This article is a written version of a YouTube video about the design of Red Flag Over Paris. In Part 1 I wrote about Political and Military Spaces, Victory Conditions, and Strategy Cards.
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Badajoz is a small and quiet city in the southwest of Spain with 150,000 inhabitants. It is replete with history relevant to the Congress of Vienna game period. It boasts an old fortress with 17th-century Vauban bastions that was key to the southern corridor between Portugal and Spain during the Peninsular War. It was occupied by the French March 1811 after the Spaniards surrendered.
The article below is a written version of a YouTube video I made talking about the design of Red Flag Over Paris: https://youtu.be/SkdiyuPefAg
In this article, I won’t go into too many details about the historical background. Still, if you are interested to know more about it, I published two articles on InsideGMT about this topic. First, I wrote about the Franco-Prussian War, and then I wrote about the Paris Commune and its implications:
Flashpoint: South China Sea is a two-player game designed by Harold Buchanan and currently on GMT’s P500 preorder list. The game simulates the current events taking place in the South China Sea, a sea area in the western outskirts of the Pacific, near China. This article introduces the game’s key mechanics.
The depth of the history around the American Revolution is captured in the Liberty or Death Event Cards. Below is a sample of the Patriot Faction first Event cards with a brief discussion of the history.
Card Number 4. The Penobscot Expedition
The largest American naval expedition of the war, a flotilla of 19 warships mounted by the Provincial Congress of the Province of Massachusetts Bay sailed from Boston in July of 1779 for the upper Penobscot Bay in the District of Maine (then a part of Massachusetts colony.) The flotilla also included a ground force of more than 1,000 colonial troops as well as a 100-man artillery detachment under the command of Lt. Colonel Paul Revere. The goal was to reclaim control of what is now mid-coast Maine from the British who had seized it a month earlier, renaming it New Ireland. The Patriots paid a heavy price in the fighting over three weeks in July and August of 1779. As the British were reinforced the Patriot fleet was destroyed as it fled up the Penobscot River. It was one of Britain’s greatest victories of the war. The Expedition was also the United States’ worst naval defeat until Pearl Harbor 162 years later in 1941.
