Complex games have more complex pieces and more complex interfaces, i’m not sure wargames would be better if you replaced the chits with nice minis and then you were forced to look at a table to see what the mini does as opposed to being able to see the ratings for a unit on the chits.
The types of games they are just precludes a lot of what people consider ‘attractive’ in a board game.
Saying wargames have bad interfaces because they’re complex sounds to me like a failure of imagination. If you want complexity and good interfaces, look no further than certain modern heavy Euro. Vital Lacerda’s games, for instance, seem to be designed around the flow of complex systems, and it shows. Why can’t wargames have that kind of development?
And more to the point, complexity is why games need better interfaces! A good interface can help manage complexity. The complicated games are the ones that need the best interfaces, not the ones that should be excused from having them!
I might not be following you, but you seem to be talking about something aesthetic. I’m talking about better interfaces. And specifically the ability to display more information more efficiently. How would that not be attractive to a wargamer? I actually think wargamers are precisely the people to whom that would be most attractive!
Lisboa has a fraction of the complexity as, say, Axis Empires:Totaler Krieg! or World in Flames. But, if you have some solution to all this information that needs to be conveyed that doesn’t compromise the things that make them distinct, i’m all ears. There are solutions, but they tend to compromise complexity. It is, for example, possible to eliminate stacking, but one ends up having to embrace a bunch of mechanical limitations to make it feasible to see the strength in a hex at a simple glance.
We might be talking past each other- i’m certainly sure there are ways to make it better, but i’m not sure how, so i’m not going to knock anybody for not having figured it out yet. You can make choices that help one thing and hurt another, true, but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.
I don’t know any of those games, so I’ll take your word for it. But I consider something like CO2 or Kanban easily as complex as the average wargame. Do you disagree? And more to the point, I’m not sure it matters unless your point is that complex games must have bad interfaces. Surely that’s not what you’re saying, is it?
Hmm, maybe it is. To wit:
“Solving” stacking needs to be done at the design level. I don’t think it’s anything you and I are going to resolve exchanging short snippets of text on a message board. But if your point is that convoluted or inefficient interfaces are the price of complexity, I disagree strongly.
I do not believe you. :) Because I bet you could point to plenty of back-asswards wargames in your own collection and come up with suggestions for how to improve an interface. It’s not that hard! It mostly just involves having played games with efficient interfaces.
But the first step for all y’all (i.e. wargamers) is getting around the mindset that you can’t have complexity and a good interface! That’s about the wrongest way I can imagine to approach the topic. Perhaps it would be better if we were talking in concrete terms, about specific games? Do you know John Butterfield’s D-Day series, published by Decision Games? Because I have a ton of ideas for that one specifically, and I don’t think any of the ideas are particularly revolutionary or even innovative, and they certainly don’t compromise the complexity. If it’s a game you know, I’ll gladly grab my notes and give you some specifics if you’re interested.
I am confused now, Arkham Horror 3rd edition is actually worth modding? I heard it is a bad game/design. I was fooled by the internet again!
Mmmm,
I would say wargames are not necessarily more complex per se than many euros. They tend not to have too many interlocking systems and most of them, even “complex” ones, have decision loops that boil down to move-and-shoot, where de difficulty lies on choosing between the huge amount of options (in my personal opinion wargames tend to encourage “statistical” thinking, where single moves become less important than overall strategies -compounded by the heavy reliance in random tables-).
What wargames are is granular. Where a more mainstream wargame would have 10 pieces, wargames give you 100-200. Where a stat would have 3 levels (good, neutral and bad), wargames give you strength numbers in something like 10-20 different overall values. And this granularity is a big part of the UI clutter in the genre.
I think from a pure game design standpoint the granularity is not necessary, and there are successful designs that have done away with it, but in general, the wargame market reacts poorly to granularity simplifications.
I think part of it has to do with the perception (or sales pitch) that these games are also simulations (I would say many of them are at the very least “studies” on different situations and theories of warfare), so limiting the granularity does impact the “precision” of the simulation so to speak.
This ties to an area where wargames are definitely “complex”, and that’s the rulebook, or the extremely process heavy nature of playing. Since for example, a wargame has to adhere to a theory on how to model losses, and due to the extreme granularity, you have stuff like counting factors, etc…
But yeah, other than the granularity problem, which I don’t think it’s easily solvable unless you can simplify individual outcomes (and again, that’s a hard sell for a lot of the target market), a lot of the other issues are indeed solvable and there are nice attempts here and there (I love the Enemy Action series chit pulling for damage calculation, which avoids both the need to consult a CRT and also to calculate modifiers. At most you need to add factors).
In general I agree wargame UI can be vastly improved and that there’s a lot of inertia in there, but that’s both designer and buyer inertia. I just don’t know if those games with clearer UI will sell great if they lose granularity (and I don’t know how you solve stacking while maintaining granularity).
But there’s stuff like this out there: Helsinki 1918: German Intervention in the Finnish Civil War | Board Game | BoardGameGeek