Any account of the history of railroading in India must of course begin with James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, the 1st Marquess of Dalhousie Castle, referred to hereafter merely as “Lord Dalhousie.”[1] He served 8 years as the Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856 at the very end of the first century of British colonial occupation of the subcontinent (Battle of Plassey, 1757).
Zheng He was born in 1371 in Yunnan Province. His given name was “Ma He,” indicative of his family’s Hui Muslim origins since “Ma” is the Chinese version of “Mohammad.” His father was a hajji, a Muslim who had made the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. Zheng He’s great-great-great-grandfather, Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, was a Persian governor of the province under the Mongolian Emperor Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty that ruled China from 1279 to 1368.
In 1381, when he was about 10 years old, Yunnan, the last Mongol hold in China, was conquered by Chinese forces led by generals of the Ming dynasty, which had overthrown the Yuan dynasty in 1368. The young Ma He was among the boys who were captured, and he was castrated and made a eunuch. Ma He was sent to Beiping (now Beijing) to serve in the household of 21-year-old Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan who later became the Yongle Emperor. Ma He distinguished himself as a junior officer, skilled in war and diplomacy, and soon became one of the prince’s closest confidants. In the 1390s, he served as a soldier, fighting on the northern frontier and participating in the Prince of Yan’s military campaigns against the Mongols.
At the opening of the American Civil War, Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his people faced an enemy that had a substantially larger and fully ocean-going navy and was wedded to a strategic “Anaconda Plan” of defeating the Confederacy by economic strangulation through a naval blockading of all of its ports.
Like their forefathers, the Confederates used the technology of the 19th Century’s Industrial Revolution to even the odds by engineering an up-to-date version of a Revolutionary War weapon, the torpedo.
The term “torpedo” here applies to any explosive device triggered either remotely or by its own internal fuse.
With the Civil War entering its second year, the Confederate government set up two separate bureaus in Richmond, VA to expedite development and deployment of the torpedo on land and sea.
In my last InsideGMT article, I gave some background on the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and covered some of the threats to the regime besides the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. In this article I shift focus to the war in the countryside between the ARVN and VC players. In the early 1960s, the Strategic Hamlet program was the major counterinsurgency strategy of the Diem regime. The main goal of the program was to separate the rural population from the Viet Cong while increasing the state’s control of the countryside. Sovereign of Discord introduces new wooden strategic hamlet pieces and additional mechanics to Fire in the Lake to model this strategy.
Though inspired by the game Legion of Honor, I, Napoleon can also trace its origin to the line of solo narrative games that begins with B-17 Queen of the Skies and runs through the designs of Greg Smith such as The Hunters. It is a game where you are put in the shoes of an individual leader and have to deal with what the game throws at you. Except instead of leading a plane or a submarine, you are leading France, and what gets thrown at you aren’t shells or depth charges but the armies of entire nations.
In this InsideGMT article, I’ll give some historical comments on a few (but not all) of the strategy cards. I want to unpack the events and people at play behind these cards so you can better appreciate what they represent. But this is a high-level overview of the historical background, and detail here is sacrificed in the pursuit of brevity.
Note that this the second part of a two-part series of InsideGMT articles about the cards in Bear Trap—in the first part, I discussed how the different cards work and what the deck compositions look like in the game.
If you have trouble reading the card text on the card graphics presented here, take a look at the second page of the Bear Trap player aid, which can be found on the GMT webpage for the game, as the card text for all strategy cards can be found there. (And note that the cards depicted here are playtest components and still subject to possible change—including text, art, and graphic design.)
For those unfamiliar with how these strategy cards work in the game, here’s a quick overview: Each side has eight pairs of strategy cards (16 cards total). During setup each player will choose one strategy card and add it to their deck—thereby informing their initial strategic direction. Then, each time a player reshuffles their deck, they add two additional strategy cards to their deck. This allows them to develop their overarching strategy in reaction to the changing game state. It’s also worth noting that, during setup, each player will remove a random pair of strategy cards from the game. This means that a player cannot ever rely wholly on one pair of strategy cards to be a staple of their approach to the game, as it won’t necessarily be available to them in one playthrough or the next.
Twilight Struggle (TS) and Imperial Struggle (IS) are two great creations of the Ananda Gupta & Jason Matthews duet. We waited a long 15 years between the publication of the first (2005) and latter one (2020). Both titles prove to be deep, immersing, and very replayable designs thus no wonder that they have pretty broad pool of fans.
What is more, those games share a lot in common but on the other hand, have also vivid differences. In this article I am going to discuss them!
Part 3 of a three part series: The Cold War in the 1970s.
Twilight Struggle Red Sea is now nearing completion and will soon join the cue of GMT titles ready for printing. TS: Red Sea is a free-standing, two player card-driven game that builds on the Twilight Struggle system. The game covers the period between the mid-1970s and the conclusion of the Cold War. It emphasizes the many proxy wars and revolutions in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa during this portion of the Cold War.
With a more limited scope and much shorter playtime, TS Red Sea is the perfect way to introduce new players to the Twilight Struggle. Yet this new game maintains all the tension, decision making, and theme of the original classic.
This is the third of a three article series, introducing players to the history reflected in the game, and providing some example events that illustrate the ties between history and gameplay.
Hitler gave two speeches targeting Czechoslovakia during the Munich crisis. The first speech at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg was mainly a message to Sudeten Germans that they are “not helpless and abandoned”. Two weeks later, during the second speech at Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler targeted Czechoslovak president Dr. Edvard Beneš, revealing his world view of a fight between two men embodying their nations. Beneš was so tired from his hard work trying to manage the crisis that he slept through the whole speech. When he was later told about Hitler’s personal attack, he just smiled and replied: “That’s an honor.” The Bell of Treason is a game about the Czechoslovak decision to either concede the demanded Sudetenland territory to Germany, or to stand and fight against German aggression, even without allies and with little hope for victory. From the perspective of the decision itself, achieving victory is simple, with victory points representing the popular legitimacy of the decision to Concede or Defend. However, the strong personalities of Beneš and Hitler complicate that decision for both players. Let’s start with Beneš.
In this article I will explain how the economic mechanics work in Baltic Empires – both in terms of how income is generated and how this revenue is then spent. Both of these are handled differently than in many other games, as I wanted something that was simple and clean, but still felt fitting for a game on the fiscally underdeveloped states of early modern Europe and the prevailing mercantilist thinking.
