I really wish you weren't using "thrust" when you mean "vector," and then also using "thrust" to mean "thrust." It's really grating and I'm sure that it makes it harder for people who don't already know the system to understand it.

Model-6 computers are insane on ships this tiny (assuming that I heard you correctly).

Missiles have 5G thrust, but are limited to how many times they can thrust.

Surprised there's not more synergy between striking no helmet (2-in-6) and the pummelling rules. 🤔

Warhammer just wrecks IGOUGO and makes it tedious. Other wargames, particularly Osprey’s “Rampant” series, as you’ve explained just does it better. In “the Pikeman’s Lament” you can take regimental gun that can tear into a unit… but it only activates on an 8+. Woe to the over-eager commander who tries to activate that gun first before all his other units and rolls 7 or less. End of turn.

This video is a triumph. Off to get me a copy. I owned 2rd edition AD&D as a kid, but never played it. Now I want a copy of the OG game, it looks like a better Mighty Empires the way you explain it.

The list grows... -D&D is a wargame... -Because it is actually a chainmail supplement... -chainmail is a streamline of tony baths medieval rules leading into his hyboria campaign... Blackmoor was a more tolkienized fantasy supplement for chainmail. D&D was a more pulp fiction supplement for chainmail. Fascinating stuff. I look forward to seeing the collective understanding in another 6 months.

Most of the games you mention have mechanics built into try and overcome the limitations of IGOUGO. Take Xenos Rampant, there you have a lot of units with abilities like Firefight that involve you during your opponent’s turn. This isn’t just involvement by making saving throws, it’s an opportunity to inflict casualties on the enemy and disrupt their plans during their turn, a sort of interrupt or reaction -lite mechanic. Haven’t played 40K since 3rd edition, but from what I recall, your only opportunity to intervene during an enemy turn was to put your units onto overwatch, then to snap fire at an enemy unit during their move. This has to be planned for in advance and meant you couldn’t do much in your previous turn. As you say, many of these games could be IGOUGO depending on the draw of counters/cards or success rolls, but in practice they are generally fairly mixed and there is always that edge of unpredictability that keeps you hoping, rather than a pure IGOUGO where you know that next turn, your enemy will move ALL those units against you with very little you can do to prevent it.

Really useful illustration of 2x2 which I am looking at using with a few additions and changes re Command and Control plus using a solo mechanism

For me, and I’ll say it again for this video, it’s all about Chit/Token/dice draw. - Blind turn based keeps players engaged. The flow of the game is in a state of flux and you need to be constantly engaged even if it isn’t your active turn. - Bring alive the chaos of battle. It can be difficult to lead in battle for various reasons. Blind pull for turns emulates that very well. - Blind pull is great for solo play where you play each side to the best of your ability. It is far more interesting as it adds a layer of tension and decision making when it is just yourself. - For the same reason as solo play. Tension of who will go next based on the pull. Weighing the pros and cons of pushing all in or holding back for defense increases with the tension of battle flow. So many good reasons for chit pull and very few not to play this style of determining turns. My friends and I will implement it whenever possible. For solo play… it’s a must for me. I’ll always switch to chit draw turns. Far more fun solo.

Written orders are superior to both. Sticking to this.

Instant 5e shade thrown😂

I don't think the argument is whether people LIKE "I go, you go," but rather there are MUCH BETTER OPTIONS

😃👍! House Rule if one side doesn't get to move any troops for three consecutive turns, they get a freebie move of one unit. Hopefully they're bad luck breaks by then or otherwise you can give them one free unit move every two to three turns if they have zero units activate

A bit of push back: The issue with IGOUGO isn't just about players waiting between turns. It's about how much the first player can change the game state before the second player gets a chance to react. This becomes a bigger problem if there are a lot of units per side, or if the turns represent relatively long-ish units of time. It also allows a higher degree of coordination between units, which may not always be desirable.

Hi Jon, just to add your insightful comment at the start. I don't care about activation it's the downtime I can't stand. So if it's IGOUGO then I look for the counterbalance to keep me interested. All the systems below are IGOUGO but with counterbalances Song of blades engine, you covered 7TV you have a number of activation points that you can use to allocate activations to. You can save activation points and make multiple activations, but you gain activation points at the end of each turn. It's unlikely every model moves but it still can have downtime. Void Admiral - It's IGOUGO but at unit size level (small to large) and there are 4 (maybe 5 if you count swarming units) unit sizes. So unless you or your opponent takes units in one size specification it feels like alternate activation. Quar Ryffles - you get 3 activation points each turn but it could be 4 or 5 but you only know it's 4 once you've completed the 3rd and likewise you only know if you've got a 5th activation after you've made the 4th. Again small number of activations keeps it similar to alternate activations One hour skirmish with the variable number of activations based on a card draw and the instant turn end on revealing a joker. Pikemans lament is similar to Song of Blades except that each unit has to pass a "morale" check to activate. On a failed check your turn ends. GW Blood Bowl has skill checks for some actions, again failure means turnover but because it is almost like melee, you are involved a lot of the time via opposed rolls. Personally I find the whole game too slow but a smaller scale spinoff Blood Bowl 7s uses a smaller pitch and smaller model count and can absolutely wizz by. Port Royal (currently on KS by Firelock Games) each model activation may cause a reaction but there aren't any real gameplay videos. Mantic's Armada generates unit initiatve order via game state - Wind blows from 8 points on a compass (N,NE,E,SE,S,SW,W,NW) and is it sweeps across the board, you move when it hits your model. Positioning becomes important for shooting (broadsides) but also activation (catching the wind) Modiphius have done a emailshot recently on Five Parsecs [IGOIGO (loved that)] about a new game mode Five Parsecs: Tactics which looks to use bigger unit sizes (ie not individuals) and competitive (1 on 1). I'd be interested to see what the activation mechanics look like for that. So upshot for me, is how to keep people "in the room" rather than them being distracted by social media because they are bored. Years ago, not an issue, now with wifi and smartphones it's very much how to keep people in the moment. Have fun and a great weekend.

I'm only partially sympathetic to the complaints about waiting. One should not be looking at one's phone but using that time to come up with proper responses. Turn order considerations for me should be tied more to scale of the system both in space and time. In general short time scale (usually short distance scales too) are more amenable to activation systems or any system where opponents are in a more reactionary mode. Large timescales less so. But, also the nature of the armies/conflict. I go you go may be quite appropriate for Napoleonics where everyone is marching in discrete lines and protecting one another's flanks. But even then some sort of limited activation system might be included to account for those critical times (which happen) when a unit or two fails to move out and leaves their neighbors flanks wide open. These sorts of considerations are more important than player attention span. Players, get better.

Playing the Civil War rules Regimental Fire and Fury and the Napoleonic rules General D’Armee 2 makes the whole side activation more balanced. In both rules there are opportunities for defensive fire and counter charges by the inactive player. Each game turn in those systems also has an initiative roll to see who will be active for the first player turn, so its not fixed at the start of the game. The Baroque rules for Renaissance have a similar system and more opportunities for reaction moves. These small features remedy a lot of the issues with whole side activation

Where in the dmg does the rule for wolverine fur sit? Cheers.

I think my favorite part is where you discuss how people can explore RPGs on their own terms. Seems a lot of people do not realize that when you buy the rules the game is yours to do with as you please. There is no right or wrong.

The Bolt Action/Beyond the Gates of Antares dice-pull system brought be back to wargaming. After playing nothing but GW IGOUGO and getting brutally tabled over and over again to the point of quitting wargaming, the Warlord Games' dice-pull mechanic was so refreshing. I think the dice-pull combined with some kind of possible reactions is my favorite way to play. PAX

I really like your deep dive into this aspect of OPR! However, I think it is a bit of a strawman to say, "No one is talking about this." Especially when every content creator I've seen talk about OPR mentions it. Now you make excellent points that may not come up, and you definitely expanded on the strategy of AA and even gave a mention to Objective locations and deployment. Good discussion though!

We already have isakai in English: fish out of water.

I remember the cool Blackmoor video!

Imagine if the game that Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were playing together never reached our hands? During that time, People were publishing work using typewriters. Dave Arneson did not know how to type on a typewriter, let alone create a decent layout for the material. Without having Gygax as a primary contributor, this game might have never left the cutting room floor. Without Gygax, we might have had to wait for Griff Morgan to bring the game to us 50 years later.

I'll probably get slammed for asking but why can't the game be both a Wargame and an RPG regardless of its origin? As you have shown, it can be used to work a 4x campaign (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) with elements of role-play and it can also be used for a straight-up RPG (i.e. A DM running a group through a single or multi-adventure campaign). Calling out different groups because they enjoy a different way of playing the game seems as divisive (well, not as divisive) as those who try to shoe-horn the game into the specific (and problematic) narratives that plague the game world today. Thanks for the review! Looks like a great book.

I wish someone made a video about the Egg of Coot. It sounds intriguing.

Dave Arneson is definitely not "the" guy who invented RPG's. It seems clear from the various histories that RPG's existed in various forms before Dave or Gary started playing.

Thank you so much for the flip thru. I don't mind you going backwards and forwards. I am now going to put this on my wishlist.

Thanks for doing the Review brother. The EGG of Coot theory should now be circulated.

Nice, I was gonna buy this when it was released

I'm a simple man, I see a Blackmoor video and I click (no joke, I didn't catch this was a Joy of Wargaming video to a split second I clicked on it). As much shit as I give D&D (at lest modern D&D, OD&D played with the way it was meant as a expansion to Chainmail is a very different, and better, beast), Blackmoor has always been more my style. It's actually a very different game then D&D, your HP pool didn't go up but you would reroll your HP before battles (representing the fact that some days we're not at our peak while other days we're just unstoppable), armor class was an armor save, your ability to dodge and avoid damage went up with levels not HP, it was 2d6 roll under and had skills and so on. And it was more science fantasy (one of the characters found a suit of power armor and a cyborg horse and there were laser and particle beam L shaped "staffs" that if you read their descriptions were clearly rifles... so for me, it's a yes please!) mike with some Hammer Horror vibs, so much more up my ally (I'm a Vampire Hunter D fan and that's the vib I get from the setting). So yeah, I do not mind if you dive more into this topic. As for who did what, I think it's safe to give Anderson the credit on inventing the concept of table top RPGs. Yeah, it was an organic evolution of what came before hand but if we go down the kinda-sorta route then nobody invented anything. Sure, there were things kinda sorta like a smart phone as far back as the 90's but if you actually look into them... they were only smartphone like in the most abstract sense of the term. It wasn't until Steve Jobs rolled out the Iphone did someone had the foresight to get all the elements to gel. He didn't whole cloth invent every feature, but that doesn't matter. No one before figured how to get them all into one package and to work in a way anyone can us. Same thing with Blackmoor. Everything in it came from ideas that were in common use in one way or another. It just took his genius to gel them all together into something that worked. That's how thing re made int he real world, that's how realy people get shit done. They don't hand forgue every part and only pull from their own head. That's stupid. They look at what works and go, "How do I make it better." and if they don't have the skill to build it, the find the right person to. So yeah, I think it's safe to give Dave this crown. Now for D&D.... that I'm going to give to Gary. Yeah, Dave inspried him and helped out with it but as I explained above, they are very different games. After Dave showed Gary Blackmoor, Gary ran his own version of it called Greyhawk which used the basic idea but ran with it's own rules based off off what Gary liked. So Grayhawk had as much to do with Blackmoor in terms of rules and feel as much as D&D and, say, Rolemaster have to do with each other. They're both RPG's and that's it. Of course D&D also wasn't 100% Greyhawk but Gary taking his and Dave's (but mostly his) ideas and trying to make something would make sense to people who weren't mad lad game developing geniuses. Just my take away on the topic.

The first Wizard was played by a fellow named Gaylord? Some things can only happen one way. It's fated.

Very nice. Always. Very informative your videos. I spent the morning kit bashing some old figures that had missing weapons from their hands...fun. 1st time

just ordered it, $30 uk postage well worth it!

I think you misread that helmet paragraph. Wearing a "great helm" with the associated weight and vision restriction gives the head an AC of 1, else it is assumed the armor the character is wearing has "an appropriate type of head armoring", thus the head is equal to your armor's AC (possibly without the shield bonus?). If you are for some reason specifically helmetless then the head is AC 10. But the point you were making about abstraction still stands

This is awesome Thank you for showing how Gary does it! Wise man

Mr. Wargaming, great video as always. Off topic question, I remember you recommending a channel that was using the Solo Wargaming Guide to play an ancients campaign, but can't remember what channel that is, do you? I've tried checking the video descriptions from your solo campaigns to no avail. Thanks and keep up the great work!

"EGG of Coot" was a shot at Greg Scott. Has nothing to do with Gygax. This is well documented. Scott had mocked fantasy gamers in some 'zines. Thanks for sharing this. Now I wants it.

Cool!

Mind blown 🤯 Looks like my DM'ing is about to get a lot more interesting!

Loving this series! I'm sure I won't get all the way through but I'm a new solo player and think ad&d would work great. Love how you highlight the quirkiness and genius of Gary Gygax. Yes, OSRIC is better organized, so probably better for DM reference. But you can't beat going back to the source. So inspiring!

Thank you again for covering my games!

I really enjoyed this video, and it inspired me to try a totally different and more 'sound stage' type of set up for my most recent video. Thanks for sharing this!

Again, two years late, but I thank you for covering this. Because I am a nutter and love supers, I also wrote Super Mission Force and Super Skirmish Gaming, both systems trade a bit of detail for smoother, faster play. Also, Crossover Miniatures make excellent super figures in 28mm! Thanks, again!

Sorry it took me two years to see this! Can I send you a copy of my latest solo / co-op skirmish game? It’s 2D Delves, a revisitation of Goalsystem Delves with a Traveler-like resolution mechanic and heavy procedural elements. Love your channel! Thanks!

You should add your video to Boardgamegeek.

May I please know where you got that spaceship?

D&D is so much more interesting as a wargame tbh

*Looks over my shelf* Let's see, The Fantasy Trip, GURPS, Traveller (The new Era outside of Snap Shot), Cyberpunk, Bubblegum Crisis, Big Eyes Small Mouth (which was a gift, GURPS makes it pointless), and Battletech. Not a single inch of D&D and proud to be.