Search Results for: peloponnesian war

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Delian League Diaries #2

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mark-herman1As I write this, the Yankees just lost to Toronto and I just lost the first full playtest of Pericles to my wife. We played the Pentecontaetia scenario, which is the beginning of 1st Peloponnesian War and the Campaign game, and covers the period from 460 BC to 400 BC. The way you win the game is your City State (Athens or Sparta) wins the war and of those two players the one with the most Honor (Timē) wins.

Carole and I played the two player version. Before you ask, the game can be played with one, two, three, or four players, ultimately with ‘Bots for each faction. While Pericles uses a variant of my Churchill conference mechanic this design is not a clone of its predecessor. I will also say that the rules should clock in at around 8 pages of rules without diagrams.

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Delian League Diaries #1

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mark-herman11 February

Today I played Pericles for the first time, so it’s game on! This is the first of a regular set of notes that I will pen and post on InsideGMT and on my Blog. So, what is Pericles?

Pericles: The Peloponnesian Wars is the sequel to my recently published Churchill: Big Three Struggle for Peace. Although Pericles is the second in my Great Politicians Series, it is its own design that does not follow a formula from its predecessor, yet borrows the conference mechanic to simulate how City State strategy was formed and executed in 5th Century Greece. Unlike Churchill, Pericles is a wargame, although a light one. So, let me frame my design for you.

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Design Update from Mark Herman

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I had the pleasure of spending a few days with Mark this week at John Kranz’s excellent Consimworld Expo in Tempe, AZ. I got to play the final version of Churchill and had a blast and also got some detailed updates on Mark’s upcoming games. Mark has a bevy of terrific titles lined up to grace our gaming tables over the next few years, so I wanted to make sure all of you got to see his latest update, posted recently in his personal design blog. Enjoy! – Gene

mark-herman1Studiolo Designs Update: June 2015

Studiolo Designs has just completed its first year of operation and I find myself at a good transition point. I thought it would be a good time to review the recent past and talk about what’s next.Fire in the Lake Cover

My very enjoyable collaboration with Volko Ruhnke yielded gold, well at least it looks gold, from Boardgame Geek when Fire in the Lake won best 2014 wargame. Thanks to all who supported this title.

I also am very appreciative for the support shown by the tribe in getting all of my GMT CDGs back into print. While Washington’s War and For the People are more or less straight reprints, Empire of the Sun 2nd Edition is the same design, but with significantly upgraded components and concepts such that it is the next evolution of this design. Folks should be receiving this one at their doorstep soon as it is being organized as I write this for the P500 orders in Hanford.

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Triumph and Tragedy: Outside the Box

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I guess it’s been six or seven years now since I got a call from Rick Young asking me if we’d be interested in publishing games from a proven block game designer. I was a little hesitant, as we didn’t have many block games in the line back then, although Rick and Jesse had done a great job with Europe Engulfed and Asia Engulfed, both block games that were very successful for us. But when I learned the name of the designer who was asking, my own interest skyrocketed. Although he’d never done a game for us, I certainly knew the design work of Craig Besinque. In my mind, he was the “king of block game design.” My response was of course really reserved, something along the lines of “Craig has a game for us? Heck yeah!!!” So let’s just say I was “pretty excited” to get an opportunity to work with him.

Even though Craig was “new” to GMT, a bunch of our insiders knew him and some had worked with him before, so the working relationship was pretty smooth from the beginning. And then he and Joel Toppen gave us this beautiful re-creation of the Peloponnesian War that was elegant in its simplicity, yet dripping with historical flavor, game tension, and replayability. Hellenes is a game I REALLY like, so I couldn’t wait to see what Craig wanted to do next, but then again I didn’t really care that much which topic he chose. I knew we’d get a thoughtful, insightful, and elegant game.

I was a little surprised that he chose a 3-player WWII game, as I kinda thought we had plenty of WWII games in the hobby. But then I looked closer and saw that it’s a REALLY different take on the WWII period, and in some ways you wouldn’t even call it a WWII game. But I was right about the “thoughtful, insightful, and elegant” part. Triumph and Tragedy is that, in spades.

I hope you guys share in my excitement that we have Craig Besinque designing games for GMT, and that you’ll join me in welcoming him to the blog, as this is his first design post to InsideGMT. And I hope you enjoy this inside look at Triumph and Tragedy. Here’s Craig! – Gene

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I find GMT’s embrace of “different” games like Leaping Lemmings, Mr. President and Thunder Alley an exciting development. While innovative new designs on more well-covered themes are also introducing creative new ideas, I for one am glad to see a broadening of game topics.

Triumph and Tragedy (TnT) was conceived as a different look at the most well-covered wargame topic of all: World War 2.  Basically, it is a block game with cards and an area map.

Fall 1945

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On the Design Table: Mark Herman

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Over the past several years, my regular phone conversations with Mark Herman have usually included me – or sometimes Mark – referring to how great it would be when Mark finally could  retire from his day job and get to design all those games he’s been wanting to create, essentially full-time. Well, those phone pipe dreams have become reality this year (!), as Mark got to retire and is (at least for now) pretty much a full-time game designer.  When you read Mark’s Guest blog, below,  you’ll see that he is not letting any grass grow under his feet – he is off and running on several designs that he’s been wanting to finish for some time now. (And there are more, but we don’t want to cause you guys to weep with joy all at once :-), so we’ll save info on those for another day ! ) So, get ready for a treat – Mark is one of the best, if not the best,  pure systems designer I know, and he’s running at full-throttle now. Hang on! It’s going to be a fun ride!  Here’s Mark. – Gene

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Hi everyone! I’m happy to accept Gene’s invitation to write a Guest blog on the new InsideGMT blog. I’m also posting this information on my personal design blog, which I invite you all to visit any time.

I want to catch everyone up on where I have been over the last couple of months and where I am going.

 

Empire of the Sun:

Since my last blog post, the Empire of the Sun reprint has been on the front burner. One of the perennial WBC champions, Antero Kuusi, stepped up to re-write the rules to make them more accessible. I want to say he has done a fabulous job in reorganizing and rewriting many of the trickier sections. While EotS is still a very intricate design I believe that he has lowered the barrier to entry for those who want to get involved. Backing him up is a crack team of editors drawn from the elite staff players on Consimworld who have been playing the game continuously since its publication almost a decade ago. Besides the rules rewrite I have incorporated a few of the more important c3i variants into the core rules, so there is a lot to like about the reprint rules.

On the card front, about 60 of the 160 cards have had a rewrite to incorporate FAQ questions and I took the opportunity to insert a bit more history into the game with new bonuses on many cards that were not in the original. A good example is the small naval force that was under MacArthur’s command is now incorporated without any extra rules. MacArthur’s navy allows an Army activation of one non-carrier naval unit while under ISR. The rest of the new bonuses I will leave as a surprise.

eotscoverThe counters are almost unchanged except we added many of the c3i mnemonic counters that the team have found useful plus I renamed a few counters to give each counter a unique name so instead of BB Kongo 1 and BB Kongo 2, we now have BB Hiei and BB Kongo.

Probably the most interesting dimension of the reprint is the incorporation of the Card Driven Solo System that is based on my experience designing the US ‘Bot for Fire in the Lake. Essentially I am writing a Japanese and Allied ‘Bot for EotS. When I told Mark Simonitch what I was doing he wrote, “you’re crazy”. While that may be true, it works. I learned a long time ago that if you tackle the hardest problem last, you end up solving lots of small issues that do not add up. To avoid this pitfall I started by building the logic for a non-player Japanese opening. My current version captured Malaya, the Philippines and the DEI plus set up a defense perimeter in 9 cards. Not too bad… The way I see this working out is you will have the option to play the Japanese, play the Allies, or what I like best is start as the Japanese with a non-player Allied side. When the Japanese have reached their apogee switch sides and become the Allied player against the Japanese ‘Bot. This way you are always on the attack. So, far I have finished the version 1.0 Japanese opening logic, with much more to do before this is fully up an running.

Now what you will get in the reprint is the version 1.0. It will not be perfect but I am looking at this as a work in progress. I will do the first cut, put it up on line with a template and the EotS tribe can continue to improve and develop it.  That’s about all I have on the EotS reprint other than a few minor map improvements to handle the revised India surrender procedure and a couple of nits.  All that is left is to proof the revised rules layout, which I should see shortly.

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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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GMT Games: State of the Union (Summer 2016)

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Founder, GMT Games

As I mentioned in last month’s Customer Update, GMT is now growing at a pace that is significantly faster than ever before in our history. Although I don’t pretend to understand precisely the mix of factors behind our exploding growth, what I believe is that we are benefitting from a sort of “perfect storm”:

  • Popular games and game series’ that are standing the test of time and continuing to sell well as they age
  • A growing corps of creative and skilled designers and design teams who continue to hone their craft and bring us innovative new games
  • An increasing awareness of our games across the broader game market due to a core group of very popular strategy games as well as the increased customer reach fostered by our expansion into digital products

Of course, these synergies are leveraged by the power of the internet, and more specifically, an increasingly varied and eclectic customer base full of people who enjoy our games and are willing and able as never before to spread the good word about them online through the powerful  tools of social media, blogs, YouTube videos, and mass-gamer sites like BoardgameGeek.

GMT LogoIn this series of GMT Games State of the Union articles, I’m going to take a look at our games, our design teams, our strategies to increase our ability to embrace and foster growth, and finally the challenges that growth is bringing and how we intend to meet and overcome them. For this Part 1, then, let’s talk about our games.

The games are the product that we ultimately trade for your gaming dollars. Their quality is paramount. The designers of these games (we’ll look at them in detail in our next installment) and their teams are our capacity to continue to create future products. Because of this, they are possibly the most important cog in the GMT machine (although all of our team members are very important) because without them, we would lose the capacity to provide quality designs to our customers. And that’s really what it’s all about; putting consistently high-quality game designs on our customers’ game tables at a pace that we can handle and that meets but does not exceed our customers’ demand.

Now let’s look at the sales of our games in a bit more detail, as we examine where GMT Games stands today.