A manual wargame demands that the players understand far more of the designer’s intention and work, through the simple fact that they must work harder to make sense of it, through reading and interpreting the rules, shuffling the cards, moving the bits and rolling the dice. I believe the very tactility, the fact of physical engagement with the game and its components, promotes a different understanding and processing of the information the game offers.
Quotes about wargames
Personally I’ve always found it ironic that wargames attempt to model the species at war, its most illogical and atavistic activity, through a framework of rules full of consistent logical regulations and mathematical procedures.
A child will remember Napoleon’s historical situation better by playing the role of Napoleon than by reading pages and pages of text. Better still, if he enjoyed the game, he will read all the historical background in the rules, before or after the game.
If you take any three wargames at random, you’ll find more fundamental differences in approach and design, even though these are all hex-based military simulations, than you will among three real-time strategy games selected at random.
But the basic rules of historical simulations still applied. Or, as we put it back then, “If you can’t predict the past, you can’t predict the future.”
