Avalon Hill founder Charles Roberts passes away

Charles S. Roberts, Train line expert and founder of Avalon Hill games, died on August 20th. He is more well known for his writing about railroads than for his games, but the games are what I know.

In 1958, he founded Avalon Hill Co., a Baltimore game publishing company that specialized in war and other mental combat games such as "D-Day," "Stalingrad," "Battle of the Bulge," "Gettysburg" and "Victory in the Pacific."

See the full article at the Baltimore Sun:

Charles S. Roberts, train line expert, dies at 80

[Big Hat-Tip to Brant at Grog News]

Update: Christian has a much better article on Charles Roberts at Cinerati.

The Grinder (20/08/2010)

The Grinder has been a regular event at the some of the gaming conventions for quite a while now. At our local our Battletech group, we sometimes play this as a "pickup" game, using whatever sheets and resources are available, sort of a "Battletech Stew" we can cook up on short notice from leftovers of other games - and an easy alternative when our planned scenarios doesn't work out.

Photo Courtesy of Scrapyard Armory

My plan for another part in my Lanchester/Attrition Modelling series (1,2) is taking me a long time to prepare, but I've got a bunch of cool stuff I was saving for a "miscellaneous" post, which is a good alternative plan. I've been thinking about making such a post an occasional anyway. All I really need is to think up a good name it.

Think up, or maybe steal borrow. See where I'm headed with this yet?

Fair Dice, Unfair Dice, and Dice Rolling Machines

Today's rambling blog post started off with my searching for a material in reply to a post at My Little Soldier. Looking for one thing I stumbled across much more, and ... well ... here it comes ...

Fair Dice and more from the Mathematical Association of America. Be sure to read about Lou Zocchi's father's Believe-it-or-Not accomplishment.

Unfair Dice, also from the MAA. Notable because someone calculated the theoretical unfairness of dice that are unbalanced due to hollowed out pips. This would include most of the dice in my bag, since I prefer pips to numbers.

The Physics of Dice, this page has links to pictures of a dice-rolling machine custom built to test dice, and a bit more that might be interesting. This is what I was looking for in the first place!

And Finally ...



A bit more about this machine at Gizmodo
 and Boing Boing is better still.