Found out today through Consimworld that legendary game designer and father of Avalon Hill, Charles S. Roberts, has died. Considering the past couple of years it has been a rough time for the Old Guard of gaming.

What I found interesting though was how his life was viewed. To anyone who has played a wargame the name instantly conjures up memories of classic wargames, along with the knowledge that without him there may have never been a large wargaming hobby. Yet the Baltimore Sun...

S.R. Krol

Apparently the news leaked out a month ago but I just saw it this week. WOTC is releasing a new edition of Battle Cry later this year.

Battle Cry was the first game in Richard Borg's Commands and Colors system (though technically second, as there is an unpublished Revolutionary War game using the system that predates Battle Cry) and really opened up to my gaming group the idea that light games can be just as enjoyable as the heavy lifting games. The addition of new scenarios is...

S.R. Krol

Some thoughts over at RPS of Settlers of Catan running on Surface.

Me? Not so impressed.

In yesterday's blog post I mentioned how we played a thirty-nine year old game over the weekend. Didn't have to worry about operating systems, patches, DRM...just plopped it down on a table and played. You're not playing a game on a Surface or one of those precious iPads thirty-nine years later. I suppose you could keep buying the latest edition of a game as systems become obsolete,...

S.R. Krol

Over the weekend we pulled out the old 1971 wargame, Barbarossa, designed by Jim Dunnigan and published by SPI. This is the second edition version, the first being published in 1969. There is also now a Ty Bomba redesign as published in World At War.

Covering the entire war in Russia Barbarossa is a rather basic game even though it depicts such a massive subject. The rules are straightforward, the map rather small, and the units are all one-step units of varying strengths. ...

S.R. Krol

In 2004 Lost Battalion Games tried an interesting experiment with the release of Sergeants on the Eastern Front. Created by veteran wargame designer S. Craig Taylor, Sergeants was a skirmish level game of tactical combat on the Eastern Front using only a handful of troops on a small map. The core game consisted of the rules folders (about four pages), a single 8.5 x 11 map, a single scenario, and a sheet of counters. I can’t remember the exact cost but I think I paid six bucks for it. ...

S.R. Krol