Category: rules

Any trap good enough to scare Indiana Jones is good enough for Castle Meatgrinder.  Obviously, these little gems won’t make an appearance until they are triggered or disabled. I debated with myself over whether markers for traps were even necessary for Castle Meatgrinder.  They are, after all, single events...

Oh, Cirsova, I wish I knew how to quit you. My RPG style has been regressing over the years.  The last time out it was pure 5e glory with the RPG elements in full blown glory, and the wargamey aspects utilized to the hilt.  When I run games the...

Castalia House, that is. This week over at the indy publisher’s blog, soon to be the best wargame blog on this or any other net, Wargaming Wednesday With Warren.  Somehow I managed to sweet talk the editors over there into letting me in the pool during adult swim.  Now you...

The Amazon stork finally delivered my latest rules baby, and I couldn’t be a prouder papa.   I’ve been on the lookout for a decent set of medieval rules for use with my fantasy figures, and bought these largely on the strength of Black Ops.  Much as I love...

If you’re one of those poor bastards that grinds through a long commute on a daily basis, then you can’t get enough decent podcasts.  There are a hot steaming pile of them for tabletop RPGs, a few of them are even worth a listen, but very very few for...

Put on your thinking man’s cap, because today we’re talking math. Earlier this week, Delta Vector (you know Delta, he runs the excellent Delta Vector blog) posted the latest installment of his in-depth analysis of wargame design, this one on the perfect number of units.   The entire series is...

With multiple games of Neil Thomas’ One Hour Wargames under the belt, it’s time to take a more solid look at the ruleset and see how it stacks up. Spoiler alert: Pretty darn good! What makes for a good tabletop game?  Enough units to have meaningful choices.  Enough variety...

Continuing on from yesterday’s discussion on suppressing fire in Black Ops, but the same sort of thing happens in a number of wargames where the condition of a model is left ambiguous until that model next activates. So there you are, staring at the table where your opponent has...

When somebody uses suppression fire at my table, they always announce it like this. Osprey’s Black Ops uses a card driven activation system.  It’s a randomized IGOUGO system broken up by held actions, orders, and suppression fire.  As can be imagined, suppressing fire is more likely to have an effect, but...

If you haven’t seen it yet, Castalia House Publishing has a new blog feature called Wargame Wednesdays, for all of us hex-and-counter-philes.  The series has inspired me to push some cardboard around.  All of my kids love themselves some Awful Green Things, and we spent a summer tooling about with...