Search Results for: peloponnesian war

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Pericles: Strategy in the Archidamian War

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For me having a new design enter the gaming fray is like XMAS where everyone else gets to open the present. I opened a new copy yesterday to check that it was packed correctly and I was struck by that new game smell. I love that smell… far superior to what I usually smell in the NYC subway. As I have done in the past, I thought it would be helpful to pen a short piece on strategy beyond what is already well covered in the game’s playbook (page 35). I would also like to reiterate at this point that I strongly urge you, even if you have been gaming like myself for over 40 years, to make use of the games training regime (14.01). It will only take about an hour and the War in the Aegean scenario is quite fun, short, and interesting history. If you follow this sequence, you will come to 14.01 F, where you take the training wheels off and play a two turn scenario that I consider the tournament scenario for this game.

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Epipolae: The Setting — The Map, Cities, Routes, and Supply Sources

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In the Levy & Campaign system, players conduct operational campaigns subject to transport, supply, and logistical constraints of the geography. In this article, the designer dives into the Epipolae (P500) map design, and the supply and route constraints of ancient Sicily. All map art is prototype playtest art, and not final.

The Setting: Ancient Sicily

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Why Levy & Campaign: Ancients?

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Here the designer of Epipolae: The Athenian Expedition in Sicily, 415-413 BCE (P500), presents his thoughts on why the Levy & Campaign system works well for ancient settings. (All images are public domain from the Illustrated History of the World, 1881.)

Levy & Campaign

The Levy & Campaign (L&C) series of games was designed from the ground-up to model operational-level medieval military campaigns. This includes some modeling of the feudal system of Lords and vassals, obligations and fealty, and organization and service. [1]

Key features in the series include each turn of the game consisting of a Levy phase and a Campaign phase. Each Levy phase is used to muster allies, vassals, capabilities, transportation, and supplies. Each Campaign phase allows players to plan and command the movement and various actions of their Lords and armies, subject to the logistical constraints of the previous Levy phase(s). Each game board has two features: a calendar and a map. The calendar serves as a turn record track that is used to track the availability and service of various Lords and vassals. Each map is point-to-point, where Locales are connected by Ways, which control movement and supply routes. Victory conditions vary, but can be achieved through conquering strongholds, defeating enemies in battle, and ravaging and plundering. [1]

Key Features

  • Levy Phase – mustering allies, vassals, capabilities, transportation, and supplies.
  • Campaign Phase – plan and command Lords and armies subject to logistical constraints.
  • Calendar – track availability and service of Lords and vassals.
  • Map – control movement and supply routes.

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GMT Website Update

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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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Unleashing Hell: Redeployment Rules in Pericles

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“At my signal…unleash Hell…”

One of the interesting things that occurs when a new game is released is that members of our tribe try to push the rules to the extreme, then immediately conclude that there is a problem. The purpose of this strategy piece concerns the redeployment rules. Redeployment in Pericles is very broad and allows for very aggressive force concentrations that, when first seen, can surprise the other side with thoughts like, ‘you can do that?’ For today, let’s consider not that you can do this, but rather what should you do about it when someone, like in Texas holdem, goes ‘all in’.

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Delian League Diaries #6

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Pericles’ ‘Bots at War

In my first Peloponnesian War design, circa 1991, I had a mechanic for an Auguries die roll. In this regard it appears that Pericles: The Peloponnesian Wars has been successful in its appeal to a higher power when I got this note (republished with permission):

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Delian League Diaries #5

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Pericles Strategy Guide

This installment of my Delian League Diaries is intended offer deeper insight on how Pericles lets you experience Thucydides’ epic history of this long ago war. I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the key mechanics and their impact on strategy options.

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Pericles Playtest Map. Note that all components shown in this article are playtest components, not final art.

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Delian League Diaries #4

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During a recent session of Pericles, JR Tracy (host and ASL expert) and myself represented Athens versus our worthy Spartan opponents, Roberto and Nate. We played the 1st Peloponnesian War scenario, which can last from 3 to 6 turns, ending when Peace is declared. In keeping with the history, this one ended up being a true death match and went the distance, as no one wanted to declare Peace.

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Delian League Diaries #3

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The First Peloponnesian War

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Pericles is now starting its public testing with my favorite gamers, the 1st Minnesota. This means that Pericles is now officially launched and from early responses doing very well. I am now getting a breather where I sit back and see how things are going, modify stuff that needs improving and so on. However, the design is finished and I cannot stop playing, which is my key metric for any of my designs.