Wargame reviews on YouTube

February 5, 2012 12:51 AM

Marco Arnaudo reviews wargames on YouTube

About:

Marco Arnaudo was born in Italy in 1976. He graduated (BA) from the University of Pisa in 2000, and earned his PhD from both the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2004) and Harvard University (2006). He is currently Associate Professor of Italian and Director of Graduate Studies in Italian at the Dept. of French and Italian of Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

Marco usually spends about 15 minutes first showing the maps and pieces, summarizing the rules and play and ending with an opinion. Take a look at some of the amazing games being released, many of then quite expensive, others more complex than most would try.

He reviews many games but favorite Wargames of 2011 are #10-6, #5-1

#10: Dragon Rage
#09: Road to Carentan (Sergeants Miniatures)
#08: Engage
#07: Lost Battles
#06: U-Boat Leader
#05: Band of Brothers
#04: Sekigahara
#03: Strike of the Eagle
#02: Field Commander Napoleon
#01: No Retreat!

posted by stbalbach (16 comments total)

Did anyone else click and then have the immediate reaction "oh okay, well this is neat but I'm kind of disappointed that it has nothing to do with David Lightman and the legacy of Joshua Falken"?

To be completely fair, the poster didn't capitalize or separate "war" and "games" but for some reason that's just where my raised-in-the-eighties mind ran off to...
posted by trackofalljades at 1:01 AM on February 5, 2012 [8 favorites]

Nah, I thought that too... and I grew up in the 80s playing wargames.

That said: this is good.
posted by pompomtom at 1:07 AM on February 5, 2012

My god that guy has a lot of expensive books.
posted by Ad hominem at 1:20 AM on February 5, 2012

He also has the exact same IKEA chair as I have, if slightly more comics on display.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:51 AM on February 5, 2012

These are great, now I wish I knew people who played grognard-lite games like No Retreat!
posted by Justinian at 2:30 AM on February 5, 2012

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
posted by Fizz at 5:14 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Dragon Rage is a re-release of the original Dwarfstar Game, featured in a post here last year. It'd be kinda nice to see him acknowledge the history of the game, too. It's also very similar, mechanically, to OGRE/GEV. It'd also be nice to see the review mention that.

Interestingly, the board for the new version of Dragon Rage was done with Campaign Cartographer! I wonder, is it the beginning of a trend?
posted by jiawen at 7:57 AM on February 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

Also, on the topic of OGRE/GEV: Lego OGRE.
posted by jiawen at 8:04 AM on February 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

I've played around a bit with CC and I think it is a tool for making good, but not great, maps and boards. I could see some publishers using it more as a way of saving on art costs, but I can't imagine too many professional artists or graphic designers would find value in it. Photoshop, Illustrator (or Gimp/Inkscape) already do most of the same stuff and would be more familiar. I commented on the game board as well in my Dragon Rage review on the Opinionated Gamers blog. Short version: I was less impressed with the board graphically than a lot of folks seem to be.
posted by meinvt at 8:08 AM on February 5, 2012

CC doesn't produce perfect maps, it's true; maps created in CC tend to have a great deal of sameness, to me. I didn't notice right away in this case because I was paying attention to the Dwarfstar connection. As you said, though, meinvt, it can be a good way to save on costs.
posted by jiawen at 8:28 AM on February 5, 2012

In the interests of variety, it would be nice if he occasionally did a review in front of the DC comics wall.
posted by running order squabble fest at 8:33 AM on February 5, 2012

Oh man, the OGRE/gev refrerence takes me back. It also immediately brought to mind car wars . . . and the video game based on car wars, autoduel. A more current car wars style video game is darkwind. There is also a video game loosely based on ogre, Goliath.

My friends and i still occasionally pull out illuminati - good times!
posted by ianhattwick at 11:21 AM on February 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

LegOGRE looks like the best thing ever.
posted by KingEdRa at 12:22 PM on February 5, 2012

Holy shit, it's Marco! Marco's a great guy that I used to play boardgames with- he doesn't generally come to boardgame night anymore since he had kids, and I don't really go since it'd involve getting up at the rough equivalent of four in the morning. He's also heavily involved in Indiana University's boardgames club.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:32 PM on February 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

Marco reviews sorted at BGG.
Marco reviews chronologically at BGG.
posted by stbalbach at 11:05 PM on February 5, 2012

Marco's a great reviewer of games, and is on 2d6.org.

He's also starting a podcast with a couple other wellknown gamers, first episode you can listen to here (just listening now, in fact).
posted by symbioid at 10:45 AM on February 6, 2012