Search Results for: dwarfstar

The Games Plus 2019 Spring Auction: Part One

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A few of the treasures acquired at the 2019 Games Plus Spring Auction I’ve been attending the Games Plus Auction in Mount Prospect, Illinois ever since David Kenzer first told me about it, when we worked at Motorola in the late 90s. So, twenty years, give or take. I’ve been writing about it here ever since my first report in 2012 (in the appropriately titled “Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever.”) The four-day auction occurs twice a year, in Spring and Fall.  Each…

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The Priceless Treasures of the Barbarian Prince

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A complete set of Dwarfstar games. Probably worth more than my house. I enjoyed Sean McLachlan’s Black Gate post last month, Wargaming with my Twelve-Year-Old. Sean and his son played Outpost Gamma, a 1981 science fiction board game of man-to-man combat on a distant colony world. You don’t see a lot of coverage of early-80s science fiction microgames these days, so I appreciated being able to share the fun. Outpost Gamma was published by Heritage Models in 1981, under their celebrated Dwarfstar…

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Wargaming with my Twelve-Year-Old

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It may be turning into an annual tradition here at the McLachlan-Alonso household–beating the Madrid heat by playing tabletop wargames. I first introduced my son to the concept of wargames with Soldiers 1918, an old Strategy & Tactics game. This summer it was Outpost Gamma, an old Dwarfstar Games science fiction wargame available free online. Just download it, take it to your local printshop to get the board and chits on suitable card stock, and bingo! Old school fun. This…

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The Roots of Microgaming: The Classic Games of Metagaming

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I’ve been writing a lot about board gaming recently. It’s been a big part of my life ever since the late 70s, when I responded to an ad for a line of new “microgames” from a company called Metagaming. I saw the above ad on the inside cover of Analog magazine, which I started reading with the April 1997 issue, when I was 12 years old. Responding to ads in comics and magazines was something you did in the 70s; don’t…

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All Hail the Barbarian Prince

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One of the great things about having a blog is that you get to celebrate all things cool. Books, movies, comics, games… if it keeps you up late at night, after your spouse has gone to bed wearing lingerie and a disappointed look, it’s usually worth at least a few paragraphs here. Of course you need to take things a little more seriously when talking about the real classics, the enduring masterpieces that define our very culture. And that goes…

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Return of the Barbarian Prince

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If you’ve spent much time on the Black Gate website you’ve probably seen Barbarian Prince get mentioned at least once. A solo board game from the 80s designed by Arnold Hendrick, Barbarian Prince is a little like one of those old “choose your own” adventure books, except that the order of events is far more random, for they’re generated by rolling on a number of tables depending upon your location on the map and are partly affected by choices you…

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Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever

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Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL, is the finest games store in the Chicago area. Every spring and fall they hold a fabulous games auction. Now, I don’t use that word lightly. I’ve been to some terrific games auctions in my time, starting with CanGames in Ottawa in the early 80s, then the friendly auctions at WinterWar in Champaign, IL where I was a grad student in the 90s. And of course, for sheer quantity of items on offer, nothing beats…

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Solitaire Gaming

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I blame the whole thing on John O’Neill. A few years back I asked him about the solo Dark City Games adventures that Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Todd McCaulty had reviewed so favorably for Black Gate. John happens to have a larger game collection than most game stores, so I’d come to the right person. Solo games were great fun, John told me. “Here’s an extra copy of an old game you’ve never heard of that’s really cool. Go play…

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