And look at that, a very young Tom Hiddleston.
And a very old Albert Finney is in there as well.
Free scenario for Advanced Tactics Gold @ Matrix: http://www.matrixgames.com/news/2664/Advanced.Tactics.Gold.-.Mod.Global.Domination.38.v3.is.released
I dimly recall, and could be wrong because the books are so vast, a similar incident in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books…
I am reading them right now (literally just finished a chapter) and there are several similar events, depending on how you mean. And the Duke himself is a participant in the story.
Yeah, I’ve read those books twice, but there’s soooo much in there. Love that brand of historical fiction, though.
Just looked it up (Quicksilver) on Amazon. Is it a late-17th Century Sharpe in style, sort of?
Fun aside: Lou Coatney’s club? That’s my boardgame club too. Haven’t been there for a while now due to too much work, but Lou is/was a fixture over in the corner sitting with one of his many designs, usually playing/playtesting with one or the other of us “grognards” in the club. I’ve played him quite a few times.
Worth trying if you like traditional CRT wargames and don’t mind print-and-play - there’s a ton of games available on his site and the one’s I’ve tried have been pretty solid.
Hmm, well, sort of, but not quite. If you’ve read Cryptonomicon you have an idea of how Stephenson approaches these things (and there are some ties from that book to the Baroque stuff). The books focus on several distinct characters who, while seemingly very different and existing in very different spheres, all come together in very interesting and unexpected ways. There is adventure and action but there’s also a ton of historical inside jokes, fast and loose but often accurate caricatures of historical figures, and a very earthy, human sort of deconstruction of icons that are too often presented like dusty museum pieces.
Heh, I think we may have discussed this once here… wow five years ago
Can’t believe I remembered that.
I have no problem with Lou’s designs - based on the games of his I’ve played, I have no doubt many are probably pretty good. But if you have 300 games, 100 of which are sci fi or fantasy, 100 are boxed historical wargames, and 100 are Lou Coatney print-and-plays, I don’t think I would say that “out of 300 games listed, 200 are wargames” for the purposes of “games released each year.”
And by that flawed numbers logic he is the King of the Industry.
It’d be like saying Ty Bomba is the most dominant published designer of our era.
Man - I had completely forgotten that.
But I agree - there are lots of really cool PnP games, but it makes no sense to count print-and-plays as part of that kind of statistic. Though I think, even if one did it wouldn’t move the dial much. Guys like Lou may be prolific, but there are a lot of PnP games “published” and/or registered on BGG every month.
You may (or may not) have been specifically thinking about Harry Turtledove’s World War series of books with that, but I wonder if that could be made into a good game?
Tony
Going full-Turtledove, what about a Gettysburg or Antietam game (I forget which one) that posits the Confederate Army had AK-47s at the battle?
Those sorts of things are nearly impossible to balance right, I think. You either have a roflstomp or it feels very artificially “balanced,” neither of which are terribly fun.
Concur. I just meant, would it count as a “Historical Board Wargame”, hypothetically (if it existed), in @Brooski 's data journalism vision quest.
Couldn’t be any worse than Turtledove’s crappy books, for sure.
Guns of the South. Actually one of my favorite Turtledove books. I agree, though, that this particular book probably would not work well as a game. One side using muzzle-loading single shot rifled muskets…the other has Uzi’s and Ak47’s…
Tony
I think Turtledove has some good ideas for books/series, but fails miserably on the development of said stories. His idea of ending a series is to jump ahead 20 years and kill off a few main characters and start over.
Tony
I finished the count. It came out to 129 games out of 680. That’s not even 20%. If you add in the foreign stuff I excluded and get a bit more generous with the criteria than I was, you can maybe get back to 30%. That’s not a lot.
Whole thing is here: