soCal's burning

Surely you have seen the news about the wildfires in southern California.  White dots covered my car one morning, and it took a few minutes before I realized that the winds had shifted, and it was ash from the fires which are several miles from my apartment.  Griffith Park is part of the area burning again, threatening the landmark Observatory.  The skies are dark, and the sunsets are redder than usual, all due to the massive amounts of smoke.  One can see the horizon at night as a red glow from the top of my hill.  The heat is hindering firefighting efforts — hopefully we will see cooler temperatures soon, which will slow down the advance of the flames.

miniatures vs boardgames

The classic dilemma.  Usually there will be a strong preference by a gamer for one over the other.  And for good reason.  It costs a lot in time and money to play the games, and you cannot do everything.  I like both, with a slight preference for miniatures, due largely to the appeal of the models and the free form of the movement.  But there is an excellent series of boardgames from GMT called the Great Battles of the American Civil War (GBACW), that have drawn my interest.  Their game on Gettysburg, which battlefield I had the good fortune to visit for the second time this past July, is visually stunning and engrossing to play.  Now I will never turn down a worthwhile miniatures game of the ACW period, but GMT has published some real winners here.  The great thing about boardgames is there is usually no doubt where a unit is, what it can see, how far it can move, and once you buy it, your investment is over.

tabletop terrain

Like a lot of guys, I had model trains when I was young.  And like a lot of guys, I still have them.  One of the legacies of model railroading is an interest in terrain and making it look realistic.  Now a lot of wargamers do this, and more power to them.  They have it all — a beautiful table, with finely painted miniatures marching across it.  But too often the splendid miniatures traipse across a terrible excuse for a landscape.  One of my favorite additions to any table is trees, of which one can never have too many.  You can go out and break your bank buying them ready made, or do-it-yourself using the variety of techniques available just by surfing the web.  Also, there is a dedicated Yahoo egroup just for tree making.

Living in southern California gives me access to sage, which makes a wonderful armature for realistic trees in virtually any scale.  You just have to get out and go hunting in the brush.  Living near Griffith Park makes that very easy for me, and gives me the excuse I need to go hiking and biking on the trails there.  The trees one can make are stunning, and really score points when placed on a table.  It is so much better to play a game when one feels that the ground is worth fighting for, than when you have to pretend it is something that it is clearly not.

Meine Truppen playtesting

So I have a few responses from my four hundred and one email blast to the Mein Panzer database.  Good to see that some are willing to try out my weird and unusual concepts.  I have one idea that is very radical, involving a wholesale change in the way the game is played.  May introduce this to the playtesters at a later stage as an alternative.

secret pleasures

Dare I say it?  I play other publishers' games.  And enjoy them.  I think that no one has a monopoly on the right approach or answer.  And ODGW does not cover every period in which I have an interest.   Seeing how other designers answer the questions of how to simulate a battle churns my creative juices.  Let's face it, as one of my professors in college once said, you will have one, maybe two, completely original ideas in your lifetime.  It may not be the best place to have them on something as mundane as a wargame.