ZOCO Historical Simulations Archive

The ZOCo Archive

1809
1950-2000 WRG
2nd Fleet
Across 5 Aprils
A5A 2nd Bull Run
ASL
1st Afghan War
Afghanistan
Afrika
Alesia
Ambush
Armee du Nord
Angola
Atilla the Hun
MBG Auctions
2001 Auction pics
S&T Austro-Prussian War
Axis & Allies
B17
Balkan Wars
Barbarians
Battle for North Africa
DBM
Blood & Iron (Pac Rim)
Blood on the Tigris
Bobby Lee
Borodino
Brother Against Brother
Brother Scenariosr
Blackbeard
Blue vs. Grey
Britain Stands Alone
Bunker Hill
Byzantium
Carrier
Central America
Charlemagne
Charlemagne Set Up Chart
Greenline Chechenya
Chinese Civil War
Civil War & War for the Union
Clontarf
Commands and Colors
Crimea
DBR
Denain
Dr Who CCG
Dragon Dice
White Eagle Onwards
When Eagles Fight
End of Empire
Europa Universalis
Europe AT WAR
Fall of Rome
A Famous Victory
Fatal Alliances
Flintloque
FlashPoint Golan
For The People
For The People New Cards
Franco Prussian War
Games Workshop Games
Geronimo
Gettysberg
Groo
Gulf Strike/ANKW
Give Me Liberty
Great Battles of Alex & SPQR
Great Battles downloads
Great War In Europe/Near East
Hannibal
Hell and Fateful Decisions
Hitler's War
Hornet Leader
Imperium Romanum II
Indo-Pakistan war
Ironclads
Ironsides
Kings War
Kolin
Korea 95
Korean War
Kreig
Lawrence of Arabia
Les Croisades
Like Lions They Fought
Lion of the North
Magazine games
MBT
Memoir '44
Mohawk
Mosby's Rangers
Moscow Burning
Napoleonic Wars
Napoleons Battles
No Better Place To Die
Nuts
Other Short Comments
Red Sun Red Star
Russo-Turkish War
On to Moscow
OAW II Scenarios
Paths of Glory
Patton's Best
No Pasaran!
Phalanx (soc of Ancients)
Pyramids translation
Pyramids
Raid on Richmond
RAF
Rise of the Luftfaffe
Risiorgmento
RoboRally
Rossiay 1917
Royalists & Roundheads
Runequest downloads
Sands of War
Raid on St. Nazaire
Sam Grant
SASL campaign
Sea Devils
Seven Years War In Europe
Silver Bayonet
Six Days of Glory
Shogun Cards
Simple SPQR
Space Hulk
Star Trek CCG
Strike North
Storing Minatures
Successors
Tac Air
Talisman
Thunderbolt Apache Leader
Thunder at Cassino
The '45
Up Front
Too Much for the Mahdi
Vittoria 1813
We The People
Wings
WW1 (SPI)
WW2/World In Flames
World in Flames Final
When Tigers Fight
Zeppelin

Historical Boardgames

Off we go here is the ZOCO boardgames and figure games archive together with a little chat from the author. ZOCO has been printed since the early 90's to a very limited readership and went up to issue 21 before leaving the print room and staying in web only format. The links at the left are all to ZOCO articles; they are not duplicated elsewhere. Most are reviews but there is the odd variant here and there plus 2 gamekits. I, by the way am Grayde Bowen, Cymro, currently exiled in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.

Latest news 10/3/07

Another year, another MBG auction. I have added a brief report below; it has also been added to the auction page.

Auction 2007

I used this year to clear some collecting space. Games were sent off if they were large and not especially collectable. I must have succeeded as I needed to use the car to get the goods to Romiley. It took 2 trips to fill the car with games. When I came back I still had quite a pile of bought items but I could get it out of the car and into the house in 1 trip. A typical sale of mine was Warhammer from 2 editions ago with numerous expansions. I was only selling the rules but could barely lift it. This went for a princely £1; it appears virtually unsaleable on eBay. Most common game appeared to be Russian Front. I resold my copy from last year at a loss having found several counters missing and having photo-shopped replacements. I propose an auction bingo. We will have bingo cards made up and sell them at 50p a pop. Prize will be £5 or more if enough cards are sold. Instead of numbers the cards will have game names. Russian Front, Omaha Beachead, Flight Leader, Air Force are all de rigeur. Some wild cards will fill up the cards such as any Bulge game or a GMT game published in the last year. You check off the card as games are auctioned and call house when you get a line. Tim Cockitt did a spreadsheet of selling totals for the 2007. It seems that there were 475 lots at an average price of £8.39. Reasonably desirable games went for about £18 a shot. Thankfully there seemed to be fewer Euro games this year and more real wargames. Nothing massively rare, a West Wall quad fetched £26. The GMT games Here I Stand and Pax Romana (2 copies of this) both breached £30. I like Here I Stand but am still holding out on Pax Romana. In a break with tradition I bought and have already played Combat Commander. This was a game that I would probably have bought anyway, honest hAndy Dagleish had mint copies and was offering a modest discount. Most of the games that I bought were of a type that should be playable without massive rules to digest. This does not completely explain why I bought DAK.

Gaming with toy soldiers

I have been building up and playing with miniatures. The DBM and DBR pages have been updated for the first time in a long while. Also there is a page on storing 15mms. Amazingly I have got around to heeding the requests about the reds files being stuffed and have replaced the zip folder with the map sections. The HTML pages may lack the images (or not) but they are now in the zip as well

The Commands and Colors (sic) series by Richard Borg is a lot of fun. For my sins I have painted figures for all 3 games although these rarely get used as I usually play other peoples sets. The Ancients game took more effort than I had bargained for. I have posted a page showing how I got on.There are also some Memoir '44 pics . I have since flogged the Memoir figs and replaced them all with much the same stuff in 15mm.

Gaming in the USA

I got back from Dixie (Beaufort SC) at the end of July 2003. Missing the 2003 auction was no great loss as the weather was significantly better in South Carolina and I still have quite a pile of unplayed games.

While in the South I bought a few emergency games from boulder games. There is a games shop in Savannah on Montgomery Cross Rd on the way to Wormsloe. I have dropped in 3 times, they have a fair selection of real games but these are not any cheaper than buying by mail. Their main bread and butter seems to be GW stuff. I have a separate site describing my experiences over here in Beaufort. take a look . Chez moi: Temporary yahoo address.

I have bought Piquet and am trying to figure it out. My copy has no cards so I made up the 2 sets; these are customised for the Articles of Faith Pike and Shot supplement. I have put these with the download stuff. One of the files is a Word document and the other a PDF as Acrobat could not handle the combinations in the more complex card deck.

Someone made up very nice ADC2 modules for my 2 DTP games before I went to the USA. As my copies were stuck on a computer on a different continent on a drive that was boxed up for safe keeping they have been out of circulation. I have dug up the files and posted them here. If the author gets in touch I will put his name up here.

I have interested a local couple in German games plus got the wife to play. This has allowed several sessions of Settlers and Puerto Rico. The drawback is that my middle daughter, Lucy, almost always wins. Puerto Rico is intriguing as there is no luck involved. I have yet to win a game, they are all out to get me. On a wargame front I have GMT’s Napoleonic Wars. I played it once using the bits but resorted to using cyberboard as there are a lot of bits to sort out. The family are not into that sort of thing so I have been soloing it now and again. With a stack of cards for each nation, neutral or in play I am finding it fiddly to track all the card play. Later I went back to setting up the bits again. I went to BROGfest in Charleston in April 2002. Not many there (about 15). I did get to meet Mr Berg and 5 of us amongst the rest played Napoleonic Wars. The brief review details our experiences.

The recent-ish games that I played in the UK.

Battle Cry gets played a lot as it is short and a good hybrid of miniatures and German games. My miniature armies have not been out of the boxes for years (except for those I have sold and the new boys that I have painted). We can set up and play Battle Cry in about half an hour. I get to check ranges and roll dice and the fluffy gamers get to pick cards. There must be an element of chance because I have only ever won once. On that occasion I managed to draw the all out attack card twice (unlikely but legal). I am usually thrashed even when we play again and swap sides. I now have 2 sets having picked up a 2nd on Ebay at a fair price. For my sins I have painted the bits and made extra lines of hexes to make both boards line up. The Italian game Vive L'Empereur has a similar system for Napoleonics. The rules are on line, We played this out with the Eagle Nappy figures. It all worked OK; slightly more complex than Battle Cry.

The Eagle games look great. I bought them all except Attack but have only played WAR and Civilisation against a live opponent. I left Civilisation in the USA because it is so big and heavy although I am tempted to buy a new copy. The ACW game plays well solitaire despite the armies not fitting too well on the map. I just had to buy the Napoleon game although I am away so it will stay in the attic. Set up it is stunning, you need long arms to reach across the map. The French have more plastic sprues (3 and 1 for an ally) than the others (2 for Austria or Russia, 1 for the others). Together with combat advantage cards that the French start with they are going to be hard to beat. The problem with the Eagle games is the sheer size. The Manchester club meets in a tiny pub, no chance of setting them out. They were most unhelpul when I brougt along Age of Mythology, "Evil Games" they said. I believe that these games have played them in Romiley (MBG). Not the sort of game that you can tuck under your arm in the hope of a quick session. We do not have this problem with Battle Cry as nearly everyone has a copy. No kidding here, we had a gaming session where there were 3 copies in the room and a fourth (my copy) a few hundred metres down the road. With the Napoleon Eagle game playing Battle Cry in the Napoleonic period should be a breeze (see above).

I bought Europe Engulfed for a quite reasonable £55 on eBay from the states; nearly half of this being the postage hike. It arrived safely and I have played the tournament scenario and the full campaign against the same opponent. Rules are pretty obvious ‘roll a 6’ stuff but we missed quite a few of the details. The tournament took a long afternoon and was about long enough. The full campaign was setting us back up to 4 hours a game year and took 3 sessions to complete. I will not be selling yet but am still to be convinced. The game seems tightly scripted; it pays to redo what happened in the war. I left out invading Norway as the boche and was penalised by the Allies taking it; I lost production from Sweden and saw vast resources shipped to Uncle Joe. Similarly it appeared that Crete was worth visiting; the Allies worked that out and beat me there making an assault just too risky. As a contrast I am playing someone else at Totaler Kreig. Here there are options as to who to ally with giving risks and tradeoffs. As this game has been sat idle for a while I tried to fast forward solo using another copy of the game. It took off in its own direction; although I tried to mimic the political ploys events happened that just could not be passed up. You don’t get this in Europe Engulfed; the feeling here is of commanding armies but someone up there decides where they ought to go. Perhaps the Europe Engulfed political rules could be fleshed out. The downside here is the time involved in playtesting the game variants.

MBG

The MBG or Manchester Board Gamers are what they seem. They meet twice a month in Romiley, which is South of Manchester, in the North of England. Their home is the Sea Scouts hut that looks as though it was thrown up to shelter bombed out refugees during the last war. It probably was. They hold an auction of games every year on the 1st Saturday of March although check that as it can change.

Game Assistance Programs

I have written 3 stand-alone programs that will work with Windows '95 or better. Two are battle card players for "We the People" and "Hannibal". Unless I get any feedback of problems I regard these as complete and will not be changing them. They are designed for solitaire play but could be handy for pbm/pbem. The sole player takes the part of the attacker and enters the number of cards drawn by each side. The attacker's cards are visible and can be picked at will. The defender's cards are hidden and will be played to match cards played by the attacker. There is a measure of AI as the defender will play his best card if he counter-attacks. Matches to this by the attacker are automatic. I have slipped in the pursuit tables so you don't have to root for the dice after battles. Ironclads is just finished and may be tidied up - all depending on feedback. The program writes ship and gun data to disk so a battle can be set up and played over without having to put in all the data again. Speed and movement plots are not covered but all the armour and damage results are calculated and recorded. As this requires use of the msflexgrid control it has a set up program to update the user's Windows registry. Due to the size of the program there is a basic set up zip file and the latest .exe version. To update to the latest version just replace the .exe file.Ironclads notes.

Gamekits

Hannibal GAP
We The People GAP
Ironclads GAP
Ironclads Update
Dervish Rules Part 1
Dervish Rules Part 2
Dervish Charts
Dervish Counters
Dervish map
Maps and Counters (zipped)
ADC2 Gameset

Reds Rules Part 1
Reds Rules Part 2
Reds Q & As
Reds Map
Reds Counters
Reds Tables
Reds Cards
A zip of the map images
Piquet Age of Faith ACR Cards
Piquet Age of Faith Sequence Deck

Feedback

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