I recently finished reading Jackals, designed by John-Matthew DeFoggi and published by Osprey in 2021. It had been on my items-of-interest list for a couple of years as an RPG that kept popping up in Reddit threads about underrated gems. In April, while heading home from a rifle class in Alabama, I swung through the Chattanooga location of McKay Books and found a copy in their used gaming section. I’m glad I go to this one ahead of a number of other books that have been languishing in my to-read queue for more time, because “underrated gem” is definitely an accurate descriptor for this one. This will be more of a pleased burble than an actual review, but it’s not like I’m getting paid to do this, so I can occasionally indulge my enthusiasms.
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Head to Head Engagement: Eagle Leader vs. Fulcrum Leader
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been playing – and thoroughly enjoying – Eagle Leader. I recently picked up its sibling, Fulcrum Leader, and am currently playing through my first campaign. These are collectively the newest additions to Dan Verssen Games’ Leader series of solo wargames (more specifically, of the Air Leader sub-branch, which originated with Hornet Leader). I won’t say too much more about the games’ shared ancestry here because there is plenty of content elsenet, and this is neither advertisement nor review (despite me dumping this in the Reviews category for ease of later return).
So whatthehell am I spending electrons on, then?
My intent with this post is to illustrate the points of congruence and divergence between the two games – beyond the “well, duh” obvious of NATO versus Warsaw Pact player-avatar perspective. Basically, I’m putting together the kind of information that I wish I’d had when I was considering whether to buy one or both, because it was all too easy to conclude that they’re the same game with different skins. That, I’m happy to report, is in no way the case. While they definitely share the core mechanics and gameplay loop of the Air Leader sub-series, the devil is in the details – and there are a lot of details in which they differ.
The following assumes a baseline level of familiarity with the Leader series, particularly the Air Leader sub-family (Hornet Leader, Phantom Leader, Israeli Air Force Leader, Corsair Leader, Zero Leader…).
Continue reading →In Which I Wax Rhapsodic About Eagle Leader
Because of poor impulse control and a strong interest in late Cold War (i.e., my formative years) NATO air operations, I wound up snagging the full run of Eagle Leader from Atomic Empire and The Tabletop Strategist (good vendors, BTW; will doubtless give both them more money soon, especially before TTS’ current moving sale ends on Friday). Despite Dan Verssen Games’ long-standing and justly-deserved rep for crappy editing and questionable playtesting being fully borne out with this product, I have been having a ridiculous amount of fun.
A small amount of that is the fact that this is a physical product. Analog gaming feels innately healthier than my default mode of digitally-mediated work and play. It gets me away from screens and requires my brain to manipulate things in meatspace, something I’m realizing I need badly. With our recent rearrangement of furniture, it also gives me another reason to spend time in our now-much-more-welcoming library – either alone, or engaged in parallel play while The Girl is working on Lego kits or writing on her laptop.
The greater part of Eagle Leader‘s appeal, though, is its existence in my sweet spot of complexity (fiddly bits! options!) and speed of play, combined with the sort of emergent narrative I first encountered – and latched onto – in the original X-Com. This extends to the other Leader-series games in my library (currently more Cold War – Thunderbolt/Apache Leader, Spruance Leader, and Hornet Leader, with the Vietnam-era Huey Leader in my Kickstarter fulfillment queue). When my little dudes are individual pilots with names and callsigns, or named warships, with varying stress levels and damage and experience and improvement over time, it’s easy to get attached, and to start writing stories in my head.
Continue reading →Review: The Poisoned Chalice
I purchased my copy of The Poisoned Chalice at full price and am receiving no compensation for this review. However, in the interest of full disclosure: author Alf Bergesen and I are long-time collaborators. We’ve been playing in each other’s play-by-post games for over a decade, and we coauthored Tara Romaneasca, the Romania sourcebook for Twilight: 2000.
I don’t often review stuff, mainly because of some undefined unease about the process. This is probably unfair of me because, as an author myself, I appreciate any attempt at a thoughtful review that shows someone actually read and paid attention to my work. This post, then, is an initial attempt at a module review. Reviews probably won’t be regular features here, but I do want to make some sort of occasional effort toward highlighting products that I find interesting, useful, or praiseworthy.
By the Numbers
The Poisoned Chalice is a module for Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. It’s PDF-only, available on DriveThruRPG through Free League Workshop, that publisher’s community content channel. At the time of this writing, the product link is https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/437864/Twilight-2000-The-Poisoned-Chalice and the module is priced at $1.99. For that princely sum, you get a 19-page module (3 pages of front and end material, 16 pages of content) and a 27-hex x 18-hex battlemap in 4th edition’s 10-meter scale.
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