Here are the games that I’m working related to urban and the PhD, although not all will form part of my thesis.

My Postcard solo game on the weird events in Trieste right at the end of WW2.

See Trieste1945

Rubble Town takes the core mechanics from FestungStadt but presents them as a beer-and-pretzels, solo, card driven game to be played in about 20 minutes. It struck me that a lot of the learnings of CiH were in that main combat cycle as you pushed up a street, and that setting up a big game if that is all you're interested in (rather than the historic context) was probably a waste of time, so Rubble Town hopefully delivers that “quick hit” urban experience.

See RubbleTown for the rules and a print'n'play version and a simpler playable Powerpoint.

This is a generic urban rule set aimed at urban battles in WW2 and similar conflicts, with about a Bde force (but might flex up to Div and down to Bn) and 2 DOWN manoeuvre units. It is heavily informed Christmas in Hell v1.6, which is itself based on many of the mechanics from the Storm Over.. series. Solo/Asymm version being premiered at DSET and hopefully fill the other 3 modes (Sym vs Asym, Solo vs 2-player) during Winter 2023/24.

• Die Roller for Urban One and CiH

See Festung for more details.

This will be my first attempt at a generic modern urban ruleset again with a Bde force (but might flex up to Div and down to Bn) and 2 DOWN manoeuvre units. It will be a fairly “vanilla” set, and will probably use totally different combat mechanics to Urban One, and might spawn a number of more specialised sets, and there are also a number of completely different games I want to do looking at different aspects, but need to get this one “out of my system” so as to consolidate some initial thoughts. Aiming to present as a WIP at COW 2023.

See City & CEMA for more information.

John gave me about 2 months notice to get a game in for COW. Luckily I'd just ordered High Flying Dice Games “Christmas in Hell” about the Canadian Battle of Ortona. As you can read at http://newconverj.blogspot.com/2022/06/christmas-in-hell-aar.html I had some real issues with it but though that it captured rubble nicely, had a better solo model than some of the other games I've played (see urban_wargame_reviews) and was based on the well respected Storm over Arnhem model. So I rebuilt it (v1.5) as described in http://newconverj.blogspot.com/2022/07/christmas-in-hell-v15.html and ran it at COW. It took far too long, so I changed from an am/pm/ni turn model to a day-per-turn model, adjusted areas accordingly (roughly doubling the size) but otherwise minimal changes and then ran it again (v1.6) at Connections UK 2022 where I think it worked pretty well and I got good feedback from the players and Dstl spectator.

I'm now bringing the CiH v1.n “strand” of development to an end as it's High Flying Dice Games IP and I've moved far father from it than I thought (I was originally planning to run a v1.1 at COW, not a v1.5!), so I'm further evolving the Storm Over .. model into Festung.

Derived from Dropzone Commander but designed to be played over video conferencing with mobile phones on the table giving each player a troops-on-the-ground view of the combat only. See my write-up, images and videos at http://newconverj.blogspot.com/2023/02/vertical-urban-wargame-summary-report.html