Village Pillage: Vikings 878 Attack

The Viking leaders offer a distinct advantage in that they can pick up and drop troops off as they move and can perform something akin to an overrun if they can whack all the defending locals in one round of combat. I forget which Viking leader begins the game, but Dennis gets one to start and draws others from a deck of cards each turn.

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Book Review: The Battle of Znaim. by John Gill

Gill brings you inside the command tents of Archduke Charles and Napoleon, explaining the multitude of options, hopes, and fears that descended on the commanders in chief and their senior commanders. Better yet, you also get the political influences, and especially the Austrian infighting, that accompany Archduke Charles and Napoleon as they weigh battle versus the fragmentation of their armies in retreat and pursuit.

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Breslau 1945: Fresh Boardgame Playtest

Anyway, game designer Perry Moore came up with a variation of the usual move, blow things up, fight the remains, and exploit if possible. In his scheme, Soviet air and all artillery bombardments come first, then move and combat, and then any exploitation from the CRT.

Decision making is marvelous, because the air and artillery you use in the bombardment phases are not available to you as artillery and air support in the regular combat phase.

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The Day Rommel Was Stopped: The Battle of Ruweisat Ridge – 2 July 1942.

Written in a memoir style, with a hint of a detective story in tracking down sources, the elder Jephson was able to collect information from the diaries of various British officers to supplement his own memories and the official histories obtained from the Imperial War Museum. This informal style highlights the journey of the former soldier of obtaining the truth about the battle and placing it in context of stopping the Afrika Korps from slicing through the El Alamein position.

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Grizzled Mon Amis: WWI Card Game

Sacre Bleu, what is this? Ah, a clever cooperative card game about WWI French troops in the trenches, with a strange way of being cooperative, but The Grizzled works.

The goal? Survive. No path to glory. No Anthill to take. Just survive long enough to end the war in one piece, or at least with fewer than four wounds.

My set up as Charles Sauliere with coffee chits. Note the war pile (upper left corner), speech tokens, and peace pile (next to box). Sauliere’s lucky charm is rain, which triggers discards.

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