Hot Blood & Cold Steel: game design
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Trawling the Archives
I’ve been looking through some of my early writing on my computer, most of which was written for publication in Chestnut Lodge‘s club magazine, known affectionately as MilMud (a contraction of Military Muddling). I found several articles from the mid 90s which I have cut and pasted into the blog with dates when they were…
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Book Review – Biggles in Spain by W.E. Johns
Biggles in Spain by W.E. Johns My rating: 4 of 5 stars I picked this up for a pound in a charity shop in Caterham. I was surprised to find that it stood up well to the passing of time. It was written towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, during which it is…
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Book Review – In the Face of the Enemy by Ernest Powdrill
In the Face of the Enemy: A Battery Sergeant Major in Action in the Second World War by Ernest A. Powdrill My rating: 5 of 5 stars I borrowed this from the library and liked it so much that I bought my own copy. I found it very interesting because it is unusual for an…
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CLWG July 2013 Game Reports
There were five of us at July’s CLWG meeting, myself, Nick, Mukul, Dave & John. There were three game sessions presented: I went first with a two part committee game called “The High Ground” about the consequences of cheaper surface to orbit space travel; Nick presented an economics card game for educating people about markets…
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New Model Army by Adam Roberts
It has a Fab Concept. However it doesn’t quite work. Some of it is too heavy handed and not well enough researched to be credible. I bought this book because I liked the premise, a change in the nature of warfare brought about by better information available to the whole army through a wiki style…
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For Fuhrer and Fatherland: SS Murder and Mayhem in Wartime Britain
This was the first time I have read a prisoner of war story involving Germans as the POWs, apart from having read the official history of British Intelligence in WW2 (which only dealt with the captured German spies). I have, however read lots about the prisoners of the Germans. It was interesting that security in…
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Book Review – To Reason Why, by Denis Forman
This is more than just an infantry officer’s memoir. Denis Forman was closely involved in the Battle School movement that transformed the British Army’s infantry training during the second world war. He then went on to serve alongside Lionel Wigram (the primary proponent and intellectual leader of the Battle School movement) in Italy. The story…
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Black Watch by Tom Renouf – Book Review
This is a campaign history written by a veteran of 5th Bn Black Watch who later became the secretary of the Highland Division Association. Direct personal accounts, both from the author and other veterans, are used to tell the story of the 51st Highland Division in a very personal way. This book offers some new…
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Midnight in Some Burning Town –a Review
I actually enjoyed reading this book, even though it wasn’t the book that I thought I was buying. I had ordered it expecting that it would tell me about the various special forces missions that UK forces had been up to between the first Gulf War in 1990-91 and when it was published (in 2004).…
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Urban Nightmare – the megagame pt.2
Shortly after lunchtime (when I ate my lunch, megagames don’t have breaks, they run continuously until the end) I changed role. The trigger for this was that the Emergency Services didn’t really need two players (and Geoff had clearly got the hang of megagames even though it was his first time). Also Federal assistance was invoked,…
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Urban Nightmare megagame
The Urban Nightmare megagame, is a political crisis management game of a zombie outbreak in Romero City. I played the Deputy Chief of the Emergency Services. (A combined paramedic and firefighter service). We had 20 fire appliances and 8 emergency ambulances to service the city. During the megagame I posted tweets of what we were doing, remembering…
Got any book recommendations?