In this episode Paul and Colin review GMT's block game Hellenes. The also discuss a bunch of other block games including, Richard III, Hammer of the Scots, Rommel in the Desert, Eastfront, Europe Engulfed, FAB: Bulge and others.
Notes: In this episode we did not talk about the step reduction of blocks. While I had intended to it is easy to forget such things. Block step reduction is very easy. The number of steps a block is currently one faces upwards. In order to take a step loss you simply rotate it, to repair a step you rotate it the other way. This is clever because your opponent can see you rotate units, but can't see what you rotate, so it keeps the for of war. This also stops having to have any convoluted system of step management to maintain fog of war. However it does limit you to only having 4 steps (or possibly each step takes two hits to reduce). Thanks to Tim for reminding me to add this.
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7 Responses:
May 2nd, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Some listener feedback…
The overview of Hellenes was very good. As someone who has the game, but hasn’t played it yet, I appreciated your description of how the game played—not just the rules, which I can read for myself, but how the rules came together. For example, I’ll not overlook the significance of some of the Olympians I might otherwise have ignored. The first part of the podcast was weaker. When you discussed the games you had played, especially those you had played more than once, you had a lot of useful information. For someone unfamiliar with block games, some of the distinctions among them, such as the combat systems, would be very useful information. Unfortunately, you billed this part of the podcast as an overview of block games, which it was, but only to a point. It’d be hard for someone to do a comprehensive overview, given the number of block games that you’d have to have played. Dealing with these gaps would always be an issue, but it felt like, with a little extra homework, you might have dealt with them better. For example, at one point you were musing about the lack of tactical block games. A few minutes later, you mentioned in passing a Civil War block game from Columbia. They’ve published multiple Civil War titles, including a game on Gettysburg which is most definitely tactical in scope. Also, I’m not sure why you decided to pass over Worthington Games completely. They have a few block game titles, such as Prussia’s Defiant Stand, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and my personal favorite, Forged In Fire. (Love the McClellan confidence index, which deals with an important historical element in a very clever way.) I hope these suggestions are helpful. Thanks for doing the podcast.
May 3rd, 2010 at 1:26 am
Thanks for the comments Tom.
I’m not going to respond point by point, but I say this, it was my intent to cover the major modern block games. There are plenty of smaller block games out there many of which are good titles, but there is no way to cover all of them in any depth what so ever in what was supposed to be 30 minute segment (although ended up about 45). Having said that it was intentional on my part to leave out many the games you have mentioned, which indeed I am familiar with and have certainly read reviews and comments about. However I feel very strongly that I don’t want to simply cover a game because I can, I want to cover it because I have something to say about it. I could easily have read off some comments from BGG or spouted another person’s views on a particular game, but to be honest I’m not interested in doing, I have done it before a little with our CSR episode and when we put one together again the next year, it really felt quite hollow to me. So as a result for me personally I do not intend to talk about games that I don’t feel I have a decent grounding in. I can appreciate that that will have trade offs, but to me the integrity of opinion is more important than covering a few smaller games.
Despite this, I do appreciate your comments and as always I’m speaking for myself here, Paul may well feel differently than I do. At the end of the day we have to make ourselves happy in this regard, but if you are interested this is why I intentionally did not talk about the worthington games stuff, the newer GMT releases (like PQ17 that I’m somewhat familar with) or some the Columbia stuff.
Colin
May 3rd, 2010 at 1:33 pm
I definitely understand. In fact, I applaud your discipline. My biggest complaint about BGG is the proliferation of junk reviews, written by people who haven’t even played a game, or played it only once or twice. My suggestion, cut down to fewer words, was just to make it more clear that you were talking about a limited domain of block games that you’ve played.
Also, I do believe in paragraph breaks. This site was doing funny things yesterday, including stripping all the paragraph breaks from my post.
May 3rd, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Yeah I was having trouble with site yesterday as well. Often it times you out at very annoying times. 
Anyway Thanks again for the comment, we are mentioning your podcast on the next show.
May 8th, 2010 at 5:55 am
Can you provide the link you mentioned to your friends europe engulfed program as it sounds interesting- cheers
May 11th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
http://sites.google.com/site/sludgenz/ieenet
You can download the great EE implementation. here.
November 5th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
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