Glad to hear you enjoyed GCACW, I really think it's a game that (besides the combat) has a ton to recommend it in terms of drama to ATers.

Let's see, in terms of what I have pre-order right now:

1989 (GMT) - How can this possibly be bad for someone who loves TS?

The Battle for Normandy Expansion (GMT) - Because I still have some room on my monster game table.

Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass) - Butterfield's previous solo designs are all absolute winners.

Fields of Fire (GMT) - Hoping for the second edition reprint this year, likely not going to happen unless it is announced soon.

The Hunters: German U-Boats at War, 1939-43 (Consim Press) - The describe sounds pretty darn good. I always have room for some solo games.

Mr. Madison's War: That Incredible War of 1812 (GMT) - I love CDGs so this one was a no brainer for me.

No Retreat: The North African Front (GMT) - The East Front game is a brilliant design. Let's see how the system ports to the smaller scale of the NA front.


Still debating on some of the MMP stuff like Lincoln's War, Kingdom of Heaven, What Price Glory?

Gary Sax wrote:


Ha, another one? I've a graduate degree in anthropology, and one of my regular gaming partners is ABD in History at Harvard. Lots of Social Scientist Wargamers running around.

And I think your attitude is probably the healthier one; it's just not in my gamer DNA to ignore blatant, intentional asimulationism, and Volko's modern stuff is just so dreadful in that regard. And we need to be fair about Labyrinth: it's not a game with 'a few' flaws. It's a game where the coordinated world-wide Jihadist menace is facing off against a 'free world' that wants nothing more than to see democracy prosper in the Middle East, a world where the Iraq War was a good idea, where Bin Laden or his stand-in romps around the world convincing governments to join the New Caliphate, where Predator strikes are exceedingly good at removing terror cells but never cause any collateral damage... the list goes on and on. It a noisome bit of propaganda.

I can't find a "report" button for spam posts.

I usually TrashMail uba the link for the post (which I've just done for the spammer above).

Jeff White wrote:


NukeWar '68 is just a professionally printed version of Nuke War '78, which was a free print-n-play game posted on BGG for a while. There are few if any changes other than some backstory bits from the rules that were posted on BGG a couple of years ago. I'm not a big fan of All things Zombie [I like it more than a lot of folks around here but it's just never seems to be a go-to game], but Space Infantry, another free PnP game that LnL picked up is really pretty good. NW is, in my opinion, much closer to Space Infantry than ATZ.

Now, the World at War series (Eisenbach Gap is the first in the series) is one I really dig but mostly because I love WW III games in general and there hasn't been *anything* of note on that front published basically since the Wall fell and the west discovered that we had been overestimating the quality and capabilities of Soviet hardware for the better part of the previous 2 decades. (I recently took a look back at the values for Warsaw Pact hardware used in Close & Destroy, the microarmor miniatures ruleset I used to play the fuck out during my late-80s high school years; I think they'd have to be *halved* based on what was learned after the breakup of the Pact and in Gulf War I [in particular].)

wolvendancer wrote:


History ABD from Georgetown and a card-carrying member of the Military-Industrial Complex here. I can at least vouch for Volko's games being reflective of the Weltanschauung of a pretty significant chunk of Wonkery here inside the Beltway. I find it's mighty rare and generally tough to find a "nuanced" view of The War on Terror...or the War on Drugs...or the War on Poverty...or the War on any other thing that we have "declared" War [with a capital 'W'] on more or less since we declared war on Japan [or at least since we declared "Police Action" on Vietnam, anyway]

If you want "nuance" you need to go...uh, fuck...I don't know where you should go. Between the 500 TV channels and 10,000 "news" sources on I have come to believe that the whole fucking English-speaking world has been reduced to hyper-specialized echo chambers where like-minded people congregate and wall themselves off from anything that might accidentally creep in and challenge the raw absolutes they hold and use to define themselves and the world as they see it.

Really great posts guys. It's cool to hear the perspectives on these games from the academic historians.

Oh, and to get the thread back on track, my most anticipated "coming down the road" wargame is Mr. Madison's War. Naval games aside, the War of 1812 doesn't get a lot of attention, so I'm really looking forward to this one as I think a card-driven game will be *far* more interesting than the block games [a mechanic I generally dislike to begin with] and near-Euros that have covered the topic of late.

My most anticipated wargame on the near-term release schedule is, without question, Virgin Queen. I've played the hell out of Here I Stand and I got to watch an early playtest of VQ a few years ago in person. I'm dying to get my paws on this one....

After that, like GSax, the new GCACW reprint/expansion. He turned me on to the series and I've had a blast with it ever since. While I own the original SJW, I've yet to play it as it seemed the least polished of the series. This new version will almost certainly be an improvement over the original (hell, if only for updated art...)

wolvendancer wrote:


Yeah, seems it's a diverse social science crowd here, political science PHD/prof here. Obviously the biggest laugher of an assumption in Labyrinth (as you said, among a number) is that the global jihad movement was actually centrally organized by some cadre of jihadists resembling our friend the "grey eminence" from the Paradox computer games or every strategic wargame ever made... and most operational and tactical games for that matter (Who is the player in a game of ASL?). The last 10 years have certainly taught us that that is a load of BS sold by the West. The international control that did exist was quickly and easily broken by the massive resources of the US, it's pretty much a domestic issue of independent groups at this point with perhaps some tiny, tiny communication between one another. But you wouldn't know it looking at the policy behavior of the US and allies.

On the other hand, I personally don't find the general premise that the real culprit from the perspective of the developed and developing world is actually quality of governance that farfetched. Very thankful he did not call it democracy, to put it mildly, but I think as a concept poor governance is one of the necessary conditions for non-trivial amounts of violent extremism (and not just of the Islamic variety, I once read a fantastic comparison between Islamic extremism in the past 20-30 years and the anarchist movement around the turn of the century). Add to the top of that two other things I think are reasonably descriptive, that he could have easily gotten wrong---that Islamic extremism is in many ways really about governance in the middle east rather than some absurd war against freedom, which is what his victory conditions reflect. Additionally, international terror against the West is simply a way to raise visibility and especially to gain big time funding for your organization from sympathetic donors. There's still that sticky victory condition of setting off some weapon of mass destruction in the US, which to me is not reflective of reality, but ah well.

But you won't see me presenting it in class for accuracy or anything, don't get me wrong.

Dogmatix wrote:


Yet another! I've got a bit of that last thing, too, as I'm ex-military (Army intelligence, cryptolinguistics).

I would certain allow that the Beltway is a noxious echochamber, and I do think echochambers are a problem, but I think that whole spiel can easily be overstressed; the problem is not really that the Beltway is an echochamber, it's that what they are echoing is almost always completely untrue.

And the whole 'echochamber' spiel leads one very easily into the 'fair and balanced' trap of the Neocons, i.e., 'we lie, but so does everyone, we're all equally guilty, nanana, I'm not listening'. When in fact there are people committed to telling the truth (or, if you prefer, whose truth-content is a. 9000% more than the average pundit). These people are not, in general, on television.

Gary Sax wrote:


Oh, I thought you said you were a social scientist.

*rimshot*

I think the whole concept of 'good governance', including your framing of it, is very problematic, and is demonstrably not why the US has been involved in the Middle East for the last two decades. But that's waayyyy off topic, I realize, and I too will stop hijacking the thread.

Your other comments (about player role being fuzzy in wargames) is something I'm very interested in - it's especially problematic in CDGs - and is one of the many reasons I have no interest in ASL. My favorite tactical wargaming system is TCS, which handles issues of player-role and 'friction' (to use Clausewitz's term) a bit better.