Monthly Archives: March 2022

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Battles for the Shenandoah: Developer’s Notes for the Death Valley Expansion Pack

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This coming August will mark the third anniversary of Death Valley’s publication. During the GMT Seminar at CSW-Expo 2019, six weeks or so before the game shipped to customers, I announced that designer Greg Laubach was working on a follow-up battle, Piedmont.

As time went on, those listening that evening might have wondered what had become of this mini-game on a single rather smallish Civil War battle.  The answer is that, just as Death Valley’s initial concept grew to encompass the Shenandoah’s big-name 1864 battles in addition to the 1862 battles, so the expansion pack grew to include McDowell, Second Winchester, and Cool Spring, yielding a total of nine scenarios or variants.

The expansion pack battles are not exactly household words, but interested readers can easily find accounts of them online.  Thus, this article will focus on the challenges each posed to the design and development process, detouring into history only as necessary for an understanding of those challenges.

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All Bridges Burning: A 2-Player Variant

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At the time of writing this, All Bridges Burning, COIN Series Volume X, is the latest released COIN Series game.The game tells the story of the Finnish Civil War of 1918 including the lead up to the war during the previous year.

In this article, we will introduce you to a new variant to All Bridges Burning for two players. The 2-player variant is released as free download with this article. All the rules and procedures needed to play are contained in this PDF file.

I want to thank Adrian Rubiero for testing and preparing the variant with me.

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Commands & Colors: Ancients – Skirmishing and Evasion Strategy by BrentS

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It never ceases to amaze me how a few tweaks in the basic C&C engine can create genuine variation in play experience between different games, presenting new strategic challenges and modeling different tactical imperatives across widely divergent historical periods and genres.

Some of these differences are minor and modular, such as national unit characteristics in Napoleonics or elephant units in Ancients, but each game has one or two major elements that define the game and are the fundamental features that differentiate it from its C&C cousins. For base game Napoleonics reduction in firepower with block loss, for Samurai Battles the Honour and Fortune economy and the Dragon deck, for Medieval the Inspired Action tokens, and so on.

I enjoy many of the C&C games but Ancients is still my favorite. In part this is my personal historical interest, part is what I perceive to be the lean, clean interplay between units and the perfectly balanced deck, giving me a feeling of battlefield control that I never quite get with the other C&C games. Most important, though, is what I consider to be Ancients’ two defining features, the critical importance of leader positioning, and evasion. The latter will be one of the subjects of this article.

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Infernal Machine: The Inventor’s Vade Mecum (Nautica ed.) Part 8 — Acquiring Letters Patent

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By Ed Ostermeyer, Master Engineer (Grade 2)

Good day to you, young Inventor.

In these chaotic days of this accursed Civil War, it is well that you have all your important papers in order.

Especially important is to have in your possession documents known as “letters patent.”

Today’s session of instruction from the Inventor’s Vade Mecum will discuss the acquisition of two of these letters patent from the War Department.  

The first of the letters patent can be useful, though you may not need its help right away.

Of the other letter patent, a young Inventor and his fishboat cannot afford to be without one.

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Sovereign of Discord: External Support

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Last article, I covered the struggle in South Vietnam between the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. Both sides in the war received external assistance and advice from sponsors seeking to direct the conflict and exert control over their clients. Over the course of the Kennedy administration (1961-1963), US assistance in South Vietnam dramatically increased until there were 16,000 advisors in country by the end of 1963. Likewise, beginning in 1959, North Vietnam gradually increased its military assistance and advisors to support the insurgency. The North eventually sent thousands of trained “regroupees,” southerners who regrouped to the North in 1954 as part of the Geneva Accords, to add additional strength to the insurgency. In this article, I’ll focus on how Sovereign of Discord models American and North Vietnamese external assistance.

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Tank Duel Print and Play Update Kit

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Last year we released the first expansion for Tank Duel: Enemy in the Crosshairs, adding North Africa’s sand and sun to Tank Duel. We also incorporated feedback from hundreds of games using the Anti-Tank Gun and Infantry Rules to improve the rules for both. Those rules require some new components, so we wanted to make sure owners of the core game could use these rules as well as owners of the expansion.

So we are pleased to present the printable update kit for Tank Duel. If you own Tank Duel North Africa, you already have everything in this update kit. The update kit requires you to make the following components – details after the list:

  • 12 AT Gun cards (6 German, 6 Soviet)
  • 4 Infantry Cards (2 German City/Non-City, 2 Soviet City/Non-City)
  • 2 Anti-Infantry AFV Attack Cards (1 German, 1 Soviet)
  • 1 Minefield Scenario Card
  • Various Counters

Each of these components can be used independently, although you will need to make the counters corresponding to each card and ruleset as explained in each section.

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Infernal Machine: The Inventor’s Vade Mecum (Nautica ed.) Part 7 — Running Your Pressgang: A Methodology in Recruiting Sailors to Your Project Team

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By Ed Ostermeyer, Master Engineer (Grade 2)

Ah, the budding entrepreneur returns.

Welcome back, young Inventor.

If you will open your copy of the Inventor’s Vade Mecum to the section entitled “Sailors,” we will get started.

You must be mindful that several decisions must be made before you are allowed access to the Navy’s manpower pool.

How will your fishboat be powered?

If your underwater marvel is to rely on muscle power, then a surplus of brawn would be advantageous.

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Greco-Persian Wars as Depicted by Commands & Colors: Ancients

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I truly love coming back from time to time to C&C Ancients, my most played game of all times. After covering all the official scenarios now I am picking my favorite mini-campaigns – connected thematically sets of battles – and try to play them in one go. Recently I brought to the table couple of Civil War battles (Caesar vs Pompey). This time we decided to completely change the scenario, belligerents as well as armies compositions. We went for Greco-Persian wars, namely:

  1. Marathon (490 BC) – a battle which ended the first Persian invasion on Greek homeland; Athenians managed to defeat Easterners before Spartans arrived; famous soldier run a “marathon” to deliver the story to worried citizens of Athens.
  2. Thermopylae – (480 BC) – one of the iconic battles of all times; who has not heard about Leonidas and his 300 Spartans? Richard Borg created here one of the most interesting scenarios in his carrier – a true struggle till the end, with epic 10 Victory Points objective.
  3. Plataea (479 BC) – a huge battle in which unified Greek Polish inflicted a crushing defeat on Persian forces. I always play it with three sets of blocks: one for Persians, one for Spartans and one for Athenians.

Without further delay, let me invite you to the session reports! Enjoy! PS. As always, you can click on each picture to see details.

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Infernal Machine: The Tale of the “Pioneer”

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Though the “H.L. Hunley” was the first submarine to sink another vessel in combat, it was by no means the first submarine built by the American Confederacy in the 1860’s.

There were multiple underwater marvels in various stages of completeness at several different locations when war broke out between North and South in April, 1861.

We will concern ourselves with a specific vessel, not just because it was one of the first of a type called a “fishboat” by the popular press of the time, but also for the knowledge it imparted to a team of bright young engineers and mechanics who had a dream of building a craft that would allow them to travel and fight underwater.