Smartphones and FoW

Last week the wife and I switched over to Verizon Wireless after being with our carrier for years. Our home happens to be in one of the old carrier's "bad areas" or "no coverage areas" and the wife finally had enough and demanded a switch. It didn't help the old carrier's cause because she hated their phone as well.

Now have each have Samsung Fascinate's (aka Galaxy). It's my first truly smartphone and the 4.3" screen is a big bonus for my eyes (along with the wife's) and I LOVE the touchscreen.

Back in May, WWPD did an article about the Ipad and wargamming (read it here).

It got me thinking about how to use the Fascinate for wargamming, especially when compiling After Action Reports. Would referencing the phone slow the game down? What about using a dice generator? How about looking up rules or army lists? Is the camera quick and easy to use?

Right off the bat, I'm going to import my Army Lists (along with their stats) into the phone. Now I don't have to dig and rummage through legal pads to find an army, nor into the sourcebooks to find stats.

Here's my MW 11th Panzer Division list viewed with the SheetToGo ap.


I downloaded the Adobe Acrobat ap and lo and behold, it's a RAM hog just, so I quickly deleted it. I thought I was screwed with PDF readers, but then I found that Samsung has Open Office ap already loaded and can read PDF's. Sweet! Here's the Soviet Intelligence Briefing cover page.


Inside the Soviet Intelligence Briefing. The Samsung phone has the "pinch" function, so you can zoom in and "draw back" with ease.


FOW's Quick Reference Guide. A must for any game.


Dice Generator


What a horrible roll! 10 dice and 3 hits versus Veterans in the open. I'm not sure I'll use this ap. I like the feel of rolling dice, especially when you pick up 30+ MG dice and wink at my buddy before I blow apart his dug-in infantry. =)

The ap only lets you roll 10 dice at a time, so that's not very useful for a player who has a Soviet Army. Besides, many people place dice next to the units hit during allocation and it's also useful to know which units need to make saves.

There's a Note Taker ap that allows a person to put notes on a photo, which is a very useful thing for creating AAR's. I'm sure there's more aps out there that can aid a game of FOW.

I need to learn how to multi-task on this phone, so I can quickly go from Army List to Quick Reference Guide to Intelligence Briefing and the Mission PDF's without slowing the game now.

As always, thanks for stopping by.