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Resolving Combat in Bear Trap’s Solitaire System

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When I began developing Bear Trap, it was already a tight and competitive two-player game, much like its spiritual ancestor Sekigahara. However, the designer P.R. Daniels had ambitions to go beyond this and include a solitaire mode that would allow a single player to enjoy the game by themself. Bear Trap is a block game with a lot of hidden information, which makes designing a solitaire mode quite challenging, but Paul has come up with some clever systems to facilitate this. In this article, I want to look closely at just one aspect of Bear Trap’s solitaire mode: how combat is resolved, which highlights several of the core design principles that underlie it. For an introduction to the combat system in Bear Trap, you can read Paul’s earlier InsideGMT article here.

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Pragmatism, Tension, and the Power of Cooperation in Mr. President

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I’ve gone to some lengths to try to keep Mr. President from reflecting a partisan point of view, as I have no interest in being part of any game that would further the deep divisions we already have in this country around party loyalties, personalities, and platforms. What I have tried to do is present you, the new President in game terms, with the reality that you have both a party affiliation and an opposing party to deal with. My problem-solving methods usually lean toward the pragmatic, so I tried to take the same approach with a game about the President, sometimes called the “Problem Solver in Chief.”

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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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Rebellion: Britannia Playthrough with Daniel Burt (Video)

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In this week’s blog, we take a step away from the history and dive right into the game itself. Daniel Burt takes us through a playthrough of Rebellion: Britannia in its prototype form on Tabletop Simulator, walking us through the sequence of play, key concepts, and some of the strategies the different factions may explore.

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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.