What is your favorite wargame? Share your stories!
I'm always out on the look for new types of strategy games that offer brain-twisting moments for each of the player participated.
Myself, I am an avid fan of Columbia Games block-type boardgames, having played EastFront with a ruleset modified for 8 players (1 commander and 3 front commanders per team) plus a referee as well as Bobby Lee with a similar ruleset. I've experienced the impending victory in Liberty as the Americans, forcing my rival to quit before I even got a chance to properly win. But I have also faced failure in Napoleon having failed to destroy the Prussians on my last turn.
These are some of the best moments in my boardgaming history (including such basic boardgames as Risk and Diplomacy, which are both fine games), and I suspect with the arrival of my freshly bought Rommel in the Desert I will be gathering wargame memories for many years to come.
What I wanted to ask was, in search of fresh perspectives, what do you consider to be your favorite war-based boardgame, if any? Discuss!
Posted Dec 1, 2010, 8:47 AM UTC
Not strictly war game, but I used to run Diplomacy games at my student coop (125 residents). We put a huge map in the dining hall, and required teams to submit moves, by email or paper, twice a week.
The tension was hilarious, watching the backstabbing and skulduggery going on before the moves came due. There'd usually be at least 4-5 people standing around, watching me update the map.
Followed closely by Risk -- we had numerous all-night beer-sodden Risk tournaments. You usually end up making up your own rules sometime around 5 a.m. and they are not always perfectly coherent rules.
That long, huh? I always thought it was the then-pinnacle of my gaming history when at the beginning of a Diplomacy game the player representing Russia was left alone on the table him wearing an almost literal, shocked :O face, and then seeing one player backstab on the players with whom he had negotiated before... except for Russia, he left Russia playing in the east while he played, or kept backstabbing people, in the west (as France I recall).
Granted, we were pretty new at that game so we had tons of fun with it. I couldn't play that game for long, because I always kept getting conned by everyone, made me shout bloody murder on a turn basis. I might be up for it again, though...
I like the way you made teams of each country (as we only played with 6 people). Did you get all of them to play or most of them anyway? A game of such scale would be a most intriguing challenge to try, if not even epic, since the behavior of each country would be made of more opinions than one (a factor that definitely affected our Diplomacy runs).
I left it to the teams to figure out how they did the moves. That was the whole point. The high visibility of the board meant that there was usually someone standing around it, plotting and scheming. That in turn motivated others to participate.
If a team flaked, they just lost their moves, got raped for the round, and learned quickly that they had to pick it up. It also helped that I occasionally announced the progress at weekly house meetings (only took 2 minutes.)
This was the first Diplomacy game I'd run. This format is best done in places like school dorms. I would not try in offices, because people inevitably get pissed off and start taking shit personally.