Men of Iron: What is a Turn Anyway?

In this article, we’ll look at one of the major game mechanics that causes players to make choices in any Men of Iron series game. You might think this would be movement or combat, as in many wargames. But that’s the point. Although players’ choices made involving those two mechanics are important in Men of […]

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Designer Blogs

The Life & Games of Wallenstein Through the Lens of Thirty Years War, Cuius Regio, and Baltic Empires

Below you will find another fantastic article from Clio’s Board Games, this time discussing the zenith of Albrecht von Wallenstein’s life through the lens of boardgames. You can also find this article on Clio’s blog. The previous article in this series can be found here. Enjoy! -Rachel Two weeks ago, we had a first look at Wallenstein’s life until its

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Inside the Game as History

The Hubris Histories – Book 3: The Lay of the Land

We have introduced in the precedent entry of these Histories the main players and movers of things in Hubris – Twilight of the Hellenistic World: the Kings and their Friends. Now we are going to examine what they were fighting over, i.e. as in most of history, land and the resources that could be obtained

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Designer Blogs

The Hubris Histories – Book 2: The Kings and their Courts

As we have seen in the general historical overview in Book 1, individual leaders, first and foremost, but not exclusively, kings, drove the historical narrative in Ancient times. Accordingly, Hubris – Twilight of the Hellenistic World has been built around these leaders, their strengths and weaknesses, unique abilities and relationships. Who can you trust to

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Designer Blogs

Disease and Other Unexpected Losses in A House Divided

Disease killed significantly more soldiers in the Civil War than bullets did. The Union lost 110, 000 killed in action and 225,000 from disease. The South lost 94,000 killed in action and 169,000 from disease. In addition, each side had about 30,000 men die in captivity, and almost all of those would have been die

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Designer Blogs

Ermine Design Process & Historical Look at The Battle of Champtoceux

In 2024, my upcoming game Men of Iron Volume VII: Ermine was put onto the GMT P500 list, and reached its number relatively quickly. For those who don’t know, Men of Iron, created by Richard Berg is a hex and counter series of games focussed on medieval battles at the grand tactical scale.  Ermine covers

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Designer Blogs

The Hubris Histories – Book 1: Historical Overview

Hubris – Twilight of the Hellenistic World takes one to three players twenty-two centuries back in time to the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean. This period is often little known, obscured by the great epopees of Alexander the Great (that preceded it), Hannibal (that took place simultaneously) or Julius Caesar (that followed it). It was nonetheless pivotal

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Designer Blogs

Putting the Operation in TacOps

In previous installments of this series we spent a lot of time on how the game works on the tactical scale, from the Dynamic Hexes and Counters and the Simple Structure of the action system, to how the opposition bot uses Contact to Contest Control. We began bridging the gap between the tactical and operational

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Designer Blogs

Using “Congress of Vienna” in the Classroom and Reducing Time to Play a CoV “Clash of Armies” Scenario Turn Through a “Warm Start”

Introduction by Congress of Vienna Assistant Designer/Editor, Fred Schachter – The CoV Team is privileged having in its rank’s educator Tyler Brooks, who with his co-teacher adapted Congress of Vienna for the classroom to teach students so they could experience the challenges of being in a coalition or facing one. The class they created was

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Scenarios/Variants

Factions and Scoring in Tsar

This is the fourth in a series of InsideGMT articles from Paul Hellyer about his board game Tsar, currently on GMT’s P500. You can view the previous article here. Tsarist Russia was supposedly ruled by one person, but this didn’t keep Nicholas II’s subjects from debating the faults and merits of their government and hatching

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Designer Blogs
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