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Board Games / Tabletop Games

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Board Games / Tabletop Games

 

Major questions I have

Why play wargames?

  • They’re fun. I think people (and other animals) have an instinctual enjoyment of play-fighting.

  • They build a habit of 1) trying to predict the future, 2) making plans for the future and then 3) working to see those plans come to fruition. They shouldn't be seen as IQ tests. Risk was my most-memorable exposure to this but all other wargames have it to some extent.

  • They can teach you to build your own wargames, which can help you determine the best path forward for you in the face of an uncertain future state of affairs and/or an active opponent.

    • Built-for-purpose wargames can also help you prepare contingency plans that are either written down and/or memorized to allow you to quickly react to changing circumstances in the future, especially in situations in which you won’t have a lot of time to make a decision: “if X happens, do Y.”

Why play tabletop wargames?

  • Tabletop wargames do a far better job of letting you see “underneath the hood” at the underlying calculations. As such, playing them is a good way to learn how to build your own wargames, which can help you make decisions about or prepare contingency plans for real-world problems.

How many games should a person buy? How should a person decide whether to buy a particular game?

  • A common thing you hear in wargaming is that people buy too many games, and end up with games being unplayed.

  • I think the simple answer is, “buy until the cost exceeds the benefit”.

    • If you’re paying a lot of money to store the games, that would be a good reason to sell some of them.

    • You can usually sell them later if you don’t play them, so it’s generally not a big loss if you make a “bad” purchase.

How much time should a person spend playing/thinking about wargames per week/month/etc.?

  • A common thing I’ve seen is people who spend so much time playing or thinking about games that they neglect other parts of their lives, such as their health.

  • I think the best answer here is likely to do a top-down plan of your life to work backwards to an answer. Similar to how people budget their finances to arrive at an answer regarding whether they can buy a particular ice cream or if it will break their budget.

How to get into tabletop wargames

  1. Start with games with simpler rules: Risk, go, chess, etc.

  2. Play PC/mobile games that work in a similar way to tabletop games.

    • Decisive Campaigns, John Tiller’s Panzer Campaigns, Arete

  3. Watch YouTube videos about tabletop wargames.

    • reviews, rules explanations, AARs (turn-by-turn or after the entire game is over), full playthroughs

  4. Play PC implementations of tabletop wargames.

    • You can check the section I have dedicated to this for more information / ideas.

  5. Have someone teach you to play more-complicated games, either face-to-face or via Discord/Vassal.

Ways to play board games on a computer

Vassal

How to ease into using Vassal

  1. First, I’d recommend that you get experience playing Steam and/or mobile implementations of board games or board-game-like games.

    1. Example games: Risk, Axis & Allies, Arete, Rebel Fury, No Retreat, Twilight Struggle, Race for the Galaxy, Fort Sumter.

    2. These have in-game tutorials, nice animations, music, good graphics, etc.

    3. This can help ease you into some board game concepts you might not be familiar with if you’re jumping into Vassal without a lot of previous board game experience. Things like having different phases, playing cards to take actions, rolling dice to determine outcomes, cubes and meeples, victory points, tracks, CRTs, etc.

  2. Next, I’d recommend that you get experience playing browser-based board game implementations that guide you through the game’s phases and limit your actions to what you’re legally allowed to do.

    1. This will ease you into the experience of needing to refer to the user manual frequently while learning the rules, needing to look stuff up on player aids, and needing to play some throwaway games to get the feel for the rules.

    2. The graphics aren’t as slick as the Steam/mobile versions, there’s no music, no tutorials. But you get access to a lot more games than if you stuck with Steam/mobile board games.

    3. These are sites like Rally-The-Troops (the best UI IMO), Yucata, BoardGameArena, BrettspielWelt.

    4. RTT has easily-accessible HTML versions of the rules of the games it carries, which makes searching for stuff much easier than if you’re using a PDF manual without searchable text.

      1. https://www.mcssl.com/store/danverssengames/vassal/pdf-games/solitaire - These aren’t free but they’re guided versions of some highly-regarded solo wargames.

  3. Finally, take on using Vassal itself:

    1. You can download the Tic-Tac-Toe module and get practice playing a game locally, via PBEM, and live.

    2. You can try some solo games to get more experience with Vassal before getting into multiplayer games if you’re worried about bothering your opponent with basic questions (although honestly, Vassal’s UI isn’t that complicated, and you may get bored playing by yourself).

      1. Vassal modules designed for exactly one player

      2. Singleplayer games I found that seem like good fits to help you get comfortable with Vassal:

        1. (For reference, Risk has a BGG complexity of 2.07)

        2. Intro:

          1. Micro Space Empire - BGG - 6.5 rating, 10 Min, 1.22 complexity

          2. 12 Patrols - BGG - 6.3 rating, 5-15 Min, 1.78 complexity

          3. Solitaire Chess - Not on BGG - 15 Min

          4. Delve: The Dice Game - BGG - 6.4 rating, 20 Min, 1.26 complexity

          5. Aces of Valor - BGG - 8.2 rating, 30 Min, 2.50 complexity

          6. Shadows Upon Lassadar - BGG - 6.6 rating, 30 Min, 2.25 complexity

          7. Sunburst City Transport - BGG - 6.6 rating, 30 Min, Unknown complexity

          8. Bomber Boys - BGG - 7.7 rating, 15-30 Min, 1.80 complexity

          9. The Way of the Warrior (Second Edition) - BGG - 7.3 rating, 20-60 Min, Unknown complexity

          10. Utopia Engine - BGG - 6.9 rating, 30-60 Min, 2.03 complexity

          11. Corvette Command - BGG - 8.1 rating, 30-90 Min, 2.00 complexity

          12. Village Builder - BGG - 7.4 rating, 40-100 Min, 2.00 complexity

        3. Intermediate:

          1. Agricola, Master of Britain - BGG - 7.1 rating, 60–90 Min, 2.54 complexity

          2. The Hunters - BGG - 7.7 rating, 120 Min, 2.54 complexity

          3. Beneath the Med: Regia Marina at Sea 1940-1943 - BGG - 8.0 rating, 120-180 Min, 2.42 complexity

          4. The Castles of Burgundy - BGG - 8.5 rating, 70-120 Min, 2.94 complexity

          5. Ambush - 180–240 Min, 3.26 complexity

          6. Target for Today - BGG - 8.1 rating, 45–90 Min, 3.34 complexity

          7. D-Day at Omaha Beach - 120–480 Min, 3.47 complexity - Note that you can get a guided computerized version at the DVG website.

        4. Advanced:

          1. Fields of Fire - BGG - 7.9 rating, 60–300 Min, 4.24 complexity

    3. You can then try multiplayer games:

      1. The best way to find people to play with is to join the official Vassal discord server and the Vassal PBEM discord server and post in one of the LFG (“Looking for a game”) channels. It’ll probably be quicker and easier for you to find a game if you reply to someone else’s request for an opponent than if you post your own request.

      2. How to think about Live games vs. PBEM: Live games are useful (especially with a voice call) because you can ask for help immediately if you don’t know how to do something. If your partner can’t record a screenshare video showing you how to do everything, then it’s probably best to start with a Live game to get help with the UI for whatever game you’re using. However, Live games have the disadvantage that you’ll feel pressured to make decisions quickly, which can make the game feel less pleasant (in my experience anyway). I like that when I play an asynchronous game I can take my time reading the rules for whatever decision I need to make.

      3. I found people recommending Battle for Moscow as a good PBEM game for beginners to wargaming to start with because the rules are simple and each player only needs to send 7 emails.

        1. You can find an online implementation of Battle for Moscow that’ll let you play against a bot here: https://oberlabs.com/b4m/

      4. Core controls / methods:

        1. Alt + Left click will ping a certain part of the UI (normally the main map but it also works for auxiliary windows) and center other players' UI on that point. So this is a key way to make it easy for other players to follow what you’re doing when it’s your turn or when you’re taking some action.

        2. It seems common for people to write a comment in the log when the dice are going to be rolled that summarizes what the roll is for.

          1. In my Last Hundred Yards game, IIRC we’d write a comment describing who was attacking whom with each roll.

          2. When I played Downfall of the Third Reich, my opponent would write a simple “X / Y” comment that summarized the die roll modifiers(?) for each side prior to each side rolling a D6.

        3. PBEM:

          1. Create a channel in the Vassal PBEM by commenting in the “lfg-discussion” channel like this:

            1. @grogs Could we please get a room for <the game you want to play>. <then tag every player you want included, like @nathan1234 @john1234>

          2. After loading a log file, “you will need to click the play button on the top left of the map screen to step through the log file. Once it is finished you will be prompted to create a new log file. Increment the number in the file name and then complete your turn. Once your turn is finished you will need to select End Log File from the File menu to save the file. You can then upload it [to the Vassal PBEM Discord server] for [your opponent] to look at.”

Wargameroom

  • http://www.wargameroom.com/

  • This seems to be an alternative to Vassal which always enforces the rules of the games it covers, whereas in Vassal I think most of the time the rules are not fully enforced. So it's kind of like a cross of Vassal and Rally the Troops, where it's a downloadable program like Vassal, but it fully enforces the rules like Rally the Troops does.

Pros and cons of tabletop games vs. PC games

  • I spent a while learning about tabletop games to get a sense of what they have to offer that you can’t get from PC games.

  • Note that there’s a spectrum of options:

    1. pure tabletop games - physical components, played in-person (or possibly via a video call, but that can be very difficult with many games that have small text or hidden information).

    2. Tabletop Simulator / Vassal, where it’s often a pure simulation of a tabletop game with no automation to help you, or there might be some automation available to guide the game along. You can still make a mistake interpreting the rules.

    3. Rally-The-Troops / Wargameroom / Steam editions of games (like Risk, Axis & Allies, various niche wargames), where you’re playing the tabletop game but guided through the whole process. There’s no way for you to not follow the rules.

    4. Pure PC game, where it was never intended to be a tabletop game, and has features / complexity that couldn’t work as a tabletop game.

Advantages of playing tabletop games

  1. Variety. Tabletop games require less technical knowledge to develop than PC games, and so it seems more common / easier for non-technical people (like historians) to develop tabletop games than PC games. This seems to lead to a wider variety of gameplay / themes than you typically find in PC games.

    1. On the other hand, it is possible to develop a game as just a Vassal module. But since there doesn’t seem to be as much of a market for paid Vassal modules, it seems like the market for physical tabletop games is what is motivating developers.

  2. Modability. Tabletop games are extremely easy to mod. It’s extremely easy to add rules, remove rules, change rules, create new maps, etc.

    1. See the note above about this being possible in Vassal modules.

    2. Two analogies for non-gamers to understand the appeal of the modability difference between tabletop games and computer games are:

      1. cars - it's like the difference between having an older car that you can easily work on yourself, change out parts, fix etc. versus we're having a newer car that might be fancier but also limits the ways you can interact with it.

      2. cooking - it's like the difference between cooking yourself and eating at a restaurant. The restaurant meal might be fancier and less work, but it also limits the ways you can customize it. Cooking is fun when you try new things / experiment and see what happens. And it might be hard to find a restaurant that serves the particular food you want to eat, in the same way it might be hard to find a PC game that models the conflict that you're interested in gaming (although that's not an issue of modability, that’s a matter of variety).

  3. The visual/tactile/temporal experience. The physical presence of the pieces on the board and slower process of working through the events in the game can add to the experience.

    1. “There is something inherently dramatic about holding the die above the table and knowing I need a 5 or 6 to take Paris. Computerized wargames -- and computer-based versions of board games -- suck a lot of the drama out of the situation. B-17 Queen of the Skies was great at building dramatic tension during solitaire play, by making you roll on a series of charts. Bad things happen on one chart, which leads you to another; then you get another bad roll which puts you onto another chart... It would be really simple to write a program that just presents you with the final results, but you would not get the tension building that you get from manually rolling dice and looking things up.” (Source)

    2. When playing Risk, there's a big difference between having two players roll off face-to-face with two big armies, one roll at a time, versus what it's like when playing on a computer, where the whole battle can be resolved in a fraction of a second and one player may not even be paying attention.

    3. It’s common to hear people say that after spending all day working on a computer, they don’t want to look at a computer screen while playing a game to relax.

      1. “I spend too much time staring at a screen as it is.” (Source)

    4. It may be easier to be able to see everything at once.

      1. When you play a tabletop game with Vassal, there may not be a way to reorient the map to display nicely on a big TV screen, so you may be left using the mouse to drag the screen around, which may not be as nice of a user experience as having the whole map on a table in front of you.

  4. The social experience / table talk. Being physically present with your opponent does seem to add to the experience (depending on the circumstances).

    1. See the note above about this being possible with Vassal modules.

Disadvantages

  1. Refereeing/accounting. You don’t have the computer guiding you through the sequence of play / ensuring you’re following the rules / rolling the dice / keeping track of the state of the game, which means:

    1. it can take a lot, lot longer to play, especially if you’re not familiar with the rules

      1. setting up the game takes a lot longer.

        1. Wise Guy History says a larger game can take four hours to set up, versus 15 seconds in Vassal. (source)

      2. It can take much longer to get an answer to a question like what the rule is for a particular thing or to look up a particular chart. Most “living manuals” are searchable PDFs and thus let you easily search for references to a particular concept, and Vassal usually has any charts you need listed in a helpful list form that you can click on to immediately be brought to that chart.

        1. Wise Guy History talks about how exhausting it can be to spend a lot of time looking up charts and looking up rules over and over again for every little step. (source)

    2. if you bump the table, a cat jumps on the table, etc. you can lose the state of the game. Taking a photo at the end of every turn can help but when there are stacks of units your photos won’t tell you what’s under the top counter in the stack.

    3. it can be harder / almost impossible to “undo” your decisions (like how you can on rally-the-troops.com)

  2. Remote/Async. You can’t easily play remotely / asynchronously.

  3. Space. The games take up a lot of space, are harder to travel with, etc.

  4. Fog of war. You can’t easily hide the pieces of your opponent, which means that often you’ll unrealistically be able to see a lot of information about your opponent.

Major issues in wargaming

Players

Not playing in public

  • This makes it much harder to attract new players to the hobby.

Over-emphasizing minor, fixable issues in their reviews

  • I see this all the time: people will give a game a dramatically lower rating because they don’t like some particular rule that they could very easily house-rule around.

Designers

Not including meta-rules / rules-of-thumb in the manual

  • Chess is much more fun when you treat Reuben’s 30 Rules of Chess as your “available moves”.

  • Examples:

Always having zero-sum victory conditions

  • I would prefer to at least sometimes see victory conditions defined independently per player such that each player could “win”.

  • Another thing you don’t see often is prisoner’s-dilemma-style situations.

Not modeling ulterior motives

  • Oftentimes leaders are optimizing for their personal benefit at the expense of whatever group they’re supposed to be working for.

Not attempting to model current / near-future warfare

  • Next War and some others do this but from watching the fighting in Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, etc. it’s clear that they don’t do a very good job of it.

Not attempting to model the uncertainty around capabilities

  • The classic example of this being the uncertainty of how Russia and Ukraine would perform during a (at the time hypothetical) Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Not attempting to search for common lessons in wargames and apply them to current conflicts

  • For example, they could be used to come up with plans for current political conflicts.

  • A wargame could then

Being too ‘hard-coded’

  • In D&D, the DM is there to let the players attempt whatever they would do if this was a real situation, with the DM then using their judgement to decide how that attempted action should be resolved. But in current tabletop wargames, the games are played with the rules as-written and players are not allowed to “think outside the box” and do things other than what the rules allow them to do.

Not explaining the rationale behind their CRTs, DRMs, column shifts, etc

  • I feel like a lot of gamers don't have a good understanding of why a designer would use a column shift instead of a DRM or a multiplier of combat power in a given situation. And so for example I was watching a review of Demyansk Shield by the Player's Aid and towards the end Grant complains that the column shift for defending across a river is cancelled if even a tiny fraction of the attacking group is not across the river. It doesn’t make sense. You would expect that any units attacking across the river will be halved for example. And I think that's how they do it in the Simonitch system. But those kinds of decisions are never really defended anywhere or debated anywhere other than maybe in forums sometimes.

Not “building up” their CRTs / rules from lower-level data/games or real-world AARs

  • For example, in an operational game like Panzergruppe Guderian, the rules around how combat works could be based on lower-level games that model various situations and creating a distribution of results. I saw a review that talked about how an ‘engaged’ result just means one step loss by both sides, regardless of the size of the stacks involved, which seems like the kind of rule that wouldn’t survive scrutiny if modeled at a lower level. I feel like the actual way it should work is to have one step loss per hexside attacked across or something like that.

Publishers

Not compiling best practices for the production of wargames / making the same mistakes repeatedly

  • I repeatedly see people complaining in reviews about the same issues in released games.

Manuals

  •  

Player aids

  • Not including a pronunciation guide for foreign place names.

  • Not explaining the units

  • The Enemy Is At The Gates | The Players' Aid

    • The counters have NATO symbology but the game doesn’t include a reference explaining what it means, because in the game only the numerical combat values matter.

  • Not including visual examples of what various end-game states look like (e.g. what a minor victory vs. major victory can look like). This makes it harder for a new player to get up-to-speed, which is an especially large problem if they’re going to be playing against someone who has already played several times.

  • Not showing blown-up views of the hexes that show the terrain at 1:1 scale, so players can get a better sense of what the reality on-the-ground looks like.

  • Not coming up with “one/two/three-minute summary” paragraphs of the rules. Something that just kind of gives a high level view of the victory conditions, sequence of play, and maybe the very basics of movement and combat.

Maps
Components
Counters

  • Low-quality cardboard for the counters

  • Not pre-rounding the counters

  • Off-center printing

Counter storage

  • The games don’t come with Cube4Me-style trays by default.

Not selling “newbie packs” that contain common wargaming equipment

  • 3 (or 6?) 3mm 12”x22” sheets of plexiglass, two General Tools #70408 tweezers, dice tower with felt lining, tape to hold the plexi in-place, extra D6 and D10 dice in white/black/red/green, magnifying glass, tile spacers, …

Squad-unit-scale games

  • Not modeling the trade-off between movement speed and the ability to observe the surrounding environment. This is something Combat Mission does really well, where you need to keep units still or moving slowly if you want them to be able to spot enemy units in the distance.

How to find opponents near you

Who to target

  • Males

  • Interested in combat games / sports

  • Older males may be more interested in games depicting higher-level command

Where to find people

  • Combat games/sports

    • Board game cafes

    • PC gaming cafes

    • Martial art gyms (Judo, Muay Thai, etc.)

    • Paintball courses

  • Places where males spend time / hang out

    • Gyms

    • College campuses

    • Pubs / bars

    • Places where people eat (cafeterias, outdoor restaurants)

Where to play in public

  • You should first figure out what the footprint of your game is, because that will affect where you can set up.

  • The standard map size for most wargames is 22”x34”. If a game has multiple maps, they’re typically arranged next to each other length-wise, so a “two-mapper” would typically be 44”x34”. A “three-mapper” would typically be 66”x34”.

Restaurants/bar tables

  • Best for “one-mappers” or smaller.

  • Restaurant tables are usually smaller than pool tables, so you may not be able to play wargames with a larger footprint.

Pool tables

  • Best for larger-footprint games.

  • A standard bar pool table is 7' long, and has a playing surface that’s 38”x76”. So many hex-and-counter wargames should be able to fit on a pool table if you can get permission to use it. You just need to make sure that your game’s maps aren’t arranged in some unusual way, like at an angle to each other.

Board game cafes

  • IMO the problem with these is that they don’t have any foot traffic, so you’re not going to be attracting any new players.

Advertising / Sales

  • Put up flyers at places where these people congregate.

  • Pay for Facebook ads.

  • Play in public.

    • Have signs that:

      • invite people to play (maybe offering compensation as an incentive, like money / beer / food)

      • have a QR code to the FB group or where people can learn more / follow the activities of the group

    • Consider using games with less-niche themes to draw in new players.

      • War of the Ring

      • Root

    • Consider having a movie playing on a laptop or TV screen showing the battle being represented in the game.

Sources of information on this topic

My ideas for board/wargames

A version of Risk that introduces mechanics used in more-complicated games and encourages customizing the game

  • The idea would be to ship the game as a double-sided board, one side of the map would be the normal Risk board, the other side would be a hex-based version of the world map. The game would also a thick booklet introducing lots of mechanics that can be included/introduced. Maybe include paper maps?

    • Mechanics to consider including:

      • using counters instead of miniatures

        • the game should include blank counters and a pencil so you can make your own units / terrain / etc.

      • using CRTs

      • chit-draw to do impulses

      • terrain modifiers / variable terrain (e.g. terrain counters that get randomly placed)

      • allowing/forcing the defender to retreat

      • ‘disrupted’ units

      • handling supply

      • separated movement/attack phases

      • using auctions to decide rules or bid for territories

      • relationship tracks to use for bots or to limit how you can interact with other players (e.g. you must have a relationship score less than X to attack them)

      • CDG-style card play to place units / make attacks / have other effects, a la Twilight Struggle

      • simultaneous writing of orders (a la Diplomacy and War Room)

      • bridge-style bidding to account for uneven starting positions

      • random starting positions determined via die rolling like in Chess960

      • Allow the defender to retreat their armies at any point rather than face battle.

      • Have hex maps of the US, Europe, Africa

        • So this will let people play out the US Civil War, etc. using Risk combat, different values for different territories, and retreat.

      • one or more random events per turn drawn from cards or determined by rolling dice against charts.

    • Components to consider including:

      • a dry-erase marker and laminated 8.5”x11” sheet of white paper (maybe with an ornamental border) with a foldable plastic stand that a player can set up in a public place to invite other people to play.

      • a 22”x34” mounted map, double-sided, by Mark Simonitch, with one side using the classic area movement and the other side using hex movement.