Every year when we roll out our Yearly Sale, we get lots of requests from customers asking for a variety of information about the games that they can buy in the sale. Which games have the lowest stock levels, which games of a certain series are available, which hot games are available, which games have the highest retail values (usually for the folks who are looking to resell some or all of their sale purchases), etc. So this year, as we approach the GMT Sale that starts on Tuesday, September 3, Rachel and I have created this Buyer’s Guide to try to give you some of that information to help out with your buying choices. We encourage you to use this information and the links below to build your sale carts on the GMT website between now and Tuesday when the sale begins. I hope you find this Buyer’s Guide useful.
The content for the Thunderbolt Deluxe package has been finalized with the GMT Art Department team engaged in finishing up the counters and finalizing the maps.
A few changes have been made to the Thunderbolt scenario line-up. Added are two scenarios commencing at key points during the long war:
As a designer, I like to focus on why things happen in campaigns, operations, and battles. In old school terms, I “design for cause.” This tends to make my games more complex, but I hope players come away with a better understanding of why their game progressed the way it did beyond “he had better cards” or “the dice hate me.”
In World War II carrier battles, there were eight factors of significant importance in determining how attacks took place and their outcomes: wind, weather, range, reconnaissance, CAP (Combat Air Patrol), coordination, targeting, and training – WWRRCCTT. All are interdependent to some extent and have an impact in Imperial Eagles (at least in the Advanced Rules).
Introduction by Fred Schachter, Assistant Designer & Editor: As lamented within previous InsideGMT articles, the amount of Congress of Vienna material the Team generated for the game is too copious for inclusion within the to-be-published Playbook. Hence, that content is being provided through InsideGMT pieces.
The Congress of Vienna Playbook contains all needed direction, in a list narrative form, for setting up each of the game’s five scenarios. There are no concerns there! However, some gamers prefer a graphic approach in the form of Scenario Set Up Maps. This article provides those Set-Up Maps.
For those interested in learning the historical background regarding each map, please access the link to their associated InsideGMT “Game as History” articles. The following link provides a background, in terms of the Congress of Vienna game, for Turns 1 (March-April 1813) through 3 (June 1813): A Historical Introduction to the Congress of Vienna Period Part 2 of 4: Napoleon Resurgent (Spring 1813) | Inside GMT blog. Once you’ve accessed this article, others of the series will become available through this GMT Game Site’s table of contents.
Hopefully, this material is informative to all readers interested in this fascinating historical period, the 1813-1814 resurgence and downfall of Napoleon and his French Empire and will complement the Congress of Vienna list narrative Scenario Set Ups provided with the published game. Playbook Section cross-references are provided for each Scenario.
Let me invite you to a great strategy article by Mark Herman for his Rebel Fury game. The main topic and focus area is the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863 – the so called Robert E. Lee’s “perfect battle”. The Confederates are standing in front of immensely difficult task, being flanked by multiple Union forces. What should be done in such case?
Let us see how the game depicts that conflict. Enjoy!
This is the first in a series of InsideGMT articles for the new Enemy of My Enemy expansion for the first COIN multipack, The British Way. Joe and I are extremely pleased with the positive reception of the first printing of The British Way which sold out from GMT last November. After seeing a ton of reviews, after action reports, and game award nominations for The British Way, we wanted to offer even more content for those enjoying the game or those looking forward to the reprint. The Enemy of My Enemy expansion offers three new ways of expanding the base game’s content: a new Arab Revolt (1936-1939) game using the Palestine map, a new Japanese Occupation (1942-1945) game using the Malaya map, and new rules and components for an advanced variant for each of the conflicts depicted in the base game: Palestine (1945-1947), Malaya (1948-1960), Kenya (1952-1956), and Cyprus (1955-1959). We’ll cover each of the parts of the expansion in a separate InsideGMT article. Today’s article is focused on the new Arab Revolt game.
The British Way: Arab Revolt addresses a major issue with the base game’s depiction of Palestine. In the original British Way: Palestine, which covers the 1945-1947 struggle between Jewish terrorist groups and British counterinsurgency forces, the Palestinian Arab community is not directly referenced in the game. As the introduction to the rulebook notes, the game “does not directly model the wider political struggles between the British, Jewish Agency, and Arab political groups, or the civil war that began in November 1947”. By focusing on a narrow period of time and British counterinsurgency tactics against the major armed opposition of that time, armed Jewish groups, the game could not adequately depict the Palestinian Arab community’s less confrontational stance against British rule during that period. However, that raises the question, why was the larger Arab community not more focused on resisting British rule between 1945-1947?
The answer is that members of the Palestinian Arab community launched a massive revolt against British rule between 1936-1939 that ended with equally massive British repression and major concessions, including a new limitation on Jewish immigration introduced by the 1939 White Paper. That same limitation motivated the Jewish armed groups to violently resist British rule during the 1945-1947 period. In other words, one cannot understand the Palestinian Arab community’s exhaustion in the 1940s without exploring the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), nor why Jewish groups such as Haganah cooperated with the British during that revolt but then opposed them in 1945. Therefore, rather than simply tossing in a few token events into the base game, I knew from the start I wanted to design an entire game on the preceding conflict to help provide more nuanced context to the “absence” of Palestinians from the narrowly focused 1945-1947 Palestine game.
Along with my friends, Johan and Chris, I have been playing the scenarios in The Ancient World: Rise of the Roman Republic and The Ancient World: Carthage pretty much every Wednesday night since December 2023. At first, we just wanted to take the system for a spin as Johan spoke highly of it, but it has since turned into a grand adventure.
Our first play of the 1st Punic War scenario from Carthage ended with a Carthaginian victory. We had so much fun with that play, we immediately reset and went back to it again. This time the Romans prevailed. It was also around this time that, since we had been asking so many questions of the developer, Alan Ray, we formally signed on to the playtest team.
Since that time, we’ve played every scenario in both Rise of the Roman Republic and Carthage (except the Mercenary War – that’s coming) at least once and a few of them twice. It still hasn’t gotten old. Playtesting can sometimes be work; this doesn’t feel like it.
What is it that’s so engaging about this system that we keep returning to it?
