The first one is Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62. I watched La battaglia di Algeri when I was little, it’s almost the most important movie for shaping my views on good and evil in my whole life. After years, I watched Mon colonel by Laurent Herbiet and also read the Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal, started to know the road to justice never easy and anger is not enough to get rid of colonialism. So a game about The French-Algerian War, I bough it without a doubt. it’s a COIN System game, also the first one allow 2 or 3 players. It contains more than only Algeria also includes the influence of Morocco and Tunisia’s border war. It captured the high-level decision space of guerrillas and counterinsurgents, make a higher view to understanding the history. 10/10
3 issues of magazine Modern War, including the greek civil war, Somali privates and Armenia vs. Azerbaijan war. All of them for me it’s a tool for understanding the reality, they all got middle rating on bgg, but not means they’re not good cause bgg player is more interested in WWII but not modern times or cold war. The first impression of them was good, clear, concise and easy to internalize, especially the designer of the greek civil war offers the original rule on bgg, it makes playthrough became more smooth and compact. But the sad news is Modern Wars was closed on last year, it’s hard to simulate rare war in history later.
Need some figures for playing the retro medieval miniatures wargame, so glad it’s easy to get zvezda from local. I bought Zaporozhian Cossacks as mongolian cavalry , Vikings as light foot and Macedonian phalanx as Swiss Pikemen.
this is a ww1 era one. Horse artillery got its start around the 17th century, and in Imperial Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, cossacks were often hired as cavalry so it makes sense there’d be a horse artillery unit.
It turns out that this is a pretty good platform. It avoids some of the annoyances of Tabletop Simulator at the cost of having a more limited selection. But it does have some good games.
I have played a few new (to me) games recently (in real life, not on Board Game Arena):
Amerigo
I paid next to nothing for this game back in 2016, and only just last week got around to trying it out. It uses the same tower in Wallenstein/Shogun, and it’s a fun gimmick in both games. This is by the designer of Castles of Burgundy, a long-time favorite of mine.
Azul: Summer Pavilion
Okay, I actually played this for the first time a couple years ago and liked it, but I just recently decided that I wouldn’t mind owning two games in the “series” after all. It’s possible I will ultimately end up removing the first game from my collection as part of my constant effort to keep it manageable.
Faiyum
A recent game by the designer of Power Grid. I don’t think it’s as good as Power Grid (few games are) but I like it. Your farmers have to remove little wooden crocodiles before they can harvest the land.
Hadrian's Wall
At first glance, this is a ridiculously complicated-looking roll-and-write game. But it becomes clear enough once you get going and the busyness of it is kind of appealing.
Troyes Dice
I have long been a fan of Troyes (though I forget how to play every time I get a chance to again because it’s so long between games) and I was very curious about this. It’s another roll-and-write game, and a pretty good one. But I would probably buy the aforementioned Hadrian’s Wall before this one.
mosty we play Kingdom Builder, modular map with 4 scoring mechanisms (1 fixed, 3 random) + 3 location types that grant a special move. On your turn, draw a terrain tile, attempt to place 3 settlements on that terrain, adjacent to your existing settlements. most fun when you have ridiculously conflicting scoring cards, like ‘1 point per 2 settlements in your largest group’ + ‘1 point per group’
some of the BGA implementations are much better than others. Alhambra is very good (new!), Race for the Galaxy is trash (very old)
I enjoyed Irish Gauge recently, a bare-bones train game with a very simple stock market and a very good commodity market. stock certificates have their opening bid printed on them and are revealed in order. income is taken anytime, draw three cubes (could be black, white, or pink) blind from a bag, score each company according to how many cities with a cube matching one of the drawn types are connected to a similar city (or an empty city).
It plays in less than 2 hours and has all the major plot points of an 18XX game: swindling, sandbagging, market manipulation, cynical cash grabs, hostile takeovers. I love to set up very obvious and unavoidable trickery. don’t buy more than one company in the opening auction, if you can help it.
I’ve been playing with Board Game Arena some this week. They have a pretty good selection and some games are implemented pretty well. Much less annoying than messing with the physics in Tabletop Simulator, though of course the tradeoff is that you’re much more limited in what you can play (especially what you can play for free).
Did you know that Tulpa created a SB group there?
(You can play anything on the site for free as long as you play with someone who has a subscription.)
