Wargame

A House Divided is unquestionably my favorite game about the Slaveholder's Rebellion (better known to many as the American Civil War, and to Reb sympathizers as "The War Between the States," or in sad and extreme cases as "The War of Northern Aggression"). It deals with the entire war, barring minor actions in Texas, with a map whose four corners cover roughly New York, Kansas, Louisiana, and northern Florida. It's also playable in a few hours.

John Butterfield, with whom I shared an office for a time at SPI, has long since gone onto an impressive career as an interactive designer, but in the late 70s and early 80s, he designed a whole series of games for SPI, Victory Games, and West End Games. Among them was RAF, which we published when I was running all game development efforts for West End. He has greatly reworked and improved the game for this new edition from Decision Games.

Once upon a time, new subscribers to Strategy & Tactics magazine -- once the premier board wargaming journal -- received a free copy of Napoleon at Waterloo with their subscription. This was actually pretty generous, because NAW is a pretty good game. And it's also about as simple as board wargames get (still pretty complex by mass market boardgame standards), while serving as an excellent introduction to the core mechanics of the board wargame: combat strength and movement allowance, zones of control, the Combat Results Table, the Terrain Effects Chart.

1848 was a year of unrest across Europe. An uprising in Paris led to the abdication of Louis Philippe as king and the election of Louis Napoleon as president of the Second Republic; Sicily rose against the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; mass gatherings in Germany sought greater liberty and a united Germany; a civil war in Switzerland led to the federal canton system. And revolution in Hungary led to the establishment of a independent Hungarian republic -- which was suppressed by combined Austrian and Russian forces in the following year.

1848 is a traditional computer wargame (turn-based, hex grid) based on the Hungarian revolution; it's also free, because it was funded by the Hungarian Ministry of Education, and when released in Hungary (in 2005), more than 100,000 people downloaded it, in a nation of 10m. One wonders what most of them thought of it, since like most wargames, 1848 is not simple, nor something you can easily play without reading the manual.

There are no zones of control; instead, armies can be of arbitrary size, and combat is between armies in adjoining hexes. Regiments within each army are tracked, not only in terms of manpower but also morale, training, and supply level. Supply is strategically vital in the game; cities and towns generate supply points, which travel automatically to nearby units, and an army in an isolated pocket will quickly find its military effectiveness reduced.

Thus, the game succeeds in creating the feeling of mid-19th century military conflict: armies maneuvering to isolate others and hold and conquer territory, while meeting periodically in ferociously bloody pitched battles.

The basic issue you face as the Hungarians is that in mid-game, the Russians will intervene with 100,000 men, a truly overwhelming force. Your goal, therefore, is to eliminate the Austrian forces (and the Croats, who have risen up against the Hungarians) as quickly as possible, while recruiting vigorously, so you have at least a chance of facing down the inevitable Russian invasion.

(The Russians had no great love for the Austrians, but had no interest whatsoever in seeing a radical republic on their borders, and shared the common goal of European conservative governments of sustaining, in as much as possible, the monarchies restored at the end of the Napoleonic era.)

As a game, 1848's greatest flaw is muddiness of interface; military units are sometimes hard to distinguish over the terrain of the map, and while small text beneath each unit says something about its strength, the text is difficult to read. Consequently, you spend quite a lot of time just clicking about to see what you and your opponent have, and there's no equivalent of a "next unit" button to let you easily find units you've neglected to give orders to (or cities lacking recruiting orders).

The wargame was once a mainstay of the computer gaming industry, treated with the same respect by reviewers and gamers as other genres; today, it has retreated to a fringe, with a handful of companies continuing to develop and publish wargames. Because of the genre's complexity, it has always been, and will always be, a minority taste; yet the fact that the game media today pretty much ignores the field is a shame. 1848 is on an obscure topic, and far from the best example of the form; yet it's quite playable, and seems well researched. It also, of course, has the virtue of being free; and as such, should be of interest both to those interested in finding out more about this once-important, and still surviving, genre -- and to actual wargamers, of course.

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.

I'm a fan of strategic-level World War II games, and I've played any number, starting with the old World War II from SPI.

Like Strategic Command: European Theater, Commander - Europe at War uses a hex map, is turn-based, and is limited to the European theater. In general, I tend to think that hex-based wargames are humorous--we adopted hexes for boardgames because they provide a better tessellation of territory than a square grid, but computers are quite capable of calculating true distances trivially, so to my mind, the use of hexes in digital games has always been a technologically unnecessary homage to an earlier non-digital style. (Of course, one might say the same of provinces.)

BrikWars challenges you to take all the random Lego, Playskool, and other construction/little plastic toys you have around, and fight battles with them -- with a clever set of rules that encompasses the basic tropes of the hardcore miniatures game, but with an unusual "rules are made to be broken" slant.

Brass Hats is very much a game in the vein of Advance Wars or Military Madness. It's turn-based, you have your guys, you move them around, they attack other guys, they die, maybe you build some more, maybe you don't, and hopefully they kill all the bad guys. If there's something really witty left to be said about this subgenre of game, it ain't gonna be here and now.

What I love about this subgenre is the attention required from you is completely on-demand. Whatever other swarm of media devices you have ongoing in the background, your attention can shift seamlessly between them and this type of game, given its quick, turn-based nature. But games like this can be a little too simple when you have the brain cycles to spare. However, Brass Hats, with some small additions and adjustments to the overall formula, sharpens the strategy to a finely honed point.

Making History reminds me of the games from Paradox, most famously Europa Universalis. That's a bit of a paradox (hem hem), because Paradox has its own (excellent) WWII game, Hearts of Iron -- but HoI is very much a war game, and while military conflict is central to Making History, the war side of the game is much more abstracted, and at a more grand strategic level, and it pays much more attention to economics and diplomacy.

I haven't played a board wargame in some years, but there was a period in the 70s and 80s when I played virtually everything of importance in the field, and it's still a genre for which I have a high degree of empathy. While there are any number of games I remember fondly, and even a few I view as superb and worthy of study today (including Dunnigan's WWI and Chadwick's A House Divided), Zucker's Napoleon's Last Battles is a game I still think of almost sublime in its focus, concision, and all-around polish. It's also simple enough that I can suggest that, even if you never play another board wargame, you should play this one, to get a sense of what this particular genre is all about.