Category Archives: Designer Blogs

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Zheng He Playthrough with Geoffrey Engelstein Part 3

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A reminder of the situation at the end of Turn 5

Welcome back to our playthrough of the first voyage in Zheng He: Admiral of the Ming Fleet. This is part 3 of 4 and will make a lot more sense if you read parts 1 and 2 first.

We have played through the first five turns of the 22-turn voyage. I’m going into a lot of detail about the rules and my thought process, but during actual play, once you know the rules, each voyage takes about 30-45 minutes to complete.

We are located in Malacca and are running very low on cards in hand, so we will need to Resupply as our first order of business.

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The Other Infernal Machine: The Tale of the Union Navy’s “Submarine Propeller” Part 3 – The Appomattox River Raid: June 26-28, 1862

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Strangling the Rebel Capital

Rebel battery position on Drewry’s Bluff defending Richmond from US Navy attacks from the James River. Image taken in 1865. {courtesy the National Archives}

Ever since the Union navy had retaken Norfolk, Virginia, Union gunboats had been prowling the James River to within seven miles of the Confederacy’s capital city of Richmond. 

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Zheng He Playthrough with Geoffrey Engelstein Part 2

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This is the second of a four-part playthrough of a voyage from Zheng He. The prior article covered the basic rules of the game, setup, and the first turn. We had just arrived in the port of Champa, in modern-day Vietnam. 

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The Other Infernal Machine: The Tale of the Union Navy’s “Submarine Propeller” Part 2 – The James River and Richmond: 1861-1862

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The James River in Northern Virginia

As the longest river system in the Virginia Commonwealth, the James River has its origins out west in the Appalachian Mountains. It meanders 443 miles through the northern Virginia countryside before emptying into Chesapeake Bay.

The James River – Present Day – the Richmond skyline in the distance] {image courtesy richmond.com}
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Crisis: Britannia — Nero and Britain

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At the end of our previous installment, the defeated Briton leader, Caratacus, had been betrayed by the Brigantes, and handed over to Rome. However, the rebellious Silures do not seem to have been deterred by the loss of their leader, and continued to resist Roman occupation and engage in hit-and-run guerilla attacks on Roman forces. Such was the tribe’s resistance, that Scapula declared that they would be either exterminated or enslaved and forcibly removed from their lands. But again, this merely served to reinforce their resolve, and they continued to be a bothersome thorn in the side of the Roman Governor and to oppose Rome’s occupation throughout the Claudian period.

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Zheng He: Commanding Your Fleet

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Zheng He: Admiral of the Ming Voyages is a solitaire game that recreates the voyages of the Ming treasure fleets in the early 1400s. In the game you take the role of Zheng He, commanding the fleet as it sails the Indian Ocean, earning glory for the emperor, and keeping favor with the ministers of the court so the voyages can continue.

Your fleet is represented by a deck of 20 cards at the start of the campaign. Each card represents a specific type of ship that historically constituted the fleet: Equine, Patrol, Supply, Treasure, and Troop. Throughout the course of your campaign, you will have the opportunity to upgrade your ships, thus increasing the fleet’s capabilities to take on greater challenges. 

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Borikén: Diving Into the Game

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Borikén: The Taíno Resistance ended up being quite a big project to work on, especially in the early days of doing research. While I went through many references on the topic, the information was scarce, but many referenced one historical book that I ended up using as the backbone of the historical narrative of my design, and that was Agüeybaná: El Bravo by Jalil Sued Badillo. What was interesting about this book is that the author used the original historical texts as his sources in his analysis of the historical period, instead of referencing the historical narrative of Spanish historians of the 16th Century and afterwards. 

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Dalhousie’s Influence on the Indian Railways

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How did railroads begin in India?

Any account of the history of railroading in India must of course begin with James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, the 1st Marquess of Dalhousie Castle, referred to hereafter merely as “Lord Dalhousie.”[1] He served 8 years as the Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856 at the very end of the first century of British colonial occupation of the subcontinent (Battle of Plassey, 1757).