Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

– Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash

For a long, long time I wanted to make a grand scale WWII war game. I thought, I scribbled, I talked. I wrote up rules, made graphics, laid everything out. Everything was ready, except for one thing: the game.

Truth is I don’t have the time to playtest a grand scale war game. If an average scenario takes 8 hours, and an average campaign takes 50-100 hours, then work, family, friends and common sanity says STFU. There is not way that I can make a good grand scale WWII game. Not now. (more…)