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...
Are you curious about roleplaying games, but not ready to buy a rulebook or to find a bunch of people to play with? There are tabletop games that can help ease you into RPG, or serve as alternatives to playing an RPG. Here are 5 of my favourites.
The obligatory disclaimer before the list is that p...
Zombies are the perfect mindless threat. I'm a fan of zombies in movies and video games and tabletop games. Do you want to know why? Well, there are 10 reasons.
1. Zombies have no soul
You can kill them without remorse. You'll never walk into the back room of a bunker to find the innocent zombie...
It's widely (although not universally) accepted in tabletop gaming that it's fun to roll dice. Broadly speaking, that tends to be correct. There's a guarantee in rolling dice. You're either going to be happy because you get what you want, or else you're going to be surprised. We humans like getting...
Most wargames are designed to be played as a single game event. You play a game, the game ends, and whatever story that game told is over. The game has no "memory", and the next time you field your army it's like you're fielding a brand new army, with no battle scars or past experience beyond what's...
I decided that during 2024, I'd design one game every month. This month, I've created Paper invasion, a wargame designed to be played entirely with pencil and paper. The design challenges for this one were that I didn't want to rely on dice for randomization, and there's a lot of notation required...
A gaming miniature usually has a base it stands on so that the miniature doesn't tip over during your game. After you paint a miniature, the finishing touch is to clean up the base, because inevitably paint has splattered on to it as you've been painting. Some people decorate the base with tiny shru...
Wargaming and, to a lesser extent, tabletop RPG poses an interesting data management problem when it comes to miniatures. The challenge is that your imaginary player character can have an infinite variety of weapons and adventuring gear, but the little plastic miniature (or paper token, or whatever...
I was recently in the US for a conference, and while there I decided to finally pick up a Steam Deck, which is hard to find in New Zealand. This is my review of [spoiler] a pretty amazing gaming device.
In terms of gaming, there were a few "problems" I wanted to solve.
Time to play
First, I wa...