Month: July 2021

Combined Arms 2000 Board Game

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Combined Arms 2000 is a free print-and-play board game for modern era combat. The description from Board Game Geek:

Combined Arms 2000 is a light wargame simulating armored warfare using modern technology. It features a realistic scale for both movement and fire (1 space = 1 kilometer), a good selection of vehicle and infantry types, off-board fire support, and fixed-wing air support.

Players build armies from parts of a shared deck, then fight! The attacker has only ten turns to seize his objectives. Wise use of reserves, clever scouting, and bold maneuver are all needed to attain victory.

This is a free print & play release on BoardGameGeek. Print cards and box to 110 lb cardstock, and rules to a single sheet of typing paper. Heavy lines on the box are cut lines; lighter lines are all mountain folds.

Stripping Paint From Figures

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The LeadHead blog has a short article on his experiences in stripping paint from figures with Simple Green.

Making An Orange Grove

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The Daddy’s Little Men Blog has a brief article on his experience trying to make an orange grove for a game set in southern Lebanon.

Muskets and Marshals Napoleonic Rules

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Muskets and Marshals is a set of free wargmes rules for the Napoleonic era. The author writes:

Following the Battle of the Crossroads I have had a final tweak of my house rules Muskets & Marshals. I say ‘final’ tweak even though experience has shown me that there is actually no such thing because tinkering with rules is as much a symptom of my borderline OCD as the desire to keep re-basing my model soldiers is.

That said I am pretty happy with the rule set as they stand and I certainly had a lot of fun playing the game using them. The firing system involves throwing a lot of dice and I’ve found over the years that this always tends to make a wargame more fun than the slide rule/logarithm approach.

The rules are an amalgamation of various rule systems and ideas nicked or created over the last 40 odd years. The movement rates and ranges are straight out of the London Wargames Section Napoleonic Rules (1968). The melee system is spookily like the one from the board game Risk. Many of the other ideas were developed for a set of ACW rules my brother and myself knocked up in the 1980s. The emphasis is on fun and speed of play.

Agricola Express

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Agricola is one of the great “Euro” style board games of recent years, but like more than a few, it can be quite involved. Agricola Express takes the strategy and basics of that game and boils it down to a dice based game. Even better: it’s free and ownership of Agricola is not required.