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I've had interesting Steel Panthers (WW2 & modern) battles with realistic amount of artillery. That game has several restrictions on artillery, like it takes some time to change targets, the guns might run out of shells, counterbattery fire etc. And mortars and artillery have different roles they are good at. A good tactic against artillery in SP is to deploy your troops spread around instead of clumping them all on a road or on victory points. And even if artillery and mortars causes the most casualties, you can't win by them alone, but have to use infantry/tanks at some point. I was basically wondering if there was a miniature game that handled artillery like that.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:08
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Without being reductive I think you're going to need to look at the more hex and chit kinda games for those. But yeah Blitzkrieg Commander IV can simulate that particularly if you're going for the larger scale skirmishes like SP can get to where you might capture a few towns in a mission. The artillery can be on board in that game but will have to withdraw if any opposing fighting units get too close. But for the most part I have not seen a game that replicates exactly what you want.
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Aug 19, 2023 04:22
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thanks, blitzkrieg commander looks promising
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Aug 19, 2023 07:00
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I’m not going to use these miniatures, I don’t think as they’re 1/72 - but I’m just trying to figure out a colour for the coats on my soldiers. I think I prefer the middle - any thoughts? This is for a fictional country, for the sake of sun basis in reality, I’m looking at Bavaria. 
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Aug 19, 2023 11:08
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Has anyone seen Victrix’s new augmented reality app-based WW2 rule set? https://digitalwargaming.com/?fbclid=IwAR2KMTsotVdWjsGPqshpB_Gr2FgrKDauV3y1RS22wz_djUrD18PMKtaBobI Goonhammer review: https://www.goonhammer.com/ww2-comp...ng%20digitally. I’m not so much interested in the game itself as the prospect of new games similarly exploiting phone-base AR in future. I don’t play tabletop games much any more, mostly just model, but it would make it significantly easier for someone like me to get into and to play a new rule set with this kind of setup. I always found the constant cross checking of rule books and need for everyone to do a bunch of homework just to learn the basics of a rule set to be pretty tedious. These days I rarely have more than 2 hours straight for recreation time, so it would be great to set up with some figures and just let the app handle the annoying mechanics. It also opens up a lot more design space for more complex chains of decision making and the like.
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Aug 19, 2023 17:34
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 An embryonic force of SYW infantry! I’ve got another lot of these in the oven. I think I need to establish how many bases form a battalion or regiment though, to make sure I’ve got at least a roughly proportionate amount of command! As much as I criticised Henry for his prices, he at least does give you a fairly comprehensive bundle of figures. You can see in the photograph above, I have troops ready to receive a charge, marching, standing, troops firing and reloading. One odd omission seems to be the lack of an officer with a Grenadier mitre? The officers all seem to have tricorns? I’m going to assume that Henry knows more than me about this Honestly, I don’t know anything about this period except that I like the uniforms. Southern Heel fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 18:28
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MeinPanzer posted:Has anyone seen Victrix’s new augmented reality app-based WW2 rule set? AR seems like such a natural pairing with minis, but imo it’s gonna take widespread adoption of the technology beyond phones for it to be something anyone wants to do as more than an occasional “look at my plastic cannons shoot digital smoke out, haha” kind of deal. Right now it’s way too cumbersome (and battery intensive) to be holding your phone up for sustained periods.
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Aug 19, 2023 19:36
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Koramei posted:AR seems like such a natural pairing with minis, but imo it’s gonna take widespread adoption of the technology beyond phones for it to be something anyone wants to do as more than an occasional “look at my plastic cannons shoot digital smoke out, haha” kind of deal. Right now it’s way too cumbersome (and battery intensive) to be holding your phone up for sustained periods. That’s what I thought initially as well, but the Goonhammer review is pretty positive, even with the limitations of it being an alpha build. I really don’t care about sound or visual effects at all; If I can use it to measure a distance between two units, check the stats of each with a simple reference for keywords, and automate a lot of the tedium of roll-counter roll-roll again etc., I think it’s great already at this stage.
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Aug 19, 2023 20:41
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Oh that’s interesting, I’ll have to read that review. I’ve actually given this medium a bunch of thought but admittedly mostly only from the visual side of things for exhibition pieces. I think one of the other eventual strengths at least at certain scales will be automatic detection of unit types even without keywords, just based on their shape. Might be tricky for certain relatively more indistinguishable human figures but the technology exists already to grab the shape of e.g. a tank on the table and identify it, its gunports and their facings, and from that give a visual identification of what they can hit etc.
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Aug 19, 2023 20:53
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Koramei posted:Oh that’s interesting, I’ll have to read that review. I’ve actually given this medium a bunch of thought but admittedly mostly only from the visual side of things for exhibition pieces. I could definitely see companies facilitating this with proprietary bases: give each unit’s base a small distinctive symbol and the app could recognize it and pull up its stats immediately. As the review notes, apps like this would make large scale games so much more manageable; all you need to do is ID the unit and its stats and abilities are right there, making turns much faster than in a normal game of BA, for example. Having a game based on an app also cuts out all the difficulty of errata: as long as both players have the same version of the app, they can build the same lists and play without having to worry about whether the Panther’s front armour starts are correct or not, or whether this unit of paratroopers is able to take two bazookas or just one. I could definitely see GW doing something like this in the future for its games as well. Weirdly I never actually thought about AR and tabletop gaming before, but after reading about how this works in practice the more I think about it the more exciting it is in terms of cutting out a lot of annoying aspects of tabletop wargaming.
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Aug 19, 2023 21:38
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I'm glad people are enjoying it, but there's no way in hell I'm going to stare at a physical wargame through my phone. Part of the joy of the medium for me is that it's purely analogue.
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Aug 20, 2023 01:02
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Endman posted:I'm glad people are enjoying it, but there's no way in hell I'm going to stare at a physical wargame through my phone. Part of the joy of the medium for me is that it's purely analogue. preach
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Aug 20, 2023 01:57
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I play a lot of tabletop sim for wargames due to distance with friends, and it's hard to imagine my phone being a faster measuring tool than anything more tactile. It does sound neat as hell though, and will be following the progress.
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Aug 20, 2023 02:01
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i like the idea of not having to track stuff with chits and markers or some offtable records keeping and stuff
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Aug 20, 2023 02:06
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Absolutely, and having played with Infinity or Malifaux's apps which let you track all the status modifiers and tokens it is extremely good.
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Aug 20, 2023 02:21
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Endman posted:I'm glad people are enjoying it, but there's no way in hell I'm going to stare at a physical wargame through my phone. Part of the joy of the medium for me is that it's purely analogue. This might be me thinking idealistically, but rather than being something that displaces people already used to the purely analogue hobby, I could well see AR be something that entices new people that normally only play video games to try something with minis at a halfway point. Like MeinPanzer was saying, by stripping a lot of the frankly notorious tedium in so many tabletop rulesets, I think it'll be a much simpler thing to get into. For myself I'm super interested in the idea of an AI opponent, and I don't see why that wouldn't be doable via AR. I don't know anybody else that's into the hobby in person so I've never really gotten an opportunity to actually like, do anything with the minis I have, but having an app make AI moves and tell me where to put its pieces and such could solve that nicely.
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Aug 20, 2023 03:04
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I co-wrote that Goonhammer article. For me the advantage of using the app was that I literally didn't have to look at the rulebook once during play and it tracked everything for me like unit states, casualties, etc. I think its promising for really big games with tons of units and/or convention games where you have a lot of new players and not much time to teach them the rules. With an AR app you can just have them download the app, give them a couple of quick instructions, and the app does the rest. edit: or if you want your game to have very complex calculations, like realistic armor penetration mechanics.
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Aug 20, 2023 03:16
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Southern Heel posted:
I'm starting a 7YW army soon! Officers all wore tricornes, even ones over Grenadiers and Fusiliers, though they had fancier metallic lacing on their tricornes. I believe some officers of the elite regiments would wear metal gorgets though, so that may be a distinction. I can't remember if that's a distinction made in the Henry Turner stuff but it's doable if you get the customizable Blender files 
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Aug 20, 2023 04:43
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Count Thrashula posted:I'm starting a 7YW army soon! Thank you for the tip, there. I do appreciate we might be having two parallel conversations in this thread, so I apologise for returning to the Horse & Musket period over AR/WW2! I have been pondering imagi-nations for a quick and dirty 7YW-style campaign so I asked ChatGPT and I was pleasantly surprised. I won't bore you with the whole lot - but two countries in the anglosphere with mid-18th century german petty state populations and geography, casus belli and typical major war aims - all generated on the fly. Of course it needs massaging to work properly but it does take the legwork out of thinking of a dozen commander names all along a particular theme, or whatever. I still don't have an actual rule-set to play with though - I'm debating OHW Horse & Musket (Springfield Fatts version) or Absolute Emperor? I understand Henry Hyde's "Sword, Steel and Stone" rules are meant to be quite good and his main interest is the 7YW but I imagine he's probably conceded to Napoleonic developments to ensure a wider appeal? Time for me to order up some cavalry and guns, I guess. Since I have you on the hook, Count Thrashula - is there a reason why Dragoons seem to be conspicuous in their absence on Henry's list of figures? Is this a case of them being effectively utilised as Cuirassiers? I thought they were quite distinct...
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Aug 20, 2023 12:41
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Endman posted:I'm glad people are enjoying it, but there's no way in hell I'm going to stare at a physical wargame through my phone. Part of the joy of the medium for me is that it's purely analogue. Yeah I feel this way too. The minis and terrain are the biggest appeal ofc, but honestly l just love the visceral feel of chucking Brice and even flipping through rulebooks. Same reason I haven’t switched to an ereader despite it being clearly the better option. Also, we came into some money which is mostly being saved for the kids but bought the Black Seas starter and the first few Aubrey-Maturins. This is it. I am become Dad
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Aug 20, 2023 15:19
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Southern Heel posted:
All his SYW Cav packs have "light" and "heavy" variants, e.g. for the Prussians Dragoons and Kuirassiers. I have the whole SYW range from him from the Kickstarter so if you have any questions about specific pack contents before you buy let me know!
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Aug 20, 2023 15:22
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Count Thrashula posted:All his SYW Cav packs have "light" and "heavy" variants, e.g. for the Prussians Dragoons and Kuirassiers. Thank you very much for your kind help. I forgot I ordered this book, and it’s quite timely as I’m trying to define a war game campaign for myself. I didn’t realise quite how big the book was going to be… 
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Aug 21, 2023 16:07
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Southern Heel posted:Thank you very much for your kind help. I forgot I ordered this book, and it’s quite timely as I’m trying to define a war game campaign for myself. I didn’t realise quite how big the book was going to be… Oh hell yeah Also hello dog you seem good
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Aug 21, 2023 16:39
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Southern Heel posted:I still don't have an actual rule-set to play with though - I'm debating OHW Horse & Musket (Springfield Fatts version) or Absolute Emperor? I understand Henry Hyde's "Sword, Steel and Stone" rules are meant to be quite good and his main interest is the 7YW but I imagine he's probably conceded to Napoleonic developments to ensure a wider appeal? Oh I forgot to respond to this! I haven't fully ingested all of these rulesets but here are my initial impressions of some of the commonly-recommended rulesets for SYW: - Koenig Krieg: seems a bit dated, but it's probably the most recommended ruleset other than the Sam Mustafa stuff. Good for large battles it seems. - Might and Reason: the newer gold standard for large battles. It's a Sam Mustafa product so you know it's good. - Maurice: now here's where things get interesting. It looks like a lot of this shares bones with Lasalle, but there's aspects of it that deal with campaign games and you can sort of create your own commanders and run them through multiple games, and I think that'd be ideal for an Imagi-nation game. - Honours of War: the Osprey SYW game. It looks pretty simple but from what I here it's one of the best Osprey blue-book games. I'm excited to try this one out, but it uses square basing so I just need to tweak it to use my 40mm rectangle bases. - Volley and Bayonet: I'm really enamored with these. They're quick playing, have plenty of rules for pickup games (i.e. would be good for a choose-your-own Nation kind of thing), and plays really easily at half scale using 40x20 bases. There's also a great blog with extra scenarios and musings on the system, it's what got me interested in it - https://volleyandbayonet.wordpress.com/category/seven-years-war/ Count Thrashula fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Aug 21, 2023 |
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Aug 21, 2023 16:42
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As I'm building out a Sharp Practice French Peninsular army, what are the must-have auxiliary bits? The wagons and such?
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Aug 21, 2023 18:12
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Beerdeer posted:As I'm building out a Sharp Practice French Peninsular army, what are the must-have auxiliary bits? The wagons and such? Imho nothing of the extras are must-haves. It’s not like CoC where the supports are a big part of your tactics. I’ve made wagons of various types, but mostly as objectives. I’d think of it more as a neat way to get to field something you like to paint up. The most impactful extra I’ve seen in action is the extra ammo cart on a heavy Russian cannon on the defence. Limitless canister volleys is a hell of a thing to try to get through. E: we like to field drummers and flags in all our units, but as ”freebies”. Because napoleonics is strange without them. So we play that anyone that is replacing a soldier is free and doesn’t have rules. If you buy them for points, they deploy next to the unit, and have the actual rules active. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Aug 21, 2023 |
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Aug 21, 2023 20:54
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Mule team is nice to have for each side imo
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Aug 21, 2023 21:03
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I'm pretty much done with the Persian converted heavy cavalry. They'll serve as Hearth Guard in my Saga army, and I wanted something with a bit more oomph than the stock kit from Victrix. They could represent hired steppe noblemen from tribes like the Saka or similar Scythian-related peoples, or the royal guard of a Persian king. I just need to put the sidearms on them, and those will be stock from the kit. A lot of work involved, just the horse armour has about 9 steps where the putty needs to cure inbetween. And yes, I just HAD to give their leader a more suitable beard for a Persian nobleman than those on the plastic heads.    They're not quite that poisonous green, I had to adjust the pics to make the details stand out. Shooting green stuff is hard!
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Aug 22, 2023 22:18
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Hell yeah that looks great. The armor over the riders legs is interesting, haven't seen it like that before
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Aug 22, 2023 22:22
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StashAugustine posted:Hell yeah that looks great. The armor over the riders legs is interesting, haven't seen it like that before Thanks! It's kind of a "proto-cataphract" thing, where you start to see heavy cavalry first putting scale male at the front of the horse, and then expanding it towards the sides, to cover the legs of the rider. Sometimes I've seen these plates in a more square shape, sometimes like wings. I went with a mix of both designs. I think that especially the wing design makes these stand apart visually from later cavalry like those of the Parthians.
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Aug 22, 2023 22:35
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Beerdeer posted:In Sharp Practice, is a Leader part of a unit or is he a separate model? Like the French Peninsular list has a Leader over a unit of 8 dragoons. Is that 9 models or 7 and a Sgt/Leader?
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Aug 22, 2023 22:51
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Here is my progress so far on my fictional seven years war army: I’ll hold off on the close-up photography until I’m a bit further along – I still need to put some flock on the bases and do some highlighting at least - but I’m very pleased with how it’s looking so far. I have some cuirassiers and artillery in the oven, and I think that I should probably sort me for an initial force? It’s about 13 units of two bases each. Given there is no requirement for the square in this era, I think I can get away with a smaller base count at least initially?
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Aug 23, 2023 08:54
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Southern Heel posted:Here is my progress so far on my fictional seven years war army: These look great! Can't wait to see them finished in all their glory.
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Aug 23, 2023 09:00
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 Really liking these minis a lot, for my chosen period they look so good ranked up. I just wish there were more available options for flags. Only a few really fit them well.
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Aug 23, 2023 13:21
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alg posted:
What minis are those? They have a lot of character.
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Aug 23, 2023 13:48
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Count Thrashula posted:What minis are those? They have a lot of character. Warlord Epic, these are the plastic Zouaves.
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Aug 23, 2023 13:57
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Progress!
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Aug 24, 2023 11:22
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I don't know if anyone from Germany reads this thread, but if so, I am wondering if anyone knows what wargaming was like in Germany from roughly 1960 through 1989? Historical board games and miniatures, did they get played? Were there games getting published in German language, either domestically or imported? I don't see any German language Avalon Hill releases from that time, for instance, but I could just be missing them. Was there much of a scene? Were there conventions? Were there zines? Did they just avoid WWII games? I am very familiar with what wargaming looked like in the USA during this period but have no clue how it went in Germany. The creator of Catan, Klaus Teuber, apparently had a war game about the Romans vs Carthaginians as the first game he ever played in 1963. Was this a thing Germans even did at the time? The country basically invented miniatures wargaming through Kriegspiel a hundred years prior, so what happened in post-war Germany?
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Aug 24, 2023 14:39
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nesbit37 posted:I don't know if anyone from Germany reads this thread, but if so, I am wondering if anyone knows what wargaming was like in Germany from roughly 1960 through 1989? Historical board games and miniatures, did they get played? Were there games getting published in German language, either domestically or imported? I don't see any German language Avalon Hill releases from that time, for instance, but I could just be missing them. Was there much of a scene? Were there conventions? Were there zines? Did they just avoid WWII games? Uhh. I can think of some reasons military stuff especially WW2 might have been unpopular for a while.
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Aug 24, 2023 23:08
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nesbit37 posted:I don't know if anyone from Germany reads this thread, but if so, I am wondering if anyone knows what wargaming was like in Germany from roughly 1960 through 1989? Historical board games and miniatures, did they get played? Were there games getting published in German language, either domestically or imported? I don't see any German language Avalon Hill releases from that time, for instance, but I could just be missing them. Was there much of a scene? Were there conventions? Were there zines? Did they just avoid WWII games? I would imagine there was a lot of difference between East and West Germany as well.
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