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Southeast Asia

Area-Effect Gaming

A long time ago I bought a game called Storm Over Arnhem. I think I was 14 years old. Because I was 14 years old, I didn’t realize just how groundbreaking the game was. All I knew is that I loved playing it. I didn’t know it then, but this was a system so good that it would become known as area-impulse, and it would be around forever.

When I first played the game, I was fascinated by the idea that my die rolls and my opponent’s die rolls were in a sort of “competition.” Being very competitive, and being 14, I would think things like, “I can win this combat if I just out-roll him by 5!” Probably because I was 14, I didn’t quite get that it didn’t work like that, where I just had to try harder to roll a high number. But I loved the idea of this direct conflict of dice, and that turns were short that we were mostly playing and not waiting, and that the game itself felt so much like Cornelius Ryan’s book that I had already read twice.

Storm Over Dien Bien Phu takes advantage of this amazing system born 35 years ago, but I’m not sure that we remember just how remarkable a design the original system is. The gaming world has become so accepting of novel ideas, such as cards, chit-pulls, worker placement, traitor mechanics, and mancalas, that it seems weird to think that people once dismissed games solely because they didn’t use hexes. “Area movement” was a dirty word, because the implication was the designer somehow was so bad at research that he couldn’t even get enough terrain information to make a hex map. “Eh, just get a map from the library and draw some lines through it,” the designer seemed to be saying. This was the antithesis of both “detail” and “realism.”

I’ve played two different Historical Advanced Squad Leader modules about Arnhem bridge, and both of them are significantly more complex than any area-movement game. Yet neither one of them captures the feel of the overall battle as well as Storm Over Arnhem. The fact that novel systems could do just as good a job (or better) simulating a conflict as your standard hex-based odds calculator was a revelation for many people. After all, point-to-point movement is really just a variation on area movement, and Paths of Glory is considered the definitive game about World War I. And it uses point-to-point movement and cards.

It seems ridiculous that area movement was at that time so disrespected, but sometimes it can be hard to see past your prejudices. When I was about 12, I played War at Sea against a friend of mine who was 14, and neither one of us could figure out how the Germans could possibly win. “Well, that’s because it’s realistic,” he told me. I guess. Except after maybe a dozen plays, we realized that we had been playing wrong: the German player always moved second. Suddenly, the need for the British player to anticipate, and stretch to cover more ocean that he could, and hope the German player failed his speed rolls, made it seem like the Allies who were on the back foot. And that’s when I started to appreciate how much you could do with a few numbers and some clever mechanics. And, admittedly, a lot of dice.

Game design has come so far since then that a friend of mine refers to a time “before they knew how to make good games.” I think there’s more than a little truth to that. But we also risk a time “before we learned to appreciate good games” if we write off the years when such designs were fermenting. I’m admittedly biased towards discussions of hobby history, since I’ve experienced a fair amount of it now. But more than simple nostalgia, I think it can be very useful for new designers to appreciate just how hard to was to get players back then to take revolutionary ideas seriously.

Of course, there are still people who dislike any abstraction. I found the following post on the old Usenet group for historical wargames, dating just to 2013, in a discussion about the acceptability of using cards in a wargame, which I will present without comment:

“What did Pontiac need to conduct a cross-water raid? He needed a bunch of Indians assembled next to the lake, he needed a bunch of canoes assembled next to the lake, and he needed some nice weather.

That’s it. His possession of a “card” wasn’t necessary – and he could conduct a cross-water raid *every time he got these three elements together – regardless of the number of “cross-water raid” cards were in the deck.

So why make the raid contingent on possessing a card? Why not just assemble some Indians and boats, and wait for a sunny day?”

Discussion

9 Responses to “Area-Effect Gaming”

  1. An informative tour of grid/area map history in wargaming. I look forward to the video of DBP The Final Gamble.

    Posted by Cyrus | January 31, 2016, 3:06 pm
  2. Basically agree. Luckily, that attitude you describe at the end is from a dying breed that still hasn’t figured out that complexity does not add up to realism.

    I sort of had the same epiphany with EastFront, a game that came out in 1991, and block games in general. Finally, a game that decently modeled fog of war and attrition, at the same time even! And without the need for tons of chromy rules, either.

    As I sit here looking at my collection, most of my hex & counter games are tactical games. The majority are area impulse or point to point.

    Posted by Daniel Berger | January 31, 2016, 3:56 pm
  3. Excising that from its context and leaving it without comment is a bit disingenuous, Bruce. It’s true that the original poster was also quite disingenuous 🙂

    The context – and I think we’re talking about the same Usenet discussion – had to do with the tendency of certain card-driven systems to forget about grounding the cards on actual game play. Indeed, if the card Pontiac raiding requires two have two “indian chits” and two “canoe chits” in an area adjacent to the one to be raided, the original poster could hardly have a problem with a card-driven system to get the variability in weather conditions random enough.

    As you say, certain game design elements – such as cards and what not – went through a process of evolution, and certainly, on the way to the present-day maturity not all designs featuring those elements did a better job than older ones.

    Posted by Miquel Ramirez | February 1, 2016, 4:49 am
  4. I’ve always celebrated the very good, unusual games out there (my main problem with War at Sea is that it’s not as good as Victory in the Pacific), but when I finally tried out Storm Over Arnhem a couple years ago, I wasn’t impressed.

    The general idea always appealed, but it felt like every decision I made was rooted firmly in manipulating the game mechanics, and none of it in the situation on the map. Particularly, I was activating or not activating groups to just manipulate their vulnerability. I didn’t find it particularly enjoyable, and it didn’t give any of the ‘paper time machine’ feel.

    Posted by Rindis | February 1, 2016, 3:39 pm
  5. I am an enormous fan of the area impulse concept, though I continue to think it works better at some scales than others. What I appreciate so much about the use of area maps and the committed/non-committed mechanism for troops is that it naturally forces players to make appropriate command decisions. Instead of micromanaging the terrain placements of each and every counter, you do things like compile a defensive reserve, or make partial force commitments while holding back your second wave for future exploitation. Tactical level impulse games cut out all the line of sight hassle at one stroke, further cutting out layers of rule management. The introduction of a clock that is tied to offensive performance naturally captures the way offensive energy is expended on the battlefield.

    There are some downsides–notably, the combat system that is used is asymmetric in the way it can generate casualties for a defender but not an attacker, which makes games like TP:S or SOS unable to capture the grinding attrition that came with constant attacks into Stalingrad. They also can be hard to play despite the simple rules sets, as the designs are asking you to think very differently about how you handle your forces.

    Posted by Sean McCormick | February 2, 2016, 12:07 pm
  6. I really enjoyed viewing this review. Great production standards, compelling narrative, and down-right entertaining. As a fan of the battle, I went back and viewed your previous productions on the same topic…and took notes on game design! Say WHAT…?

    Excellent stuff! Thanks for taking the time and making the effort to educate/illuminate — on the history of the area combat system. Hard work well done.

    Posted by bcgames | February 3, 2016, 7:05 pm
  7. Thanks for the effort you put into making this, it really paid off. I’m really looking forward to the payoff when the next in the series comes out.

    Posted by CDano | February 11, 2016, 4:58 am
  8. Hello Bruce,

    just wanted to say I really appreciate the time that went into this series. The best thing about them though is the thought and analysis behind them all. I find it just terrific!! Thankyou!

    On another track. Are you sure you’ve finished this series? I know from listening to various podcasts you’ve been involved in that you are a player of ASL as well. Is there a chance you’ll cast your eye to the CH Dien Bien Phu module?

    Posted by g young | September 17, 2018, 11:07 pm
    • Thanks for posting! Regarding CH Dien Bien Phu, including it would require shifting to a completely tactical rubric which I am not sure would fit into the series. But it’s a good suggestion. Maybe I will add it at some point, if I can find someone to play against face-to-face.

      I am already working on a series on another topic, so hopefully that will be interesting to people as well.

      Posted by Bruce Geryk | September 19, 2018, 2:18 pm

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