When I was a boy, I thrilled to the adventures of Thor Heyerdahl in books such as Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft
Now, though, it turns out that he might have been partially right. A recent study of chicken bones suggests that Polynesians reached South America between 1321 and 1407.
Its fascinating stuff for anyone interested in history. But there’s a wargaming angle in this, of course. How about a skirmish game between Polynesians and Incas?
I have always been a big fan of Ray Harryhausen’s works. I saw a couple of the Sinbad movies in the theatres, and to this day can’t get enough of them. Even with all of the CGI effects, I don’t think there has ever been anything as amazing as his coreographed skeleton fights — whether in Jason and the Argonauts or in Sinbad.
In my recent web surfing, I stumbled across the Chinese Jet Pilot site, which has a page dedicated to Harryhausen’s monsters. They’re all listed, and each has a short video clip attached. It’s a neat site.
The Perfect Captain’s Battle Finder is a set of 64 cards — done in the usual high quality graphics — that you use to generate terrain for your miniature wargames battles. There also are rules for using the cards to create linear campaigns, and maneuver campaigns using the downloadable force counters, order and control markers. There are even revenue and siege rules.
Truly innovative stuff, and something that I’m going to use almost immediately.
The 15 Mil is an online magazine from Peter Pig about 15mm gaming. A feature of the magazine is a “Gamette” — a small set of rules for a specific gaming scenario. The 3rd issue’s Gamette is about French Resistance destroying train tracks ahead of D-Day.
Incompetech has a page that lets you generate pdf files for different kinds of graph paper, including hexes, staggered bricks, hex dot patterns, multi width, etc. If you’re makign maps or planing scale models, this is an essential site.