John S
Posts: 101
Joined: 9/5/2004 Status: offline
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When you ask about the differences between the BGACW and the BGNW series, I'll give a bit of background that might interest the "war game historians" in the crowd. Back about 1979, SPI published one of its early "monster games" - Terrible Swift Sword by Richard Berg. This three map, regiment based civil war game was truly ground breaking. The TSS units used a three hex frontage and the game had a lot of other truly memorable and new features for a civil war board game. About three years later, SPI came out with another "monster game" and what was, in my humble opinion, the greatest board game ever created (and I played board war games from 1960 through 1990) - Wellington's Victory. WV used a two hex frontage with two hex sides flanks and two hex rears. The cavalry rules, with charges and reaction charges, the introduction for the first time of skirmishers, the breakdown of some units into entire groups of skirmishers while other units could only release one strength point of skirmishers, these and many other concepts and rules were among the most inventive developments in war gaming at the time. Sadly, about two years later SPI went out of business at some point and other bad things happened with respect to the company and the business (though Strategy & Tactics is still going strong and is still the best historical resource of its kind in the business). Now, I am not trying to start a controversy here, but as a guy who was very familiar with both TSS and WV, I would say to you that when the BG games first came out in the 90's - BG Gettysburg and BG Waterloo - the resemblance in game play, rules, counters, (all the elements) to TSS and WV was, in my humble opinion, truly striking. I recall thinking when I first bought each of these computer games that the differences between the BGACW system and the BGNW approach had everything to do with the decision to use the best elements of TSS on the one hand and WV on the other hand, and the fact that each of them (TSS and WV) had had their origins with different developers using what were, at the time, entirely different and new game development concepts. This is not to take anything away from the BG developers except to say that when we are enjoying these two computer games, it is nice to recognize that, in my opinion, the most enjoyable parts of the games were originally the creations of some very skillful and imaginative board game developers more than 25 years ago and the differences between the two systems are, in large part, (again in my opinion) reflective of their different points of origin. By the way, I'll take credit for being the person who suggested to the guys who were in the process of developing BG Shiloh, that they give the attacker a "plus" for fire into the flank/rear of the defending unit!!!
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