Barnes on Games- Secret Weapons of the Third Reich in Review

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Nice review, sounds interesting.

Mmm, I'm struggling through Origins: How We Became Human at the moment. My God, the rules are really badly presented. It's really hard to get to the actual game through the obscure ruleset and presentation.

I'm hoping the recently completed Kickstarter for High Frontier comes with a totally revamped and understandable rulebook (I'm told it does).
I'm not frightened of extensive rules (I'm an ASL player for God's sake) but this is ridiculous.

^I've vacillated on just selling my copy of Origins. It's a really off the wall take on a civ game, but the rules are brutal and who would I play it with?

It's worth like 400 dollars on the secondary market.

Origins is really, really interesting...but man, it is Eklund at his WORST in terms of presenting and explaining information. $400? If I still had it, I would sell it in a hot minute. I've always wished that he would do a second edition of it with some major usability updates.

He did, there's an expansion to Era IV with rules clarifications.

Of course, this is Eklund we are talking about, where clarification means something different to him.

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Many thanks Michael, happy to find today your kind review, great!

"It’s a fairly complicated worker placement game"

Ok, not that it matters to me, but weren't a lot of those workers slaves?

I say this as someone who spent two years in Qatar, also known for their institutional slavery.

Q: What if Phil Eklund made games.

A: Lumenaris.

Leaving Earth is awesome, and entirely playable in a way that High Frontier isn't...quite. More after I try the rest of their stuff.

Played this last week and agree on the whole. There seems to be an interesting game hidden beneath a badly written ruleset. I spent quite a lot of time going through the rules before I dared to bring it to the table and I still missed essential bits tucked away in paragraphs. Which is a shame because the theme is awesome and some of the elements included, like Himmler's pet projects, really speak to the theme. Although I have a better grasp of the game now after filling in the gaps by rereading the rules after playing, I;m not sure I can get the players to play it again.

If you want a similar theme but smoother execution, think Manhattan Project.

CranBerries wrote: "It’s a fairly complicated worker placement game"

Ok, not that it matters to me, but weren't a lot of those workers slaves?

I say this as someone who spent two years in Qatar, also known for their institutional slavery.

Yes, part of those workers would be slaves, POWs (like my grandfather), Jewish inmates of concentration camps and semi-voluntary foreign labourers (Arbeitsdienst)

Read Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction