As shared by 9/19/24’s GMT Update (September 19 Update from GMT: New P500s, Many Game Updates, Art Samples, and More! (mailchi.mp)), Hannibal’s Revenge: A Card Conquest Series Game, received a status update and something of a “teaser”. That teaser was a promise for an After-Action Report of Hannibal’s Revenge playing when my two buddies, George and Perry, from our youthful New York City wargaming days, arrived at my North Carolina home for an annual gaming get-together. Ah, a happy multi-day escape from our normal routines!
Friends Reunited! “A Tale of Two Sexenniums Hannibal’s Revenge After Action Reports” participants are pictured above: Seated is game co-designer Fred Schachter, George Miksad is standing behind him to the left and Perry Silverman to the right with his NY Yankees hat. Perry, incidentally, is the designer of GMT’s Illusions of Glory.
I hope that many of you are aware that a reprint for Next War: India-Pakistan is up for pre-order. This particular game in the series has long been touted as a good entry point into the system as it concentrates solely on the ground and air war and doesn’t have those pesky naval rules. This will be a second printing with a few updates. To keep it simple, I wanted to give you a brief outline of the following changes, i.e., it’s not a new edition with a bunch of changes.
Counters
We will, of course, be correcting the two errata counters (PRC J-31 and Pakistani JF-17). In addition, we’ll provide the counters presented in Supplement #2 including the Pakistani T-129 Attack Helicopter and the new PRC Group Army (the 77th) as well as some independent units. The ROI Tejas will be upgraded to the Tejas Mk2 (which will also be available in Supplement #4 when it’s published). There will also be a host of other changes to bring the game up to the current standards for the Russian, US, and CW units.
In the last article, we explored the four factions of Hammer and Sickle and their unique asymmetries. This time, we’ll cover how these factions relate to one another, and how victory is achieved.
Revolution and war are two different things. For someone who is not only trying to defeat a military opponent but also radically change the society in which they live, there is no clear-cut front line visibly separating friend from enemy. – Hans Magnus Enzensberger
In order to show how leaders work in this new edition of A HOUSE DIVIDED, I’m going to look at a historical battle as it would play out in the game. In this case, let’s look at Chancellorsville, in April and early May of 1863. As it happens this is also the turn when the 1863 historical scenario starts, so we know the game position of the relevant units.
The accompanying map is a piece of the playtest (not final art) map showing the key terrain of the Eastern Theater at that time.
Let us set the Wayback Machine to review Frank Chadwick’s ETO’s past year of development and bring you up to the present with a look into this project’s future.
The multiple volumes of ETO have seen the “completion” (always subject to further playtesting, but there have been very few changes to the rules .docs as things have come together very nicely, greatly assisted by the regular examples of a rule or system, and the extended examples of turns of play which illustrate important system interactions) of their counters, maps, rules, and player aids. The research is done for most of the scenario OOBs (except some “what if” Spain and Mid-East scenarios we would like to include), and the main corpus of the core rules has barely changed over the past year, meaning the core systems and mechanics are very stable. The development team has been piling up accomplishments as we work on completing every volume concurrently (to ensure that when a new volume is published, you will not need a bunch of errata to fix the previous volumes).
Seas of Thunder is one of my favorite games that I had a hand in designing. It covers a topic that I find fascinating. And it does it in a way that I find satisfying. It is easy to teach and learn. It has a fun factor with a lot of dice rolling. It also requires some thoughtful approaches to it if you want to do well. There are some mistakes that I have owned up to, but in the end the mistakes you think are there really play no part in the play, fun, or strategy of the game. I will not be addressing those so-called errors here. But what we did have to do to get the game to a point where it was feasible to print was to cut out a lot of extras. Now I appreciate the folks here at GMT and they make my games better by giving me a deadline or a component limit and those not only help make the game better but help me to be a better designer. But in the case of this particular game there were a few things that were dropped on the cutting room floor that I am interested in returning to the game and that I think make an even better experience. Unfortunately, low sales and low interest have ensured that Seas of Thunder remains a one-box game with no official GMT expansions on the horizon. That is their choice, and I respect that, but I have so much more that was prepared and ready to go. I have no intention of scrapping it completely.
Today I am happy to announce that Laboratory H has released the first expansion for Seas of Thunder, Blueprints. This 207-piece add-on covers a multitude of “what-if” ships from World War 2 and the eras leading up to it. The expansion includes the giant ships that would have been built except for the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty that reigned in the massive shipbuilding projects after World War I. There are a handful of mothballed ships that could have seen action. Some of the minor navies that were not included in Seas of Thunder like the Danish and Polish are added. And finally, there are two classes of speculative ships; the ones that were started and never finished like the Graf Zeppelin, and the drawing board-only ships that could have been built but were scrapped by circumstances or the end of the war.
All these ships can be used to suit your own taste in play. We have included rules for adding the ships in, but you can also just add them in as you see fit, or to test a theory. Whatever you want to do with them you can. We finished this expansion first because it is just data that can be plugged into a formula and the pieces then quickly extracted. I think you’ll see that the other expansions all have more test work to do on them and will be much more impactful to the game.
Future expansions will include Operations, where players will have missions that they will need to assign ships to execute and defend against. This will become a drain on the ships available for standard play and make things more challenging. Auxiliaries will add small ships, more areas to cover, and thirteen new two-turn scenarios. Admirals will add in strategy cards (these were originally in the game for quite a while before they were removed near the end) to allow for more technology, weather, and human elements in the game. Treaties will be a small expansion to mix up some of the minors and neutrals from game to game. And finally, Fleets which will allow for the same game to be played but with many fewer “fleet” pieces as opposed to individual ships. As you can see, it was always obvious that something as straight-forward as Blueprints was destined to be the first expansion to cross the finish line. The others will actually require some time and work to complete.
I hope if you are interested in following not only Seas of Thunder, but Carla & I in general that you will join our Patreon page. Membership is free and we will be using it as an online headquarters and communication hub from now on. One thing we will be doing is allowing patrons to vote on what comes next in not only this series, but all our projects. We hope to see you there.
We are trying to make the page interesting for everyone that enjoys our racing games, to the war games, to Dark Domains, to our sports-themed games and lighter fare. We will organize fantasy sports leagues, brackets, voting, and special gifts for Lab Rats. Everyone is welcome and this will be our community moving forward. Now that it is just Carla & myself making the decisions, look for a lot more interactivity with the fans and consumers.
Introduction by Congress of Vienna (CoV) Assistant Designer & Editor, Fred Schachter: My what a wonderful journey it’s been since, through circumstances best described as “karma”, I some years ago met CoV Designer Frank Esparrago through his daughter Ana who was furthering her finance education while working in Seattle and introduced us through a local game club I was affiliated with during my time residing in that fair city. Members of that club, Metro Seattle Gamers (MSG), helped Frank playtest an early hand-made version of Congress of Vienna and while playing this fun and exciting game realized it had commercial possibilities (thanks Nathan & Scot!).
So that’s the genesis of how the Congress ofVienna commenced its road to publication. If interested in learning more, here’s a link to an InsideGMT article conveying additional details: Congress of Vienna Designer’s Notes (Part 1 of 2) | Inside GMT blog. It will also bring a reader to GMT’s site for the game which is replete with a host of CoV related pieces readers will hopefully find interesting, enlightening, and entertaining.
Hi everyone, it’s been a long time since I have brought any news of the Thunder Alley Racing Series to you. As some of you know, we have been using some play testers for various components and add-ons to the game series. These include bringing new tracks, new expansions, and solo play to the collection. Carla & I have been toying with ideas, including some of those presented to us by the fantastic Richard Launius, to help make each of the games even better than they are now. These ideas consist of league play, new Racing Decks, new events, new teams, “build your own” cars, and even an entirely new game with a new style of racing. This is just sort of our update to you on what is going on with the Thunder Alley Racing Series this year and into the future.
First off are the tracks. We are making a range of new tracks. The exciting part is that each of these tracks are designed to be used with each game in the series. There will be a Thunder Alley friendly portion of the track, a Grand Prix extension, and an associated Apocalypse Road course complete with jumps and dirt on each track. This will allow for the tracks to be useful to any player no matter if they are only die-hard stock car racers or immersed in the entire series. Each track from here on in will have something for everyone. Some of these very roughly drawn sample tracks are shown below. Trust me, my primitive etchings are not close to the final product.
The constellation of conflicts that consumed the former Russian Empire in the period 1918 to 1921 and beyond, known shorthand as the Russian Civil War (or the “Russian” Civil Wars by Jonathan Smele’s book of the same name), went far beyond a simple division of Reds. vs. Whites.
As Smele emphasizes, the new Bolshevik state that Lenin and comrades had birthed in revolution the previous October was at war for survival against enemies both Left and Right, democratic and totalitarian, urban and rural, ruling class, bourgeoisie, and peasant, Russian and non-Russian, Christian, Muslim, and atheist, as well as foreign intervention forces from Russia’s former Great War allies, the British, French, Japanese, and Americans, among others.
A two-player Reds vs. Whites duel cannot capture the complexity of this maelstrom in a holistic way, particularly when forces such as Petliura’s new Ukrainian state and the Makhnovist “Black Army” separately waged war against both Red and White armies for their own independent aims, using characteristically distinct strategies and tactics.
Hammer and Sickle expands the playing field of this 20th century-defining conflict by delineating four asymmetric factions, yet with an elegant ruleset that enables quick learning and fast play, so that the entire conflict is covered in 2-3 hours.
Let’s break down the four factions and their asymmetries.
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:
