As I mentioned the other day, my girls (9 and 12 years old) are big fans of Memoir ‘44. When we play, I try to incorporate a bit of World War II history, and it’s definitely prompted the younger one to read both fiction and non-fiction books on the period. At Oregon’s Jewell Elementary School though, teacher Jesse Rasmussen has taken it a step further with the establishment of the Memoir 44 History Club. According to an article in Wednesday’s The Bulletin, he has around a dozen students each week excited to learn about the next battle, discuss its weapons and geography, and debate the necessity of war.

(hat tip)

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David “Grubman” is fully committed to BattleLore and his love of the game shows. Once a Warhammer fanatic, he now finds BattleLore easier to tackle and more enjoyable, while still providing an opportunity to assemble terrain and paint miniature armies. Follow the link to RPG.net for more pictures, including a glimpse of the miniature war councils he created for each player.

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Keith Dunkley from Heckington has invented an educational game for Chemistry students called Crazy Chemists (that’s chemists as in “people who muck about with chemistry”, not chemists as in “pharmasists”).

Move markers around a board based on the periodic table, buying laboratories within a research station. Players who land on an owned laboratories must answer questions on specific chemical elements before moving on, or pay a fine.

(source)

P.S. No relationship that I know of to the artist Keith Dunkley.

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Nubian Jak is a trivial type game around since 1995. There are four or five editions of the game, the latest called “The Windrush” edition.

It’s been called “The Black Trivial Pursuit”, as it features a questions on a wide variety of people of color from different countries. It became a little known UK game show called “Who Knows Jak?” (sic)

(source)

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This is a very special post from Purple Pawn, giving you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to earn millions of dollars for the cost of only $1!

In this post, I present the MLM Board Game, a virtual instantiation of a business practice that preys on suckers all around the world ^[1]. You can be one of those suckers!

Here’s how I will become a millionaire, and you will too! Just link to this post and send $1 to me. Then send a link to this post to 5 of your friends with instructions to send $1 to me, too. They’ll tell 5 friends, and they’ll tell 5 friends, and so on. Soon, I’ll be rolling in money. And, since you know me, people will give you money, too! It’s that simple!

And look! They have an affiliate program for selling the board game, too!

[1] Not all MLM schemes are shady or illegal. Getting screwed is not guaranteed, and depends on whether you are first required to outlay money or get paid to subscribe new members. All sales are final.

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League Leader is a series of Irish sports board games officially endorsed by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA).

They have games for Hurling (I thought this was vomiting, but it appears to be some kind of field hockey), Gaelic Football (something like Rugby), Rugby, and Soccer. (Oddly, the games run by the GAA are Gaelic Football, Hurling, Handball, Carnogie, and Rounders).

The games are pretty decision-less, which is a let-down, but they look ok, will probably engage sports fans and kids, and you can get them in Irish, not only English.

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Warp Spawn is the brainchild of Lloyd Krassner.

Since 1997, Lloyd (primarily, with some help from others) has been posting free rules for themed board and card games on his site, and his collection now numbers over 1000 games. A great number of them are war games, with themes ranging from pre-history to the future, military, fantasy, comedy, card games, classic game adaptations, hex games, role playing, and anything and everything in between.

Lloyd concentrates on the game play, leaving the art and design to his hordes of admiring fans. Sure, with over 1000 games produced at such a rate, there’s a lot of cruft, but the best games attract the most feedback and tweaks and boil up to the top of the forums.

Best of all, every game is free for non-commercial purposes.

(source, source)

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First Strike is a strategic Risk-like game – without the dice, with more resources, and with nuclear warheads.

The game is played over 10 turns, with 7 rounds per turn (this can take several hours). Players start the game by assigning neutral countries and then their opponent’s countries. Resources (especially oil) are scarce compared to demand, and combat is simple and Chess-like. Eventually you can acquire nuclear capability and wipe out an area, stopping its production and making it impassable for four turns.

Reviews indicate that the plastic pieces are cheap, but that the game itself is quite good. A classic case where a higher-priced game with better bits is warranted.

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The Linares Chess Tournament, unofficially known as “The Wimbledon of Chess”, will be partially moving to the United Arab Emirates.

In the last few years, half of the tournament was played in the Mexican city of Morelia. Now Sulaiman Al Fahim has purchased the rights to move that half of the tournament to the UAE, leaving the other half still in Linares, Spain.

All well and good, assuming we don’t encounter the problems we just had with the UAE Tennis tournament (i.e. banning Israeli players from attending).

(source)

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In the last four years, Compass Games has released five interesting war games, including the well-respected solitaire submarine battle game Silent War. But they’re only picking up speed. They’ve got five more planned for release, this year:

Spartacus: Strategic card-driven war game of ancient Rome; available for pre-order

Yalu: A reprint of the 1977 GDW game; available for pre-order

Combat Patrol: Tactical card-driven WWII combat game

The God Kings: Strategic card-driven war game of ancient Middle East

Steel Wolves: The Atlantic version of Silent War

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