The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

I have a friend who is very into these types of games, having dedicated about 1200 sq ft of their home to them. The commercial ones are usually centered on specific historic battles, and often follow a sort of "script" where things happen at specific turns e.g. the introduction of new units or weather conditions, that sort of thing.

They seemed interesting, and I came away with two main observations:

1 - A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which you must leave the game out and setup for an extended period of time.

2 - My first thought when encountering these was "why aren't they just using a computer?". But I quickly learned that the ability to spread out a map, that might be many square meters, and see everything happening on it at once, without having to slide a monitor's viewport around (or zoom in and out) has a number of massive advantages -- and (at the time I was looking at this) there's really no display technology today that can replicate this.

I feel like both of these observations have changed significantly with the advent of cheap, high-resolution, networked AR/VR headsets. I don't think I'd want to wear one entirely for the length of time a game might take, but we're much closer now to having truly digital versions of this that eliminate many of the downsides.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#8

Post by JoeDaDude » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 1:02 AM UTC

The military has a long history of using war games for training, going all the way back to Kriegspiel [1]. At least one history book [2], has been written about the topic. However it is rare that these military training games make it outside of their domain and become available to the general public. A rare exception may be the games designed by Volko Ruhnke [3], who designed games for training the CIA (though these may not be war games per se, but rather games about complex geopolitical situations). Mr. Rhunke's experience led him to become a highly successful commercial game designer.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel

[2]. The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists by Peter P. Perla (Author), R. Dawn Sollars (Illustrator)

[3]. https://spyscape.com/article/meet-the-cia-spy-who-creates-wa...

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#9

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 1:17 AM UTC

JoeDaDude wrote: post #8

The military has a long history of using war games for training, going all the way back to Kriegspiel [1]. At least one history book [2], has been written about the topic. However it is rare that these military training games make it outside of their domain and become available to the general public. A rare exception may be the games designed by Volko Ruhnke [3], who designed games for training the CIA (though these…

Can't upvote this hard enough. I'm fascinated by large scale games of this kind and have a loose acquaintance with some people who run them, but it's a very tiny industry that's almost exclusively based around DC for obvious reasons.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#10

Post by MrMember » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 1:50 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #7

I have a friend who is very into these types of games, having dedicated about 1200 sq ft of their home to them. The commercial ones are usually centered on specific historic battles, and often follow a sort of "script" where things happen at specific turns e.g. the introduction of new units or weather conditions, that sort of thing. They seemed interesting, and I came away with two main observations: 1 - A game can t…

>A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which you must leave the game out and setup for an extended period of time.

The Campaign for North Africa is probably the most extreme example of this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Afric...

A "proper" game requires 10 players and an estimated 1500 hours.