Hot Blood & Cold Steel: game design
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Book Review – Bullets and Brains by Leo Murray
Brains and Bullets: How Psychology Wins Wars by Leo Murray My rating: 5 of 5 stars Brains and Bullets is an excellent and very readable book which tries to put some hard numbers on a variety of psychological tactics that can be used to persuade your own troops to fight and the enemy to give up.…
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Book Review – Spies Under Berlin by David Stafford
Spies Beneath Berlin by David Stafford My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a very well put together story of the Berlin spy tunnel, and some of the context that lead up to it being dug. It looks at the contemporary views and also re-evaluates the impact of the tunnel and whether or not…
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Counterfeit Game Money
At Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group we design and play a lot of games involving game money. We do this to the extent that we often joke that all you need for a game are CLWG members and some (play) money. Â By definition none of this is real, but in game terms it is always genuine.…
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Commentary – Hunting Nazis
I’ve written a short story called Hunting Nazis for the End of Module Assessment (EMA) for A215 Creative Writing. The target word count was 2,500 with an upper limit of +10%. The first draft weighed in at 5k words, double the target length. However some of this was because although I plotted it I needed to…
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A215 – Life Writing – Working in the Dark
From the two pieces I’ve already posted, Early Memories & Initiative at Night and another I drafted this piece as part of the life writing tutorial for A215 Creative Writing. It has summarised the original freewrites and linked them with a through-line. Working in the Dark “How many civil servants does it take to change…
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Evolution
We’ve had a succession of changes in socially acceptable behaviour. First we couldn’t smoke on trains, then it was smelly food, noisy headphones and excessive alcohol consumption. Now there is the most sensible change in social responsibility. The Daily Fail is now not allowed on Britain’s rail network. About time if you ask me…
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Poetry – Bloom by James Kemp
Bloom “Splash!†A roar over my head closes from behind and drowns the radio. Binoculars brought to bear, I observe the seed embedding. It grows a small orange blossom. Morphing into a larger, darker flower climbing from the point of impact. Rain patters over the iron roof as sods and stones strike sonorously. The flower…
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Book Review – Flames in the Field by Rita Kramer
Flames in the Field: Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France by Rita Kramer My rating: 3 of 5 stars While this has lots of fascinating information about SOE Operations in France in WW2 it needs a better editor. The nature of the story, primarily of the secret operations in German occupied France in…
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Book Review – First Light by Geoffrey Wellum
First Light by Geoffrey Wellum My rating: 4 of 5 stars If you want to know what it was like as a spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, then this is the book you need to read. The author was a public schoolboy that joined the RAF just before the outbreak of war. He…
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Game Design Notes: World War One Strategic Battles
This was originally written as a game design session prompt for a session at Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group back in April 2004. A discussion thread on about this excellent blog post http://sketchinggamedesigns.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/the-wrinkles-of-tactics-first-world-war.html lead me to dig it out and post it here. World War One Strategic Battles Turn structure Three turns per year, March – June…
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The Stress of Battle – Pt5 Operational Research on WW2 Heroism
This is the fifth and final part of my extended review of The Stress of Battle by David Rowland. It is such a strong piece of operational research on WW2 heroism that I thought that it would be useful for wargame designers (and players) to understand what the research evidence is for what went on in WW2 battles. This…
Got any book recommendations?