Reply To: Sitrep Podcast: Historical Gaming (and Register for Upcoming Gaming Event)!

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Okay, time to get to some more responses.  😀

@grimwolfuk – Ultracombat is definitely on my interest list.  Skirmish Sangin, Spectre, and Plausible Deniability aren’t quite in my wheel house because I prefer battles to skirmishes, but I’m hoping that Ultracombat takes the basic Radio DishDash concept and ratchets it up one echelon level to platoon+, as you say.  Definitely more of “my jam,” so to speak, taking that ASL / Valor & Victory scope and converting to miniature combat.

@flatbattery – Thanks, and I agree.  One criticism that’s often leveled at hex & counter (or really any non-miniature wargame) is that it’s too abstract or not as immersive because you have to imagine or visualize what’s going on, where as a miniature game “shows” you.

Wow, I couldn’t possibly disagree more.

The degree to which almost any miniature table is “lying” to you staggers the imagination of anyone who’s ever actually been on a battlefield or knows how combat works (even if only in an academic sense).  I look at virtually any miniature table and have to close one eye and cock my head and imagine … “yeah, that’s wrong … but I can sort of see what they were going for here …”

The three exceptions to this:

1) Teams / Clubs who build absolutely massive tables like the one @piers featured earlier, or people who set up 20-foot tables at 10mm, 6mm, or 3mm.

2) People who stick strictly to infantry skirmish games with 5-10 shooters on a side, where small arms fire tends to be murderously short (even this depends on the table – urban environment is usually a good choice).

3) Miniature wargames that focus more on settings where melee combat is the norm, or at the most – black powder weapons.  Here, the engagement ranges collapse to such a short distance that most of these grievances do not apply. 😀

Conversely, a non-miniature wargame (of which hex & counters are admittedly only ONE selection, there are lots of others) – by dispensing with miniatures, frees itself of the “ball and chain” of limited scale, practical tables, etc.  You can make your tactical wargame table 10,000 miles across if you want (as you have to do in, say … Darkstar) or 3-6 kilometers (as you do in say, Panzer Leader / The Arab-Israeli Wars).

You can look at the board, and because you know how the game works, you instantly “see”  what’s really going on, in the proper scales, ranges, proportions, and geometries.  The way a real commander does (who uses an “abstract” map, by the way, they don’t stand on the battlefield with binoculars and point 😀 ).   The board isn’t lying to you.  Immersion is not broken by tanks shooting at each other at 20 paces, parked bumper to bumper, or infantry having virtually the same engagement ranges (200 meters) as MBTs (4000 meters) or artillery 30,000 meters).

Battles that are typically portrayed miniatures cannot be immersive in my opinion because the table fails to explain or excuse how that battle is taking place at all.  By rights almost everything on, say a FoW table or BA table … should be dead 20 tables away.   This causes different arms to have improper interrelationships (e.g., when can infantry engage tanks and how), which causes tactics that would work in real combat not to work, and vice-versa (tactics that do not work to suddenly work in the fantasy-land that most miniature wargames present).

All of which is fine.  I mean these games are often made for people who only know what they’ve seen in games or in movies.  To their credit, some game companies have tried to explain this away, or introduce rules that suggest some kind of logarithmic scaling or range mechanic, which I support, but now you’ve dumped a pretty steep level of abstraction into a genre that “prides” itself on having little or no abstraction.

Still don’t know why “abstraction” is a bad word.  I get the feeling that most miniature wargamers don’t know how much abstraction is soaked into the games they play.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to “preach to the choir” (“rant to the choir” might be more accurate) –   if you play ASL you clearly get it.  And man, congrats.  That’s not a beginner’s game.  If you play ASL you definitely jumped in the pool at the deep end.  😀

@hobbyhub –  No worries, sir.  At first I was very, very  confused by your post, but then saw where you were reconsidering.  No worries.  By no means do I imagine that any kind of scaled- or command-tactical wargames are for everyone.

But they are wargames.

12,000+ titles published since 1954 (Avalon Hill’s Tactics II), Victory Games, Matrix Games, Decision Games, GMT Games, GDW games, FASA games, Avalon Hill Games, Avalanche Press Games, High Flying Dice Games, HexWar, Multiman Publishing, SSI Games, SPI games, that’s 13 companies off the top of my head, I’m sure a look at Wikipedia would get me 50+ more – Strategy & Tactics, World at War, Modern War – there are three periodicals just for this market space.  These are all hex & counter or some other form of zone-based, unit-driven mechanic wargames.

One last thing, please note that the Sitrep has taken the decision to specifically remove the word “Miniature” from our title in order to approach more of three-pronged inclusive approach:  miniature, non-miniature, and computer modern games.

We also took the “war” out of “wargaming”, I think that might be a YouTube algorithm thing.  Not sure on that.  😀