Big Board Gaming

StrategyBigBoard Gaming · Strategy Series The Strategy Strategy 3 — 間 (jian) — Spies Whenever planning to conduct a major military expedition, you should first employ spies to determine the enemy’s troop strength, emptiness or fullness, and movement and rest, and only thereafter mobilize the army. Great achievements can then be attained, and you will […]

Two Campaigns, One System: Commanders, Leadership Cultures, and Synthesis Continued from Part 1. Part 1 covered the historical campaigns and the game-design contrast between SPI’s Breakout & Pursuit and SPI’s Turning Point: The Battle of Stalingrad. Part 2 takes up the commanders on each side of each campaign, examines how the KURSK chassis encodes (or […]

Continuing the series. In Side By Side No. 1 the two games could not have been less alike — SPI’s Borodino and GDW’s Attack in the Ardennes, a hex-and-CRT Napoleonic battle and a point-to-point operational Bulge built on a Civil War combat chassis. Different periods, different publishers, different design cultures. The fun was in the […]

Battle of Stalingrad: The Soviet Winter Offensive, 1942 Year Released :1972 Designers: Jim Dunnigan John Young Artist: Redmond Aksel Simonsen Publisher: SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.) HISTORICAL BACKGROUND On 19 November, 1942, the Red Army launched a massive offensive, code-named “Operation Uranus,” against first the northern and then the southern flanks of th...

.HISTORICAL BACKGROUND On 24 July, 1944 (D + 48) the Allied armies in France, after suffering over 122,000 casualties, had still only managed to gain control of an area that invasion planners had hoped would be in Allied hands by D + 5. All that changed when, on July 25th, American General Omar Bradley’s 1st […]