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The Pendragon Chronicles – Vol. 11 – The Historical Material

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We looked in the previous entry of these Pendragon Chronicles to some elements of the Arthurian Legend that can be found in Pendragon – The Fall of Roman Britain. The game is also drawing from what little historical material came down to us through the centuries, i.e. mostly De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the destruction and conquest of the Britains”, a pamphlet by a British monk, Gildas, circa 510), the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical history of the English People” by the English monk Bede, c. 730), the Historia Brittonum (“History of the Britons”, compiled by the chronicler Nennius c. 830), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (late 9th century), the Annales Cambriae (“Annals of Wales”, 12th century?), and, for flavor at least, the epic Welsh poem Y Gododdin by Aneirin (c. 600).

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The Pendragon Chronicles – Vol. 10 – The Arthurian Legend

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As we are getting near the release date of the game, we are now going to present some of the Event Cards that you will play with in Pendragon – The Fall of Roman Britain. For our first installment of this second series of Chronicles, we are going to focus on a very visible, and sometimes controversial, aspect of the game: the elements it borrows from the Arthurian Legend.

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Playing the Story in GMT’s Enemy Coast Ahead: The Doolittle Raid

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In one of the Harry Potter books, author J.K. Rowling presents a device called a pensieve. Characters peer into this stone basin to see events experienced by other people. Those memories are removed from a person’s head like wispy spaghetti and dropped into the magic bowl, and the “viewer” peers into the basin for the experience. The word “viewer” has to be in quotation marks because they do more than merely see the memory. They walk around in it and feel the space and hear the sounds, and one presumes, smells the scent alive in the scene they uncannily inhabit. By “playing” the memory, the “viewer” lives in another’s shoes.

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Arizona’s First 6-Player Game of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea

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Above is a photo of the first large multi-player game of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea conducted in Arizona.  It was essentially a learning game for the pictured entirely Euro Gamer participants (sorry, I did not record all their names… but you should recognize me, upper left hand at the table, in the white shirt… yup, I came to the gathering straight from a work day at the office).  One participant is not pictured because he was the photographer.
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JUST ASK PHORMIO (or “how to teach Pericles”)

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Introduction

Back when I was young and I could count the number of games I owned on one hand with fingers left over, we all read the rules on how to play our games. However, times have changed. I now own a ridiculous number of games, and when I get together with friends it seems we are almost always playing a game that only one person has played before. As such, teaching games has become a more important skill than I believe it was in the past.

Although the game has thankfully received many kind words from players and reviewers, a few of the ambivalent reviews of Pericles have made two points. First, that the game is more complex than the average Euro-gamer can tolerate. Second, that it requires a dedicated group to become proficient at the game, and unless you are willing to put in the time, beware. With all due respect to these respected reviewers, I believe that they have lost the forest for the trees.

What I am going to do in this short article is offer a very simple method for teaching Pericles. Using this method, you can play Pericles often or sporadically and still play well. I have been playing wargames for over half a century, so I think I have earned my stripes enough to know a mechanically simple game with complex strategy from a complex game with complex strategy. Pericles is the former, so mechanically it is fairly straightforward, but understanding what to do is where the fun lies. For a reviewer who plays a game once, though, the game’s deep strategies are the source of their view of complexity.

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B&T Warpath Chronicles Volume #8: Custom Battle Dice – How They Came to Be, Evolution, and Test Under Fire

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I started wargaming in the 1980s with the first edition of Jim Day’s Panzer. Convincing battle modeling has always been crucial for me. For a long time, I found the “to hit” process and also odds based combat result tables to be the ne plus ultra — along with 10-sided dice (I confess my love of exotic dice sprung from my D&D past!).

Then in the early 2000, my interest shifted to the bucket of dice approach. My experience is that when it is well conceived, its simplicity (1 piece : 1 die) frees the brain, allowing us to focus more on the narrative of the game.

From the very start, I wanted Bayonets & Tomahawks to be devoid of calculations. But I aimed for a battle system that could replicate each and every historical battle outcome of the French and Indian War. Dedicated research and perpetual evolution/streamlining (with many good ideas contributed by expert players) led to a custom dice system that is fun to use and delivers realistic results for that conflict.

Here’s the story of its development.