Category Archives: Downloading

Flames of War: Forces of War Launches

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This month, Battlefront Miniatures, the makers of the popular World War II miniatures game Flames of War, took its first big digital step forward with the introduction of the first of their two new digital services — Forces of War.

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The soon-to-be retired EasyArmy.com

Debates have been raging through online message boards, Facebook groups, Twitter and over WWII-themed tabletops ever since the announcement that the beloved EasyArmy was being closed down and absorbed into Battlefront with Forces of War. During its run, EasyArmy had become a much relied-upon tool for FOW players worldwide. Battlefront has maintained a lengthy working relationship with EasyArmy’s designer in an incredibly rare example of a corporation willing to cede some control of their intellectual property. Now, like so many other companies working in the digital space today, Battlefront has brought the ideas and work of a passionate outsider in-house with this month’s launch of Forces of War.

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The New Companies menu on Forces of War

Beginning with Forces of War, buying a company list will run $1.00 USD with a 25% discount extended when buying all lists from an entire book or compilations at about $16.50 USD. The initial offering of lists is meager, focusing on the more recent FOW books Road To Rome, Barbarossa, Road To Remagen and the World War I themed Great War. Devil’s Charge is listed but the complete book is not available and instead points to the popular Panzers To The Meuse list. This set of German companies is the only free offering at launch, allowing for some limited experimentation with the site before buying additional lists. Being a Late War player who mostly plays US and British lists of the D-Day, Market Garden and Battle of the Bulge operations, my hope is that FOW quickly updated Forces of War with these lists as well as Eastern Front lists for Late War Russian and German players.

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 Company builder on Forces of War

As a test, I went through the quick PayPal process of buying the US 92nd Infantry list from the Road To Rome book. The performance was familiar to my experience on EasyArmy, although I did find the Forces of War site to be somewhat faster than its predecessor. Within a platoon, options are selected with simple clicks, and a running points total is tracked along the top of the page by company and platoon. Forces can be saved with custom names and a nice (but minor) new feature allows notes to be added within each platoon.

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A sample Saved Company page on Forces of War

Saved companies are accessed through easy to view lists which can be filtered by period, country, type, name, source, motivation and skill. Companies can be exported and saved as PDFs or printed. The printed lists are somewhat clearer with better page breaks than those with EasyArmy, a simple but welcome tweak. Frustratingly, the platoon motivation and skill ratings still print within unnecessarily colored text boxes which are nearly unreadable on the page.

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Scenarios selector on Forces of War

Most other aspects of EasyArmy have been ported over to Forces of War, including the handy Scenarios map. The Scenarios page could use some upgrades with a search or menu feature to allow quicker access and some better designed graphics or links.

Much like EasyArmy before, Forces of War offers an easy interface in which to view and manage force lists for FOW. In a nutshell, all the core functionality of EasyArmy has been preserved and then packaged with an official FOW wrapper.  Like a lot of players, I would have very much liked to have seen more lists available at launch. As more lists become available in the coming months, re-buying lists already purchased via EasyArmy is also a sticking point for many but I find the new pricing scheme to be completely in-line with FOW balancing customer usability with needed company profit. Some will also continue to complain about the inaccuracies in some lists, but clean-up edits over time, cross-checking the books and being a considerate, mindful and fair player will always trump any gaming tool.  Gone too are all the ads which cluttered the layout of EasyArmy — a true step forward for any premium digital offer. As transitions go, the evolution of EasyArmy to Forces of War is a good start with room for greater improvements to hopefully occur in the very near term.

Pinball, Pixels and Play In Rochester, New York

StrongMuseumIt’s been a couple years since I visited The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY, but I took advantage of a recent week visiting my family in Western New York to pay the place a visit. The museum was founded in the early 1980s with the massive hoard of dolls, toys, games, household items and other objects collected over the lifetime of Rochester heiress Margaret Woodbury Strong. Since then the museum has evolved and expanded to encompass the more recent history of play, as evidenced in some of the wonderful exhibits I had a chance to see this past month.

Pinball Playfields

2014-07-08 11.59.24Running through September 7, 2014, Pinball Playfields offers up a tight overview of the American history of coin-operated pinball machines from their earliest appearance in the 1930s through today. A number of early games from the museum’s permanent collection kick off the small exhibit showing the first rudimentary gravity-fed games where balls plunked and clinked their way through a series of “pins” which would give the game its name.

2014-07-08 12.00.10Early 1930s and 1940s pinball machines

By the 1940s, electrified games were on the rise and the introduction of flippers late in the decade added enormous playability and control for anyone willing to feed the growing craze a coin at a time. As explained on the brief wall text, it was this coin-fed frenzy that caused many cultural killjoys throughout the country to advocate for laws banning pinball as a frightening tool of gambling in the 1940s through 1970s (just this past summer, Oakland, California finally repealed an 80-year ban on pinball).

2014-07-08 12.02.40Superman pinball (1979)

Despite its opponents, pinball fandom grew into the 1960s and 1970s, crossing over into rock music with The Who’s iconic “Pinball Wizard” from 1969’s Tommy. In my 70s childhood I can easily recall many pinball machines tucked into pizza parlor corners or inhabiting the basements of some of my lucky friends with their constant glow of light and pinging sounds. The exhibit includes a number of playable machines from the 60s and 70s, including superhero tie-ins with Superman and the Incredible Hulk which demonstrate intersecting pop culture influences on games.

2014-07-08 12.12.03Hercules (1979) — the largest pinball machine ever made

By the late 1970s video games were creeping into territory dominated by pinball machines. Gimmicky games like 1979’s enormous Hercules machine attempted to maintain the hold on fistfuls of coins which would soon be increasingly making their way to video arcades. With video games dominating coin-fed play throughout the 1980s, it was not until the 1990s and the 2000s that pinball rebounded by incorporating increasingly-complex mechanical animations, advanced LED and video screen elements into games. The more recent Wizard of Oz, Monster Bash, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings games on display — and all playable — show how the old-time pinball fun has truly been integrated with a modern thirst for visual effects overload.

Aside from the dozen or so playable machines, Pinball Playfields gives a good deal of historical information with descriptive text, early photos and advertisements, news articles and modern design schematics. All this is certainly fine stuff for the museum context, but anytime I found myself lingering a bit too long over some of the historical material I had to look around to find my wife and kids feeding another token and pulling back the plunger to start another play.

eGameRevolution

2014-07-08 13.01.51The last time I was at the Museum of Play, the museum had just launched its important International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The collection now contains tens-of-thousands of video game artifacts, making it one of the most important repositories and research resources for the dominant mode of play of the past forty years. The debut exhibit a few years back presented an overview of  video game history and dozens of playable arcade and home games from the 1960s through the present. My latest visit allowed me time to see the full permanent exhibit, eGameRevolution.

2014-07-08 13.20.36Early home video game systems from the 1960s and 1970s

2014-07-08 13.20.26The Atari 2600 and Apple II computer — two machines that changed my world in 1977

The exhibit traces the development of the now-ubiquitous video game from its science lab beginnings of the early 60s through early console and home computer games in the 70s and 80s to the modern games which now inhabit so many living rooms worldwide. Changes in the sophisticated technology, graphics and marketing of video games are well-traced along with traditional curated displays behind glass. And, of course, there are plenty of playable games throughout the exhibit.

2014-07-08 13.22.23The video arcade in the eGameRevolution exhibit at the International Museum of Play

Pinball machines, an air hockey table, arcade cabinet classics, interactive dance and music games and a half-dozen home console games of different eras are set throughout the exhibit. A dark, low-ceilinged room reminiscent of the video arcades inhabited by many first generation video gamers like myself in the 1980s is set in the middle of the more traditional displays. At five plays for a buck, a visitor to eGameRevolution can easily lose themselves in decades of electronic gaming history.

 Game Time!

2014-07-08 13.09.07Museum goers willing to take a few steps further back in time will also find a dizzying and deep story of traditional games in the Game Time! permanent exhibit nearby. Three centuries of American board, card, puzzle and electronic games with brief, well-researched text offers a tremendous overview for those who wonder how gaming culture has evolved since the 19th-century.

2014-07-08 13.04.51An early 1970s Dungeons & Dragons set and the famed Dark Tower game from 1981

Games are arranged both in a historic timeline and also along themes such as economic games, chase games, strategy games and puzzle games. Along the way, a story unfolds where games provide a view into the American values and politics of each era, as well as the rise of the big business of games and the importance licensing particularly in the late 20th-century through the present.

2014-07-08 13.10.29War games, including classics like Risk (1959), Stratego (1961) and Battleship (1967)

2014-07-08 13.11.05Role-playing games, including 1970s and 1980s Dungeons & Dragons books

Wargames and role-playing games each receive their equal due with an early copy of Little Wars by H.G. Wells and some classic Dungeons & Dragons books from its genesis in the early 1970s. Seeing these games side-by-side with other games, like the extensive exhibit on Monopoly, is incredibly validating for someone like myself who has spent my life engaged in games which once dwelt only at the edges of our culture.

Putting all these games — from pinball and video games to board and role-playing games — which so shaped my youth and those of countless others within a broader context of American history is something one can experience in few places like you can at the Strong Museum of Play. If you can get yourself to Rochester, stealing away a few hours to play through time will be time (and maybe some game tokens) well-spent.

Downloading: Valiant Hearts: The Great War

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World War I has quickly moved from news to memory to history in the past 100 years, especially in the United States. While there are certainly plenty of grand remembrances being made of the lingering historical and political ripples of the Great War, the best parts of historical memory often continue to ring truest to us through personal stories. This is the reason why a classic book like All Quiet On The Western Front or the more recent graphic novel The Harlem Hellfighters resonate still in telling the story of WWI.

So, in this centenary year it’s a pleasure to have the distant memory of WWI retold in a vivid modern way with Valiant Hearts: The Great War from Ubisoft. Like any good war story, Valiant Hearts isn’t really about guns and glory, but more about love, friendship, connection and dedication humans strive to maintain when faced with the most hugely catastrophic events.

ValiantHeartsCharactersMain cast of characters from Valiant Hearts: Ana, Walt (dog), Karl, Emile, Freddie and George

The cast of characters presented in Valiant Hearts represents a cross-section of nationalities swept up in the European conflict. The main character is Emile, a French farmer who is pressed into service at the outbreak of the war. His daughter is in a relationship with Karl, a German who is exiled from France at the beginning of the war and subsequently compelled into service with the German army. Just after completing basic training, Emile meets Freddie, an American ex-patriot living in Paris and volunteer in the fight against Germany. Once in the trenches, Emile befriends a military service dog named Walt. A fast-driving Belgian nurse named Ana completes the main cast of characters, although a British pilot named George does make a cameo later on in the game.

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Emile completing basic training in Valiant Hearts

With a minimal amount of introductory back story of the outbreak of WWI, the game begins with Emile marching off to some quick basic training which introduces a player to the basic climbing, attacking, picking-up and throwing actions. Once at the front, the game quickly moves into the more familiar trench warfare settings which were the hallmark of the war.

For gamers looking for WWI first-person combat wielding a bayonetted rifle or driving a clattering tank through No Man’s Land, there will be disappointment. Although death and destruction surrounds the game, there is surprisingly little direct combat experienced by the player. The entire WWI setting and all its trappings of planes, tanks, artillery and machine guns become tools to propel the characters to action, more like a violent ghostly hand lurking in the background than the main focus of the action.

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A typical puzzle challenge in Valiant Hearts

As a game, the main focus of Valiant Hearts is at its core a platform, puzzle and adventure game. It is a game set within the war, but the playable characters are not working on racking-up body counts. More typically, a character will work their way through completing a series of tasks to progress to the next level– break down a wall, crouch in a trench, dig a tunnel, climb a ladder, crank a wheel, set a charge and blow up a bridge.

Different characters in the game also work in combination to get puzzles solved and sometimes work with non-player characters. For instance, the burly Freddie is good at smashing down walls, doors and barriers with his bare fists while Emile is handy at digging and Ana provides care to wounded soldiers on and off the field. Characters can also order commands to Walt to move and fetch objects from areas unreachable by the other human characters, such as crawling under clouds of poisonous gas.

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Richly accurate artwork of the Western Front and equipment such as tanks and biplanes set the scene in Valiant Hearts

Beyond the entertainment of the puzzle adventure gameplay, Valiant Hearts is rich in historic detail. A number of short behind-the-scenes developer videos on the game’s website show the depths to which the team at Ubisoft went to paint a vivid picture of WWI using primary documents. Even within the cartoonish game animation, there’s a ton of detail in the flags, uniforms, weapons, vehicles and settings throughout the game. The diversity of nations participating in the war is well-represented, so we not only see the typical British, German, United States and French soldiers but also those from countries like India. To keep the nationalities with their mix of languages consistent, dialogue among characters is limited to emotive symbols and vaguely accented but recognizable foreign mumbles.

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Historical photos and background fill out the detail in Valiant Hearts

As Valiant Hearts progresses, gamers and would-be historians will find a wealth history laced within the action. Brief cut-scenes do well to set chapters within regional maps and shifting events throughout the war. Pop-up screens provide historical facts and beautifully color-tinted period photographs of life, equipment and stories from WWI. Players who complete puzzles within the game also collect historic artifacts such as identification tags, a whistle, a helmet or actual letters from soldiers of multiple nations. Again, additional pop-up windows takes a player back to the primary sources from which each object is drawn.

Both my 14-year-old son and I have spent time playing through Valiant Hearts this week. As a hardcore gamer, my son found the play pretty rudimentary by modern standards but my greener fingers did find at least some initial challenge to the puzzles. What we both equally delighted in was the art and historical documentation which was wrapped up around the simple human story unfolding throughout the game.

Far away from the politics, grand plans and horrors of combat, every war throughout history has come down to humans and relationships torn asunder or brought together in wartime. This is the journey of the characters in Valiant Hearts: The Great War and one well worth the trip back a century in time.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is available for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Windows PC.

Downloading: A Century of British Pathé Newsreels

pathe_6da6dceb176b5785e86615b8619ffb28With today’s constant digital feed of news both major and minor, it’s fascinating to think back to an era where newsreels supplied much of the world’s news in motion. In an era still ruled by newspapers and radio, newsreel series from The March of Time, Fox Movietone News, Universal Newsreels, British Pathé and others brought events from far corners of the world to local movie house audiences. Presenting news in motion with dramatic music, voiceovers, selective edits and even reenactments, newsreels provided important foundations for how people would eventually consume video news via television in the latter half of the 20th-century and online in the 21st-century.

British Pathé announced this past week the availability of much of its archive of some 85,000+ HD videos available via YouTube. Some videos appear in their original full newsreels including iconic opening titles, graphics and voiceovers. The A Day That Shook The World series offers more modern edits of pivotal world events from a UK perspective. Other videos are mere snippets, often presented without sound or much context.

Topics covered in the British Pathé newsreels range from celebrity, politics and British royalty to industry, disasters, contemporary slices of life and news from the British Empire worldwide. From the historical to the humorous to the downright bizarre, the newsreel collection paints a wide picture of nearly 100 years of life on Earth.

For people with an interest in armed conflict of the 20th-century, the British Pathé collection has some gems. The Second Boer War gets a little coverage in some amazing footage from the years around the turn of the 20th-century. World War I is covered in major battles such as the Somme and Verdun, but also short features on new technologies like tanks and news from the home front.

Second Boer War

World War I

World War II coincided with the peak era of newsreels, and the British Pathé collection provides an amazing document. There are full newsreels covering the Battle of Dunkirk and the Battle of Arnhem from Operation Market Garden. The brutal siege and liberation of Stalingrad gets a lot of coverage, as does the major battles of the Pacific like Iwo Jima. Nail-biting aerial and naval combat from throughout the war is also documented in some stellar footage.

World War II

There’s a ton of additional military-themed footage in the post-WWII era covering the Cold War events, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Six Day War and the Falkands War. Seeing history come alive in video vignettes from British Pathé, often with more than a glint of heroic propagandist presentation, is just another opportunity to view history as contemporary audiences once saw it. With more and more archives enabling wide distribution of their photo, film, map and document collections online, armchair historians everywhere can tap into a wealth of information painting an ever-widening picture of our past.

Downloading: Mapping the World at the New York Public Library

britishcolonies

As a lifelong gamer, I’ve spent many, many hours staring at maps or drawing my own. Most board games provide maps of sorts that define movement and area control. For players of Dungeons & Dragons and the like, adventure maps create much of the framework for how campaigns and role-played stories evolve. Miniature wargames, from ancients and historicals to fantasy and sci-fi, utilize three-dimensional set-ups driven by maps and the relationship of various features on the tabletop.

Late last month, the New York Public Library announced the availability of some 20,000 high resolution downloadable maps. The collection is an enormous resource for hardcore historians and hobbyists alike. Well over half the online collection naturally focuses on New York City, New York State and the surrounding areas. Beyond the New York area, the cartography goldmine grants access to hundreds of years of maps from around the world which can be viewed singly or within the context of their original books, atlases or folios.

Digging into the archive, there’s a fair amount of material certain to be of interest for gamers. Maps of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas portray the development of civilizations and empires over the centuries. A fair amount of material is available on the American War of Independence, particularly in the areas around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Aside from maps, there are also some engraved plates of native societies encountered by European colonists, renderings of forts and some naval views.

The entire online collection is searchable here, but here are a few highlights I’ve come across on my digital travels.

New York

newamsterdam

New Amsterdam

navy yard

Brooklyn Navy Yard

American War of Independence

battleLI

Battle of Long Island

saratoga

Saratoga

Forts

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West Point

fortalbany

Fort Albany

Naval History

dutchportships

Dutch and Portugese Ships

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Ships in the British West Indies

Europe

ancientgreece

Ancient Greece

romanempire

Roman Empire

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Prussia

 

Downloading: Wargame Blogging With 35 Million Images

Embed from Getty Images

I’ve written previously about my longtime career in the photo and film licensing industry, starting out in the mid-1990s as a historic photo researcher. One of my former employers, Getty Images, made a surprise announcement this week that it was making available for free some 35 million images for non-commercial use in social media and blogging. The press release stated Getty Images’ acknowledgement of the widespread use of images without proper licensing, and the new system will allow for data-gathering and one would think some form of monetization long-term.

Using the new functionality is easy with a quick image search and copy/paste of the embed code into a website like Facebook or blog platform like WordPress. Images are importantly displayed with the proper photographer and collection attribution. The Getty Images logo is also prominently shown along with buttons to share the image via Twitter or Tumblr. Clicking on the image itself returns the user to the Getty Images website for full caption information. Because the image is never actually uploaded to the blog’s hosting site, there’s an additional cost savings in storage space. It’s all fast, neat and, again — free.

For wargame bloggers, there’s an enormous amount of iconic and more obscure photographs, maps, posters and illustrations available. The black and white and color historical offering is deep. Contemporary photos of equipment, re-enactments, memorials and sites relevant to military history should also be useful for reference for wargame bloggers like myself. Not every image Getty Images represents is available for free through the embed code, and users should be careful not to grab an image requiring a license fee.

Check out the below for just a glimpse of the breadth and depth in the Getty Images offering which may very well be popping up on some of your favorite blogs very soon.

Ancient & Medieval Warfare

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

American War of Independence

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

Seven Years War

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

Napoleonic Wars

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American Civil War

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

African Colonial Wars

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

World War I

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

World War II

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

Cuban Revolution

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

War Concepts

Embed from Getty Images Embed from Getty Images

Retro Gaming The 70s & 80s: The Internet Archive Console Living Room

80s consoles

As another 21st-century new year approached, the endlessly-fascinating Internet Archive took a big backward look into video games past with the launch of their Console Living Room in late December.

Flying under a murky copyright wire, the Console Living Room archive of over 1000 first-generation home video games allows retrogamers of all ages to play storied favorites through their browsers. The archive is overwhelming and a dream for those of us who coveted the arrival of each then-expensive game cartridge. When the Atari 2600 was released in 1977 the world of indoor play for my generation and every one since was transformed. The archive contains games from the popular Atari systems of the day, as well as those from ColecoVision and the more obscure Bally Astrocade, Magnavox Odyssey and the Sega SG-1000. Anyone with kids can attest to the hold video play continues to hold on today’s children with games that span multiple screens from TVs to handhelds to computers. But for those of us of a certain age, these old home console systems of the stuff of legend.

Aside from the hundreds of sci-fi, fighting, adventure and sports-themed games in the Console Living Room online archive, there are countless games which hold a special place in the memories of those of us who still game to this day.

Combat

Military enthusiasts will enjoy such classics as Tank Attack (1981), Air Sea Attack (1981), Combat (1982), M.A.S.H. (1983), GATO (1987), Choplifter (1987), Front Line (1984) and  Chopper Rescue (1982).

WizardofWor

For the dungeon-crawling crowd, there are old gems like Dungeon (1985), Wizard of Wor (1981), Dark Chambers (1988), Adventure (1978) and The Incredible Wizard (1981).

StarWars

Licensed games from movies of my 1980s youth like Star Wars (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) and E.T. – The Extraterrestrial (1982) display the nascent power these cinema brands held on young geeks like myself. There are also plenty of my personal favorites like the home versions of arcade faves like Dig Dug (1983) and Centipede (1982).

The Internet Archive Console Living Room joins their existing online collection of over 5000 playable Classic PC Games in documenting the pixelated gaming we Gen-Xers were weaned on. The Internet Archive joins the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY in the preservation, scholarship and celebration of electronic gaming. Like the afternoons spent hunched on the carpets of the 70s and 80s, there are hours and hours to be spent here trolling what can now safely be called our video game heritage.

Downloading: Blogging War In Pictures

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I’ve made my living for the past 17 years in the pictures business. In 1996, I arrived in New York City and landed a job with a photo-licensing company doing historic photo research. My days were spent fulfilling client requests for photos, illustrations and artwork to be used in advertising, corporate marketing, book publishing, magazines and newspapers,  documentaries, motion pictures and TV programming. Since then, I’ve gone on to work with several of the largest stock photo and film licensing companies in the world.

In my time, I’ve participated in the rapid changes in the business as it evolved from a world of photo prints kept in dusty file cabinets to the digital marketplace of images today. The proliferation of online search and digital photography databases has granted professionals and non-professionals alike enormous access to visuals illustrating  the arc of world history from the dawn of time to the latest celebrity gossip.

With this has come the significant challenges of copyright management. Companies like those that have employed me license images for a fee ranging from a couple bucks to tens-of-thousands of dollars each, depending on the use and value of the image (often based on murky concepts of scarcity and quality). With these licensing fees, photographers, archives recieve payment and people like me are able to pay the rent and feed my kids.

With images easily available online there is a lot of misinformation on in what instances a photo which may be used without paying someone a fee. Bloggers and other online outlets (and even traditional print-based users) regularly use photos under misunderstood concepts like “fair use.” In short, unless someone is granting you permission to use their works you could very well be in some sort of copyright violation and subject to significant legal and financial penalties. This is a conversation we in the licensing business have countless times a day with new and old customers alike.

For a blogger like me, I try to take as many photos myself and stick to others that are either out of copyright or used in the context of reviewing a game, book or film. Looking for great historical reference images for use online or off still remains a challenge at times, but it keeps getting easier all the time.

This past week, the British Library announced the release of nearly one million images for free use via Flickr Commons. The BL becomes the latest insitutional archive to make available enormous selections of images. For bloggers, gamers and armchair historians, these resources are incredible and hours can be spent paging through them. Other existing collections of interest for wargamers include:

For now, below is just a taste of what’s new to be found in the British Library’s new online Flickr collection. The emphasis is on 18th-19th century history with tons of maps, engravings, diagrams and photographs. The Napoleonic Wars is documented in a ton of gorgeous color plates of uniformed soldiers, making them a perfect reference for your miniatures painting projects. The American Civil War is represented in scores of maps, portraits of various military and political leaders and lots of reference drawings of equipment and fortifications. The centuries of Britain’s colonialism is captured with a lot of material on Egypt, South Africa and the Middle East. Finally, there is a fair amount of naval and land imagery from the Spanish-American War.

Have a look for yourself and I’m sure you’ll find some obscure visual historic treasure of your own.

Napoleonic Wars

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American Civil War

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African Colonial Wars

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Spanish-American War

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santiago

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New Game Weekend: Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game

CivBox

Unlike myself, electronic games have been a constant presence with both my sons since they were born. Now aged 8 and 13, my boys have graduated up through a host of platforms and games with the Leapster, DS, PS2, Wii, PS3, online through sites like Steam and on the iPhone. Over the past year, their obsessive play over Minecraft has been gradually replaced with scores of hours logged with the wildy-popular Civilization V.

Developed more than 20 years ago by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, the Civilization franchise has evolved from a PC-only DOS game to occupy a variety of gaming platforms. The turn-based civilization-building mechanic and historical theme sets up an incredibly-engaging and educational universe for players to plan and play out a nearly-endless variety of paths in human advancement from the ancient era to the near future. The latest iteration, Civilization V, broke on the scene in 2010 with two expansions since. Worldwide, the game has sold millions of copies and has continuously won accolades from a couple generations gaming critics and devoted fans alike.

Even though my kids are devoted electronic gamers, they’ve also been raised with a healthy love for card, board and miniatures gaming. So, when my 8-year-old caught wind last week that a boardgame version of Civilization existed, I leapt at the chance to introduce the boys to the game. I’ve played a number of civilization-building games such as Clash of Cultures but hadn’t yet played Civilization.

Now published by Fantasy Flight Games, Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game has been around since 2002 and can be found at your local Barnes and Noble for $60 or cheaper online. Like many games of this type, the box comes stuffed with hundreds of components plus more than 300 cards. Geared for 2-4 players ages 14 and up, Civilization takes 3+ hours to play. Fortunately, my boys have been exposed to enough games, both online and on the tabletop, that they’ve been able to quickly pick up on the basic play and strategy Civilization offers.

CivContentsCivilization involves a march toward victory in one of four ways: Economic, Military, Cultural or Technological. Players begin by selecting a civilization such as the Americans, Egyptians, Romans or Russians. Each starting civilization carries its own strengths in play, making this first choice an important one in setting your strategy for the game. Based on the number of players, a map of hidden tiles is laid out and the market area is set up to the side of the board.

After set-up, the game progresses through a series of turns. In the Start Turn, a player may build a city or change their government type – an important choice which can greatly affect the path of a player’s civilization. Next, the Trade Phase allows a player to reap trade points from the areas around their cities and offer trades in resources with other players.

In the City Management Phase, the player may build units or buildings, harvest resources or focus on developing their culture. Building units – Scouts or Armies – allows the player to explore and conquer areas of the board. Constructing buildings such as Markets, Temples or Baracks allows a variety of bonuses to your civilization. At a higher price, Wonders like The Oracle, The Hanging Gardens or Angkor Wat may be built. Finally, a player may pay to build their military prowess through a progression from simple archers and pikemen to tanks and aircraft. Aside from building, a player may harvest resources such as silk, iron, incense or wheat to be later spent to activate certain technologies already researched. A player may also choose to focus on culture, with gained cultural points moving the player up the culture track while also earning special cultural event cards played to change different courses of the game’s play.

Next, in the Movement Phase a players may move their Scouts and/or Armies to explore, claim new territory or engage in combat with a barbarian village or another player. In the final Research Phase, players may spend their earned trade points to develop new technologies. The game’s “technology pyramid” is built progressively by each player as they grow from simple technologies such as Metalurgy and Horseback Riding toward higher level advancements all the way up to Flight and Nuclear Energy.

The play adavances through the above turns until a player arrives at a victory condition. Cultural victory is earned by completing progress on the culture track. A military victory is won by conquering an opponent’s capital city. Earning a technological win is done by completing the technology pyramid all the way up to Space Flight. Finally, an economic outcome is reached by collecting 15 gold coins earned through various actions your civilization makes throughout the game.

To summarize the game in a couple paragraphs is hard, as the variation of play in the game is boundless. This weekend, my younger son and I played through our first quick starter game on an eight-tile two player-map (pic below). Despite over twenty pages or rules and scores of playing pieces to manage, he picked up the game really fast. Along the way, there’s a ton of reading I’m certain is not covered in the general elementary curriculum with stops along the way to have side conversations on the meanings of words such as “despotism” and “anarchy.” At his age, my son’s memory is quite amazing and our discussions of the finer points of the rules has continued even away from the game table.

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In our second game (pic below), three of us played on a larger map. My older son, a pretty experienced gamer at this point, blew threw a ten minute intro to the rules and played as the Prussians with an aggressively militaristic strategy I’ve grown used to over the years. Using the Egyptians, my younger son focused on culture and building construction. For my own strategy, I played as the Romans with a healthy mix of the military and cultural expansionism for which their empire was known.

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For parents and critics of them who decry the falling attention spans of today’s kids, weekends like this past one show how with a bit of parental creativity all the stereotypes simply fall away. A game like Civilization — both online and off — offers so many opportunities to build vocabulary, learn history and develop some complex multi-layered management skills I see sorely lacking in many of the adults I encounter. Over hours of focused play, not only are my sons and I developing our civilizations but we’re also developing each other — an investment in time together well-spent.

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Downloading: Zulus On The Ramparts

Living in Brooklyn and commuting back and forth to Manhattan on the subway for work each day, I wind up with a fair amount of time on my hands. I read a lot and the New York Times crossword puzzle is a daily necessity, but sometimes I like to just unwind with a game on my iPhone. I’m not a big electronic player in general, so I was glad to happen across Zulus On The Ramparts! by Victory Point games in the iTunes Store.

Over the past six years or so, Victory Point Games has cranked out dozens of board and card games covering all kinds of scenarios, eras and genres. More recently, they’ve begun releasing a few apps, and Zulus On The Ramparts! just debuted a couple months ago. The game is based on their popular boardgame of the same name from their historical “States of Siege” solitaire games line, and it is available now for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

As with the boardgame, the app inserts the player into the Battle of Rorke’s Drift. In the January of 1879 battle, a small group of maybe 150 British soldiers from the 24th Regiment of Foot successfully defended a small outpost against a massive army of thousands of Zulus. The battle was popularly dramatized in the 1964 movie “Zulu,” and I was first introduced to it in John Keegan’s “A History of Warfare.” My interest in the battle and the Anglo-Zulu War period has only grown over time, and I’m currently working toward getting a large 28mm scale wargame up and running.

The game progresses through a series of turn phases. First, a random action is chosen for a Zulu impi to move, attack, retreat, stand their ground or perform some other specific action. Each Zulu force appears on the field and then moves over the course of the game through a series of predefined oval spaces which progressively close in on the walls and barricades of the British hospital outpost. Some Zulu actions may cause extra moves or the entire Zulu force to move en masse. Since close range combat is key to a Zulu victory, the first portion of the game is spent quickly organizing and supplying the British before the inevitable attack.

A lot of information is crammed into the game map screen. The position of the Zulus is shown at their various ranges from the fortifications. At the top, the game phase is indicated. On the left side of the screen, various historic officers or more generic soldier characters stand at the ready to use their various bonuses in combat and other special actions. On the right side a running status of supplies such as water and ammo, along with other factors which will effect the outcome. The bottom of the screen displays a clock as the turns click by toward darkness as well as a link that takes you to the “barracks” screen.

On the barracks screen you manage your officers and troops, viewing their heroic abilities on virtual “cards.” Abilities range from calling up reserves, ordering the construction of barricades or distributing supplies to the troops. The barracks also contain combat actions allowing you to fire volleys from your Martini-Henry rifles with various effectiveness of range

Once actions are selected, combat is resolved through a nifty slot machine-like spinning wheel. Depending on range, the type of weapons being fired and any modifiers from heroic actions on activated officer and troop “cards,” combat outcomes are determined. After combat, new cards are randomly placed in your barracks and the next round begins with additional Zulu actions.

Like the historic battle at Rorke’s Drift, time is of the essence in Zulus At The Ramparts! and hours run by quickly on the game clock as the Zulus swarm in on the British and supplies run low. This is a really tough game in a small digital package with lots of variables to manage from turn to turn. Playing on the tiny iPhone screen makes things even harder, and there is probably significant playability to be gained in playing the game on an iPad or Android tablet.

With a few games (and losses) behind me, the game can seem frustrating at times. With that said, the difficulty of Zulus At The Ramparts! does a pretty decent job in simulating the bloody tough spot the British found themselves in on the plains of Africa on that famous 1879 day where retreat simply wasn’t an option.