LITTLE WARS

One of my long-standing hobbies is wargaming - here are some links to other useful gaming places and to some home-made games, scenarios and variants I have cooked up over the years.

The Latest News

If you really want to know the latest news, go to my Wordpress blog at  http://brtrain.wordpress.com 

Otherwise, the Approximately Annual Update follows.

23 March 2015

Yowza! Much has been happening on the design front. Getting busier every year, it seems.

Three, soon four, of my games have been/ will be released in folio format by One Small Step Games: Shining Path, Green Beret, Operation Whirlwind, and Kandahar. The first three have all been released before but these editions have very nice map and counter graphics, die-cut counters, and 17x22" maps, as well as revised and cleaned-up rules.

BTR Games is my ghetto-DTP imprint I started last summer. 11x17" maps and counters on a sticker sheet you needed to assemble yourself, price only $15 including postage worldwide which is about what a Microgame Design Group DTP game would cost nowadays. These come in comic book bags too, just like the old MDG games. Current titles include 1848, Andartes (original version of Greek Civil War), Civil Power, Land of the Free, Tupamaro. Temporarily withdrawn are Green Beret, Kandahar and Shining Path while they are in print by OSS Games. Soon to come are Algeria (redesign), Autumn Mist (maybe, if I get around to it), Balkan Gamble (my original version of Balkan Gambit), Binh Dinh 69 (Vietnam), Caudillo (new title of Dios O Federacion), EOKA (Cyprus 1955-59), Palace Coup (multiplayer rework of Power Play), Third Lebanon War (original version of Next War in Lebanon).

I keep saying "original version" in the above. That's because Decision Games, in publihsing these titles, has kept the names but made extensive changes to the games, without my knowledge until the game is actually published and thuds its way into subscribers' mailboxes. I think the original versions are still the ones worth playing, so I make them available myself through this imprint, as well as some other things that would never see the light of day otherwise. Not a profit-seeking activity but the $$$ I got paid for the DG products is not worth the professional embarrassment. I'll say no more about it here.

Speaking of Decision Games, Strategy & Tactics #296 will see Korean War Battles, a three-fer of small battles from 1950 (Pusan Perimeter, Second Seoul, Changjin Reservoir) using the um, familiar Fire and Movement system they use in all their modern folio games.

A Distant Plain will be reprinted, probably in 3Q 2015. 

Uprising and Army of Shadows (new title for the single-blind Asymmetric Warfare game done for the CTFP-ECCO website) will be published in #2 (April-May 2015) of Yaaah! magazine, a journal that has nothing to do with Howard Dean.

Ukrainian Crisis was to have been published by Victory Point Games in late 2014, as it turns out the playtesting they wanted to do on it went off the rails so, on the first anniversary of the crisis, we are still waiting... but I think they will get it done, and it will come out as Headline: Ukraine. I found the game ssytem an interesting experiment and might use it again.

Compass Games hired a new layout guy, so it is possible that their production of Paper Wars will get back on schedule and Finnish Civil War may appear in early 2016. Yes, it is possible. And maybe this summer we will talk again about them doing up The Scheldt Campaign

Entering the playtesting arena with Denouement, a COIN system game of the Algerian War for 2 players. Worked out its bones in July-September 2014, after GMT asked me if I woudl be interested in doing such a  game. I liek the title but it will probably be changed.

Besides all this there are four modules of the District Commander system (Red vs. Blue, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Algeria) that I have worked out or need to test.  

The 2014 Connections conference was in Quantico in August, which was interesting to say the least... not going this year though.

21 April 2014


Okay, a bit late with the news as always but five weeks ago I designed a free print and play game on the Ukraiine Crisis of spring 2014. Designed in a weekend, during which the referendum on whether the Crimea should leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation was held, the situation was changing hourly and an outright invasion of Ukraine seemed possible if not likely. It's a fairly simple pol-mil game with card play on the military, diplomatic and information-warfare fronts combined with a simple counter game if someone decides to "go kinetic" - though it's quite possible to play the game without ever doing so. Files for the PnP version are hosted on my dedicated game design blog (which is where everyone goes now anyway, I guess).  But a VASSAL module for the game by Martin Hogan is stored here: link to module . You will still need to download the game's rules from the link above. Uh, what else has happened... in backwards chronological order:

A Distant Plain sold out in seven months, and GMT is taking P500 orders for a second printing...

In September 2013 I went to London for the first time in 25 years to attend the first Connections-UK conference, gave a presentation on the CTFP-ECCO project and the value of using abstract games...

Summer 2013 Decision Games bounced two game designs back to me (Green Beret and Kandahar, the latter after a lot of revisions seeking what I thought they wanted, turns out they weren't sure of it either). Because of this and the non-appearance of some other designs, I am going to start self-publishing some designs, in DTP format, this spring. John Kula is doing the art, and the maps and covers look great. Doesn't really feel odd to be going full circle back to Microgame Design Group and colour-copied stuff in comic book bags again, after 20 years.

19 March 2013
I've decided to post Balkans 1943-45, a variant I designed back in 2005 for Joe Miranda's Balkans 1941 game that appeared in issue #182 of Strategy and Tactics magazine, in mid-1997. My work on this variant grew into the complete game Balkan Gambit, which Constant Readuhs will know has been awaiting publication almost as long as this page has been here. It still is, so here at least is something on the same subject that can be played if you own the original game. It's over on the variants section: here. Have a look, it's real vintage! In other news, A Distant Plain is about done and will be out in August 2013. Only a year and a quarter from idea to P500 to production and sales... sometimes the system works!

3 October 2012
Damn, man, thirteen months passes like nothing... but I have been busy.

First, much more of the game design talk, though posts themselves are intermittent, is at my Wordpress blog "Ludic Futurism": http://brtrain.wordpress.com/ . I started it in August 2011. You will find many of my posts on game design etc. from my Livejournal blog (still there, and still posting to it, but not so much now), talk on gmae deisngs I am working on, and also find a more complete and detailed ludography, slides and notes of any presentations I've given (so far, one), and a chance to talk back. I woudln't mind if you went over there now and took a look ... I'll wait.

So what all has been happening? Well, the past year has been dominated by much more design work than article writing. My invitation to do some work with and for the Naval Postgraduate School (http://brtrain.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/presentation-at-naval-postgraduate-school/) generated some new games (Uprising, an abstract game, and District Commander, a counterinsurgency game in a generic red vs. blue setting with three levels of increasingly detailed play). I also finished work on EOKA, Third Lebanon War, Palace Coup (revision of Power Play), Kandahar and The Scheldt Campaign. But the thing that has garnered the most attention is that in May 2012, Volko Ruhnke approached me with the idea that we co-design a game on Afghanistan using the COIN system he first worked out in Andean Abyss, a system based on my work in the Algeria family of games. We got right on that and within 60 days the game, called A Distant Plain, was being playtested at the big convention in Tempe! Playtesting continues, the game will be published by GMT Games (http://www.gmtgames.com) once it has made its P500 nut (which should be in a couple of weeks, it is about 475 pre-orders now).

In other publishing news, I can say that much of this new work and some older work has found a publisher (or rather several publishers) and the following games, in no particular order, will be appearing over the next two years (barring a total collapse of the American economy): Greek Civil War, Balkan Gambit, Andartes (game on Greek Civil War 1947-49 but with a different system), Green Beret, Third Lebanon War, Kandahar, The Scheldt Campaign, Finnish Civil War. Titles that will possibly appear include EOKA, Uprising, Palace Coup.

Details will be given as the publisher permits them to be known. Actually, I can announce one of them right now: Finnish Civil War has been picked up by Compass Games and will run in issue #82 or #83 of Paper Wars magazine (as of issue #77 Compass Games has taken over the enterprise and will be publishing a game in each issue). This will probably appear at the end of 2013 or early 2014, but I have been asked to take down the free print-and-play version of the game available on this website. Available until now, that is.

That's a big chunk of my ludography, which is shown to great advantage in issue #30 of Simulacrum magazine. It took editor John Kula years to put this one together, especially since I kept designing almost as fast as he could profile, and I could not ask for a more touching gesture of friendship and respect. Feeling's mutual. http://brtrain.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/simulacrum-30-special-issue-on-brian-trains-games/

Well, I don't suppose people come here very often since the damn page is updated annually or less, but that is the news as it stands now... I do recommend you drop in on the Wordpress blog as I do update there more frequently (though I have to admit I don't care for the editing interface any more than I do for this one....)

 

1 September 2011
Joel Toppen has made a VASSAL module for Guerrilla Checkers, see here! link to module

 

7 January 2011
I finished off the year with a couple of new designs.

THIRD LEBANON WAR - An operational level wargame of operations in Lebanon some time in the near future. The context is that Israel has decided to mount an invasion of southern Lebanon to eliminate the threat posed by the continued presence and actions of the Hezbollah organization, but on a much larger and more destructive scale than the 2006 incursion. This game was inspired by my reading of Policy Focus Paper #106, If War Comes: Israel vs. Hizballah and its Allies, written by Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It was published in September 2010 and can be found at http://www.scribd.com/doc/37913846/If-War-Comes-Israel-vs-Hizballah-and-Its-Allies. The paper included a notional order of battle for an IDF ground and air assault into Lebanon in the near future, in an effort to stamp out Hezbollah once and for all. I thought that this situation might lend itself well to a game system that emphasizes the limitations and advantages of centralized and decentralized command and control systems: that is, an adaptation of the staff card system first used by Joe Miranda in his game Bulge 20.

THE SCHELDT - An operational level wargame of operations in the area of the Scheldt Estuary in Belgium and Holland in October and November of 1944. The crucially important port city of Antwerp had fallen to a rapid British advance in September, but the port could not be used until the coastal artillery defences at the mouth of the Scheldt had been neutralized and the river swept of thousands of mines. It fell to the First Canadian Army, already tired and overstretched after being in continuous combat since the D-Day invasion, to do this. The terrain and weather the Allied forces faced in this campaign could hardly have been worse. Huge areas of the ground fought over had been flooded, and it rained for most of the month of October. Infantrymen (for this was a battle fought primarily by infantry) who had been fighting continuously since June went forward through waist-deep water to assault positions the Germans had had months or years to fortify and prepare. For their part, the Germans fought with the desperation of men who truly had their backs to the wall. Over 1,500 Allied soldiers were killed and over 5,000 were wounded in the battle to clear the Scheldt. Over 50 percent of the dead and wounded were Canadians.

In designing this game, I wanted to show several things about the campaign and in so doing, pose challenges to the players: the grinding, attritional nature of the fighting; the difficulty of the terrain fought over; and the limited resources available to either side. The Staff Card system, again adapted from the Bulge 20 but taken in a completely different direction from both the original game and 2nd Hezbollah War, does not allow players to move and fight every unit every turn, as is often the case in other wargames - they must choose what they want to do, and where, and how to support it. The combat system, seemingly very simple because it does not rely on odds computations or column shifts, favours the defence and reflects the incremental nature of unit losses as they wear away in the fighting.

These of course would be the first and only games designed on these particular topics. I'm looking for a publishing venue, but the time lags involved are frustrating. I have three games that were all turned in to publishers in 2008 and none have yet appeared. One (Summer Lightning, the Poland '39 game) took until now to get enough pre-orders (about 150), the other two (Balkan Gambit, Greek Civil War) were just held up while the publisher did his best to survive the recession. I don't fault the publishers at all, this is what they need to do to stay in business and feed their families, but sometimes I feel like going the print n' play route and plunking this all on wargamedownloads.com or drivethrurpg.com. At least then the stuff would be Out There, for the six or seven people who might want it, and at a nominal price.

11 May 2010
Another free game for you - GUERRILLA CHECKERS. I was thinking about how two people could be playing two different games on the same board at the same time, with the common objective of killing each other, and came up with this hybrid of Checkers and Go, for two players. Equipment required: checkerboard, six checkers, and 66 small flat pieces (buttons, glass beads, M&Ms, macaroni, small Go stones, etc.). The "Guerrilla" player, using small pieces, plays on the intersection points of the checkerboard squares to surround and capture the enemy pieces. Meanwhile, the "Counterinsurgent" player, using checkers, moves on the checkerboard squares to jump and capture the enemy. Actually illustrates some Maoist tactics, in an abstract way and if you are sufficiently imaginative/trusting. I looked around on the Net to see if I had not unconsciously copied someone else's idea, didn't find anything like it, and so it's released to the world as a free download. ( Go get it, you know you're curious!

 

4 March 2010
Gee, this is turning into an annual event!

Newest game, for free download: FINNISH CIVIL WAR For years I have been wanting to do a game on the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Chaotic, savage, balance tipping this way and that, and one more facet of the turmooil coming out of World War One. In September-October 2009 I finally got it together to make such a game - actually made it in two versions: one using the Freikorps/War Plan Crimson system with 280 counters, and one with only 60 counters using a modified FK/WPC system that I was going to send in to Victory Point Games, which does a lot of small fast games (http://www.victorypointgames.com). They use the same map. I finished them at the end of October 2009, then got sidetracked on writing a major article for Strategy and Tactics (on Dieppe 1942) and usual end-of-year stuff. And VPG's pipeline is seriously impacted, even if they were interested in thei obscure tussle and accepted the idea right away it would be 2-3 years before it came out. So, I decided just to upload it to my page - ( GO GET IT!

Updates on new games: Summer Lightning: went up on P500 in June 2009, now has roughly 115 pre-orders which miiiiight be juuuuust enough for Lock n' Load to print it. It's excited some interest, and I hope it will come out soon. Greek Civil War and Balkan Gambit are both pretty much ready to go, and have been since the fall. Fiery Dragon, the publisher in Toronto, has been cutting way back on production of new items, especially wargames which have iffy sales. The publisher has a digital printing business which simplifies most of the production but he has of course had to concentrate on keeping that business afloat - if it goes under, then no one gets anything out of the deal. So, still looking for those tow to come out in 2010. Likely Green Beret will follow in 2011. VirtualiaI have had very little time to work on this, VASSAL (see below) looks to be the way to go but I haven't had the time to figure out how to make a workable module. I'm told that once you do, producing others is easy. Thinking of overhauling it (not much required) to handle Afghanistan situation. I recently read David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla and what he is saying seems to fit in with the game concepts of Virtualia. Even better if I can get that onto a computer screen.

Conventions and things: I haven't gone to anything. Had to spend $$$ repairing the sundeck last summer, so no Consimworld Expo, will miss this year's "Connections" conference in Dayton Ohio this March (I'm acting Boss at work, trying to put old house on the market again, and no money as we have to fix the roof siding on the new house), no MORS meetings (Irregular Warfare conference in February 2010 was classified, as is the annual Symposium in June in Quantico VA.

Republications: Arriba Espana was published in #8 of World at War magazine, and Battle for China in #259 of Strategy and Tactics magazine, both aroudn October/November 2009. Seemed to have been well received, not much comment. Will get around to posting China expansion kit to Boardgamegeek Real Soon Now.

24 April 2009
Well, a bit more of an update:

I came up with a title for what I had been calling The As-Yet-Unnamed Poland 1939 Game, as it enters the P500 process with Lock n' Load (http://www.locknloadgame.com/). I decided to call it Summer Lightning, as a tip of the hat towards the first "blitzkrieg" (lightning war) campaign and because it jived with Autumn Mist, my Bulge game that was the first to use the system. Now, Balkan Gambit also uses this same system, so no I'm thinking perhaps I should change the title to Fall of the Balkans. And the OCD in me thinks this means I have to design another game with "spring" in the title.

Greek Civil War and the Balkan game are putt-putting along, and will be out by the middle of the year I suppose - all other things being equal. The game publishing industry is not exactly recession-proof, but neither has it imploded - the $22 you would spend for a nice professionally printed copy of one of my games, which you would then own and could play forever, wouldn't get you two movie tickets and a popcorn to share these days. But the margins are never very wide, as with all things connected with publishing.

Green Beret has been returned to me. Todd of Cool Stuff Unlimited has not and will not be able to finish the art and produce it due to other and frankly more important commitments in a timely way, so I have arranged to bring it out through Fiery Dragon after the other two have come out. Maybe end of 2009, more likely 2010. I first designed this game in 1995; patience is indeed a virtue.

In early March I went to Orlando Florida to attend "Connections", an annual conference run by mostly Air Force folks that concentrates on professional gaming and support to the military. It was pretty interesting, I thought hard and talked hard for several days but I'm still afraid that much of what needs to be explored will have to go on a computer screen before anyone will look at it. Well, forget Visual BASIC, I am going to put a version of Virtualia together that can be played using VASSAL, a computer program that allows people to play the same game remotely in real time over the Internet. Looks good and versatile but I need time to figure it out - could not get it done in time to show at Orlando. Maybe at a future MORS conference - I won't be going to either the MORS symposium in June (not only classified, it's in Kansas) or the Consimworld Convention in Tempe (need to spend the $$$ repairing the sundeck of the new house). And Hugo Chavez had better stop being so nice to President Obama, or I won't have any pseudo-historical underpinning left for the game! I'll have to rewrite the scenario for someplace else, that's all.

Oh, and finally here is a sort of a reissue: Fiery Dragon will be printing up a limited quantity (100 to 150 copies) of Battle for China Deluxe, that will comprise the basic 1937-41 game and the expansions to allow play for 1942-45 (Pacific War), 1946-49 (Civil War), and 1937-49 (Campaign Game). Besides being able to have everything produced to the same graphic standards, this version of the game also includes a revised and harmonized set of rules that to me streamline the game significantly. I'll be making the combined rules and charts available as a free download after the game is published by Decision Games in October/November 2009, with some homemade extension maps, so anyone who wants to can make their own stat-of-the-art copy.

 

22 January 2009
I suppose I ought to check in here at least every year or so, but the last six months have been personally busy. But here is Vott Giffs, with new and old designs:

Konarmiya was published in September 2008.

I invoked the "no progress" clause of my agreement with Lock n' Load for Balkan Gambit, reclaimed the design, and it will now be published by Fiery Dragon some time in 2009.

Ditto for Greek Civil War, in fact they may come out at the same time and there is the possibility that it will have a decent sized (17x20") map.

However, Lock n' Load would not let me go without giving them another game, and I have done one up for them - it is another iteration of the Autumn Mist system, only this time taken to Poland in 1939. Haven't named it yet. LnL is playtesting it in-house but it seems to work fine - just have to tweak the victory conditions to make it a reasonable contest among players.

In the spring and summer of 2008 I worked on a counterinsurgency game I called Virtualia (should have checked out the name as this is also the title of a series of computer porn films), about a thinly disguised post-Chavez Venezuela. I took my Tupamaro game as a start, and plumped it up a lot, but the system still works and is pretty interesting. I will try and create a port of this to VASSAL or some other kind of computer-aided game playing software, and not try to recreate the wheel programming all kinds of things in Visual BASIC. Hope to get some Official Types interested in this as it is probably commercially unsaleable.

21 February 2008
Well, it has been another while hasn't it? Here's some news about what's been going on, with new and old designs:

New games:

15 November 2006

4 May 2005

6 October 2004 Well, it's been a while.

22 April 2004
On Monday I got a big heavy box in the mail, containing 20 copies of Arriba Espana. It has been published by Fiery Dragon Productions, a publishing outfit in Toronto that mostly does role-playing games material. The company will be bringing out four of my games in 2004, they did a very good job on the graphics and production. Perforated counters on thin card. The games are even packaged in small tin boxes, a first for this kind of thing. I'm quite proud of the way they look.

10 December 2002:

21 August 2002:

27 June 2002:
Another new game, submitted to the 2002 Microgame Design Contest and to come out in August from Microgame Design Group. It's called OPERATION WHIRLWIND. It is a historical game on street battles between Hungarian rebels and Soviet invaders in November 1956. Area movement map of downtown Budapest, 140 backprinted counters, 8 hours per turn, roughly platoon to regiment scale. A tense contest, at least in terms of player victory. Optional forces include Special Forces teams and the 101st Airborne Division, jumping into battle! I've been chewing on this idea for some time, as you'll see by scrolling down the page, but it was the imminent deadline of May Day for the design contest that set me to finally carrying out the project.

From the beginning, I had planned to include an abstract Political Game. In the Political Game, the Hungarian player (representing the new revolutionary government, committed to political reform) attempts to reduce or eliminate the domination of Hungary by the Soviet Union diplomatically. My reading showed me that this was the only way for the Hungarian player to win a real (i.e. bloodless) victory, through securing some kind of "separate but equal" status inside the Warsaw Pact for his country - something similar to that enjoyed by Yugoslavia. This was not an impossible goal, but if and when negotiations failed, Nagy could try to win a moral victory of sorts in the Military Game by fighting the Soviet Army in the streets of Budapest, and the stances of the players in the Political Game at the point where the Soviet player intervened militarily would set up the conditions of the Military Game.

However, the abstract nature of the political game was the sticking point - I did develop a way to do it, but it seemed too abstract and gamey and so I have shelved it for his game. I might resurrect the idea for use in another design.

1 February 2002:
I've whipped up a quick variant for my Somalia game postulating a quick American strike into that unhappy land later in 2002, looking to uproot Al-Qaeda elements there. At the end of 2001, it really looked as if Somalia was next on the list, though investigations have not supported the rumours, which looked good. Anyway, try it out if you happen to have the game: Operation Sword o' Dubya!

22 January 2002:
Short update - over the Christmas holidays I received my sample copies of both War Plan Crimson and Battle for China, in #42 of Japanese Command. They both look pretty darn good! War Plan Crimson is raising a few eyebrows on ConsimWorld, if only because of the zaniness of the subject. Command did a beautiful job on the graphics for Battle for China - one 16x24" map and two 16x12" half-maps, 400 diecut backprinted counters, separate rules booklet with nice illustrations, wrapped up in a glossy 84 page magazine. I suppose this is as good as it gets... we'll see if we can't arrange more of the same.

Rash promise: if you go to the trouble of paying 3,780 yen for the magazine (well, more than that since that's the domestic price, even so that is over US$32) and its spiffy components, contact me and I will send you the English-language rules and charts you need to play.

Pensees en passant: kind of stalled on my other game projects. I have decided to rethink Red Guard once more; it's not quite there yet.

13 July 2001: Well, a few things have happened.

Big in Japan: In June I was approached by the editor of the Japanese edition of Command magazine (actually it's a separate magazine, the title is used under license but the two publications have gone different paths), on the strength I guess of a very positive full-page review that appeared in their March/April issue. Would I be interested in licensing them to produce a Japanese language version of Battle for China plus expansion kit for publication in the Jan/Feb 2002 issue of the magazine? Hell yes. They will redo the maps and the game will have diecut counters too! So this is my first semi-professional sale, and another example of a DTP game making it out of the Xerox-and-shirt-cardboard ranks, at least in Japan. I retain the copyright so the game is still available in English through Microgame Design Group. Another nice review of Pusan Perimeter appeared recently in Games Journal, another Japanese-language magazine, and perhaps there will be more to follow. Board wargaming is even more of a minority hobby in Japane than it is in the USA: Japanese Command has a circulation of about 1,000 copies, no more. But otaku are otaku, and they will not be denied, and that makes my pathetic little ego happy.

Do-over: I've also gone back and done revisions to two of my earlier games, Red Guard and Tupamaro. These were two designs I liked but the systems just didn't seem to work out. I made a substantial revision to Red Guard in getting rid of the map and cleaned a lot of grit out of Tupamaro, as well as tightening up the rules language. I think I will also include short articles I've written on the Cultural Revolution and the Tupamaro movement with the games, as was done with Shining Path, due to the obscurity of the subjects (to Americans, at any rate).

New ideas, stupid moves: Other projects I have hatched in the last 2-3 months include an attempt at designing a four-player Barbarossa game where the players are in limited competition with each other, still too much of a numbers-and-hexes wargame so no chance of using those cute little "German game" wood and plastic components. I'm stalled or to too busy to with mundane things to make much progress with the Petrograd 1917 and Budapest 1956 games. But they'll come when they're ready.

14 March 2001:
Gee, it's been a while but I have stayed busy. Algeria came out in December 2000, and we have, as always, had positive feedback, as well as confirmation from a couple of French gamers that this is the first strategic simulation game on the war ever designed in any language. I was also struck with the idea of doing a hypothetical US-invades-Canada-1930s game in February, and it came together very quickly (one good thing about these alt-hist games is that you don't have to be too anal-retentive about the Order of Battle). See below for details.

I didn't have much time in 2000 to do much else besides Algeria, since I was busy editing Strategist, the monthly zine of the now-defunct Strategy Gaming Society. It was fun but one year was enough. If you want to see what it looked like, go to Magweb and some back issues ought to be on display.

So what should I do in 2001? Here are some ideas I've been thinking about for games, normally to be done to Microgame Design Group physical standards:

30 August 00:
The Microgame Co-op has been forced to change its name. Basically, the Alberta provincial government (the Co-op is based in Edmonton) has legislation concerning the use of the term "co-operative" or derivatives thereof: Kerry could have continued using the name but only if we got things together like a ten member board of directors, annual general meetings, bylaws, registered status, and hefty and expensive tax-related changes. The game wasn't worth the candle so we renamed our organization the Microgame Design Group (MDG). Perhaps not the most titillating name (there were many suggestions) but this shouldn't get us in any more trouble. Too bad we had to give up on five years of name recognition, though.

10 August 00:
Reorganized this page with anchors as it was getting a bit long to scroll down.

31 July 2000:
Peter Schutze of Schutze Games in Australia has just released full-colour DTP versions of four of my designs! The lucky four are Power Play, Pusan Perimeter, Somalia, and Tupamaro. The treatment he has given these closely resembles Microgame Design Group's- you are getting a quality item for not much outlay. Prices are variable: US$5-7 including airmail postage to anywhere in the world. He also takes credit cards. These are the first four offerings from Schutze Games, but Peter will be putting out more designs by other people later. GO THERE NOW and check it out! Schutze Games

30 July 00:
posted Desert Leader and Steppe Leader, two comprehensive variants for the Panzerblitz/Panzer Leader/ Arab-Israeli Wars series of games, to cover the war in the desert 1940-43 and on the Manchurian steppe.

1 June 00:
Posted Battle of Seattle on the site for free download.


Gaming Links

Simulacrum

Irreverent and quarterly magazine for board wargame collectors and other obsessives. Edited by big buddy John Kula. I have written more reviews for this periodical than I have grasping members.

The Maverick's Classic Microgame Museum

Nice commentary on the Microgame fad of the 1980s, the precursor of DTP, and a good gallery of covers.

Microgame HQ

More stuff on Microgames. Some good links, too.

Web-Grognards

Probably the best all-around resource for gaming links, errata, sources, etc..

Gamer Cadre

The home page of Joe Miranda, game designer and editor of Strategy & Tactics magazine.

Consimworld.com

A good place for discussions on many gaming topics, news, contacts and more.

Hey! Lemme outta here, you warmonger!