Wargames To Go

This is a smaller, almost impromptu episode before I get to my next intended topic. During my last trip, the historic connection I was trying to make was to Charlemagne and his imperial capital at Aachen. That's still coming, both some games and a podcast episode. With that in mind, I'd specifically been trying  not  to get into more WW2 history while visiting Frankfurt, Cologne, and some places i...

Join the Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx I'm taking the win. For a while now I've been wishing I could do these episodes more often, study more topics, play more wargames, read more books, see more movies… This time, it worked. I didn't play that many games, but I played a few while digging into a new topic: the American entry into WW2's ETO throu...

Join the Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx Here's what I wrote last time... Quote: Ok, let's see how my attempt to tackle smaller topics more often actually goes. Can I get out one show/topic per quarter? That's my personal goal for the rest of 2025. Then I'll re-evaluate. FAIL Oh well, it was a noble goal. The reasons I didn't succeed in my goal a...

Join the Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx Ok, let's see how my attempt to tackle smaller topics more often actually goes. Can I get out one show/topic per quarter? That's my personal goal for the rest of 2025. Then I'll re-evaluate. Which brings me to Norway. Literally. In a week's time I'll be vacationing there, and that was a great reason to foc...

As has happened before, my subject for this podcast episode sort of grew to be larger & more challenging than I was prepared for. As a result, I'm bringing this subject to a "close" before I'm actually finished with the topic. Of course we never really  finish  a topic in history, but some are more digestible than others. The entire scope of "first contact" between different peoples of the world w...

Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx Once multiple games about conquistadors in the new world had landed in my collection, I had a dilemma. On the one hand, the 15th-16th century contact between the two halves of our world was one of its most pivotal events. That cannot be denied. On the other hand, the depiction of those events--in...

Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx [If you aren't particularly interested in the Wars of Scotland, you may be interested in the wargame open house/convention event known as GMT's Weekend at the Warehouse. I went last month and spend the first part of the podcast talking about that time & games played. THEN it's on to my specific hi...

Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx As always happens, a subject that attracts me for wargaming and this podcast proves to be deeper and richer than expected. Once I knew I would get a chance to visit Scotland on vacation last summer/fall, it was my opportunity to dive into "wars of Scotland" in a general sense. What did I think tha...

Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx One week ago I was at my first SDHistCon. I had a good time, would like to share that experience via this audio convention report...and still there manages to be a slender but worthwhile connection to my Wars of Scotland subject. For anyone who only found me for the convention report, I start with...

Episode geeklist Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx Guess what? This little podcast is now ten years old. I'd been doing my other one about euro boardgames even longer, and in 2013 I decided to branch off this other show about wargaming. I'd started in this hobby as a kid wargamer in 1979. I never completely left it, but my hobby i...

Episode geeklist Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server  https://discord.gg/vxEG9bMPdx Times are approximate Introduction (0:30) Operation Market Garden overview (12:00) Nils Johansson transcribed/read interview (16:30) David Thompson & Michael Tiller interview (37:00) Mark's travels, movies, books, games about Market Garden (1:29:00) I'd been saving the famous batt...

Come join the new Wargames To Go (and Boardgames To Go) discord server https://discord.io/BoardgamesToGo For a couple reasons, this episode has been my white whale, almost taking me down. I would certainly understand if any of my listeners gave up on me along the way, thinking the podcast had faded away entirely, or that I wasn't interested in wargaming any more. Not true! Listeners of my other po...

Episode geeklist Joe Schmidt ( corsairjoe ) Now I've gone back to my usual format where I explore a single topic in games, books, films, and whatever else I can find. The Spanish-American War is similar to a lot of topics I've dived into--it's something I felt like I knew something about, but not too much. Also matching the pattern, it's been a subject I thought would be rather small and self-cont...

Episode geeklist Isn't it tiresome when a podcaster starts by apologizing it's been so long since their last episode? So I won't do that. Here's the next one. My plans to spend the summer (now months past!) playing contemporary magazine wargames sort of worked, just more slowly and less completely than I'd originally planned. Whatever--I'm doing this for fun! The truth is, after vaccinations we we...

Episode geeklist As mentioned in my last episode, I've decided to do something different this summer. Breaking from my usual pattern of tackling a single subject with multiple games, movies, books, etc., now I'm giving myself a break. I'm just going to have fun playing some of the recent backlog of magazine wargames. I'm sure I'll read Wikipedia articles and such to give myself some historic educa...

Episode geeklist Turns out Vietnam is just too big of a subject for a pair of podcast episodes. I decided to limit part 2 to just the Battle of Huế, saving more games & history for a future exploration. There are several reasons this battle is so well-represented in wargaming. In some ways it's the Bulge/Waterloo/Gettysburg of Vietnam. By reading Bowden's book on the subject and rewatching Full Me...

Episode geeklist My next exploration through smaller wargames is about the Vietnam War. This is something that was almost contemporary when I first started wargaming (1979), so that was too close. I stayed away for years, just as I'm not ready to play simulations about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now. I need some historical distance in order to process & understand what's going on. Unlike som...

Episode geeklist It's been a long pandemic, hasn't it? We've got a ways to go, too. During this strange time I've been working from home, wearing a mask outside, and playing some solo wargames. My regular euro-style boardgaming has dried up almost completely, albeit temporarily. Sure, I play some online versions at BoardgameArena, Yucata, special apps, and others, but it's only enough to keep conn...

Episode geeklist Carl Paradis Designer Carl Paradis is featured in this episode. Of course I asked him onto the podcast to discuss his landmark Eastern Front game, No Retreat: The Russian Front . Beyond that, Carl has explored this topic in his development of Gary Graber's The Barbarossa Campaign and his own forthcoming Absolute War . That would make him an interesting designer for most wargamers-...

At long last I'm posting my podcast about the Eastern Front in WW2. Except that it's not exactly that, it's Operation Barbarossa. When I started this as a subject, I really didn't know how to parse it, or what my focus would be. Over the past six months I learned to separate Stalingrad, Typhoon, the Soviet counter-invasion, and everything else that is part of so vast a topic. I learned to focus ju...

No episode geeklist this time, just the three games below I'll be attending Origins Game Fair this year (June 2019) in Columbus. I've been there before, but only in the 80s & 90s, so I'm sure it's substantially different now. I'll be there Thursday-Sunday, including participating on a panel of wargame podcasters/YouTubers/bloggers Sunday morning. That's listed in the program as shown below. I thin...

Episode geeklist Here's something I haven't done in a while: a one-off podcast. In other words, this isn't the start of a multi-episode, multi-month exploration of one battle/war. Instead, this is a single episode about (mostly) a single topic, WW2's Long Range Desert Group. I vaguely remembered hearing something about history, then earlier this year the French wargaming magazine Vae Victis featur...

At long last, the interview with author and game designer, Joe Balkoski. He's been on my podcast before, when we talked about The Korean War. At that time we made plans for his return when I dove into D-Day games. Besides designing some notable games on the subject, Joe has had an entire second career (his main career, really) of writing books on the subject. It's no exaggeration to say he is the...

A solo episode this time. That interview with author and designer Joe Balkoski is still coming, but not quite yet. He's got the little matter of his own retirement and a well-deserved vacation to deal with first. Ok, no problem, I just recorded this episode to record more thoughts about a variety of D-Day games I've played. Then I get to share my own travelogue from my visit to Normandy in 2014. P...

At long last I'm getting to the D-Day episodes. It may seem long to you because I skipped last month (April). But it's a lot longer than that. I visited the Normandy beaches on vacation back in 2014. I figured I'd record a podcast about that and play some related games soon after. Then when I went to live in France from 2016-2017, I brought a number of Normandy games with me, again thinking I'd ge...