Bruce Geryk needs no introduction to readers of Flash of Steel or listeners of Three Moves Ahead. He is my friend, my combatant and one of the people I can count on for totally honest feedback on pretty much anything. Also, one of my favorite wargame writers. His guest post is about a game you never heard of that may define 2011 for him.
Everyone remembers years for different reasons. For gamers, there is usually a game attached. I know 1990 was the year I graduated from college, but it was most definitely also The Year of Civilization. I’m not quite sure what happened in 1994, but I sure can tell you it was The Year of X-COM. For me medical school started in 1998, but it could have otherwise been The Year of about a million different great games. Maybe it was just The Year.
Remembering years with games sometimes seems like a luxury of times when there wasn’t much more to worry about than what to play next. At one time, going to the game store was all about which one thing could I afford to buy that month with my paper route money. Maybe there were more game stores, too, or just stores that carried games. Heck, Toys R Us carried board wargames once upon a time. Sometimes I wish I could go back and just remember what that was like.
A few months ago, basically I did. A local game store here called The Gamer’s Armory carries a selection of games that I would have had a hard time imagining in the good old days when a large retail toy chain had Avalon Hill wargames on the shelf. I finally made the 20-minute drive there after working for 30 hours, and when I walked in, I thought maybe I was in a sleep deprivation delirium. Separate displays held games about the ancients, American Revolution, Napoleonics, American Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the modern era, all by chronological category. The Advanced Squad Leader section takes up three full wall displays. Want any Schwerpunkt scenario pack? They have it. Want an ASL magazine, like MMP’s ASL Journal, or the outstanding French publication Le Franc Tireur? It’s there. Want an official module or expansion pack? Pick it up and take it to the counter.
The game I ended up taking to the counter is called Kampfgruppe Scherer: Shield of Cholm — a dramatic name for an esoteric and superficially mundane product: a historical module for ASL about the encirclement and siege of Cholm, Russia, during the winter and spring of 1942. It wasn’t a physically large product on the shelf, but it did cost $105. And when I brought it home, it was worth it just to open it up and read the designer’s justification for why he would make a game about an obscure Eastern Front topic in the first place.
“…gliders were having to land in the streets under heavy fire…”
It was this line, encountered while I was searching for another “special operation” to depict for ASL, that landed me in Cholm.
That intro says everything there is to say about why wargamers get hooked on whatever they’re obsessed with at the moment. As designer Andrew Hershey describes it, he was reading about German glider development in a book about World War II German aircraft, saw this reference to glider operations in the battle for Cholm, and all of a sudden that was his next project. He even made a pun out of it. [Read more →]
by A.C Grayling