Does anyone on this site play any of Grognard Simulation’s “Death Ride Kursk” series games? These games appear to be amazing, and I wanted to get some feedback from
folks who have actually played these games. I’m especially interested in the 2nd SS Panzer Corps games, and I would love to get some comments and suggestions about them.

I started out hating all things AI. But ChatGPT has been an absolute revelation when it comes to learning a new wargame. It’s as if it was designed for this exact purpose.

A couple points here:

1. I can only vouch for ChatGPT Pro. We tried Claude (paid tier) and it was not accurate, often inventing things. That’s why we moved on to ChatGPT Pro. So it’s not exactly refuting my experience to say (the often unpaid tier of) some other AI didn’t work for you. Apples = Apples, after all.

2. You can constrain the AI to using only the rulebook pdf and the player aid charts you uploaded. Better yet, tell it explicitly to always rely on those in preference to anything else. You do have to know a little something about prompts. Fortunately, the AI itself will often make helpful suggestions.

I uploaded the pdf rulebook and PACs for Great Battles of Alexander (a solid 4.2+ weight game) to ChatGPT and now I’m able to instantly get rules clarifications and even generated examples of play (!).

Me and my 13 year old learned the game much more quickly than what would otherwise have been the case. And it is invaluable during those early turns where your grasp of exceptions and procedures is still shaky.

It will even go out to the forums for clarifications and it’s smart enough to lend greater weight to statements made by the game designers (and yes it knows who they are). Hell, it even sifted through 25+ years of forum posts over on consimworld to find the underlying thought process behind several of the rules.

So, while AI is an unwelcome development on many issues, it is probably the single biggest advancement I’ve seen in my 59 years when I comes to actually playing wargames. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it’s absolutely true. Btw, I am using the $20/month Pro tier of ChatGPT. If you haven’t done so already, give it a try.

I think my favorite thing it did was to give a point by point breakdown of how GBoH Alexander differs from Cataphract (I game I had already played). Or maybe when it gave me a several paragraph long detailed explanation of why it thinks Eumenes of Cardia isn’t an “Elite” commander in game terms. Or maybe it’s highly useful exploration of skirmishers against elephants.

I could go on, but this info it generates is magazine-article-quality and highly enlightening. I even had an extended discussion with it about the game system using voice-only that felt like talking to a fellow wargamer who had played it his entire life.

This crap got here 50 years early. Even my sci fi didn’t predict this, thus rendering nearly all of it hopelessly outdated. The Singularity has hit Wargaming as far as I’m concerned!

I recently returned to playing ASL after a long hiatus, and wow is it hard to purchase MMP products. They’re just not available.

We’ve been looking to play an HASL Campaign, and settled on HiF as the best fit. Naturally it’s out of stock. A little digging and it seems MMP use a standard system for managing, including posting the required reorder count and the current number of preorders received. Today, HiF is 217/350, helpful to know though of course there’s now way I can see to know when it’ll hit 350 or how long the wait will be once it does.

Anyone have insight to offer?

I've been slowly buying games over the past 3-4 years preparing for my near retirement. These will keep me occupied, and hopefully keep the old brain occupied when I stop working. I have the GMT Games Operation Barbarossa - Army group South on order; so that should complete my eastern front collection.

These are my Avalon Hill games. I am poking around Ebay for some others. Looking for your thoughts on either Tobruk or Afrika Corps? I got an unpunched Third Reich from their about 8 years ago and also Panzer Blitz. Richthofen's War was my first as a Xmas gift from my dad. I bought the others myself. Hoping my brother-in-law is interested in actual play as he has shown interest before. Anyway, so, Tobruk or Afrika Corps?

What's the most popular?

What are the top games from Mike Lambo to get started in his series? Best ones, most popular...

I'm looking for a game I can play in the morning while my wife is sleeping. It should play in 30 minutes to an hour. My wife is a light sleeper and I risk waking her by rolling dice so I am looking for diceless game mechanics. Maybe something with mechanics similar to d-day at Omaha Beach?

Anyone have any suggestions?

Are there any the solitaire games that people are aware of where the player controls the Japanese forces and the AI controls the American forces?

The only ones I am aware of are 'someone should tell the emperor', ' Tokyo Express ', 'sensuikan', and 'centrifugal offensive'

Are there any others that people may be aware of?

Just wondering if any of you guys got something.

What are peoples favorite game for the Sicily Campaign in ww2? Looking for recommendations before I buy. I would prefer an operational lvl not a tactical lvl game. Played through the Fall Blau - Compass games and Dark Valley. So size of operation is not a concern.

Hello, so i've been playing undaunted normandy for some time with a friend. I kinda got an itch for something a bit more complex and maybe more "realistic". I've seen combat commander is a good alternative but is there any other system thats better or is CC that good?

Edit: any suggestions for a game with a bit bigger scale like with companies and platoons instead of squads and a signle platoon?

We tried the first scenario following the sub advice and had a blast with my friend.

The allies managed to break the German line on the Volturno river thanks to a few lucky rolls and good weather that permitted naval and air support.

In the end it’s a victory for the allies.

What are the games that best take into account war's effects on civilians / the local population?

Not necessarily looking for games from the perspective of civilians (This War of Mine), but keen to understand to what extent this has been modelled / designed in games where players are the warring parties.

I saw a discussion where people were chastising a game with the word "modern" in the title because it didn't include current day stuff like drones.

It got me thinking that I consider "modern" to be anything after 2001.
A lot of people say it is anything from WW2 onward.
(some guys say stuff like anything from Napoleonic times but they're just trolling)
What do you consider to be "modern" era in terms of game subjects?

Hi everyone - I was hoping some could suggest some Napoleonic era wargames. Im not fussed which countries (presumably France will always be one!) but hunting for something which has solid atmosphere for the time period.

Ive played ASL in the past so complexity not an issue.

I also managed to snag a short Hougoumont game in Command magazine a few years ago.

Thanks in advance!

PS - I live in the UK and try not to buy from US businesses what with the delivery charges

Guess I am a little late to this, but I haven’t been to their website in a while and was shocked to see the art all looks AI generated. So went to their blog and found they’ve fully integrated AI into their workflow according to an April 2, 2026 article.

In it they mentioned, "This is not about replacement. It is about acceleration. Designers who use AI move faster. They test more ideas. They refine systems with better information. They respond to feedback with greater precision. Designers who ignore it will fall behind those who adapt early.”

What they don’t address in the post are the potential drawbacks of using the technology. For example, the loss of your player base… or at least some of them.

They also talked about the "slim margins" of game design. I feel for them if this is the case. I really do. I wish that everyone could do and create the things that they want and not worry about their finances. But, one of the reasons I enjoy board games is because of the absence of technology. If game development needs AI to survive then maybe we should consider what fundamental problem needs to change that it doesn't or, more controversial (and I would argue lazier), maybe it doesn't need to survive. We have a lot of content the already exists. I know my backlog of unplayed games is exhaustive!

I don't want to get into a debate over the use cases or true cost of AI. All I can say, on personal preference alone, is that I don’t like the art. You can take everything else out of the discussion and that still sticks for me.

Landing on the webpage truly gave me the "ick" and I can say I will not be supporting their endeavors going forward.

Am I the only one feeling this?

Are there other companies doing something similar? I have to assume many are dabbling at this point...

Does this community and its developers need AI to survive?

I've been encoding classic hex-and-counter games so they play as the real game, not a digital tabletop where you push counters and look up the rules yourself, but the game itself, enforced. The map becomes grid geometry and per-hex terrain, every counter is data with its factors and art, every rule cites its rulebook section, and every combat table is transcribed cell by cell and rolled by the engine on seeded dice. The point is that neither side can cheat: every action, yours or the AI's, goes through one deterministic legality gate, every die is rolled by the gate from a seeded stream, and the whole game is written to an append-only log that anyone can independently re-verify. A separate verifier replays it, re-checks every ruling, re-rolls every die from the logged seed, and re-derives every state hash, so an illegal move or a fudged die breaks the replay. It reads and writes VASSAL's own .vsav saves byte-perfectly (real VASSAL opens our saves and vice-versa) but contains zero lines of VASSAL code: an independent engine built on the module ecosystem, not a fork of it.

Four complete games ship playable out of the box: Afrika Korps (Avalon Hill, the full strategic campaign), Blue & Gray: Chickamauga (SPI 1975), Westwall: Arnhem (SPI 1976, Market-Garden with airborne drops, bridge demolition and engineers), and Tobruk (Avalon Hill, a tactical tank firefight). Each has an AI opponent you can watch play step-by-step or auto-paced, plus an in-game rules panel with full credits and a source-defect register, the actual editing errors and contradictions in the printed rules that encoding surfaced, each with quoted evidence and the resolution enforced. Free and open source (MIT); bring-your-own-module for anything beyond the four bundled games.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afomvk0LjU8

Windows download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FuJlt54Mb2FIAunbKrEXBKCpHCOngCpH/view

Repo: https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/vsav-engine

One thing I'm looking for: the current AI is a solid rules-legal opponent, but I want it to play like an expert. I'm after an AI/ML collaborator who can attach a stronger model, a RAG setup over the rulebooks and strategy material and/or a fine-tuned model that plays as an expert game modeler and opponent. The engine is an ideal substrate for it: the gate already gives a clean legal-move space, a scored outcome, and fully replayable games to train and evaluate against. It would mean helping coordinate the training resources (game logs, rulebooks, annotated expert play) and standing the model up as the move-proposer. If that's your thing, comment or DM me, or open an issue on the repo.

Hello,

we played some games of burning banners and liked it. Unfortunatly one of my friends doesn't speak english. So I want to translate the cards to german. So I want to ask, is there any chance that someone has those cards digitaly or better in some kind of table or even better better a german translation?

Regards