(Part 2) Top products from r/wargames

I'm both a tabletop and a PC (war)gamer. I've played lots of wargames but enjoy videogames in general. My current favorite PC wargame is Unity of Command.

For me the tabletop has a tactile approach. I enjoy the hobby aspect -- collecting, assembling, kitbashing and painting -- as much or even a little more than actually playing.

Many PC wargames are indeed too convoluted and with difficult UIs (again, my favorite Unity of Command has a very streamlined UI). I've come to a point where I don't want to fight the UI or read a large manual to play a PC game. Videogames to me require almost instant gratification.

I was going to say "conversely, with tabletop wargames..." but actually, it's the same. My patience and spare time grow thinner as I get older. I really cannot stand convoluted wargames. Following the guidelines from Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames, I believe good wargames must be fast-play, simple, practical, and value gameplay over needless details and rules. This is why games such as Crossfire appeal to me: it's a tabletop wargame where the rules "melt away" as you play. Conversely, I was reading about Fistful of TOWs 3 400+ page manual and immediately knew it wasn't the wargame for me.

As for aesthetics: I value them in both PC and tabletop wargames. It's just that for something to be beautiful it doesn't need to be "realistic". Wooden blocks and a colorful map look beautiful to me. Still, I prefer miniatures in tabletop games.

Oh, awesome! I'd be interested in just about anything you felt like passing on - my brother and I have been wanting to try out 40k (or Fantasy, or really any solid miniatures wargame?) for ages (which is why we picked up Dust in the first place, as a middle ground between wargames and board games), but I'd be willing to swap for just about anything you were looking to get rid of that felt fair to you - we play a whole host of geeky games. Our Dust box is at his place - I'll swing by there and get a full list of what we've got, but looking at my Amazon order history, I pretty sure this is everything:

Dust Tactics Revised Core Set


Light Panzer Walker


Axis Gorillas


Grim Reapers


Light Assault Walker


and the Terrain Tile Set

All the minis are unglued and unpainted, and we really only played a handful of times. We'd been pondering trying out Dust Warfare, but have both been distracted by other things, so I'd love for them to have a good home!

Zones of Control

Or, since he was also into early RPGs:
Playing at the World

There are several books about the creation of D&D/biographies of Gary Gygax, my favorite is Empire of Imagination

In addition to TMP, look up John Bobeck he wrote a book full of rules for toy soldiers.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Games-War-Treasury-Soldiers/dp/1434330281

Have you looked into Spycraft?

http://www.amazon.com/Spycraft-Roleplaying-Game-Version-2-0/dp/1594720371

There's a lot of ways to do it. The most basic way is to actively play both sides, exactly as if you were playing a two-player game. The main problem there is that without additional effort, you always know what the other guy intends to do. Using things like numbered blinds can help with obscuring the placement of units on the table, and allow you to suspend disbelief a bit. I play IABSM this way a fair bit and it's pretty fun. I think it's best if there's a defined scenario like "hasty defense of a village" since even in a two-player game both sides would have a pretty good expectation of what the other side would do, and so having that "inside knowledge" isn't as helpful.

The other approach to solo wargaming involves you actively playing one side, while the other side's actions are determined by any number of randomization mechanisms, so that you really can't predict what "the enemy" is going to do. One approach that I've been working on is basically an incursion scenario where my force is infiltrating a known hostile area with intent to capture some objective, but without an understanding of the exact forces I'll encounter. When each unit advances, I roll some dice to determine whether I encounter enemy unit(s), how far away they are, and what they are (all enemies are unseen until they attack, and then they stay on the board). There are modifiers to that roll based on how stealthy I'm being, how close I am to major objectives, and how vigilant the enemy force is. Once an enemy unit is encountered, a single round of combat is fought between that unit, any units it has in support, and the enemy. I use IABSM as my base rules, so my units are activated randomly, and there are variable turn lengths. I can also modify this mechanism to incorporate reconnaissance by having a unit do a recon check which basically means, roll for an encounter but don't force a round of combat.

This seems like a reasonably elegant way to justify using a more or less random dice roll to determine whether I get in a fight, otherwise it just feels like I'm fighting waves of zombies. I think I can adapt it to other scenarios like fixed defense as well, again using my proximity to the objective as a modifier.

Sorry for going on and on. I really love solo wargaming, although my wife says it makes me the loneliest nerd in a hobby known for lonely nerds. Donald Featherstone has a really good book about solo wargaming, I'd recommend checking that out as well.

EDIT: [Donald Featherstone's Solo Wargaming] (http://www.amazon.com/Donald-Featherstones-Solo-Wargaming-Curry/dp/1409260119)