I’ve got no small interest in the design of miniature wargames, so when I saw that Pen & Sword books was doing a reprint of  Tabletop Wargames: A Designers’ & Writers’ Handbook  by Rick Priestley and John Lambshead, I was rather interested and preordered a copy. Rick’s name looms large in the hobby, and his thoughts are welcome – especially as one of the more design targeted books in a larger wave of “We’ve had a bit of a think about wargames” books that have come out recently, like Dice Men or Talking Miniatures. Reviews of those books are likely to follow in my ample free t ..read more

Now that we’ve figured out how to point out a Swedish S Tank, with all its weird little special rules and edge cases, let’s try with something more modern: the French Leclerc main battle tank. Why? Because Battlefront has just come out with models for it, and one of the guys in my group wants to play with something other than the wildly obsolete AMX-30, even if it arguably is a little too modern. Let’s pretend we’re in an alternate timeline where the French prioritized their conventional ground forces a bit more – or we’re playing a scenario where the Cold War doesn’t end abruptly, but drags o ..read more

Having established that there’s a good points cost model for units in Seven Days for the River Rhine, and also having established that we can’t just port things over sight unseen from Team Yankee, it’s time to actually do this. Let’s stat out some S Tanks! Where We Stand So first of all, a huge amount of this is speculative, because we don’t have actual battlefield data on the S Tank, because NATO and the Warsaw Pact never game to blows, nor did Sweden decide that it wanted to refight the Great Northern War or some such. So much of this is on paper, and here’s where we have to make a decision ..read more

So we’ve got a internal point costing model for Seven Days to the River Rhine main battle tanks, but knowing there’s some internal logic, the problem now is we have to get appropriate values to plug into said model. Where do we get those? Well…the easiest way is to steal that research from someone else. Namely, Battlefront, developers of Team Yankee, the other, more popular “Cold War Goes Hot” game out there. And life would be easy if we could just cross-walk between the two games like that. But is that a good idea? We can validate this by comparing known matches between 7DRR and Team Yan ..read more

Working toward implementing the Swedish S Tank in Seven Days to the River Rhine in a functional way, we will eventually need to cost them out in terms of points. Which puts our first task in front of us – to figure if there’s a systematic logic to how tanks are pointed out in the game. This may exist even if the author didn’t intend for it to exist, just because they’re working off of a mental model for how much things should cost. If we’re lucky, a statistical model can extract the patterns formed by that. And more importantly, if it can’t, we’re sort of dead in the water. So can we ..read more

As a child of the late 80’s and early 90’s, who very vividly remembers seeing Hunt for the Red October in theaters, the tanks and aircraft of the Cold War-era will always be in my mind a little bit what military hardware is “supposed” to look like. You can tell me that the F-14s in Top Gun are as old as Spitfires were when Top Gun came out, but in my soul, I don’t believe it. So when our local club started mulling doing some “Cold War Goes Hot” gaming, I was in. And then I had to make it complicated. Now you all get to follow along on a project that combines some homebrew game design with ..read more

So I’m back at NOVA for a second year, playing the kind of event slate that makes Dan over at the Badcast angry – all Heresy, all the time. Why not 40K this year? Well, first because I can play 40K pretty much whenever I want, and even with a specialist games scene that’s doing pretty well in my small college town gaming community, Heresy and related games are rarer. The second reason is that I play Eldar, and even though my army hasn’t substantially changed since the original concept in 6th edition, I didn’t feel like spending an entire weekend with my opponents complaining about a decision I ..read more

Good lord, I haven’t posted since March. So…what happened there? So this is not the first time I’ve gone radio silent for a long period of time (indeed, the first time this happened is when I converted the Patreon to per-post rather than periodic), but this one was…pretty bad. Essentially, a very large project in my professional life went sideways (this is the generous version of this), and this summer was spent on a last ditch effort to save it. Also, I’ve genuinely been able to get more gaming done with an active local group. The two of these combined to ensure that what little time I spent ..read more

Almost a year ago now, FAME (the parent company for Lulzbot) was kind enough to loan me a SideKick 289 3d printer for the better part of a few months to do a long-term use review of their…entry-level-ish FDM 3d printer. One of my comments in that review was that the small form factor of the 289 made the value proposition for it a little iffy compared to it’s bigger brother, the 747. So now they’ve sent me one of those. The Machine Returns (Unboxing and Assembly) Configuration Details The review machine Lulzbot sent me is their SideKick 747 in what is close to a base configuration. Th ..read more

January is often a time when graduate students everywhere begin frantically cramming for various exams with words like “Qualifying”, “Comprehensive” and “Defense” in their names, which means it’s also the season of detailed statistical questions like “What are the assumptions of a t-test?”, “How do you test for proportional hazards and why do you care?” and “Who is Claude Shannon?” (this last one is reserved for people doing various metagenomics dissertations built on information theory without knowing they’re build on information theory). So let’s talk about some of the statistical threa ..read more