Grognard Wargamer Thread!

I’ve P500-ordered 3 pounds worth of Normandy '44. I think it was @Brooski who mentioned that it wasn’t one of his favorite games in the Simonitch series, but I thought I’d give it a try.

I was tempted to order 4 pounds, but I’m not sure what I’d do with a 1/3 of a map.

Not me, unfortunately, but in related news, SDHistCon is going to hold another online convention Nov. 12-14. Registration not open yet. I’m going to attend that, I hope.

https://twitter.com/SDHistCon/status/1443635453693857793?s=20

If you do, make sure to sign up for my amazing exposition on Ted Raicer’s overlooked gem.

Also, in unrelated news, let’s get to the question on everyone’s mind.

Say more, dear sir! What overlooked gem would this be? Minds are curious.

So, in an effort to play games with real human beings, I introduced a friend to wargaming with Shores of Tripoli, which I intentionally picked because it has a super short 9 pages of rules that can be digested in about 15-20 minutes.

But the reaction on my friend’s face (not a wargamer, nor a Eurogamer) when I said “The rules are about 8-9 pages” was priceless. Turns out that a wargamer’s “short rules” is a lot different than a regular human being’s “short rules.”

Some idiot convinced me to read the AWAW rules as well.

image

I had very much hoped to but I don’t think it’s going to work out time wise for me.

I love reading long rulesets from wargames! Sometimes reading the rules is more fun than actually playing.

I was hoping to get it together to make the trip to Armona from Santa Barbara, but I won’t be going this season. Hopefully April though, we’ll see.

Harold badgered me into doing another presentation, so I chose a demo of Ted Raicer’s Fall of the Third Reich, a game that came out in 2017 that it seems like no one talks about, but has some really cool ideas.

Link included so Tom doesn’t ban me: The Fall Of The Third Reich | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

Filthy casuals

Never heard of that one. I just read through the page there and it looks like it could be very interesting. It sounds like you’re running this? It’s interesting because I got excited about Downfall:

Ted’s game seems to be very similar in scope and level of abstraction.

You know, there’s a movie about that. You should watch it. It’s called Jojo Rabbit. You could probably delight the audience with a few discreetly placed Jojo Rabbit references!

You could also recreate this scene yourself to illustrate German small arms tactics:

-Tom

I had just recently watched this again for the third and then even more recently watched this for the fourth time. I think this is one of the top ten movies I like. I don’t have the breadth of movie appreciation that Tom does so that’s not as high of an honor as you would think but Jojo Rabbit is superb.

Most excellent! That does look like an interesting game. Must resist buying, though, backlog has hit critical mass.

In Jojo Rabbit, the SS is just the “S”

My bad—the Hitler Jugend did have a single “S” symbol.

Just a quick heads up that registration is open now for that online San Diego Historical Games Convention.

November 12-14, $10, everything on Discord/Vassal/Table Top Simulator

Fellow grogs, I’ve been making 2D games for fun in Godot (and previously in Game Maker Studio) for a couple years now, and I need advice on a wargame project. Do you all have any smallish wargames you’d like someone to build? Like many wargamers, I’m mostly interested in WW2. I know it’s over-done, but after a half-century of wargaming I still find it fascinating.

My main wargame-creation achievement was a WEGO treatment of Tobruk that I did for a game jam last year. It worked, but I didn’t spend enough time on the UI, so no one besides me could figure out how to play it. That was a painful lesson: we make games for gamers, not for ourselves!

Anyway, I’d like to build on that experience to build something a little more ambitious, and a little more user-friendly. My secret ambition is to make a grand-strategy WW2 game in the vein of Strategic Command or WiF, but with my own take on the genre, especially naval/air operations. Realistically, though, I probably should start smaller. Maybe Guadalcanal? South Pacific? A North Africa scenario broader than Tobruk? War in the Med?

IGOUGO is my choice for my next project. WEGO is cool for smaller-scale engagements, but I like to push my own units around in larger-scale games. Using WEGO did allow me to hide the flaws in my AI, though; since the player was never quite sure what would happen after pressing “end turn,” the AI sometimes seemed smarter than it really was. Still, if I’m ever going to get serious about making wargames, I need to improve my AI skills. I am proud of the minmax AI I made for my chess engine, which competes with me until the endgame. But minmax won’t work for something as complicated as a wargame.

These days I’m using the Godot engine, always in 2D. I made Tobruk in Game Maker Studio 2, but I’ve come to love Godot, which I’ve used to make a bad card game and a slightly less-bad management game.

Finally, I’d consider a 4X-ish alternative, like “Shadow Empire”. But that would be even more work, wouldn’t it?

Maybe Tunisia ‘43? South Pacific would be interesting, it just seems like it would be tough to design with so many moving parts.

Thanks! Just the sort of advice I was looking for. Tunisia would be fun.