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Advanced Railroad Engineering Rules for 1914 Offensive à outrance: The Initial Campaigns on the Western Front in WWI

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1914 Offensive à outrance (Oào) is a monster game designed to be played to its conclusion. Specifically, that its 30 GTs can be completed in the time available at one Consimworld Expo (about six days). The rules were written to enable players to accomplish this feat while being careful not to compromise the historical simulation value of the game. To achieve this goal, rules that were found to have only a minor effect were simplified. One set of rules that fell into this category were those that pertain to Railroad (RR) Engineering.

During the design process, the first iterations of the 1914 Oào rules contained a relatively complex RR Engineering system. This is due to the appreciation of the fact that RR lines were enormously important during WW1 campaigns. However, playtesting showed that the actual effects of the complex system were subtle. During numerous playtests the player controlling the German right wing spent considerable time (too much time) occupied in organizing and conducting the RR Engineering task. Sadly, after that time expenditure, it was determined that the outcome of the endeavors had little effect on the game’s progression. It was undesirable to have arguably the most important player in the game, the German commander of the right wing, be distracted from his primary tasks by time consuming minutia. Therefore, the rules were simplified and the “as published” rules contain an effortless RR Engineering system.

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It’s All in the Cards: The Cards of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (Part 3)

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In this article we continue to explore the event cards of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (ACIS). To read the previous two articles in this series, follow the links here and here.

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Peloponnesian War: What Was Old is New Again! (Part 1)

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As I write this, my solitaire Peloponnesian War design, published in 1991 under the Victory Games label, has made a successful P500 debut as an enhanced version with GMT. To all those who supported bringing this one back from the past, thank you.

I was contemplating what to write for an article about the game, so I went into my Victory Games copy of the Peloponnesian War and found that my old habit of putting all reviews and articles about a game into the box turned this simple act into a walk down memory lane. Everyone who wrote or corresponded with me about the original published game was in the box, to include my articles in The General Vol. 28 #1.

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Nevsky: Crusade on Novgorod Replay – Part 1

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Nevsky: Teutons and Rus in Collision is the first volume in Volko’s intended Levy & Campaign Series covering various medieval and perhaps other pre-industrial conflicts at the operational level. Readers have asked for a closer look at the mechanics in the new series, so we answer that call to arms here with the first installment from Volko of Nevsky gameplay, blow by blow, from the volume’s full-length scenario, “Crusade on Novgorod”. … (Note that all art shown here is playtest not final, and all particulars discussed remain provisional as development and testing continue.)

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GMT Website Update

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[avatar user=”gmtgames@aol.com” size=”thumbnail” align=”left” /]

Hi everyone!

In this article, I want to give you guys a quick update on the website transition, let you know what we’ll be testing during the coming days and weeks, and let you know what you can do right now to help us with that, if you’re so inclined.

Phase 1 of System Transition

First off, as of today, we have now completed Phase 1 of our system transition and have a new website online. Same url as always: www.gmtgames.com.

Phase 1 involved moving all existing customer information and game information to a new server and into an upgraded website operating system. The move should be transparent to you (but we’d still like you to check your information, just to be sure); you should be able to login to the site with your same user name and password, your billing and shipping info on file should all be there, and your existing P500 orders and auto-ordering information should all be just as you left them on our old site. If any of that isn’t the case when you check your information on the new site, please let us know right away.

For the remainder of this week and through the weekend, we will be stress-testing the new server environment with real-world customer traffic loads, making sure all the graphic elements of the new site are rendering correctly and quickly, and filling in a few blanks on the site (like resizing some images and updating formatting on something like 350 game pages!) that we couldn’t do until we were in a live operating environment.

While we do all this, the site order processing is LIVE, so you should be able to place orders, add and delete P500 orders, modify your auto-orders, and basically edit any of your personal information. I’d encourage you to go into your account and just take a look through everything to make sure it’s all good. This is also a good chance to update your P500 orders on file with a few new orders anyway,  especially given the recent additions of two new P500 games that Mark Herman is involved with: Peloponnesian War (an enhanced version of his classic VG design) and Versailles 1919 (his co-design with Geoff Engelstein).

New features in Phase 1.

You’re going to see a cleaner, faster, more mobile-friendly site overall. But we’ve tried to keep a lot of the functionality – especially around our P500 operations – familiar. We want you guys to be able to use our site easily, gathering the information and enjoyment you want in the process. So the additions to our site’s functionality (compared to our old site) have been mostly based on customer requests, to hopefully make it easier for you all to find key information. Here are a few examples:

Front Page Carousels for Most Recent Releases and Newest P500 Additions

We have heard from many customers who don’t have time to keep up with GMT on a regular basis who wanted to be able to go to our site and just find out what’s new. So now, in addition to the “Recent Additions” and “News” feeds at the bottom of the front page, you also have two new Carousels above them that show you what we’ve released lately (with quick links to those game pages) and which games are our newest additions to the P500 list. We hope you guys like this added front-page functionality.

Search

Oh, my goodness. As SO many of you have pointed out over the years, the Search function on our old site was badly broken. We think you will like this new functionality much better. And “Sorry!” for all those years of Search Angst on the old site.

New section on the P500 page called “At the Printer.”

Due to the popularity of our P500 program as well as the broad range of games that our customers enjoy, we’ve in the past generally had a very large number of games in the “Made the Cut” section of the P500 page that stayed there until we were ready to charge, with no way to let customers know (well, unless you read the monthly customer update) that a game was nearing completion – until it was charged and went into the “Charging” section. But with the new P500 page on the new website, when we send games off to the printer, we’ll move them into the “At the Printer” section, so you all have a sense of which games are nearing completion and getting close to charging. We added this to our “To Do” list based on customer suggestions about a year ago (and started testing it in our customer updates then). So thanks for the suggestion. We hope you guys agree that this is a useful status differentiation and definitely helps to track a game’s progress toward production.

Multi-Image Carousels on the Game Pages

These are a work in progress for us right now, as we have a TON of game pages to update. But what we’re adding, over time, are multiple images of each game’s internal components – maps, counters, cards, etc – in high-res photography (with a massive thank you to the uber-skilled Scott Mansfield, who took the lion’s share of the new photos). We only have a handful of pages updated right now, but for examples, take a look at the image carousels on the Talon, Twilight Struggle, and Silver Bayonet pages.

Mobile-friendliness

One of the driving goals of this site rework has been to make the site much more mobile-friendly. I hope that you will find that we’ve accomplished that, and that you will have a much better mobile experience with the new site.

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It’s All in the Cards: The Cards of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (Part 2)

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In this second article of the series, we examine the 103 event cards that provide the random and color factors which can add so much excitement (and a bit of player stress) into a game of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (ACIS).  In the first article we covered natural events.  Here, we move on to mostly man-made events and calamities.

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Wing Leader Second Edition: Combat Analysis, Part 2

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In Part 1 I looked at how changes to second edition of Wing Leader: Victories affected air combat. In this second part I break down how the tweaks to bombing affect the results of air-to-ground attacks.

If air combat has barely changed since the first edition, the bombing system has evolved significantly. The rules haven’t changed radically, and mostly comprise minor fixes. However, the ratings and modifiers, the underlying numbers, have changed a lot.

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It’s All in the Cards: The Cards of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (Part 1)

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Introduction by Fred Schachter, Game Developer – It’s been a fun ride thus far with my erstwhile Game Designer partners: Chris Vorder Brugge and Mark McLaughlin.  My career relocations allowed play-testing Ancient Civilization of the Inner Sea (ACIS) with gamers across the country, and through our pal Vez Arponin’s game club in Germany; who’ve quickly learned how to play and then had fun & exciting gaming experiences with this clever design.

Mark and I even enjoyed the game’s solitaire system thrashing us (a Non-Player Civilization, NPC, can be a tough opponent – but it is possible to defeat this determined foe). See various InsideGMT articles for more about the game and its solitaire system.

The ACIS Team is gratified for all the support being given this game.  Thanks so much!!!

The purpose of this first of several InsideGMT posts is to introduce readers to more than what’s been shared to date about ACIS’ cards.  Chris here provides an overview of the game’s cards and introduces the graphic talents of Blackwell Hird, who is now in process of illustrating them.

So, here’s the first episode of your tour into the cards of GMT’s upcoming Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea.