New Version of Tattered Flags

This week I received a new version of the Tattered Flags (now renamed "Gettysburg: The Wheatfield") board/miniature game for playtesting. It seems to be a minor revision--just cleaning up the rules a bit. I want to get another game in this weekend. I hope it will be more than a solo game.

In Summary, I'll Summarize...

Over the last few weeks, I've been doing a number of game summaries, including the playtests for Tattered Flags, and Bitter Angels. What I try to do with summaries is to organize all the important game rules and list them in a compact bullet form. Having these summaries makes it easier to review and teach the mechanics of games, because you have all the important rules in one place so you won't forget little bits of things. I usually achieve about 4:1 compression, meaning that a game with 8 pages of rules will result in a summary of about 2 pages.

I've posted over 100 summaries for a wide variety of games from Euros, to board wargames, to miniatures rules. You can see a list of them on this BGG Geeklist:

Rules for 'Tattered Flags' Boardgame/Miniatures Hybrid

One of the biggest impediments to miniatures is the painting themselves. Victory Point Games is working on a new American Civil War game called Tattered Flags, a miniatures/boardgame hybrid. That is, there is a board with terrain, but there are no squares or hexes to regulate movement; units move in freeform mode just as they would on a miniatures table.

I just received version 0.1 of the rules this morning. The playtest kit should arrive sometime soon. Here's what the initial version looks like:



Currently, there's no page on BGG; VPG has a policy of creating pages only when the game is "ready", but you can read about the status on VPG's "That Was the Week that Was" column. According to VPG, there is going to be an in-depth preview published soon in Battles Magazine.