Tag: World War 1

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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Wings of War, World War I: Aerial Duel

Wings of War uses maneuver cards to plot the flight path of the plane, with the particular flight paths slugged to aircraft performance. You pick three cards and place them face down. Each card shows a starting line, which matches up to the front of the plane base, and an ending arrowhead, which matches up to the back of the plane base. You place the card down at the front of the plane, lift up the plane, and put the back of the plane base down where the arrowhead matches up. Movement is simultaneous.

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How the West Was Saved BoardgamingLife Review

Other than knowing when it took place and what the overall outcome was, I must admit I had very little previous knowledge of the Russo-Polish War of 1920. Reading through a few introductory texts did, however, confirm one thing that I had suspected was very much the case with this conflict – that it was an incredibly complex, one might even say wild, mix of military and political events flashing into focus, then to some extent disappearing, only to be replaced by further variations of the same.

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1916 Verdun – Campaign of Attrition A BoardgamingLife review

CSL’s new treatment of the battle certainly does have a philosophy, and it is a philosophy that is worth becoming acquainted with if you have any sort of interest in the battle. Part of that philosophy has to do with the designer’s (Ray Weiss) intention to create a series of games (called 2140) whereby players can enjoy the sort of unfussy simulation models that belonged to the vintage era of SPI as well as GDW’s Series 120 titles.

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1914 Germany at War: A Boardgaming Life Review and Initial Analysis of Vento Nuovo’s New WW1 Game

So what makes 1914 GaW, as a diceless block game, different from its predecessor?  The ambience of 1914 is certainly present through a series of game features, but if we want to talk about similarities, the best answer I can offer is that this system, running across two very different eras, emphasizes matter that is common to all military experience – armies that move and fight are armies that are wearing out, be that in a day of intense action or through the course of weeks of campaigning; and furthermore, as one historian put it, the knack of seeing what is on “the other side of the hill,” is here portrayed through the conundrum of what is on the other side of the opponent’s block

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