The Last of the Independents is a recent Euro-style board game from Numbskull Games. The idea behind this game is to out engineer, out manufacture, and out advertise your competition as an Automobile company circa 1950′s. Aside from the unique setting, this game is also noteworthy that it is a strategy board game that does not use dice.

The idea behind the game is that you are betting your cash against your opponents to try to win spots on the board. For example, in the first phase you are dealing with the different car models. You can put X million dollars into manufacturing sports cars. Your opponent could bid elsewhere (e.g., luxury cars or compact cars) or they could also put money into sports cars to try to beat you at it. When everyone has finished with the models, all the money tokens for the sports cards are put into a bag, and one drawn at random, that is the winner of the sports car (so the more you spend the better your odds) and this continues for all the different models.

Players repeat the same sequence for  the Engineering  and Promotions phase. You have to be careful though, your money has to last the entire round. So, if you spend all your money in the models phase, your opponents will eat you alive in the promotions phase. You also each get a unique car company that has strengths and weaknesses to help you along the way. And the round ends with announcing who won the Car of the Year (again a random bag draw).

There are other phases, cards to screw people over, earning victory points and all that fun stuff too. But, I won’t go into the entire rules breakdown.

Overall, we found the game  entertaining. The uniqueness of the setting and gameplay was a nice break from the more traditional games. The drawing from the bag mechanic got a little tedious toward the end, because you do it so much. I think a dice cup would have been better suited, because it can be a pain getting little tokens in and out of the bag.

This game is available now from Numbskull’s website, your FLGS, or Amazon.com and various other retailers.

MSRP is 39.99. This is a must have game for any car aficionado who is into board gaming. People into marketing and engineering may also enjoy it for its theme. It is also a good fit to play with any non-gamers, as it does not have a gamer-centric appearance (my wife still will not play RuneBound with me after years of attempts).

Thanks to Patrick Stevens, the games creator, for submitting this copy for review.

Stuart

Here is a screenshot.

The app is a newspaper that covers every day of the war in real time. The complete process will take four years! Every day images, diary entries, maps, original reporting and excerpts from contemporary newspapers create a fascinating experience. The diaries truly impressed me because you can either read the original document or a modern text version if you do not want to decipher handwriting. It really makes the era live.

I highly suggest iPad owners consider a download. The price is $7.99. Yes, it is a bit expensive, but it is a four year project and well worth it in my opinion.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind.  Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

This is exactly how I like to run events as a DM. I like to have the players encounter a series of events with seemingly harmless (or sometimes seemingly good) outcomes. But those outcomes add up to something far more sinister.

However, back to the topic at hand; using history in the RPG. Many DMs put a great amount of thought into the main “bad guy”, the arch-nemesis. However, most times they do not give much thought to where their antagonist resides when he is not tormenting the players. If there is a man of such evil, why would people not gang-up and hunt him down?

History can help us here. Not many an evil foe has ever had such an advanced system of lairs as Adolf Hitler during World War II. They were called the Führerhauptquartiere. A new book by Osprey Publishing titled The Führer’s Headquarters – Hitler’s command bunkers 1939–45 by Neil Short does an excellent job of of showcasing these 14 known fortifications. It is amazing that in such a short amount of time, Hitler went from simple air raid locations to massive concrete structures able to withstand heavy firepower.

This book details the design and development of these bunkers, talks about each location specifically and includes photos and illustrations of the layouts. The operations of these facilities and how they tied into the war are also discussed. And of course, important events like Operation Valkyrie, which was recently made famous by a Hollywood/Tom Cruise movie, are also brought up.

Sure, this book is not an RPG book, and it will not give you an instant base of operations for your bad guy. However, by utilizing a book like this, you can start to get inside the head of your villain and start thinking about the bigger picture of your campaign. History books like this will help a you become a better DM.

So when you are at your FLGS with some cash burning a hole in your pocket, instead of heading to the RPG section. Maybe every once in a while you should head to the back of the store with that little turn-style rack that has some quality campaign ideas at a decent price.

The Führer’s Headquarters – Hitler’s command bunkers 1939–45 was released on October 19th. It is available in game shops and bookstores or you can order it from Osprey or Amazon (among other places).

Thank you to Osprey Publishing for providing a review copy of this book. My evil masterminds just got a little slipperier.

Stuart

Bibliographic information

Today’s entry is The Fortifications of Ancient Egypt 3000-1780 BC from Osprey Publishing.  First off, Egypt does not receive due credit for its military installations. Thanks to a focus on the pyramids and tombs, people do not release that Egypt was a formidable empire and empires need castles and forts.  It even overlooked my notice until I received this book.

Egypt’s castles and forts, for obvious reasons, resided near the Nile river or its delta. This allowed garrisoning of key crossings and choke-points to enforce royal edicts or collect tolls.  The fortifications look quite familiar. High, thick walls, crenellations and fortified entrances resemble the later European and Middle Eastern castles.  That said, they do have a very Egyptian feel to the design and resemble the more familiar temples and tombs that most of us know and love, but with a more functional design. People lived and worked in these structures, not visited on the day of Pharoah’s funeral.

One fortification caught my eye because I thought it simple, but very effective. The graphic below is an Egyptian watchtower.  Usually placed by itself to oversee  a road or small town, it is just an elegant, simple design that brings real challenges to an attacker.

I am very fond of the retractable ladder. Sieging this tower is nothing short of a nightmare. Like all good fortifications, it takes far more men to achieve the tower than to defend it.  Next time your PCs think that taking out the local guards is a cakewalk, put them in one of these….

Another tidbit is the Egyptian method of portage. Rather than just dragging the boat around waterfalls with brute force, Egyptians installed semi-permanent mud race ways.  The mud functioned as grease and combined with some oxen moved boats quite efficiently. I see the encounter now, the PC are portaging their boat, knee-deep in a mud pit when the enemy arrives. Good times.

Overall, I really thought this book had some fresh ideas for the game master and a new take on the standard castle. I highly recommend you check it out.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11Jousting-t.html

Romans wrote their curses on small sheets of lead or pewter and dropped them off at a local temple, often with a sacrifice of food, coin or animals. In a stroke of archeological fortune, lead endures the ravages of time,  so there are many examples of these curses in museums around the world.

My personal favorite is this one:

The sheet (of lead) which is given to Mercury, that he exact vengeance for the gloves which have been lost; that he take blood and health from the person who has stolen them…

A death wish for some stolen gloves. I wonder what the curse for something serious like stealing boots would be?

I wrote this post because the curses are quality gaming plot fodder. Perhaps curses dropped in a distant temple come true, prompting a journey of vengeance for a wronged party.  Gods are often mischievous and an ill-conceived  curse may need undoing after the gods grant the petition…in very literal terms.  An ambitious  priest refuses to return a politically embarrassing curse and the party invades the temple to steal…er…recover the scroll.

If you would like to see some more examples, I found some sites with more information on Roman curses.

Lead Curse

Curse Tablets of Roman Britain

National Geographic article on curses

If you have any other ideas on using curses in a game, drop me a comment.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

“Indentured Servants” is a term familiar to any American student.  Landless peasants that signed a contract for free passage to America in return for a fixed period of virtual slavery, usually several years. I understood that the peasants signed a contract, but no one ever discussed what the term “indentured” actually meant. It is a contract, but a very unusual kind of contract. Here is a an image of an actual indenture.

Indenture--Source Wikipedia

Note the wavy cut at the top of the contract. An indenture is a single piece of paper inscribed with a contract twice on the top and bottom of the page. Both parties sign both sides of the contract and then cut it in half. Each party kept a copy. The irregular cut is a a primitive anti-counterfeiting system that made forgery very difficult. Sometimes in this age of encryption and micro-fibers that there were some quite good anti-counterfeiting technologies that did not rely on advanced technology.

There is also a great shot of a bifurcated, but complete indenture on the Staffordshire, UK government web site.  Sorry for not re-posting the image, but there was no  license on the site, so I erred on the side of copyright caution.

As to gaming, since the contract is very difficult to forge, protecting/stealing/destroying/finding one-half of an indenture is a great plot hook. It is also a dead easy prop to make for the game table, just print out the document in an appropriate font, copy it twice on a page and cut randomly. I also suggest you check out James Clavell’s excellent Noble House Much of the plot derives from the hunt for an indenture (a broken coin) that allows the owner to ask a very powerful favor.

The inspiration for this post came from a reference to indentures in Knight: Noble Warrior of England 1200-1600 (General Military) from OSprey Publishing. This reference only briefly mentions indentures, but I found it a great resource for knights and their equipment for this period.

I hope you find this post useful and I am more than willing to entertain any suggestions for topics in this series.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

Unlike previous Osprey titles, the “Raid” series focuses on a specific military action, as opposed to a historical period, culture or region. There is some historical background at the beginning, but after that it is all low-level planning and logistics. Before going further, please forget the Charles Bronson movie (though this book does make a point of mentioning it and ol’ Chuck Bronson does make an appearance). While accurate in the broad points, the film leaves out much of the political maneuvering, planning and skullduggery that went on during the raid.

The story is well-known, but worth quickly summarizing for the unfamiliar. In 1976, German and Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Air France jumbo jet and took it to Uganda. Most of the hostages, save Israeli citizens were released. Israeli special forces launched a raid using large transport planes and a repainted Mercedes to successfully kill the terrorists and save all but a handful of the hostages.

What struck me most in this book was the context provided surrounding the raid. There is a helpful breakdown of terrorist organizations, previous Israeli anti-terrorist efforts and some of the intelligence work that went into the raid. All of this provided useful context for both the raid and the political ramifications of invading a country run by Idi Amin.

Author Simon Dunstan’s writing style is quite readable, especially once the raid starts. I am not saying he is Tom Clancy, but the raid section is smartly written, detailed and fast-paced. “History book” and “exciting” are not mutually exclusive terms.

Though the book is very serious in tone, I chuckled a bit at the image of a commando throwing a pretty, lingerie-clad French stewardess over a shoulder and carrying her to safety or Air France’s “reward” for the flight crew that refused to abandon their passengers.

There are plenty of Osprey’s usual high-quality images, art and cartography. This book has a more modern feel and the art is a combination of the hand drawn and digitally rendered. I especially enjoyed the airport graphics with a detailed timeline and legend of critical locations.

This is my first exposure to the “Raid” series and I am impressed. I also think that this book (and probably the others in this series) offer great “role-playing gamer-friendly” content. Since the Raid series focuses on relatively small units completing specific missions, it lends itself to role-playing game encounter design and inspiration.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

Full Disclosure: Publisher provided a free copy for this review.