New Year Update

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Hello everyone! Happy new year and all, I hope you all had a great holiday.

The past few weeks have been extremely busy for me. While I have finally moved, I also adopted two kittens to help with the generalized loneliness of working from home all day, granted now it’s 2 tiny mouths I need to feed so that of course means, more games!

1987: Glad to report that this game is almost finally ready to ship out. I had hoped to get this out quicker along with 1864 but put simply, the game was not ready and needed more work. We’ve done about 3-4 drafts of the rules and I think they are really solid now. As soon as I get all the final components and OK the final draft, I will likely start shipping these out as playtesting has proved fruitful.

1864: We are in the thick of development on 1864 now. The game was initially way more complicated than it is now, with enlarged ‘Battle Hexes’ to resolve combat, but this proved way too granular for the limitations of the 2140 series. It would have brought the playing time way up along for no real return on fun. I have reworked this game to play more like a traditional wargame. 1864 wont be doing anything that new or revolutionary, but I hope it provides an intuitive, quick playing simulation on a conflict people have often overlooked.

1995: In the process of rewriting the rules for this one now. They are essentially done, but I have been going over everything with all the fixes from 1987 as to cut down on development time. 1995 will probably be the PCS game with the least bells and whistles, but will be the most focused on operations and management with the introduction of Support Points, points that can be spent on additional DRM during combat. We have also sorted out Foot, Motorized and Mechanized movement having them interact with the Terrain chart in their own way.

DAMOS (AGN, AGC, AGS): Some updates on the upcoming WW2 series. Testing proved that ultimately 2 things had to be changed. Combat is now instantaneous as opposed to during it’s own phase. While this is less like Russian Front, one of my favorite wargames, it proved untenable mechanics wise. It would have required more counters to keep track of how many MP were spent on each combat to be referenced during a combat phase. We also got rid of Reserve mode/counters. With the step loss markers (should you decide to use them, or the unit tallies), there will be enough density on the board already. This lowers the playing time a bunch though and will facilitate adding all the games together, you could even have teams playing each map at the same time. Some have expressed concern to me privately about using step loss markers with stacking limits as high as 3-4 units, while that is a fair point, only SP losses can elegantly represent losses and the overall loss of quality over time. Ultimately, this is for the best given the Operational/Strategic scope of the game, and the limitations of the 2140 series materials. We will be offering additional SP Loss counters for around 6 bucks a pop.

Slogball: Cricket In The 19th Century: Fairly excited about this one. I have always been mystified by Cricket as what seemed to me, as an American, as an avant-garde version of baseball with no strikes. My crude attempt at oversimplification aside, as someone who generally is not very interested in sports, Cricket is a fairly fascinating game. It’s origins hark back to the 16th century, which makes sense if you think (even more crudely) of the wickets as little castles you are trying to take down with a ball and paddle. Strategy in cricket being more nuanced, as when to declare or retire and switch to the defensive/offensive, but similar in its basic performative structure makes it a great choice for a simulations game. Inspired by the best selling Deadball and Deadball 1909 by W.M Akers, I am really excited about this one.

Further down the line…

I am considering the possibility of using CSL to publish some of my earlier games, though because of their size, that of a normal wargame, will end up being more expensive than the 2140 series due to costs of POD materials and NYC rent. These will range depending on the amount of content included with the games.

Anyway, thanks for reading, as always you can get at me here, CSW, BGG, or Facebook

With Love

Ray