Hot Blood & Cold Steel

Category: games

  • Thoughts on an Insurgency Game

    An article I read in the New Scientist on why people got involved in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia triggered some ideas about trying to run a game about the locals caught amidst an insurgency campaign. Farming Today, Fighting Tomorrow? This is a game to explore why people become insurgents (or perhaps not).…

  • CLWG June 2010 Meeting

    What you missed at today’s chestnut lodge meeting (unless you were one of those present) were some good conversations and two games: Come One, Come Eorl – another megagame tryout from Andy Hadley; and D-Day beach landing – an improvised game by Jim Wallman. We started with a chat as Jim, Mukul & I watched…

  • Siege Engines R Us

    Alexander asked me to build him a catapult the same as the one on the picture of his new castle playset.

  • War in the West: German Plan

    Alex Kleanthous, Trevor Duguid-Farrant and I got together a couple of weeks before the megagame to do the German plan. At the planning session we had a discussion about the plan to use, we were constrained to the historical planning directive issued by Hitler, but not to the historical operational plan. After a debate we…

  • Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend

    Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend

    A book review of Bltzkrieg Legend, the German Army official history of the 1940 Campaign in the West

  • Inspiration – Glencoe & Dinosaurs

    Inspiration struck not once, but twice! Got two outline games designs in my head, one of which I’m putting on next Saturday at the CLWG Christmas meeting.

  • The library of Triamore: Mundane tractatus

    http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/thelemur/ars/triamore/Covenant/mundane_tractatus.html Last night I joined in with Simon Cornelius’s Ars Magica campaign. My character is a female Mage (aka Maga) called Lumen, she’s a younger daughter of a French baron in the early thirteenth century. Blond, blue-eyed and slightly elfin like, the picture I have in my head of what she looks like is of…

  • Master of Europe 3

    The megagame of the 1813 campaign in Europe was played at Anerley Town Hall on Saturday 7th November 2009. My role was as General Blucher, the senior Prussian Military Commander and also the Commander of the joint Prussian-Russian Army of Silesia. We started off during the ceasefire period of August 1813, with my army in…

  • Preparing For War – Onside Report

    Onside report of a design session/roleplay game run at the CLWG November 2009 session where I tried out some ideas for a game of the administration and training of a WW2 infantry company.

  • CLWG Design Conference 2009 Reports

    A collection of reports from the CLWG Design Conference held on 9-11 October 2009. sessions included: – WW2 Operational research discussion; – Come One Come Eorl tryout/discussion; – Second Life demonstration; – Agincourt Logistics; – Minions of Evil discussion.

  • St.Valery: The Impossible Odds by Bill Innes

    This is a collection of first hand accounts, mainly posthumously published from three men who were ordinary soldiers in the 51st Highland Division in 1940. None of them were officers (although one was commissioned after his escape and return home). The main part of the book is a personal account originally published in Gaelic and…

  • Battle of the Hills, 21 January 1943

    This is a short article about the advance of the 51st Highland Division in Tunisia in the follow up from El Alamein. I wrote this to be played as a tabletop wargame.