Grognard Wargamer Thread!

Well, you CAN have it now- while the US copies are sold out, he will now ship copies to the US direct from Italy if someone wants the game badly enough. It’s €67 shipping. With the game costing €160, that’s €227 total, or about $290 at PayPal exchange prices. A bargain!

Does that make you want it less? ;)

@Brooski Or he can buy all the GMT’s next war titles and still have some change left.

Yes but that is the NEXT war. Under an Iron Sky is the LAST war :)

Or is it, the war that never was?

Something like that!

Anyway, it is cheaper than a mint copy of SPI’s The Next War.

I’m tempted. It could sit in the closet across from my desk so I could look at it every day while working, and think “I should really open that up one of these days.”

I did see some complaints on CSW I think (might have been grogheads) from someone about the quality ratings of the troops of the different nationalities.

Interest declining… :) It really does look nice though. On the other had that’s just 10 or so computer games so is it REALLY expensive? Hmm. Decisions decisions.

While I agree with your analysis of the difficulties of change in academia, It’s worth pointing out that much of the modern academic left has embraced an epistemology very different from that of the academic establishment of the 60s. As a result it may be even less tolerant of alternate viewpoints and resistant to paradigm shifts.

That’s fair, and accurate. I would, though, offer a couple of possible caveats.

One, rather than the sixties per se, I think it was more the post-structuralist and post-modernist movement that created the restrictive environment that for a while dominated some parts of the humanities, and continues to do so in some places. To that I’d add that the academy has always been sort of like this. Prior to the sixties, there was pretty much one traditional narrative in the humanities, one dominated by a vision of the rise of the West as a concept and filtered through a very limited set of cultural and social lenses. The destruction of that archaic paradigm was long overdue; the sin was not the revolution but the Jacobin terror that co-opted it and imposed its own orthodoxy. Sadly, this has been the usual way of the academy, since the days when universities were primarily for training church officials.

The other is that changing a paradigm should be tough. It took a long, long time to shift humanities departments out of their blindness to the world around them that wasn’t occupied by affluent white European males. I’d agree that the current self-negating anti-paradigm is particularly tricky to crack, but it is being eroded nevertheless.I’d argue that unless your primary goal is actually academic employment, which is a very different thing than creating knowledge and advancing our understanding of things, there are far more opportunities today for communicating your ideas than ever before. It’s only the circumscribed arena of full-time academic work that requires wading through this particular cesspool.

I’m lucky enough to be a full professor at a small college where the faculty are expected to teach as their primary function. Whatever research or writing I do is definitely secondary to my work in the classroom or in stuff like curriculum development. One reason I am where I am is my lack of interest in departmental drama, ideological infighting, and turf wars of the sort that permeate most liberal arts departments.

Anybody played A Wing and a Prayer? https://store.lnlpublishing.com/a-wing-and-a-prayer

Watched some gameplay on Youtube and it looks like fun solitaire play.

The friend of mine with whom I played Pacific War last week has it, and his only comment to me was “I really wanted to like it, but couldn’t.” I don’t think he elaborated.

OK, thanks. My concern is that it doesn’t look like you make a lot of decisions other than picking your bomber crews and flight path. The game plays the rest for you from what I saw in a Youtube video.

A fun little afternoon playing Chain of Command, which is a pretty neat streamlined set of miniatures rules. Even someone like I, who’s not played a physical war game was able to pick up in a few phases.

An awful lot of die rolling for the hit and damage phases, but a lot of clever little design features meant quite a bit of tactical nous is required, and it moves fast at a platoon and attached tank scale.

(My Churchill in the back did bad things to the German infantry trying to break out of the house.)

My collection begins again. Copy of Gulf Strike arrived today. I remember first seeing it as a kid and thinking it had to be the coolest thing ever.

Oh, my, Gulf Strike! I loved that thing. I too thought it was the bee’s knees. As well as the “Fleet” games from Victory Games; so much Cold War air/naval war goodness!

At one point I had the sixth, 2nd, and 7th fleet games. Might try picking them up again. Apparently there is a yahoo group still into it, updating things:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/vgsfleetleague/info

I passed on A Wing and a Prayer and bought the last copy of B-17 Flying Fortress Leader at Amazon. It looks more operational with more decisions to make and it got some good thumbs up reviews on Youtube. Should be here Tuesday.

Excellent! Love to see some Chain of Command getting played, nice terrain as well btw!

@vyshka I have all the Fleet games. I would start with 2nd Fleet. It remains probably the tightest and freshest of them imho. Plus I think it had the biggest print run so it is readily available.

It warms my heart to read today’s posts by @vyshka and @PreachyPreach

@Brooski, any idea on where Nuts! and Mark Herman are at with the Pacific War remake?

I was making a list of my original collection the other day, and though I’m sure I don’t remember everything it probably wouldn’t be too bad to get most of it back together.