Category: tactical considerations

This Is Huge – Gamechanging

The full ramifications of this little fact have yet to be explored. Probably because the bulk of the D&D crowd plays linear, story-line chasing, games that think too small to include such concepts as player-created megadungeons. In Brian’s case, the dwarven faction is mining in the hopes of finding...

Blade Traps

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...

Towards a Unified Theory of Wargaming Complexity

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...

Shrodinger’s To Hit Roll

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...

Shooting Around Corners in Black Ops

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...

Song of Guns and Tedium

Man, I have got to find some decent scenarios for Flying Lead.  The boy and I lined up 450 points worth of evenly matched forces against each other and just did a shoot-em-til-they’re-dead match.  This time it was his space mercs (GZG) attacking my police force.  After more than...

Beautiful Asymmetry

Yesterday we talked about the three different styles of stairs.  Today I want to talk about why I didn’t just use one template.  It all comes down to asymmetry. Asymmetry is important from a gamesmanship perspective.  If all three sides of the rocket are identical, that limits the tactical...

FUBAR Ruminations

Woah, four posts in four days, this blog just might be back.  It’s amazing how much more time a guy has when he’s not coaching his daughter’s soccer team to a league championship.  That’s right, I know how to coach soccer – the secret is inheriting kids from other...

These Rules Are FUBAR

Last night, the boy and I headed down to the weekly game night and threw together a quick test drive of the FUBAR rules. For those of you who don’t know, FUBAR is a free, one-page, sci-fi set of rules from Gawd ‘Elp Us Games. As a one page...

Tactical Terrain

Last time you saw the first of what should be several outdoor terrain tiles.  These open up the field of play, but if you’re going to have an open field, you might as well just use gridded paper.  The whole point of the tiles is to present a 3D...