WEEK 22: BANG!

First, apologies for the delay; the last two weeks of June are killer for teachers.  Second, I've passed 5000 pageviews! Yay! 

And now, on with the B's!

BANG! is the only game I know which has cards in Italian with English subtitles. 

Of course, this meshes perfectly with its theme, which is the Spaghetti Western genre pioneered by Sergio Leone starting in 1964 with A Fistful of Dollars, which made a movie star out of Clint Eastwood (who up til that point had been known mainly as the studly wrangler Rowdy Yates on the TV western Rawhide (1959 - 1965). The movies were made in Spain on the cheap and made a splash with their long Zen-like silences punctuated by explicit and unabashed violence. Naturally, they spawned many imitators and spoofs. 

WEEK 21: AXIS & ALLIES: D-DAY

It is impossible to talk about Axis & Allies: D-Day (AA:DD hereinafter) without talking about Axis & Allies (A&A), its spiritual and thematic ancestor. By the time A&A had come out, in 1981, I was well and truly launched with wargames such as PanzerLeader and Third Reich, and so turned my nose up at what was obviously (to me, at the time) an attempt by Milton Bradley to cash in to the burgeoning wargame scene with a simplistic Risk clone that had toy tanks, for heavens' sake! I mean, I only ever played Risk once, fer chrissakes! (Even at 14, I was a game snob.)

WEEK 20: THE AWFUL GREEN THINGS FROM OUTER SPACE

I first met The Awful Green Things From Outer Space (AGT hereinafter) in the game review section of GAMES Magazine. As I've said before, GAMES is where I've discovered so many games over the last thirty years, from Ace of Aces to Evo to Settlers of Catan to Puerto Rico.

WEEK 19: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

Jules Verne was arguably the first modern s.f. writer, with books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (both of which have been made into games, if you pursue the links). The book this week's game is based on was more of a travelogue-thriller, but remains one of Verne's most popular.

WEEK 18: ARNHEM

Operation Market Garden was the most ambitious paradrop campaign of WWII. It inspired the 1977 movie A Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough and with a star-studded cast that included Denhom Elliot, Dirk Bogarde, and Sir Laurence Olivier. And because of its mixture of parachutes, gliders, tanks, engineers, and against-the-odds heroism, it's a favorite with wargamers as well.

WEEK 17: ARMORICA

I like good cheap games that can fit in your pocket. Armorica is such a game.

WEEK 16: THE ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

 

After last week's foray into Looney Labs' Aquarius, it's back to the battle-board with this 1977 Avalon Hill title, which I haven't played in--easily--twenty years.

Few parts of the world are more contentious than the Middle East, and few states are subject to as much scrutiny as Israel--although the recent Arab Spring has drawn the spotlight away somewhat, for the moment. There are two major narratives about Israel, one in which its establishment and existence is a heroic act, and another in which Israel is an agent of colonial (or post-colonial) imperialism and repression. I grew up attending a Hebrew parochial school submersed in the first narrative; I've spent the rest of my life negotiating the perilous ideological terrain between the two. I highly recommend the books 1967, by Tom Segev, and How Israel Lost, by Richard Ben Cramer, for their attempts to tease out the many complex strands in this conflict.