Coming In December 2021: World War III Games Holiday Tournament

I wanted to step away from D+18 briefly to talk about my plan for the blog in December, 2021. I really enjoyed setting up and running the March Madness tournament for WWIII genre novels last spring. It was interesting to see how the relative newcomer titles stacked up against the classics of the genre like …

Titles On The Horizon: Regiments

Well, Labor Day has come and gone. The summer is over and it’s back to the real world soon enough. Admittedly, I have not paid much attention to what’s been happening on the wargame front in recent months.  I’ve started to get caught up on news in the wargaming community and it has come to …

Gaming World War III: The Future For NATO-WP Games Is Bright Part II

Specific wargame genres all reach a point in time where they run home to mama, so to speak. The classic titles of yesteryear are embraced by old heads like me who played those games as kids when they were relatively new titles. Nostalgia, coupled with a creativity shortage in the minds of some game designers, …

Gaming World War III: The Future For NATO-WP Games Is Bright Part I

A couple of weeks back I made an observation on Twitter that 30 years from now wargame companies will likely still be churning out new games based on a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict in Europe set in the 1980s. At present, we are a shade past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. New …

Gaming World War III: Building the Air War Part I

When I began laying the groundwork for the gaming phase of this WWIII project, I suspected modeling the air war in Central Europe would be a major league challenge. First and foremost because there was not a single tabletop game or computer game available that could accurately create an air war in the amount of …

Gaming World War III: Two Games I’m Dying to Review

In the next week I will be adding a pair of new titles to my World War III tabletop game collection. I hope to give the games an initial play-through by the end of October and write up individual reviews on them in early November. The theme of both titles is similar: a hypothetical NATO-Warsaw …

WW III Video Game Review: Conflict

The Nintendo Entertainment System owned the late 1980s hands down. From ’85 through to the end of 1990 the NES was king. If you were a kid during around this time you know what I’m talking about. Nintendo could do no wrong and kept belting out smash hits like Lawrence Taylor high on coke. They …

Gaming World War III: The War Comes Home Part II

Fortress America is not the only member of the Invasion USA game club. There are other games and they’re all pure wargames in the traditional sense. No corners cut in the game design. No over-simplification of the rules. No plastic, miniature figurines passed off as game pieces. The games I’ll talk about today are chock …

Gaming World War III: The War Comes Home Part I

The majority of wargames based on the premise of World War III are set in Cold War era Europe. This holds true for many of the games released between 1975 and 1991, as well as more contemporary examples. While there are certainly games that revolve around a US-Soviet or NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict set at another …

Researching World War III

I am no stranger to research. It has been part of my academic, and professional life in one form or another for over twenty years now (I’m 42). I’ve come to regard it as an essential evil. Previous to this blog, the greatest research effort I had ever embarked upon was for my doctoral dissertation. …