Sat down with Charles Sharp (seated and locked in concentration) and Frank Chadwick (no, that's Rich Hasenhauer in the red shirt--didn't get a photo of Frank, but this was a good photo of Charles) for a moment or two to look at Frank's latest brainstorm, a deck of geo-morphic terrain cards for campaign play based on ancient battles' actual terrain.

I can't remember all of the battles, but they include Gaugemela, Raphia, Marathon, and Issus. The cards have hills, rivers, and streams and fit together for the most part. You can get to a point where a flipped card doesn't match the existing configuration laid out on the table, in which case you discard and pick again. Charles was picking and playing and managed to get multiple cards that didn't fit the existing layout. Eventually, one turned up to complete the terrain. There are perhaps some adjustments to be made, but this clever idea beats rolling dice for random terrain.

I suggested that better commanders get additional card picks so that they can better pick the terrain suited for their army. In other words, you don't want a lot of hills if you have significant cavalry superiority. I also suggested cross-marketing it so that someone like a Geo-Hex would make 2' by 2' terrain squares to match Frank's cards, packaged by battle. The deck I saw was for eastern Ancients, but Frank is working on western ancients and more modern periods.

Origins 2001

Convention Introduction and Overview
Historical Boardgames
Historical Miniatures
Richard Borg's New Ancients Game
Frank Chadwick's New Campaign Idea
Artillery Evolution from Napoleon to American Civil War

Previous Origins

Origins 2000
Origins 1999
Origins 1998

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com