I've been running Tomb of Annihilation for my gaming group and the adventuring party ended up in a hex near the east coast that was (as most hexes are in Tomb of Annihilation) pretty empty. In a desperate move to give the adventure some direction, I'd already made an early introduction of the...
Snarling Badger recently released Deth Wizards, a skirmish wargame in which you play a necromancer and undead minions. I've enjoyed Snarling Badger products so far, and I like the idea of playing a necromancer with a little team of wights and wraiths and zombies. I bought the physical book and th...
The board game (or is it a wargame?) Zombicide is a brutal and exciting and imbalanced fight for survival. In the game, up to six Survivors embark on a mission (usually to retrieve supplies or a special weapon) in a city infested with up to 70-ish zombies. Of course, zombies are zombies. They sha...
I remember when I first learned about washes. It was a Youtube video demonstrating a dip wash, where you take your entire painted miniature and just dip it into a tin of watery paint, shake it off, and let it dry. I wasn't painting miniatures yet, myself, but it made an impression on me, because the...
I've been thinking about the games I play, and what kinds of games I tend to enjoy playing the most. I've written about atmosphere, mechanics, and even mechanics previously, and these apply equally to tabletop and video games. The component I'm thinking about lately is the glorious feeling of...
Some board games use special proprietary dice. They're fun because they can emphasize the game's theme. However, dice can also be easy to misplace, and sometimes you lose the dice you need to play a game. Here's how to convert special dice to normal dice for your board games.
Option 1: Numbers
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Buying miniature kits has been an interesting learning experience for me as a newcomer to the wargaming hobby. There are lots of miniature designers and vendors out there, and I don't know of an easy way to get a feel for each one without buying a box of models to find out. I don't have the time, mo...
It's easy to look at a wargame and think that it's essentially "just" the combat system of an RPG. All the G without the R or the P. Similarly, it's easy to look at the original RPG (the fabled Chainmail supplement by Gygax and Arneson, I mean) and notice that the RPG was meant to be all the stuff b...
Wargames are usually big, meaning they're physically large. They're about wars by design, so they're meant to evoke the epic scale of great historical or fictional battles. You play a wargame on a big table, with terrain so elaborate that it qualifies as a diorama, with thirty or sixty or even a hun...
The best experience I've had in wargaming so far has been with Games Workshop and Warhammer. I don't trust the company any more than I trust any company (which is not at all, due to the authoritarian power structure of corporations) but I do recognise that the '20s version of GW has been able to, so...
This month, I decided to design a game based on what I think fantasy football is. I don't actually know what fantasy football is. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, it's "a game in which participants assemble an imaginary team of real life football players and score points based on those players'...
In the Battle Companies expansion for Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, pages 104 to 111 provide a map-based campaign for the game. It's an elegantly simple and fun system for tracking the progress your army or warband is making through any given series of battles. The book suggests that a map-...
I used to think wargames sounded unimaginative and overly strategic. I pictured players obsessed with military history reenacting, with miniatures, old battles exactly as they were described in the history books. How is that even a game? I couldn't understand how a great game like AD&D could possib...
If you design even just one game, it doesn't take long for you to realise that a game is mostly a maths exercise in disguise. You have a random selection of cards, and you compare numbers to see who wins. You roll dice, and the number you roll changes the state of the game. You count spaces on a boa...
I was chatting with Jamie, the store manager at my local Warhammer store, about painting and he pointed out that there were lots of different colours for undercoat spray painting available. Depending on what you're painting, it might just be more efficient to undercoat a miniature in black or blue o...
I've been playing a lot of Space Station Zero by Adam Loper and Vince Venturella. It's a simple system and a relatively small book at just 120 pages, and a side effect of that is that the potential war gear your crew can carry is pretty minimal. But the premise of the game is that a bunch of diffe...