Author: Harvey Mossman

Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble

This is a siege game which represents the defense of an airstrip by the  equivalent of a  French division against more than three Viet Minh infantry divisions supported by nine artillery battalions.   The setting is a valley located in the highlands near the border between Vietnam and Laos in 1954.  The game is divided into 21 turns, each of which represents three days.  If the French have not surrendered at the end of the last turn, the French player wins.  If they have surrendered, the Viet Minh player wins.

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The Year 1813 and “The Struggle of Nations” Comments on the Campaign and a Kevin Zucker Design

By the commencement of the 1813 campaign season, it seemed, at least at first glance, that Napoleon had achieved the impossible.  By any one of a number of measures, he had rebuilt the numerical strength of the forces he could command to the point where they outnumbered the coalition armies currently reaching across eastern and central Germany.  But, to a considerable extent, this was a delusion.

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The Last Spike- a BoardgamingLife Review

In the game, players compete to accumulate money from land speculation out West where railroads are due to be built. This differs very much from the railroad building genre popular in eurogame circles where building the rail line is paramount and moving commodities is profitable.  In this game your goal is to buy the land where the railroad track would be laid and profit when the track is actually completed between 2 cities.  There is no product to move and no cargoes to be managed.

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FIRST LOOK: TURDA 1944

Orages a L’Est actually has two games set in 1944, Turda, featuring a joint German-Hungarian counterattack against the Soviets and the Romanians near that town in Transylvania, and Tali-Ihantala in Finland. I picked Turda because it had a flat, featureless map, and, how many times can you say 1944 joint German-Hungarian counterattack?

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The US Civil War-A BoardgamingLife Review

The Civil War by Victory Games, at least to my mind, was the epitome of strategic Civil War games and was a derivative of an older Strategy & Tactics magazine game called The American Civil War (also an excellent game but limited by the magazine format) so it was with baited breath that I anticipated the release of GMT’s the US Civil War. I was not disappointed!

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