Fox Gap 1862 on a smaller grid

Some time ago, fellow blogger Jonathan Freitag put together a scenario on Fox Gap to work with my hex based Two Flags - One Nation rules. Last week Jonathan replayed the scenario, moving from 2” to 4” hexes, while at the same time shrinking the size of the grid, providing a tighter focus to the action. He has blogged his account and I have put a link to that post in the Resource Section below.

The action is interesting because it is limited to equivalent of a large brigade on each side and both players have all three arms represented on the field.

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Old School tactical - Tiger I v T-34 performance

Over time, this blog has looked at several tactical systems from the perspective of Gun / Penetration interpretation using these two vehicles as a benchmark and today we will be taking Old School Tactical (OST) for a spin. As per previous posts on the matter, I just like tactical games, I do not have particular knowledge of the subject, so treat this as a bit of fun, rather than something to hang your hat on.

OST is a tactical boardgame designed by Shane Logan and published by Flying Pig. Counters represent individual vehicles and squads and a hex is representing 50 metres, so this joins the popular ranks of Squad Leader, ASL, ATS, Band of Brothers, Lock ‘n Load Tactical, Conflict of Heroes and no doubt a bunch of others that I have missed. This article is exploring whether the Tiger and T-34 have an inter-play that delivers the ‘feel’ of what we might expect from combat accounts and testing ground experiences.

We will be looking at how the two vehicles compare and using the stereo-typed example of T-34’s ‘charging’ towards a Tiger to highlight rules and system mechanics. We will also be comparing the Tiger and Panther tanks, simply because it always interests me how designers approach the characteristics of these two similar (in game terms), but different (in real life roles) vehicles!

It is a lengthy post, so bring coffee and nibbles.

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Converting a tabletop game to a boardgame

This post runs off last weeks post (see Resource Section below), in which I AAR’d an ACW game using 12mm figures on Hexon terrain. Actually starting with a hex based scenario meant that  moving the whole thing to a physical boardgame is fairly straight forward, though not without some practical hurdles, not least time and effort.

This post briefly outlines the process, costs and some things to embrace or avoid etc, plus there are a few photo’s of the replay action.

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