Wargame_[space]
Archive for May, 2014
Imperialism and its discontents
If anyone ever turns his basement into a museum of strategy gaming, the broken card table that holds the best of the turn-based era probably only needs to have one game on it. If you’re wondering why I’m dragging Civilization into a retrospective about developer Frog City’s Imperialism series, the answer is that I’m not. […]
Winning the National Socialist booby prize
The problem with History is that you can’t just go back and see what would have happened if someone had made some different decisions. The problem with wargames is that you can. Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. I got distracted when I spent a week on vacation playing with Hearts of Iron 3. […]
Memories of a starship
Of all the starships in history, the Enterprise is the only one I can think of which has had such a long, consistent, and well-documented life. It started out in the 1960s as a toy suspended on wires and progressed through the 1980s and 90s as a more elaborate toy, to reach its present existence […]
Chess piece face
By now we’re at the fourth installment in this new War in the East series, and you’re probably wondering if I’m ever going to attack another hex, or if I’m going to just keep going to my closet and pulling out different games about Stalingrad. I assure you that both of those things are definitely […]
Detail vs. Realism
[This article first appeared on the now-defunct website Games Domain Review in 1998. It was used as required reading material at the US Army War College in a course about simulation. It is reproduced here to save it from the vicissitudes of Internet caches.] No one disputes that wargames are, above all, games. They are […]
A question of scale
Before we can get to the fight for Stalingrad or whatnot, there is the small question of Sevastopol. This naval base on the Crimean peninsula, famous as the site of the focus of the Crimean War in 1855, was the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet in 1941 and stood as a fortress through […]
Fellowship of the panzer
When you start watching The Two Towers, you get a little reminder of important stuff that happened earlier, like the wizard who fell off the bridge fighting the flaming minotaur. It’s an integral part of the Lord of the Rings, because the mistakes made earlier in the story lead to the choices available to the […]
War in the East: weird twilight
It was often said in the Stalingrad pocket that it was better to have a cousin in the Luftwaffe than a Father in Heaven. -–Heinz Schroter Seventy years ago this month, in a place between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Soviet Red Army broke through the front lines of the Germans and their Italian, […]
The contradiction of computer boardgames
[This is another article rescued from Games Domain Review in 1998. I still feel essentially the same way, although I think the tide has turned a bit.] Computers have long since passed boardgames in their appeal to wargamers. Once upon a time, gamers dreamed of being able to transfer their beloved paper maps and counters […]
Gaming Graveyard: A-10 Warthog
I. Introduction In the history of flight simulators there is probably no name more venerable than that of Origin’s Austin Skunkworks. Responsible for the legendary Longbow series, this cohort of programmers has built a truly legendary reputation for excellence. The fact that this team was working on a sim based on the A-10 Warthog aircraft […]
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