GMT Games started shipping this week the two latest expansions for Commands & Colors: Ancients, #4 Imperial Rome and #5 Epic Ancients I. Imperial Rome includes a new Roman army with 293 purple blocks, as well as additional blocks for the Eastern Kingdom and Barbarian armies from earlier expansions. Epic Ancients provides tools for grander-scale battles: a special deck of command cards, wooden card holders, a new rule book, and 12 scenarios. Okay, I love this game to pieces, but enough with Rome already! How about some biblical armies. Or Crusaders, Saladin, Mamluks, or Mongols.

At the same time as Commands & Colors, GMT also began shipping Hellenes, a block game about the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.

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The VASSAL team announced the released of version 3.1.11.  You can download the update for all major OS’s at vassalengine.org.

The new version fixes a few bugs, and will now run with a 64-bit JVM on OS X, if one is available.

VASSAL is probably one of the best desktop tools for playing wargames (and other types of games too) over the internet. Games can be played live, or PBEM, and hundred of modules for games are available.

I’ve personally spent many hours playing Battlelore and Navia Dratp with the engine, and couldn’t recommend it highly enough for anyone who has a hard time finding people to play games with, or wants to squeeze every last gaming hour out of their day.

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Miniature Design Studio has an interesting method for developing its product line. The company produces 28 mm metal miniatures for pre-gunpowder periods (“We don’t sell WW2!”). When it’s ready to tackle the next project, MDS announces a Design Challenge, inviting the public to submit proposals—not sculpts, just concepts. Then the company chooses randomly from among the proposals and gives itself 21 days (no cheating, weekends are included) to design, manufacture, and add to its online catalog three variant poses matching the proposal. If the deadline is not met, MDS will award the challenger a £25 credit.

The last challenge resulted in a trio of Israelite spearmen. The deadline for the next is October 9th.

[Hat Tip]

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Lots of Warhammer-related activity this week. In addition to the Ultramarine movie, there are two new games from Fantasy Flight based on Games Workshop properties. Warhammer: Invasion is a resource management and combat card game set in the Old World. Chaos Marauders is a revised version of a GW original about rival Orc tribes, and is also a card game.

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Let’s check back with free game publisher, Invisible City Productions… In the company’s latest print-and-play offering, Twisty Passages, players race to escape from a maze by assembling individual paths from cards. The number of cards they draw is entirely up to them—but draw too few and fall behind or draw too many and risk triggering a trap.

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