Reply To: Midwinter Minis Historical Wargames are not popular because it has Nazi's

[onlyonepinman 18062xp 1]

I would be inclined to agree that I have always found him to be more than a little smug but otherwise pretty harmless and a lot of people seem to like his content so, whatever.  Horses for courses.  But in this particular case he doesn’t even come close to sounding fair.  There’s a few token “I’m not tarring everyone with the same brush” comments here and there, but the general tone is that “if you play as the Germans, what does that say about you, hmmm?”

He just comes across as utterly uninformed and perhaps a little taken with paranoia about Nazis.  He even says “let’s not pretend Far Right groups don’t still exist”;  well, here in the UK when you see far right groups (EDL for example) They’re typically English nationalists who are obsessed with the fact the British beat the Germans in two world wars.  If they were interested in Wargames at all (and I doubt they are) They’re probably more likely to play as the British (exclusively, British, not allies)

I won’t speculate as to whether it’s a deliberate attempt to generate clicks and stir up controversy or whether it’s simply misguided opinions about the prevalence of Nazism in today’s society.  His assertions  (or rather insinuations, because he seems to lack the cajones straight up say it, he prefixes everything with “maybe” and “perhaps”) that the historical wargaming in the first instance isn’t popular and in the second instance that the reason for this is because of Nazis are demonstrably wrong.  For a start, WWII represents only a fraction of the overall historical Wargames community – to the best if my knowledge Nazis didn’t take part in Waterloo. As to its overall popularity, you can take a stroll around any non-GW convention and look at what the dominant genres of the demo tables are (hint, it’s not 40k, it’s not even sci-fi).

And asking why Bolt Action isn’t bigger than 40k seems massively disingenuous from a channel that is utterly invested in 40k and for a long time was part of their partners scheme.  He knows full well that GW have spent almost 40 years building up the 40k game and community to the behemoth it is today.  People don’t simply drop that for a different game, no matter how good the rules, lore and/or models might be