Hexsides and Hand Grenades

GMT's Next War: Korea is part of the ongoing "Next War" series designed by Gene Billingsley and Mitchell Land.  The series is based on potential conflicts in the world today. The first release in the series, Next War:  Korea , was successful enough to keep the series going with the 2014 publication of  Next War: Taiwan. .  I can see why. Next War:  Korea has gotten a lot of positive response from gamers over the last couple of years and it's been well supported with updates, errata, and Land's helpful responses to even minor questions over on BGG.  The rules are cleanly written and the units are nicely done with beautiful maps.  There's a standard rule set and an advanced one with all the bells and whistles and tons of optional rules. The standard rules are not difficult to learn and they manage to incorporate the core concepts of a good wargame without feeling watered down.  The real meat of the game, so I'm told, is in the advanced rules - which I ha

Well, looking back at 2014 (over 60 articles), it seems that this blog saw a lot more action than 2013 (36 articles all told).  It probably had something to do with finally being finished with a degree and having more free time this year but I would also say that I got a bit deeper with my gaming experiences too.  Up until this year, I'd kept the gaming scale down to short (a few hours of play time) platoon/company level ( Lock 'n Load , World at War , etc.) games with brief forays into brigade-level ( Dawn's Early Light ) affairs.  With my purchase of Victory Games' The Korean War in early summer, that all changed for me. The Korean War was really a turning point in my own gaming experience.  It was the first really large-scale operational game that I had ever played and which covered an entire year of a war.  I wasn't sure how I would make the jump to this scale and scope and I was concerned that it would be too complicated.  Fortunately, the learning scenarios

In 1981, Avalon Hill released the beloved B-17:  Queen of the Skies , a solitaire game that put players in the shoes of a B-17 bomber crew trying to fight its way through the war just one mission at a time. The player would go through each mission, rolling dice and checking tables as his crew made it from England to occupied Europe and back on a bombing run.  Although B-17  was short on strategy and long on random results, the experience of watching your crew grow in skill and experience over the course of a campaign made the game somehow more than the sum of its parts.  Many people grew to love the game and it's still played and remembered fondly even today. The well loved B-17: Queen of the Skies (AH, 1981) One of B-17's designers, Bruce Shelley, took the basic concepts of this game   and brought them down to the ground level.  The idea of the player having a tank crew and taking it through the war similar to B-17 probably seemed like it would be a sure-fire success.

Well, it's been a long while since I've done a video so I decided to get the camera out again.  Not sure of what to play after my affair with Victory Games' Vietnam, I went with something simple that I could play in an evening.  Omega Games' Ranger seemed to fit the bill.  It's pretty straightforward and I haven't played nearly enough of it since I got it almost two years ago. The mission I pulled here was to recon an suspected enemy POL site.  Not long after my squad was dropped off in the jungle, they ran into some pretty huge problems that created a domino effect of disaster.  Check out the video below to see how the chips fell and how bad decisions compounded on each other to make for a bloody affair in the jungles of Puerto Ono: