YAAH, YAAH, JAWOHL…

Issue #2 of YAAH! magazine, featuring two of my abstract games, will be taking pre-orders as of April 3: http://www.flyingpiggames.com/yaah–magazine-issue–2.html Pre-order price is $24.99; after it ships in May sometime it’s $29.99. Also, to beat steep international postage costs of $20 you can get a PDF download for $14.99 and you then print out the games. The above illo is the preliminary game art for Uprising. I have been told there will be a few changes. Lots of other interesting stuff in the issue too – scenarios, reviews, interview with Alan Emrich, and more!

Includes a short piece by me on the think-value of abstract games, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s love of Chess, his essay on the morals of Chess, and the mental exercise afforded by different types of abstract games (especially the three of mine in this issue!)

Looking forward to this one.

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Review of Shining Path at Grogheads.com

http://grogheads.com/?p=7713

Thanks to the author, Vance Strickland!

It’s apropos that he should say near the end of the review, “It’s akin to a smaller scale version of GMT ‘s popular COIN series.”

Vance may not know, but many of our Constant Readers do, that Shining Path was designed in 1995, and that in 1999 I designed a game on the 1954-62 Algerian War using a development of the Shining Path system. Volko Ruhnke was introduced to the Algerian game later by a colleague of his, and it was part of his inspiration in creating the GMT COIN system in 2011 with Andean Abyss (another Latin American situation).

Korean War Battles and Balkan Gambit coming in S&T

The lastish of Strategy & Tactics magazine notified us all that two games of mine, Korean War Battles and Balkan Gambit, would appear in issues #296 and #298 respectively (fall-winter 2015, roughly). Artwork above is for Korean War Battles, which is a three-fer of operational scale games from battles in 1950: the Pusan Perimeter (August – September), the second battle for Seoul (September) and Changjin Reservoir (December). System used is a modification (don’t yet know how modified beyond what I did) of the familiar “Fire and Movement” system DG uses in its modern-era folio games.

Meanwhile, I redesigned Balkan Gambit from its diceless-combat, chit-pull system as used in Autumn Mist and Summer Lightning to use a modification of the action-point-allowance, step-reduction, shootin’-dice system first used by Ben Knight in his Victory in Normandy game, and which XTR and DG have used several times since in other games. Also, the 1950 hypothetical Soviet invasion scenario was dropped. Crossing my fingers… but I can see the map is slightly different, and website copy says game has 176 counters, but I sent in one with 240…. (Edit: I spoke with the developer-wrangler as CSW Expo in June 2015 and he said that was a typo, in fact it has a full 280 counters! (?))

Operation Whirlwind has shipped!

Latest update from One Small Step says that all pre-order copies of Operation Whirlwind have shipped! (Don’t let that stop you from getting a copy now though, it’s just a few dollars more and all the game it ever was!)

Kandahar will probably be the next one to ship, after Gary Graber’s Battle of the Atlantic, so look for it in May or perhaps June. So far OSS has been putting these things out monthly, like clockwork.

The update also mentions that there will be two more releases by me in the next batch of eight Folios. We’re discussing titles, it could be two of a number of things.

Victor Gannon Reviews A Distant Plain

A nice review of A Distant Plain over at Victor Gannon’s blog.

http://victorgannongames.com/tag/a-distant-plain/

He notes it’s not your usual Thursday night short-game fodder, which is fair enough.

Thanks Victor!

STRATFOR thoughts on Ukraine scenarios.

Neat that they decided to do this, but hey, blackbox much?

They consider six scenarios, from little to big, and blithely come up with numbers of troops needed and time in days to accomplish, even the one that considers total Russian mobilization. One wonders, one does wonder….but the final paragraph restores a sense of reality to the exercise:

“For all of the scenarios considered, the findings were consistent: All are technically possible for the Russian military, but all have serious drawbacks. Not one of these options can meet security or political objectives through limited or reasonable means. This conclusion does not preclude these scenarios for Russian decision makers, but it does illuminate the broader cost-benefit analysis leaders undertake when weighing future actions. No theoretical modeling can accurately predict the outcome of a war, but it can give leaders an idea of what action to take or whether to take action at all.”

“<a href=”https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/gaming-russian-offensive”>Gaming a Russian Offensive</a> is republished with permission of Stratfor.”