Oliver Cromwell Portal

The Oliver Cromwell Society has a website with basic information on the English Civil War. In light of the growing popularity of Warhammer Historicals’ English Civil War miniature wargaming rules set, this could be useful in filling in some gaps players’ knowledge.

Good Little Ninjas Card Game

Good Little Ninjas is a free print-and-play card drafting game. The author writes:

In Good Little Ninjas, players become inhabitants of medieval Japan. Each of the game’s seven rounds represent one day in the life of a bustling village, full of characters and opportunity.

Every day you have the chance to employ Farmers, Carpenters, Merchants and Peasants to harvest rice and construct buildings. The more daring might send Ninjas to raid the Palace Treasury, or recruit Samurai to prevent the predicted raids. You might even persuade one of the more powerful inhabitants to help you: the Daiymo, the Shogun, or even the Emperor himself!

Ultimately, the player who best uses their cunning to gain the most coins wins the game.

How “Dungeons” Changed The World

I suspect that many of my readers — like me — "wasted" their teenage years playing Dungeons and Dragons. But it turns out that it wasn’t a waste. The D&Ders of the late 1970s and 1980s now are driving much of mainstream culture.  In the Boston Globe, Peter Berbegal has written an op-ed about this. A sample:

Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures.

Gary Grigsby’s Pacific War Game Emulator

 

Gary Grigsby’s Pacific War was a lot of fun in the days of MS-DOS gaming. You can play it again on the Web Archive MS-DOS simulator.