I recently read a discussion about barbarians and their representation in games which reminded me of the classical article “You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!”: Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming Disciplines by Christopher Douglas, published in Postmodern Culture in 2002. In the article, Douglas argues how games are not…
Republic of Rome (RoR), soon to be republished by Valley Games, is the one boardgame that invariably always crops up in any discussion about Roman games. In one sense, this is not particularly surprising – it is the classic political game, unique in being both extremely competitive and extremely cooperative,…
So, after yet another year of working with the Imperium game engine, I am finally back where I have a fairly playable version of the game on my desktop. Wait a moment, wasn’t that the situation a couple of years ago? Pretty much. Those of you who have followed the…
A few weeks ago, I ran into another variant of the perennial “Great Wargamers Debate” – also known as the “Realism vs Playability”, the “Historical vs Random”, or – in my preferred title: “Simulation vs Gaming” debate. Bruce Geryk partly touched upon the subject in the excellent Geryk Analysis: Wargaming…
Over at Cryptic Comet, Vic Davis (he of Armageddon Empires… if you don’t know what that is, get over there and try it out), has written a nice piece on random events in strategy games. In it, he lists some of the purposes of these in game design: 1) the…
The amazing pace in terms of updates continues… or not. Anyway, before I try to finalize some more screenshots, I guess I better complete my description of the previous one. With the map out of the way, I guess I’d better explain the panels. The panel to the left of…