Grognard Wargamer Thread!

I’m not a board gamer, though I was as a kid with Avalon Hill stuff. But once computer wargames came out, as poor as the AI used to be, I jumped on them for a simple reason: fog of war. I play pretty exclusively single player.

For someone who doesn’t board wargame, how to you get around the lack of fog of war? I can only get ambushed by pretending I don’t those those units are hidden and waiting for me. In a naval game, where so much is the cat and mouse of the search, how do you pretend to not know the enemy CV is NW and I need to send my search planes there? And so on?

I did this:

But most games don’t deal with the issue.

A lot of games operate at a high enough level where abstraction does a decent enough job. All of the units in Empire of the Sun, a game about the war in the Pacific are face up and available at any time to see, but you don’t know if the opponent is holding a response card, or, will be able to respond to your operation. As a strategic game, whether the enemy understands your intentions is important, and it’s honestly one of the few that has some kind of intelligence factoring baked in.

At the levels I think you’d be more familiar with, though, it’s a real challenge to make intelligence work right because it adds an enormous amount of extra admin to hide units, especially when you play on cardboard and not VASSAL with a handy mask function. It may sometimes be worth it, but you never know.

ISR in general is one of the more technical aspects of war that, a lot like logistics, and in earlier eras, siegecraft is very hard to get in there without a lot of bandwidth being taken up. Games can feature siege, but we don’t have a lot of great mechanics for the technical aspects of rationing, mining, construction, etc that really determine the skill in siegecraft, so current siege games tend to be more ‘assault’ games.

Indeed. In games that are more abstract, the system is the key, and playing “the game” is primary. In those cases, it’s a very different dynamic I agree.

It’s a good day. Just arrived…

Question for the hive mind…

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly building up a collection of wargames, and I’ve been learning how to play a good number of them.

My general approach has been to start at page 1 of the rulebook, and read and reread trying to understand the details and nuance of every rule. But I’m starting to think this is an inefficient way to learn how to play a wargame. Generally I’m finding that I finish the rules and I have no idea where to start, and despite my best intentions I’ve forgotten most of what I read.

So I’m curious, how do you go about learning how to play wargames? Dig right in and set up a battle and play? Watch YouTube videos? Read the rulebook? Anyone have tips or found a system they like?

I read the rulebook thoroughly twice and then set it up and have bash at it, fully expecting it to take a long time as I dig through the rules as they come up. I reserve video watching for when I feel I have a reasonable grasp of the rules myself…

Interesting. I’ve been thinking to switching to skimming the rules to look for key mechanics, then just setting up some sort of smaller scenario just to test things out. I’m thinking I might learn faster by playing and reading the rules at the same time.

Drawback to this idea is that table space is limited. I’ve been reading the rules for games I haven’t played while the table is occupied by a game I’m currently playing.

GMT is having their p500 customer summer sale this week. For everyone p500 game you ordered and received in 2020 and 2021 you get a game in their catalog at 50% off, and there’s a +1 if you used the system at all over the past year and a half. Anyone getting anything?

I couldn’t help myself, and ordered SPQR, Combat Commander: Pacific, and Gandhi.

Now I need to quit my job so I can play all this stuff.

Don’t y’all forget: GMT is having their 50%-off sale today thru Sunday. Anyone who used their P500 system and had a game delivered between January 2020 and July 2021 can get one in-stock game at 50% off. Then, you can buy one additional game at 50% for each P500 game you had delivered in the past 19 months. So if you had three games delivered by P500, you can buy four games at 50% off.

Hidden movement.

I think I need to read the rules of a solitaire naval board game to understand how that works. Way, way back when I was a kid playing the old Avalon Hill games, such as Panzer Leader, I just tried to pretend I didn’t know what the Germans were doing.

Cool, thanks for the link.

Dagnabbit, I just bought the B-24 reskinning* for Skies Above the Reich and shortly before that, I bought the Pacific Theater version of The Hunters. And now they decide to have a sale? What GMT games do I still need? Am I going to end up getting the stupid Mediterranean submarine game just because it’s on sale?

-Tom

* mostly kidding. mostly.

I just got around to reading this. This feels like a fresh take on hidden movement and ISR in a board game. Usually when I see Hidden Movement stuff in a game, I think “Garg, clunky tedium!” but I could see the Fixed-Unfixed-Concealed system lending itself to all sorts of interesting decisions about where and when to take action. You’ll never quite know what’s going on and you’ll being making important decisions with degrees of ambiguity, yet have some control over that ambiguity. Looks like a nice idea with some elegant execution.

I’ve been checking your game as it makes its way through the system, and I hope it does well! I get the sense that it’s most definitely a 2-player minimum type of game, right? I ask because I don’t have local wargamer friends yet, so new purchases/orders have that as a factor. Still working on that.

Well, did you order any p500 games last year? Because you ain’t eligible for no sales unless you did.

Thanks for the kind words. Funny enough for the first time since I set the website up, I had a fatal error with an obsolete plug in I had to delete, which I was informed of by wordpress this am.

Yeah, I’m trying to do something a little different-ISR and each side’s struggle to gain and maintain a Common Operating Picture as a battle in itself, joined at the hip to the combat operations themselves. It’s very Vietnam-appropriate, but I’d argue, with rare exceptions, its pretty much the status of the battlefield from Mediggo to the present day.

I plan to release the Vassal module upon publication so that should alleviate the issue of not being able to find a local opponent. Having said that I think there is some payoff in playing two-handed due precisely to those ISR functions and statuses. However, I think you lose far, far more by not playing an opponent. Two different people making decisions with imperfect information regarding enemy disposition, let alone what the enemy’s operational goals are, exactly, is baked into everything; the way combat is resolved, determining victory, even how long the operation may last.

I ordered games that were p500’ed, so I feel like I should qualify. If not, fine! I didn’t want to buy any more stupid GMT games anyhow!

-Tom

You prolly qualify. I recommend Holland ‘44! Oh crap, it’s not in stock! Well, how about No Retreat: The Russian Front! Er … ok. Hmm, The Dark Valley? Bleh.

That’s the problem with the GMT sale: pretty much all the good games are out of stock. You’re stuck with stuff like Flying Colors and Cataphract.