Category Archives: Strategy Articles

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King Louis, Prince Conti, Marshal De Saxe (or, “Neurosis, Petulance, Brilliance and Debauche”): Running the Biggest Dog on the Continent – French Strategy in Clash of Sovereigns

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Here is a first collection of thoughts on French strategy in COS. I hope to write at least one article on strategy for each Power, and may get to a second if I just skip sleeping for the next year. Er, so, don’t hold your breath on that….

To start with a one-line look over the shoulder at Clash of Monarchs (COM) before we move on: The French are fun to play in COS; I repeat, for the benefit of all COM players [lifting megaphone] THE FRENCH ARE FUNNNNNNN TO PLAYYYYYY IN COSSSSSSSS. Who’da thunk it? A mere ten years later, the French are falling all over themselves in the Seven Years War, as a running comedy (Clermont as your CIC, anybody? :)).  In COS, the French are RUNNING THE GAME. Yeah, baby – francophiles rejoice! The French have got big teeth, and the French are the THREAT.

How so? Let us count the ways… 

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Manoeuvre: Distant Lands Tournament Part 1 of 4: Sweden vs. Qing Dynasty

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As promised, here is the first article in the follow-up series to the Manoeuvre tournament I wrote a few months ago. I’m back now with the Distant Lands expansion, and I will pit those armies against each other in a series of elimination battles with the winner moving on to fight the French army (the champion of the base Manoeuvre tournament). 

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Wild Blue Yonder: Campaign Training Mission

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Author’s Note: Almost all of the inspiration for the little mission in this article came from the excellent book Battle of Britain Voices: 37 Fighter Pilots Tell Their Extraordinary Stories, by Jonathan Reeve (Amberly Publishing, 2015). The introduction provided helpful notes on chronology and tactics, and some of the first-hand accounts provided further ideas on which planes to pit against each other. Reading books like this can really help the mind’s eye paint vivid action scenes when playing Wild Blue Yonder.

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Thunder Alley – Strategy Tips from ElusiveMeeple

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Today’s Thunder Alley Strategy Tips article is from Robert Crowter-Jones, the writer behind ElusiveMeeple, a wonderful and useful site that provides both reviews and strategy tips for a wide variety of boardgames. Robert has reviewed Thunder Alley in some depth and written strategy tips for the game on his blog (see the ElusiveMeeple site). For strategy tips on Triumph and Tragedy, 1960: The Making of the President, Time of Crisis, Churchill, Fire in the Lake, and Here I Stand (2-Player) see his InsideGMT articles here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Hunt for Blackbeard: Action on the Map

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We carry on our examination of gameplay in Hunt for Blackbeard where our previous article left off. We had surveyed the state of each player’s hidden area at a moment of play within the third of four possible turns. Now we look at the action on the shared main map board—especially, combat. Like the career of an 18th-Century pirate, the Hunt for Blackbeard can ever come to a sudden end. Below we again seek to recreate the actual circumstances of Blackbeard’s final stand, 300 years ago. (All art and rules are playtest only, not final.)

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Wild Blue Yonder: Tips for Beginners

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If you are trying to get into Wild Blue Yonder and you’ve never played a Down in Flames game before, the amount of material in the box can seem daunting. But it is being touted as a logical place for beginners and veterans of the system alike to dig into, so below you’ll find a (somewhat random) collection of hints and tips that hopefully make learning and playing the game easier. For now, we’ll leave the campaigns out of it, though once you are familiar with dogfighting you will probably want to check them out as well.

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Hunt for Blackbeard: A Peek at Play

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Our P500 page for Hunt for Blackbeard offers a brief sense of the game’s sequence of play. Here we extend our spyglass for a closer glimpse at the novel mechanisms needed to bring manhunting in the age of piracy to your game table. Note that all art work as well as game rules remain provisional, as development will yet tack to and fro.