We're not in Adelaide any more...

You know, a lot has changed since 2013, those dark days when my gaming life appeared to end and most of the rest of it to be unraveling.  Back then, a new boss at work (not like The Who said, this one was worse, way worse), midlife crises, and lots of other stuff going on led to some difficult times.  Thank goodness I discovered ice hockey, running and fitness generally.  And then they offered reasonable redundancy packages at work and then me and the missus found a nice little cottage in a small country town a couple hours north of Adelaide, and ... and ... and ... and I'm sure you get the picture.

Now, all these years later as the gamer in me re-emerges, I realise that this ol' blog's title probably doesn't really reflect reality anymore.  I could change the title, I could start a new blog, I could do lots of things.  But I reckon I'll leave it as it is and just keep going from where I left off.  Tipping my hat to my own legacy, I suppose.

So what does 2019 hold in store.  Well projects in various stages of gestation include finding some opponents to play Here I Stand - Wars of the Reformation (GMT games), getting together some saxons and arthurian britons and vikings and having a go with Dux Bellorum, and getting in a game or two of Stratego - Waterloo.

Oh, and getting the library organised.  I've just finished insulating a big shed out the back which is now lined with book cases, of which one shelf is stacked with games books and a couple crates of rules and scenarios and a few more crates of board games, and a few boxes of figures and scenery, etc etc etc.

We'll see how we go.

Long time gone - time to Go

Ice Hockey stole my life for a few years which really put a dent into my time budget.  Sadly, gaming suffered most out of the 'other things' in life (eg. family, work, gaming).  First to go were board games.  Next, online games dropped in frequency and then almost out of the equation (limited to World of Tanks).  And then I took a redundancy and moved to the country so everything got packed and stacked in boxes and still pretty well remains there (not sure if you'd call my present state one of semi-retirement or not, but I sure have kept busy).  And before you know it, the years have rolled by (take note, young ones).

There was the odd game in the past few years, but very few.  So few, I can recall them!

Condotierre - against the nephews, winning two out of three.
Settlers - against the nephews, winning none, losing two.
Ticket to Ride - against the daughter and grandson, miracle victory as the cards fell my way.

And, recently, Go.  This one has really taken my attention for a couple of months now, playing or studying it for a minimum of an hour a day.  I use an online go site and it has started refreshing my mind back into the gamer's mindset.  Very enjoyable, and a great relief for someone who is hours away from all known gaming opponents!

But, my gaming related interests have continued.  History, and anglo-saxon / viking / early norman periods in particular.  And rules get looked at.  And armies get planned in the spare moments while chopping wood etc.

And I've even had a look at Alcazia again.

And thus it continues...

Still More Treasure

What can I say? I open another of my storage boxes expecting to find painting paraphenalia and what do I find, but more missing games, a few framed pictures of medieval ruins from Scotland, some notes about force organisation for SCW wargaming, and some painting paraphenalia! I hereby publicly retract and apologise for any ill thoughts I thought about anyone who I suspected of having borrowed but not returned Risk: Lord of the Rings.

In my opinion, these are all great games. Go, because it's go. LOTR Risk, because it has all the fun and blood of classic risk, but a time limiting factor (the passage of the ring across the map on its way to Mordor, one province at a time). York Town, because it is a clean cut and physically beautiful game which puts one at ease in the playing.

BTW - to answer a question I've been asked, the most exciting 'treasure' in the initial trove was of course the game of Buccaneers.

More Treasure!

More Treasure!

Trouble in Alcazia?

World Creation, the biggest and most daunting of tasks. I'd almost forgotten, until this most recent Imagi-nation project took a hold on me. I think the last fully fledged creation of mine was a barbaric swampy area in the back of beyond for a cut back low tech D&D campaign, many moons ago, so I have no real template 'system' to apply to the problems that go with making a world. To counteract the resultant paralysis I also remind myself that I therefore have fewer preconceptions about 'the correct way to do things' and I might as well make the most of it and let the imagination roam. We get precious few chances to do this in this day and age, so take the opportunity...

So, for now I've settled on an ‘emergent approach’ to integrated game development, take an idea and run with it and see where it takes you. It promises to be an interesting trip, as I enjoy a variety of types of game (role play, skirmish, grand diplomacy, naval, political, trad tactical wargame, operational level campaign, grand diplomacy, board, computer, miniatures, card, pen and paper, solo, two player, pebm, etc, etc, etc) and would like to integrate the experiences of as many as possible into the narrative design of the resultant/precedent 'world'.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I'll invent the world as I play the games, with a basic historical model (spanish civil war) to follow if in doubt. I'll be designing the fabric, writing the code, of the world as I set up the games. It all sounds pretty hippy, but will give it a go.

I've decided to call 'it' Alcazia, a fictional place in the western Mediterranean in the second half of the ninteen thirties. The fun will start with some sort of military coup. I can perhaps make use of a scenario I once modeled on the initial seizure of north african airbase by Franco’s rebel Army of Africa (allowing Ju 52's of the Luftwaffe to immediately start an air ferry service for the rebels to the Iberian peninsula).

I had thought of using something like a dimly remembered card game (?) called Junta that I played once in the eighties (!) but, having had a look at the game at Boardgame Geek (here), reckon I’ll stick with the miniatures instead.

I’ve started a new blog for the project, but won’t direct you to it until I have at least the basic settings set.

On blogging, and some renovations

I recently returned to active blogging after two years' of 'survival posting'. On my return my blog was much the same, but the world in which it lived had sure changed!* For example, there was a new tab on the 'blogger' dashboard interface called 'stats'. As google is collecting the information anyway, I see it as a good thing that they are sharing some of it with me. Very interesting. So I looked at my stats in between postings...

Eventually I found that a significant source of traffic for the Adelaide Gamer was coming from a Blogger site called "wargamesblogs". I went and had a look, to find it going under the name of 'Blogs of War', a perpetually updating list of the posting activity of a sizeable portion of the wargaming blogosphere. It has over a thousand blogs listing on its updating scroll. Treasure indeed! So I added it to my list of favoured sites and, inspired by the many wonderful blogs I had seen, returned to my dashboard page to look at what else had changed in the years of my virtual inactivity in the scene.

As far as this blog goes, some of the results of my investigations are evident in the design of this page.

Previously, I had featured links to gaming sites, and a set of static links to blogs I followed. I did it this way for a purpose, linking to sites of activity in the 'real' virtual gaming community ahead of what I saw as 'pushing' myself or other individuals. This was my way of being a wargaming community activist.

In the two years I'd been gone, the online gamer community had exploded in size, hiving off into multiple parallel communities that blogged in ever increasing numbers about more and more things they had in common. Fascinating. Something had hit critical mass and the community was now definitely maturing (I have seen the same thing happening elsewhere on the blogosphere of recent times) into something that was functionally 'new'.

Which meant my place within that community was also changing. Now, it is individuals and the links between them which are the constituent things (rather than just our shared interests), the connections are developing around all of us as individual nodes on the network, rather than as mere feeders to the 'activity sector'. We are now a part of the wargaming world, as a blogging community, as a 'player' as well as an abstract phenomena (eg. a 'market').

So, to cut a long story short (haha), I renovated the page design of this blog. I have put my profile at the top so people can see who I am. I also changed the content of my profile to reflect my blogging soul more accurately than what was there (from another age, I started this in 2004).

I elevated the scrolling 'other blogs I read' updater** to just beneath my profile, both to (1) share out the traffic that comes my way from google searches etc (I have several posts that rank fairly high on some reasonably 'popular' search expressions), and (2), make it easy for me to see and access (I find that Adelaide Gamer is becoming practically my 'home page' these days).

I inserted a small section of 'my handy links'*** between profile and blogscroll to catch those sites that fit the definition of frequent use and not a blog (even though 'blogs of war' technically is a blog).

I kept my archive available, immediately beneath the scroller.

I have kept my other collections of links (some of which are now inactive, I suspect) beneath the 'active' parts of the margin. I will have to think about what other sets and sources of information I want to include on my page before I decide what to do with them. For instance, the concept of stand alone 'pages' intrigues me, and blogger has added it as another feature to its growing palette.

What interesting times we live in!

_______________


*The world is always changing. Here's my Adelaide Gamer Brief History of the Blogosphere.

1993 - the first Weblog (though not yet named as such), created by an I.T. student, the year the 'web' is born.
1999 - The term 'blog' is coined, 23 'blogs' in existence (?), Blogger starts.
2002 - 1 million blogs in existence.
2004 - 3 million blogs in existence, Adelaide Gamer is born.
2005 - 50+ million blogs in existence.
2007 - I notice a new wave of gamer blogs
2011 - ?

** To the old few I have added several which I have come across since discovering the Blogs of War:

The Man Cave - aussie gamer with dark ages passion.
Victoria's Boys in Red - weird and alternate wargaming genres.
Warfare and Wargaming - representative entrant for Mitch Williamson's sites (see here).
The Nothelm Chronicle - nice dark ages modeling and gaming theme.
Emporer vs Elector - well trafficked member of the imagi-nations worlds. I don't know much about it, but I like what I see happening in the background of the wargames.

***The links I include on this select list include:
Renaissance Kingdoms
Blogs of War
The Blitz

Computer wargaming ... is easy?

Tandy TRS 80

The title of this post was the title of an article by Stuart Asquith in "Wargaming: presenting all aspects of the Hobby" (1985). At the time he wrote that article we'd moved past the kit built TRS-80 (illustrated above) and into the age of BBC, Commodore 64, Apple 2e and the early IBM PC's. Asquith saw the main role of computers as an adjunct to tabletop gaming rule mathematics, spent a lot of time putting his rules into BASIC code, thought there was a role for computers in this aspect of the hobby. He was pretty excited at the prospect of being able to link computers together to hundreds of "K's" of processing power and looked forward to the future.

It is particularly heartening to note that one of his group's first two projects was to 'computerise' their Spanish Civil War rules (a point which I missed at the time). Good to see that SCW and interwar period gamers were at the front of the wave, even in 1985!

Needless to say, I report the above after finding a copy of said magazine in my 'archive' of the era. Lots of other goodies also, including a 1980 'Breakout' magazine "Dedicated to the future of gaming with computers". I'll read and report when I find the thing again (as I already filed it away in a fit of organisedness).

When that was published, we were building our first PC's at school instead of going to sports (true geekness). Hence the picture of the TRS 80. It had an onboard memory of 4Kb and used a audio-tape and tape deck for data storage. You had to program your own game for it. I was very proud the following year when 'taught' the computer to 'teach itself' how to play noughts and crosses (tic tac toe).

Ah, memories...

Can you spot the treasure?

Actually, there's more than one magic item in this lot. For example, the 'Education for All' sticker on the spine of the upright blue folder in the top left 'cube' denotes that in the folder are contained the battle plans and records for two divisions worth of 6mm Germans that fought in the epic Battle for Stalingrad in a mate's back room many many moons ago. Or, in the taped up box in the cubical right upper centre are contained the tomes associated with a terrifyingly enjoyable Call of Cthulhu campaign. But neither of these is the 'treasure' that I am thinking of. More to come.

Resuming life

Hi, back again after an extended break. Not sure why that happened, but such is life and life has been busy. I still kept going with my MMPORGs, particularly Renaissance (in which time I became a grumpy highland rebel chief, hung for treasonous activity purely due my leadership role, and an even grumpier post rebellion highland chief as the admin and the ingame rulers together conspired to take the fun out of the game), had a look at some online games, had a few games of cards, and played a lot of The Operational Art of War III (playing the partisans, about 90 turns into the 400 turn Yugoslavia 1941-45 scenario), read a lot of books, found a new game shop, and had an abortive attempt to be interviewed on a gaming podcasting site (when i get a microphone that works AND if they have me back again, I'll post up details here).

And that's the longest post I've done in ages. I'll put in a few details in near future.

RIPs

Frank Frazetta (artist).
Ronnie James Dio (musician).

Frazetta helped frame the visual side of fantasy RP, Dio provided the soundtrack of many a game in the golden age. For this, they are part of our (or my, at least) history. Thanks to Big Lee and Grognardia for the links.

Table Top Teasers

Steve the Wargamer has reproduced the wonderful series of articles published by 'Military Modelling' and 'Battle' in times past by the legendary wargames god, Charles Grant (CS Grant wrote the book that introduced me, at the tender age of ten, to wargaming). I remember as a youngster being huddled up in public libraries studying past copies of the aforesaid magazines, reading some of the very articles that are now reproduced on THIS SITE.

Steve the Wargamer keeps a number of blogs and resources out there. Good on you Steve.

I've added the 'Table Top Teasers' site to my wargames resources links.

Blast from the Past - Rise and Decline of the Third Reich

While reading Roll Dice and Kick Ass I had a memory flashback when I saw the recent post about the old Avalon Hill Classic, Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. For those that don't know, this was one of the original 'monster games', complexity level 10, massive board, upto seven players, 64 page small font three column rule book, zillions of pieces.

I got a copy in the early eighties. I was the only person in the region who had a copy. I played one game against a school friend (or, part of a game) and several 'against' myself. Never did find another player to play it against. Still have my battered copy of it, hoping against hope that one day I'll get a chance.

In the early 90s I saw a pirated copy of a computerised (Amiga) version which was a hoot to play, but I never again finished as I had to move from the house where the copy was and I didn't have an amiga.

I don't think there's a functioning community even now on the cyberworld for it, and don't know if at this stage of my life I'd have time to go through all those rules again, let alone play it. Sure would love to though!

Maybe when I've retired, as long as my eyesight hasn't gone to shite so I don't miss the fine print.

In the Dog Days

Xmas 2008 has been and gone and we're now in the period between xmas and New year. The romans used to call these the 'Dog Days' and, at different times in their history, held the Saturnalia festival through them. I use them to think a bit about what has been and what is to come.

Miniatures - very little activity on this front. I have accumulated a number of 1/32 figurines of Napoleonic French to paint up, have started some but my painting room keeps being used as a spare bedroom (heresy!) whenever the urge hits, so have stalled. Similarly with the He 123 model. As for the miniatures wargaming, a distant memory waiting to come to life again!

Comp Games - Updated my versions of East Front and Operational Art of War. Played a small series of EF games v friend via email. Lost a week of my July Holidays to playing 'Great Invasions' - if I can find the time this holiday I'll be getting back to the dark ages for at least some of the time...

IL2 Flight Sim - Have accumulated only a few dozen hours flight experience this year, mainly in the form of chase scenarios to sharpen up my own skills while waiting for the time and energy to get back into the online arena.

Blogging - This blog has suffered also this year, with only a couple dozen posts on it - and a lot of them seems to be focused on the one aspect of my present gaming life (online MMORPG). On the other hand, my favorite bloggers in the gamesphere keep going from strength to strength and have kept me going when I wonder what it's all for. Keep it up guys!

MMPORG - Continue to immerse self in Renaissance Kingdoms. Becoming reasonably skilled at the modes of online organsiation and communication which this game relies upon. Have thrived in the RP aspects of the game, even having my 'home RP' being nominated for Kingdom wide awards (a great privilege). Clan Leader, General of the local Regiment, Advisor to the Steward of Scotland, local celebrity, peace keeper, traveller. My online persona keeps me busy! Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, my aztec peasant in the Tribal Nations continues to grow strong in his pursuit of fishing and bean farming and will soon be strong enough to tour ancient mexico.

So - it's been a good year for MMORPG for me, but the other aspects have suffered. Due to domestic issues, for example, have hardly touched a 'traditional game'. As 2009 creeps over the horizon, I wonder what will be next in the evolution of this little gamer.

Happy yuletide to you and yours, and a safe new year! May your dice continue to roll above the odds!

RIP Gary Gygax

I've just learned that Gary Gygax, co-author of the original Dungeons & Dragons, passed away earlier this year (March). Quite a shock and a tear in the eye.

This guy affected my life in a very major way, and gave me many many many hours of some of the most exciting friendship filled fun.

Despite the monster run away commercialised mega rip off that the orginal game seems to have changed into (it was out of his hands for more than the past decade, in defence of his memory), Gary's ethic was always to have fun, cut the crap, remember that the game is all. So true.

R.I.P Gary Gygax

Remember Zork? Then look at this!

Zork was one of the first computer 'adventure games'. It was text based, with simple geometric graphics of landscape (if my memory serves me right, though that might have been another game called 'Adventure'). It was played on the old green screen CRT. A combination of mapping issues, tricks, puzzles, riddles and such like problems, it was great fun and highly addictive.

It looks like it has generated a minor academic history (as I guess does the early days of personal computing generally). Here, for example, is a recent accademic paper on it. It's a guide to caves upon which the game's map was based. I haven't read it all, but the pictures are amazing!

Thanks to Yehuda for the link.

Thoughts on MERP & the Barrowlands

Have again been reading Jeffs Game Blog (<----- link is on the sidebar to the left - click here for the post I've just read). Again, he's brought up a topic which strikes a chord with me, the nostalgia of the ICE system of Middle Earth Roleplaying modules. Unlike Jeff, I never ever saw the MERP game rules. I did however pore over a couple of the adventure modules - "Witchking of Angmar" and "Bree and the Barrow Downs" from memory.

I have been a LOTR fan since I was about 13 (read The Hobbit and LOTR trilogy in the one glorious year(along with Willi Heinrich's "Cross of Iron" and Frank Herbert's "Dune") - what a year!). I loved the movies (saw them once each at cinema, and Return of the King once on commercial telly - Cross of Iron only on video). My enjoyment of the modules didn't suffer from not having MERP rules to hand - I experienced my perusal of them as an immersive continuation of the escapist enjoyment I'd derived from the books.

I think that I was breaking away from what I was beginning to see as the homogonisation and routinisation, the complexification and commodification, then occurring with AD&D (around time of release of Fiend Folio). Little did I know how bad that particular trip would become (you'd need a bookshelf just to hold the systems and rules of D&D these days, as well as a tidy bank ballance to buy it)!

Instead, I went down the path less trodden. I recall coming up with a simplified set of rules (which were probably most akin to Call of Cthulhu of the games I now know - though I was only to actually see a copy of CoC nearly a decade later). I then dropped some players in a land recognisably similar to the Barrow Downs and we had a total ball - with total player group annihilation the end result.

I'll revisit this episode in my gaming past sometime later, as I have now to go and enjoy the rest of the day!

[I'm building up quite a list of tasks to type in nearish future, aren't I!]

[Almost all D&D players get a bit upset when they realise how tenuous a grip their characters have on sanity and life when one moves over to CoC type games.]

History of a gamer Pt I (long post)

I thought it might be interesting for some of you to know how I got from there to here by plotting some of the key moments in the evolution of my gaming gene. It's an interesting biographical thing to do also...

Age 5 - 10
Prehistory
Family games, such as 'snap', 'old maid' and 'rook' (an old card game from my mum's youth which we all got indoctrinated into fairly young), tic tac toe, snakes and ladders, Buccaneers (Waddington boardgame classic), and monopoly.

Somewhere around the age of ten I borrowed a library book about chess. I think it was by Fred Renfeld. Fascinated, I made my own set out of bits of paper and taught myself how to play. I then taught my sister, and eventually others. Not a brilliant player, the highlight of my primary school chess days was winning a knockout tournament amongst all my class mates for the right to play the grand final against our teacher. Mr Weckert beat me, but I didn't feel crushed. He was a good bloke.

Age 11
Accidentally found "Battle" by C.S.Grant at the local library. This is where I learnt what to do with those airfix 'toy' sodiers someone had given me once. This is when I got infected with the twin blight of the modern gamer - obsession with collection and deficiency of comrades. Discovered 'Military Modelling' magazine - with its 'Battle for wargamers' section and column by Charles Vassey (how do I remember all this?).

Age 12
After months of solitaire adventures, I finally asked one of my neighborhood friends around to have a game with my carefully painted airfix figures. I was horrified when all he wanted to do it seemed was throw marbles at them! I terminated that game pretty quick. I tried with another local friend, same experience. I began looking towards school as a recruitment ground.

Age 13
Aquire copy of 'Traveller', Sci Fi Role Playing by Game Designers Workshop. In those distant days, it was composed entirely of 3 x 48 page (?) booklets. Had a couple of classic games, but got diverted before we got too far into Dungeons and Dragons. My more affluent friend (or so it then seemed) had the books, so he was the Dungeon Master. Endless fun.

Age 14
I played chess for a school team, usually occupying fifth or sixth table in our D grade team. Even then I only had one or two wins over a couple of seasons. My most memorable victory came in year 9 when for some reason I ended up in a B grade team for a night, a result of their desparate shortage of players and my being the most expendable of players to be sacrificed from the D grade team for a game against an opponent school of which there was no hope of winning. I, however thought it was pretty cool.

I thought it was even cooler when, towards the middle of the middle game and when I was having my pieces attrited away, I observed an open rear rank in my opponent's otherwise invulnerable position. I constructed and executed a cunning plan which involved the maintenance of a poker face and the sacrifice of what few other pieces of value I had to get my last rook on the last line, and his pieces in a position so that they blocked each other from intervening. Checkmate. Victory. Utter disgust and disbelief on my older opponent's face (I didn't like him so didn't bother trying to make him feel better, he had been a psychological bully when it had looked like he was wiping me up). Sweet memory.

To 15
Games were mainly either WWII 1/72 miniatures or AD&D heroic quests.

In the WWII scene I had a bunch of American Infantry and associated tanks (Shermans, Chaffees, Jeeps, Priests and Long Toms), and faced off my friends who had built up similar company sized collections of Russians and Germans (with a surprising preponderance of King Tiger tanks in this latter). We played initially with slightly modified CS Grant rules, towards the end of the period with 'modern warfare' (4th ed.?) rules by Wargames Research Group.

We played numerous brutal take no prisoners never run away battles on cloth covered tabletops and the sand tables which my two friends had at their places. Once we took over the backyard at my house and played at something approaching scale. I was king of the rules, and recall fighting bitter battles over their interpretation at that time.

For D&D, I tended to play a dwarven fighter character. Much of what we did was loosly inspired by Lord of the Rings crossed with dungeon crawling as per the random encounter tables. A time of magic and mystery as none of us except the DM knew what was in the DM Guide or Monster Manual.

Significantly, at about 13 we hooked up with a local wargames club (SA Historical Wargaming Society) for a few months (after bargaining with the treasurer). There we were introduced to 'Risk' - which opened up a whole world of boardgaming. Although I didn't play any other boargames there, I remember pouring over the collection of games the club held. This would become significant later in life. We also played a couple of games of Napoleonics with borrowed miniatures on club tables. We used simple rules I cobbled together from the many books I was by this time borrowing from libraries all over the Adelaide metro area.

Perhaps of most interest to Dan, was the fact that I bought a painted collection of 15mm republican roman lead figures from a thug at school. I think now that the collection had been stolen, and thus find some reluctance in bringing them out (I get the guilts whenever I look at the detailed paintjobs - even though it was years later that the penny dropped).

More on this some other time.

What do you know?

You may recall that in a recent post I mentioned (half jokingly) that it might be a good time for my household to upgrade computers so that I'd be able to fly online with 'IL-46', the latest addition to the series of WWII combat flight simulators which began with 'IL-2'. I made the comment in the belief it would take several months for first the decision and then accumulation of money (we're not a house that lives on credit).

Well what do you know? In the past week we were made an offer we couldn't refuse, and are now proud possessors of a fairly new Pentium 4 machine with attached accessories! It makes flying Pacific Fighters a smoother operation (not that that's helped my success ratio very much) and has eased up the load on our workhorse computer.

So now the push is on to get the skills up to standard quicker, then time the online arrival to be either very soon, or when the next game in the series is released (believe it will focus on Battle of Britain).

Saddest thing generally at present which affects my gaming existence? Fact that I have been extremely under the pump at work and will now have a couple hours extra travelling time each day for a few months. Equals less time or energy for gaming...

Current miniatures project

Sorry it's been awhile, the internet was down.

The present miniatures project is to convert a 7' x 5' sheet of chipboard into a green beige/felt battlefield. This will just fit in the room my wife has so conveniently allowed me the use of for gaming. On this table, I hope to spend many hours with friends pondering the tactical niceties of various miniature wargames. I am playing with 6mm figures and home made rules on a smaller table at present, ironing out the issues in the rules. By the time I have the real table together (there are already of lot of items of miniature scenery to place upon it) I hope to have ironed out the Spanish Civil Wargame rules system I have developed. Then I will gather my troops and we shall have fun.

Current Projects - computer based

Well, I should maybe contribute something to this so that those who visit don't lose total faith in a 'dedicated gamer's' dedication. A place to start might be what projects are underway at present.

On the computer I've got a copy of Pandago, which allows me to play the ancient game of GO against an AI that seems to play well except it scores like shit (stopping the game once I've passed a couple of turns and counting all spaces as contested that contain an opposing colour, no matter how doomed that stone would be should the computer not have passed). The program apparently is also useable as a client on the IGS Go server on the web, which is a pretty serious place that I haven't been able to work out yet. But will someday.

Have always enjoyed playing Talonsoft's Campaign Series of games, particularly East Front II. Although aging, it's still as good a long term proposition for the keen tactical WWII wargaming buff as any game I've seen. Recently played the scenario 'Bukrin Bridge' to a victorious conclusion, first time in several attempts across the years.

Have discovered Cyberboard a while ago, which is a freely downloadable application with which one can design and use 'gameboxes', digital representations of traditional boardgames and their componentry, and then play against opponents on the web by email. Haven't yet participated in a game this way, as am still learning about the latest Beta version of the product. I am part way through designing a Gambox for 'Barbarian', a monster game produced by KP in the early nineties, based upon Avalon Hill's 'Ceasar's Legions', reproducing the military campaigns of the Western Roman Empire from about 50 BC to 300 AD. The maps cover from Gaul to Byzantium at 10 km per hex, amazing! It's taking a while because it's such a big game.