Israeli Independence

The Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49 is called the "war of independence" (from the British) by the Israelis -- and the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" by the Palestinians. Israeli Independence is, however, a single-player board wargame by Darin A. Leviloff in which, as the Israelis, you must attempt to fight off the converging armies of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon and achieve the Jewish Homeland.

This almost immediately raises a bit of moral discomfort; the designer's sympathies are clearly with the Israeli proto-state, and the fact that it is a single-player game inherently aligns the sole player with one side. I am not anti-Israeli, but obviously there are two sides to the story.

Yet in a sense, a great many wargames pose an equivalent level of moral discomfort; in a game on the Eastern Front, playing as the Nazis, you are attempting to establish win a victory for a wholly repugnant regime (and as the Soviets, an almost as repugnant one). And we won't even talk about playing a Civil War game against a Southern player who actually sympathizes with the role he plays.

Leave that aside; wargames do not require their players to take moral positions, nor should they. They are simulations of conflicts, and as such, quite as capable of casting light on history as, say, written works. What of the game itself?

Israeli Independence is interesting because of simplicity of its system. The publishers, Victory Point Games, in fact couch it as a good introductory game for players new to wargaming, and to some degree it is. At their extreme, board wargames are the most complicated simulations ever offered in a commercial market; Israeli Independence has two pages of rules, and can be played in ten minutes or less. To this degree, it is well designed.

It's also, unfortunately, little more than a die-rolling exercise. Each of the four attacking armies begins in a box 4 spaces away from West Jerusalem; if any enters it, the game ends. Cards are shuffled, and dealt one at a time; each card has some effect on the Arab armies -- typically, one or more advance a space, although other effects can occur, including the elimination of one of the Arab states from the conflict if its army is currently in its 4 box. In addition, the card allows the player to perform from zero to three "counterattacks;" to make a counterattack, you choose one of the Arab armies, and roll the die. If you roll higher than the army's strength (2 for Lebanon, 4 for Jordan, 3 for the others), it retreats a box. If the deck is exhausted before the Arabs win, you win.

That's it. The only element of strategy for the player is choosing which Arab army to attack. The actual game result is almost wholly dependent on the order in which cards appear, and the player's luck with the dice.

The one redeeming feature here is that each card represents some event that did occur in the war, and provides some text that will teach you something about it.

Now -- in general, the board wargame tends to prize simulation value over all, very much in contrast to the Eurogame aesthetic, which prizes strategic thinking. Yet in this game, strategic thinking has been compressed to the minimus, and simulation value lies mainly in card text; giving Jordan, with its British trained army, a higher value, and Lebanon, which barely participated in the conflict, a lower one, is about the only nod to simulating much of anything.

To be sure, designing a solo-play wargame is not an easy task, and many others (B-17: Queen of the Skies and, to a lesser degree, Butterfield's RAF) are also essentially die-rolling exercises; digital games can have complicated AIs, but analog ones must have relatively simple resolution systems. Still, Ambush -- and even, I would suggest, the unfairly-maligned Fall of Rome -- show that hidden information, in the first case, and semi-stochastic systems in the second, can get you beyond mere chance.

In short, Israeli Independence may adequately serve its purpose as an introduction to board wargaming; and it succeeds in what appears to be its main design objective: providing an accessible simulation of the 1948-49 war that gives a sense of the overwhelming obstacles faced by the nascent Israeli state. And yet, it is sadly deficient, both from a boardgame design aesthetic, and as a simulation.