Tea Leaves

I've been playing a lot of internet chess lately. This post is to organize my head and catalog some of the links that I've found useful.

Let's start with a list of decent places to play online (this list will be updated over time, as appropriate...please share additions in the comments if you know of any)

It was several years ago that I wrote about the unparalleled simplicity and depth of Nintendo's excellent series of Advance Wars games. While some may find the cartoonish look of the game off-putting, I honestly think it's one of the most enjoyable light tactical wargames I've played. Today I'd like to tell you about Mecho Wars, an iPhone game that tries to emulate Advance Wars and, mostly, succeeds.

I had some time to kill on an airplane yesterday, and I killed some of it playing Combat Mission: Touch. I wanted to share some of my first impressions of the game here. I've only tried the single-player thus far, multiplayer will have to wait until some of our fine readers get the game and inflict some humiliating defeats on me.

When I first saw the launch announcement (including the tutorial video) for Combat Mission Touch, my first inclination was to believe that it was yet another stupid April Fools' joke. But it seems to be real, as the above screenshot shows -- it's already on the Australian iTunes store.

"Wouldn't it be great if there were more wargames on the iPad?"

This is a question I've asked enough times that some of my friends are sick of hearing it. There have been a few nice little releases for the platform, many of them vaguely similar to Advance Wars, but nothing that really satisfies the hardcore wargamer. Until now. Slitherine and Matrix have released their excellent wargame Battle Academy for iPad.

Dear Tea Leaves Readers (all six of you):

Tea Leaves has been fairly static (and infrequently updated) for quite a while now. Truth to tell, we’ve grown a little bored of WordPress, so we plan to migrate tleaves.com, by the end of the upcoming weekend, to a new back-end, something we tend to do every few years when we feel like playing with technology for a bit instead of writing about it. This may cause some service interruption, and there will likely be some visual design changes as well. The existing articles will all be preserved at their present URLs. If you’re reading this on an RSS or newsfeed reader, check back in on the main page in about a week or so, just in case our RSS feed URLs change.

This article originally appeared at Tea Leaves in October of 2010.

Hardcore operational-level computer war games have a serious problem: most of them are unplayable.