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.
I'm pretty sure that these days the more modern military wargames done by legitimate organizations, that aren't physical simulations (a.k.a. laser tag for grownups), do use computers and have integrations with full-size flight sims and data analysis tools.
I play game called Command: Modern Operation^¹ which can barely be a called a game, but rather a military command simulation at the operational level masquerading as one for civilian mil-sim nerds such as myself to toy around with.
There is a "Pro" version^² with all sorts of data-analysis and integration with other equipment/software that, according to their website, used by a surprisingly long list of military organizations. In practice, I have no idea how much it actually is used as I don't work in the defense industry.
I'm sure there are other tools out there like this, but this is the only one I've used before. If you like these kind of things I highly recommend it. It's the kind of game that comes with a 400pg ebook if that's your kinda thing. Personally, it tickles my autism just right.
It is a game mostly about staring at a spreadsheet, showing all the ships in your (usually early 20th century) fleet and their most important data, plus the current budget for your navy. There is ship-design and fighting (2D) real-time battles as well, but mostly staring at a spreadsheet.
I worked with a Navy Vet in the 1990s that would play Harpoon and reported that it was pretty much just like sitting in the sub looking at his displays. I don’t know how true that was, but I remember them marketing it as something that the Navy used in training.
I loaded it up once and decided that I really wasn’t into games I had to study for.
Thank you for the info! I saw some good reviews about Rule the Waves when I was first looking at C:MO, so if you say it's good, I'll definitely have to check it out now.
I'm very much a fan of what I like to call "spreadsheet strategy" games. So if you any other recommendations, I'd love to hear them.
Been playing lots of logistics-heavy games like Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, X4: Foundations, HoI4, and Aurora 4X lately. Tried to learn Empire/Imperium, but I had to shelve that goal to focus on work.
For some reason I really love games that I end up spending more time learning and thinking about than actually playing.
>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.
> Because getting seven friends together in the same room for the all-day affair that was a complete game of Diplomacy was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today, inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post; the first example of this breed would seem to date from 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-post games with new themes which shared some commonalities of approach with Calhamer’s magnum opus.
> Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-by-post game called Xeno, whose concept sounds very familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started with a cluster of five planets — a tiny toehold in a sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized.
> [...]
> In practice, Xeno played out at a pace to which the word “glacial” hardly does justice. The game didn’t really get started until September of 1967, and by a year after that just three turns had been completed. I don’t know whether a single full game of it was ever finished. Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post enthusiasts. The first similar game, called Galaxy and run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before Xeno had processed its third turn.
Agreed, but do most 4X games even have an endgame? Many sandbox games are endless by design, and the intersection of sandbox & 4X seems to be pretty big.
I think it's different to CfNA in that this game simulates an actual campaign with clear goals, but that endgame cannot be reached in a reasonable time by any owner of this piece of cardboard. I'd say that's bad game design...
Well, yes, they do, for instance later Civilizations even provide multiple kinds of conditions for winning the game ! (Though in most playthroughs, the game will be clearly won or lost way before the endgame, especially in SP you often just declare the game 'won' because it's clear nobody will be able to catch up any more, and "shooting fish in a barrel" is only fun the first few times.)
Sandbox doesn't mean no end goal(s), though you typically get the option to continue playing past the end goal(s).
That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.
Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?).
(Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)
> You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.
I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year.
And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every evening for 4 years.
Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.
That is the modern (well, DnD 3E and later, so this century?) style of RPG campaign, with pre-packaged bundles of adventures to play in series, designed to last some specific time and then it ends. The traditional oldschool form of RPG campaign, still the way many groups play, and definitely the most common form last century (even if there were a few pre-packaged campaign modules for AD&D as well) is to create a group of characters and just keep playing adventure after adventure, more or less connected, replacing characters as they died off or players got bored with their current characters, but not really having a well-defined end, probably just fizzling out in the end as players drop off or the group decide to start a new campaign.
(A bit extreme maybe, but I heard of shorter campaigns, but still lasting for at least a decade of regular play.)
And I think you underestimate how dedicated some people can be to playing games like CNA. It is a big game, but it is not absurdly long compared to other big board wargames.
Note how the thread starts out "25 years after playing my last game of CNA".
So called "monster wargames" was a trend around 1980, toward the sudden end of the era of board wargames being almost-mainstream. I do not know if CNA was the biggest of all, but I think not. It was part of starting the trend, but later games were probably bigger and longer.
The actual North Africa campaign lasted a little under three years, let’s round it to 150 weeks. So if you spend less than 10 hours a week playing CNA, your game will take longer than the actual military campaign.
I think a big part of the problem is that Campaign for North Africa is a badly designed wargame, in the sense that it's not abstracted enough.
One of its flaws is that it makes you, in the role of the commander (or one of five commanders, anyway), keep track of:
> "[If using the full rules] every individual plane and pilot in the three year campaign."
This is madness! A real commander wouldn't keep track of this, so why must the player? This level of zoom-in is typical of tactical wargames, where it makes sense, but it's nonsense for traditional "cardboard" grand strategy wargames without computer assistance. So it makes total sense that playing this would take more than the actual Campaign for North Africa, since in the real deal those commanders wouldn't track every individual plane.
I don't think this was made to be actually played, and I struggle to believe anyone has actually finished it, regardless of some internet claims.
Within the wargaming community, keeping these games non-computerized is a deliberate choice. The main intent of manual gaming is to maintain awareness of all the variables you are manipulating. Another benefit to manual gaming is the ability of non-programmers to easily tweak the system. A good exposition of the manual approach to wargaming is Philip Sabin's Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (2012).
> 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.
You can do the same for much cheaper with a VR headset. A popular use for them is to simulate a movie theater or giant computer monitors for flat gaming.
I had a conversation with someone from work who uses VR to work exclusively (meaning, he doesn't use a normal monitor or keyboard for work) and it turns out his setup is really different from what I imagined.
He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus (I forgot which though). His chair is weird and positioned weird. He uses a counterweight in his headset. And so on.
Well, some people do claim one use of the Oculus is this. I remain skeptical that most consumer-grade VR headsets are useful for real work.
(As an aside, in my work experience of more than 2 decades, almost every workplace provided me entry level laptops/computers. Only relatively recently have they started handing out MacBooks or similar equipment. You can do work with entry level laptops in a way you absolutely cannot with entry level VR headsets).
What do you mean by "entry level" ? Did you have to work on an Eee PC during its time ? (I "did", but it was leased for free by the university, not an employer.) About a year ago I checked out laptops available at the supermarket, and most of them still didn't have an SSD !!
Though I think I get what you mean, and also Oculus isn't "entry level" (maybe the first consumer one would qualify today, I have (had ?) one and I can't imagine reading lots of text with that low resolution !), that would be the headsets without 6 Degrees of Freedom (or badly working ones).
I'm not using any hard definition, but by "entry level" laptops I meant low RAM, average-to-low CPU power, low-resolution screen (do you remember 768p screens? I've used that for more years than is acceptable to human dignity [1]), and if an external monitor was given, it was 1080p at best.
And this was for development.
As for the Oculus, I own an Oculus 2 and recently tried an Oculus 3, and while I don't know if calling them "entry level" is fair, I definitely wouldn't want to do any serious work with them, or spend a long time wearing them. For (some) gaming? Sure. Though I get dizzy easily. I do enjoy Beat Saber though!
--
[1] for some reason, hardware procurement at most jobs I've worked (until relatively recently) had it backwards. They thought higher screen resolutions were for "watching movies and playing videogames", while lower resolutions were for "serious work". In fact, it's the opposite: 720p is more than enough to watch movies on a tiny laptop screen, while productivity requires more screen real estate! And as for videogames -- average GPUs at the time I was having these work discussions struggled with anything more hi-res than 720p, so thinking that higher resolutions were "for gaming" was a total logical disconnect. Oh well, I cannot complain now; since the advent of the MacBook for Serious Work (tm) all of these problems seem to have gone away.
Heh, both of the laptops I still use are like this : one is a midrange one from ~2012 and has 768 lines, the other a high end one from ~2016 and in theory 1440 lines, but I run it at 720. In both cases it's because the screens are too small for the typical assumptions with regards to pixel density programs use to have more lines, their graphic cards are frankly not good enough to be able to run more than that, and it saves on battery life.
But then laptops aren't for serious work, that's what desktops are for ! (And nothing wrong with 1080 lines (though I prefer 1200) for a typical size desktop monitor, especially if using more than one screen.)
> But then laptops aren't for serious work, that's what desktops are for !
Where is that? I haven't seen a desktop at any workplace for more than 10 years, possibly more. Closer to 20 likely. And I mean anywhere -- neither small startups nor bigger businesses. Nobody used desktops for work, serious or otherwise. I'd say the only people I know who still use desktops are hardcore gamers (and not even most of them, either!).
In any case, we're getting sidetracked. My main point was that even these entry-level laptops are better than an Oculus headset for working. My experience, YMMV, and all the standard disclaimers.
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.
I have quite a few books on this topic. Perla's was probably the first that I read and it is good, but to anyone interested in the topic I would first recommend Jon Peterson's "Playing at the World" ("A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games"). It's a book about how D&D came to be and covers many topics, but the section on wargames is very well researched and detailed (and I enjoyed the rest of the book as well).
My second recommendation is CG Lewin's "War Games and their History". It is a bit lighter on the history of military professional games, even if there is a chapter or two on that, but the chapters on non-professional wargames are amazing. The author has a personal collection of games going back to the 19th century and the book is full of photos and descriptions of obscure games that I really enjoyed reading about and that I never found in any other source. It covers games up to around 1950, so it does not get into any of the more well-known modern history of wargames (starting with Avalon Hill in the 1950's).
The "Wrens" was a division of women Navy sailors who played WW2 war games to identify how German UBoats were so successful. Played many scenarios, and replayed events after attacks to understand German tactics. Would get called in to game out live events as they were happening to decide upon the next day's strategy. Arguably led to enormous increases in British naval effectiveness.
The Game, as it was to become known, took over the top floor of the building, which came to look like a cross between a school gym and a child’s nursery. The floor was covered in linoleum and divided into painted sectors. On this make-believe ocean, the Wrens moved miniature convoys – model merchant ships and their battleship chaperones – according to directions given by the officers taking part in the exercise. But while the Wrens were permitted a bird’s eye view of the play area, the naval captains were allowed only occasional peeks through holes in canvas booths, arranged at the side of the playing field, positioned to recreate the limitations of visibility at sea.
...During the post-mortem that followed each game, all of the players would be treated to a bird’s eye view of the battle. The officers could at last see the tracks of the U-boats drawn on the floor in green chalk, set against the movements of their own ships drawn in white, and learn from the umpires whether or not they had managed to sink any submarines. Often, the officers would realise that they had made numerous dreadful mistakes during the Game, which might have resulted in the loss of their ships in earnest combat.
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.
I think it is a safe bet that they are mostly computer games by now, though there is a long history of using board games for training. That said, there was Freedom of Information Act request to uncover some of the games Mr. Rhunke developed for the CIA and they turned out to be physical board games.
I mean real life games, like the ones hosted by/for military and disaster planners. The only places I can think of on the west coast that might do that sort of stuff are the RAND corporation and the Naval Postgraduate school at Monterey.
It may not be immediately obvious, but these are not "games" in the hobbyist sense of the word (though I suppose hobbyists may get interested, though access to this one in particular seems to be restricted to the military) but "simulations" for teaching and training.
They are not supposed to be "fun". They are supposed to be analysis tools. Their goal is different to a wargame for hobbyists, where "playability" is usually a greater factor than the simulation of real war concerns.
That's why it's OK that in a single day you can get one or two turns done. It's not a game, people who attend these exercises are doing work-related stuff.
Is that “in a normal work day” as in playing the game as their normal work day, or playing the game while they do their normal work over the course of the day?
It's not a game and it's not supposed to be fun. It's a military simulation, a tool for military people. 2-3 turns in one day may be entirely within reasonable range for military analysis.
You cannot buy it in a store. You need to work for the DoD to have access to it.
It's not uncommon for 4X to be Played By E-Mail (or any other way to transfer save files these days), in which case 1 turn per day is a common agreement.
P.S.: The most recent thread for MP Civ4 on the biggest Civ forums is literally this :
> Please note this is a long term commitment of multiple months requiring you to play a turn every day. We all realize life happens and when it does we just ask you post and ask for an extension.
(you select a unit, tell it to move to another tile, it moves immediately, which also changes the state of your fog of war, or even starts combat),
or during turn processing on the server/host
(you select a unit, give it an order, but it will only execute it during turn processing).
- Play can be either sequential turns (one player after another), or simultaneous turns (everyone at the same time).
- Play can be either in real time, or in hotseat / by transferring saves (either to the next player, or the server/host).
All of the 6 combinations are in theory possible, though of course some are more common and make more sense than others, and will be more supported than others. For instance various Civilizations support both sequential or simultaneous turns (Later Heroes of Might and Magic even support simultaneous until players meet, then sequential !), and Space Empires 4/5 supports both immediate or delayed orders.
Then it gets even more complicated depending on whether the tactical combat happens directly on the strategic map, or is instanced on separate, tactical maps. Some games even have instanced combat where the game becomes an RTS when unit groups meet ! (Like Total War or Sword of the Stars or Space Empires 5.)
I have played PBEM with sequential turns and 1 turn per day, though of course these games then tend to limit the number of players.
Some PBEM games, like the venerable VGA Planets, had all players complete their turns and then play those simulatenously by the host program, resulting in the next universe state.
There are rules within the game engine to disambiguate in which order some interactions resolve. If I remember correctly, the classic boardgame Diplomacy plays the same way (all orders are simultaneously, with some precedence rules for conflicts).
For anyone looking to dip their toes into Wargaming, I encourage you to look at GMT Game's output. They have a ton of games like this of varying levels of complexity. The best way to get started is to try to find a game around a theme you're interested in. These games are all (largely) in stores:
Even simultaneous turn based strategy games take hours. I cannot imagine the time commitment for non-computer managed strategy games. I also don’t understand the point unless it’s mostly about face to face interaction.
Back when I had more free time I played in some really long non-computer games like that. It was great to have a group that got together 1-2 evenings per week, played for a few hours to complete one or a few turns.
The alternative is to get together and play for a long day or weekend, but many games are much too long for that. I played one earlier this month with six other players (in two teams). We started in the morning and played til late in the evening, but we did not get halfway through the game. It was enough to see what side was likely to win. That is the usual outcome in my experience.
More common these days is to use a tool like VASSAL (https://vassalengine.org/) to play those games online.
I believe in this case that's very much the goal -- less about who wins, and more about the options/tactics debated to inform actual military battle prep.
It's about the face-to-face decision making and teambuilding. The lack of a computer is also somewhat of a bonus as it forces players to be intentional about processes, because in battle the computer probably won't be able to handle every process that comes up and so experience doing it by hand is useful
> I hope that they at the very least use a computer to calculate the outcomes of a battle.
From the article:
The real core mechanic is how dice are used in the game. The dice act as an instant adjudicator and the system uses different sizes of dice that can be adjusted during game play.
The map and counters also encode a lot of rapidly accessible state information. Using a computer would require all of this state info to be maintained in the computer, which would be a very different game, probably without the person to person interactions that make the game what it is.
This sounds extremely inefficient and even Luddite like. Having a computer involved wouldn’t reduce interaction. It would allow you to drastically increase the game speed.
> It would allow you to drastically increase the game speed.
A lot of the value of these games is the human interaction of several people working closely around the same table, not sat at separate screens interacting via the systems rather than each other. These sorts of games have real value for training senior decision makers whose day job is all about personal interactions, e.g. gold or silver commanders in a blue light emergency response scenario. They need to get into the syndicate room and immediately start to discuss how to respond to a crisis, not learn a new game interface.
You don’t need a separate computer per person, just per team. You probably only need a single computer for the entire game. This is really bad mental gymnastics.
Might not qualify, but a few years back, my team started playing diplomacy online. I had never played a game involving so much back channel negotiation, double crossing, and strategy. It had a funny effect on water cooler conversations because folks that I had a great relationship with would approach me with a noticeable air of disappointment as a result of some of my less than honorable decision making. I highly recommend this game to anyone with a group of friends looking for a turn based war game spanning many days.
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.