Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerI finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror a couple days ago. I’ll admit I was a bit surprised when I started it. I wasn’t expecting a 600-page book in 8-point type in oversized paperback format. This is a long[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ospery has been doing a bunch of ‘Battle Tactics’ books recently. I think it would have been neat if they’d made them their own line, instead of just part of the Elite series. I decided to start off with the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Norwich’s A History of Venice is a good and thorough work covering from the initial colonization of the islands of the Rialto to the city’s fall to Napoleon (roughly 420 to 1797), but I found it a bit disappointing. However,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I have a few things I want/need to write and post. But they’ve all been big, and I haven’t been able to convince myself to sit down for a long stretch and pound some of it out. But I took[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Late last year, I picked up Empires of the Silk Road, as it looked very interesting. And it is, I highly recommend it as an extremely well done history of a part of the world that most people just don’t[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Lost to the West is a very good readable brief history of the Byzantine Empire, and I recommend it as such to anyone who would like to familiarize themselves with the subject. However, the subtitle “The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Review crossposted from VGG. Initially released in 1989, Gold of the Americas was released at the height of SSG’s run as a major strategy computer game developer. Today, it is little remembered next to their signature classics like Warlords and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Review crossposted from VGG. The ideas for the 4X genre of games appear pretty early in computer history, with the early ‘70s computer-moderated play-by-mail game StarWeb. A number of games (that I don’t know much about, other than their existence)[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Review crossposted from VGG. Sins of a Solar Empire is an interesting hybrid game: It is pretty much a pure RTS game that is centered around delivering the feel of a space 4X game. Since I got it a mere[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Review crossposted from VGG. Sword of the Stars is a space ‘4X’ game; that is, you start with a fledgling empire in the great unknown, and explore, colonize, negotiate, and eventually conquer your way to victory. In the main, this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…