Sag.

Scratch that Landscape question. I think they just have their facing pages reversed in the demo sheet.

Edit -- No, if you look at the Storm Over Stalingrad logo and the attached map, it indicates wide pages. Maybe they're cutting the title in half to look edgy? Where's the publisher when you need him?

Sag.

If they include a magazine game in every issue I can see them surviving, if the games are playable.

This is something that I wish would make a comeback. Full games are cool, sure, and there have been some damn good magazine games, AGTFOS and Deathmaze for example. What I'd really like to see return, though, are the extra bits that used to come in there. White Dwarf used to do these mini expansions all the time. They'd just put a few new cards or characters in the magazine, maybe a solo variant or something. The General did the same thing for a few of their games, too.

I don't ever buy expansions unless I think the game "needs" one, but I'd definitely subscribe to a FFG magazine if there was going to be new stuff for the games I have inside. I get a cool mag, and it saves on me having to buy boxed expansions.

mjl1783 wrote:

This is something that I wish would make a comeback.

It already has. GMT and Multiman do this with their in house mags.

Yeah, C3i or whatever it is called. The nice thing about magazine expansions these days is with the proliferation of trading online and ebay even if you don't like paths of glory you can probably hock the new PoG expansion on ebay and make back 1/3 of your subscription cost...

Yeah, I know there are still a few wargaming left, and most of them include some cardboard in each issue, but as far as non-wargaming AT stuff goes, it's pretty slim pickins

That's because ATers can't read.

C3i looks pretty good, but it retails for $27 or so here. The last issue I saw had the Twilight Struggle expansion (totally unnecessary, no components needed) and some Combat Commander counters and scenarios (again, totally unnecessary, since we only play the random scenario generator anymore). Nice production though.

I'd like full games in a wargaming magazine but then didn't most magazine wargames suck?

C3i is a tremendous value if you play either SPQR, which seems to have scenarios and counters in every issue, and/or whatever their current flagship games are (CC, C&CA, FAB Bulge, Empire of the Sun, HiS, and Pax Romana currently, it would appear). They're even including cards (professionally printed, not perforated punch-outs) in recent issues, including variant cards for EotS and the Here I Stand 2-player Diplomacy Deck. I am, without question a GMT whore, so I finally gave up and subscribed for 2 copies [none of my local shops can be relied on to get them in, and when they do, it's usually priced at 20% over GMT's full retail price (which usually indicates the shop is getting screwed by their distributor in some fashion) so 2 copies at the discounted P500 price means I can cut one issue to shreds to put all the articles with the respective games I own and hang on to the other for trading down the road].

However, if you don't play a fair number of current GMT titles *and* at least 1 or 2 of the classic GBoH titles, it isn't worth blind buying every issue via subscriptioni.

I don't think MMP has put cardboard in an issue of Operations yet save the 1 $40 issue that came with a full game, a mini-HASL module, and with what amounted to the new version of The Gamers Xmas Countersheet--had a great expansion for SCS Fallschirmjaeger along with replacement counters for Devils Cauldron [of which I still have 1 spare set if anyone needs 'em], Monty's Gamble, an ACW series game and OCS title or two.

generalpf wrote:

I'd like full games in a wargaming magazine but then didn't most magazine wargames suck?

It kind of depends on what you're looking for in those games, but, mostly yea. I liked a lot of the Ares games, but none of 'em exactly set the world on fire. In the current crop of wargame mags, the stable of designers seems to be fairly limited, so, if you like, say, Perry Moore's approach/style, you'll find a lot to like in a number of issues of Against the Odds; if you think his style is dreck, then you'll probably ignore/hate it all (like me). The nice thing with wargame mags is that they tend to be fast-playing fairly low counter-density affairs. The whole "Counter-Strike" and Microgame series are, essentially, magazine games and there are some decent little games there. I think mag-games tend to fail when they get too ambitious and try to create chromed out grand-scale games while being limited to 140 counters. Plus, the rules are invariably a bit screwy due to space constraints, deadlines, and often light [or, sadly, nil] playtesting. Even highly regarded, fairly straightforward games like Mike Rinella's Not War But Murder have some stark "huh?" moments in the rulesheet that a boxed game probably wouldn't.

Back to the previous post about an AT magazine--a quarterly or biannual FFG "house magazine" seems like a workable idea in theory, anyway. They have enough games that a small magazine with new scenarios for various games and a freebie of some sort--a few Runebound cards or Wings of War cards; a bonus mini (like that WoTR Gollum that Spielbox had) would be cool. I'd think that their games have a broad enough fanbase and market penetration that they could support of $15ish magazine. The Pxxx system could work--announce content and start taking orders, when it hits a certain mark, charge cards and send it to press. Just because the, say, Starcraft bonus planet doesn't interest you, the 4 new Arkham scenarios might. It would, however, require folks to stop assuming that they should get everything for free....