Tales & Tactics

In this episode of Tales & Tactics: Beyond the Book, we dig into how to start a new time period, setting, or subject in tabletop gaming, especially within miniature wargaming. We get into choosing models you actually enjoy working with, matching rules and scope to the kind of stories you want to tell. Managing time, money, space commitments, and reusing collections across multiple systems, all get explored. We range from Dark Age campaigns and WWII platoon games to RPGs, solo skirmish systems, and how to “tentpole” a local gaming community without burning yourself out.

In this week's episode of Rules as Written, we cover Close Quarters Battles: Waterloo from Lock 'n Load Publishing, a small-unit tactical wargame designed by Andrew Glenn that brings one of history's most investigated battles down to the ground level. Rather than placing players in the role of Wellington or Napoleon surveying the field from a command post, Close Quarters Battles zooms in on the desperate and ferocious fighting around the fortified farms of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont. We discuss how the game's elegant rules, presented with exceptional clarity and backed by top notch production values, manage to make Napoleonic small-unit tactics like formations, morale, fatigue, command and control feel accessible and authentically weighted.

In this week's episode of Beyond the Book, we dig into the nasty bits: why a villain has to be genuinely vile before stopping them means anything, why a setting needs real shadows before it feels like a real place, how much ugliness a game can carry before the fun gives out, and why playing the monster at the table doesn't make you one away from it. Along the way we try to draw the line between darkness that gives a story its weight and darkness that's only there to shock. Because the uncomfortable truth is that the games we love are only as good as the things in them we hate.

In this week's episode of Rules as Written, we dig into Fairy Meat. In 2000, the publishers of Knights of the Dinner Table put out a wargame about fairies, the cute, glittery, storybook kind, with one twist: they've all become cannibals. The miniatures are life size, the battlefield is your kitchen table, a forest preserve, or the food court at the mall, and every battle runs on an ordinary deck of playing cards. It sounds like a joke, So why does it play like somebody meant it? How a deck of poker cards replaces every die, why fairies eat their fallen friends mid battle and what it does for them, and the rulebook that lists a fictional character as its co-creator. Come for the butterfly winged butchery, stay for the sneaky clever game hiding under the glitter and gore.

In this episode of Tales & Tactics Beyond the Book, we tackle a question that sits at the heart of every hobbyist’s collection. What actually ages a game? We explore whether it is the mechanics themselves that date a design, as newer systems offer more refined or efficient solutions to the same problems, or whether a game’s age is better measured by the moment its developer withdraws support, leaving rules questions unanswered and supplements unpublished. We also examine the powerful role a dedicated community plays in keeping a game alive long past any commercial lifespan, through house rules, fan supplements, active forums, and sheer collective enthusiasm. As games like Crossfire demonstrate, a design can remain vital decades after publication with no second edition in sight. Ultimately, we land on the conclusion that age in tabletop gaming is not an objective condition but a deeply personal one and whether a game has aged out is a question only you, the player, can answer for yourself.