I've written about roleplay and roleplaying in reverse in wargames, but the only reason I have the luxury of waxing poetic about additional options for wargaming is because it's such a flexible system. Roleplay can fit nicely into a wargame, just as much as a wargame fits nicely into an RPG (tha...
Some time ago, I thought that it would be nice to have spaceship miniatures for Starfinder space battles. I developed a simplified system for Starfinder ship combat, which is currently a Copper Seller on DrivethruRPG, so I do actually do run ship combat pretty frequently. So I got some (more about...
Here's the thing. I bought the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness boxed set because it has a bunch of Mk VI (beaky) space marines in it. Originally, I'd intended only to use those models with 10th Edition rules, but the Age of Darkness box comes with a 400 page rulebook in it, and I'm nothing if not...
I've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
I picked up the Black Ops wargame, written by Guy Bowers and published by Osprey Games, and have had a great time playing it. This is my review of it as a book and as a game system.
The Black Ops book is in the ubiquitous blue book series by Osprey, so it's the usual 64 pages sprinkled with te...
About 6 years ago, I bought a set of hero miniatures by Wizkids. They weren't the first miniatures I'd ever bought, but at the time they were the nicest, partly because they were already painted in the box (I didn't think I was capable of painting miniatures back then, and to be fair didn't really...
I read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Indomitus by Gav Thorpe, and this is my review. This post contains spoilers.
You know how there are episodes of Star Trek (TOS and TNG) where our heroes beams down to a planet to save a civilisation in peril, and then there are episodes of Star Trek where our...
We humans seem to really enjoy miniaturized versions of real world objects. We have doll houses and action figures and model trains and miniatures for gaming. I'm new to the game miniature world, and being new means I get the privilege of making a bunch of mistakes. Here's what I've learnt about the...
I have a handful of early Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine miniatures, which I purchased on TradeMe just to practise painting back when I was just starting to explore the wargaming hobby. I don't intend to play the 3rd edition of Warhammer 40,000 but nevertheless I thought it might be fun to...
Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse t...
Armies in Warhammer 40,000 aren't meant to be static. Like the game world itself, your army is meant to be a developing force, with new recruits and veteran soldiers sharing the battlefield, learning and adapting and improving as they experience new horrors of war. To simulate that, Warhammer 40,...
Once you learn the rules to Warhammer 40,000, you're in for a nasty surprise. To play the game, you also have to learn the rules for your army. You need to know your army special rules, you need to know your warlord's enhancements, detachment stratagems, unit and character abilities, plus the core...
For me, the Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City releases of the Warhammer Quest boxed game from Games Workshop are practically perfect games. They're extremely replayable, but they're board games and are, appropriately, bound to their boards. They each tell a specific story. Blackstone Fortr...
I'm playing a historical fiction campaign about Gaius Avidius Cassius's attempt to appoint himself Emperor of Rome from his seat in Egypt, and Aurelius's fight to stop him. The plot is based on the historical events of 175 CE, but the battles never happened due to Cassius's assassination, and my Egy...
The facts are these: in 175 CE, Gaius Avidius Cassius, a Syrian Roman general stationed in Egypt, declared himself Emperor of Rome. The problem was, Marcus Aurelius was already the Emperor of Rome and had been for years. It seems there was some miscommunication (or subterfuge, we're not sure which)...
I know what you're thinking. You're asking yourself "Why is this Ironstrider Ballistarii from the year 40,000 CE fighting Roman soldiers in 44 CE?"
Is it a simple matter of a misplaced decimal point? Time travel? A cloned Earth stuck in the past, like System 892 in Star Trek original series? Or...