Gaming News: Awesome-ness!

One of the all-time Ameritrash classics is finally getting a much needed re-print: Fortress America. Fantasy Flight Games is bringing back this 1986 Milton Bradley masterpiece, the Mona Lisa of that company's Game Master's Series that included the exhaustive Samurai Swords and the iconic Axis & Allies. I owned this title as a teenager, once upon a time, and wasted spent innumerable hours with friends on epic struggles as weekend benders. Sadly, I have no clue where that copy is now - but I know I did not sell or give it away. FFG promises that the finished re-print will be true to the original with some minor tweaks and optional rules - sort of like an expansion, I suppose. Their stated goal for including the add-on module is to update the game for the modern generation. Which begs a curious question: how will that generation receive it today?

You see, Fortress America pits one player as the United States trying to fend off three others who are invading the nation in a three-front war: West, South, and East. Apparently it's true that Canada never really took that whole War of 1812 thing personally. For me and my generation, the game is very much steeped in a Cold War psyche. It was published before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and two years after John Milius' hokey, teen world war three flick had all of us adolescent boys crying, "Wolverines!" While much has been discussed (and I think over-blown) about the political propaganda of Red Dawn, that movie and the game Fortress America which looks and sounds like it, no doubt tapped into the psychological impact of the era and played upon the tension of its global, political narrative. For my kids, and others whose birthdays post-date 1989, the game would resonate completely different. For them, the Fortress America re-print will just prove merely an awesome and epic dudes-on-a-map game. For the ones like me, it will resurrect memories of an awesome and epic dudes-on-a-map game that intricately intertwined with a worldview that remains only in history books.


The NRA whooping commie butt?  Sign. Me. Up.