the boardgamification of wargames

every time I've talked to people about their preferred way to play War Games their answer is the same narrative style play is their favorite and every time I see people ask for advice about how to get into a war game the advice from the community is the same go with the faction you think is the coolest don't worry about the meta be okay with losing games numbers change the models won't now this is all good advice great advice even but if this is the prevailing wisdom of wargaming from war Gamers why isn't this the way we play all the support and attention in the war gaming hobby seems to go straight towards the competitive scene the area that most people playing will say is the less interesting way to engage with the gaming side of their hobby so why does it get all the attention now it could be that matched play with the most updated competition rule sets is the easiest way to get a pickup game going between folks who don't know each other and that's true narrative games require more creativity and agreement between the two players on what the experience is that they're trying to create on the tabletop and the result is almost by definition unbalanced competitive rule sets are much simpler and the Rules of Engagement are predetermined before you even walk in the door now I've played a few tournaments of Warhammer 40K I've played pickup games at Shops and I've had a pretty good time with them but the most fun I've had playing War Games is narrative games where there's an emerging story playing out on the tabletop this doesn't mean that narrative games can't be competitive either you can play a narrative game with both players trying very hard to push their side to Victory but the victory itself tends to be less of the point let's step back a bit and set the context for this conversation War Games didn't Ed to be one player versus another player just battling it out in what was essentially the original war game Ciel there was an Umpire that ran the game instead they would set the conditions of the battle the scenario the troops and Troop types they would receive orders from the players on both sides and written messages and move the troops on the map according to those orders they might even hold on to messages meant for Allied players if the conditions of the battle might delay messages or even give those messages to the enemy the rules in the original version of the game weren't fully worked out so the Umpire would make judgment calls to respond to more creative orders in unique ways the more modern approach to war games is where the rules are very defined and there's an answer for any scenario that occurs at least that's what the producers of those rules would like you to think in reality using unique pieces of terrain loads of different books and resources that are constantly changing and impossible to keep a mental Archive of and various models representing different eras of the game that are technically still legal result in all sorts of rules fog of war that require players to come up with on the-fly rulings that they can agree to so that the game can just keep moving forward this happens all the time in modern war games and it's not really a big problem for most people because most people just shrug off an unusual scenario just to keep the game going but then why are we pretending like these war games are these super balanced competitive games that can or should be played in tournaments in my stupid opinion this is the worst possible development for war games right now war games are running on Modern Yu-Gi-Oh rules and I think that they should be running on dualist kingdom rules I'm having him attack a card I put on the the field myself the moon no now Stone Soldier destroy the moon or at least battle City players should be able to come up with cool ideas to try on the Fly and deploy them into games right on the spot there should be unexpected things that happen that screw up the plans of both players there should be overarching camp aigns that set the context for this battle meaning that for one of the players maybe Victory just means slowing the opponent down and the main thing that I think could improve War Games is bringing back the referee role-playing games understand that having a game master who can make on the-fly rulings on player-driven Creative problem solving that feel like they make sense in the world being played seriously Elevate them and they could seriously Elevate war games from what they've been turning into over the years which is board games war games are at war with themselves with their own identity they don't want to be war games they want to be board games they want to have that refined and defined rule set that's easily replicated and defined but the very nature of War Games makes that simply an impossible thing for them to have most War Games aren't on a grid they use measuring tape to determine distances that's messy yes measuring tape itself is accurate but most people will use it for a minute and then kind of eyeball where they put their troops they aren't meant to be accurate to the centimeter with it which means that it's not a perfectly defined and refined system and it really was never meant to be that RPGs like D and D spawned from war games because people wanted to expand on the narrative elements of their games they wanted to bring the camera down and see the struggles of the individual but when RPGs left wargaming it feels like they took all the narrative juice with them what's left in the world of war games to me just feels like a pale imitation of the tight refined mechanics of board games just with way too much time effort and money put into them you can get a strategic experience that is a thousand times more fulfilling playing War of the Ring second edition for 80 bucks with you and your best friend then you can if you spend $400 building and buying a Warhammer Army just to show up to your local game store get table turn one let it sit in your closet for a year and then sell it on Facebook Marketplace I'm not saying War Games aren't fun they're just not meant to be played in the way that companies making them seem to want you to play them or advertise that you should play them so what would it look like to put a referee back into war games well I think it works best when you have a group all involved in a game let's say you have a group of four or five friends that are into Star Wars Legion cool pick out a cool planet to fight over make a big map divide it into regions generate cool resources and cities and landmarks generate a table of conditions that could occur whenever armies meet at those locations generate a table for world events that could happen on certain turns of the game generate a bunch of factions that exist that you could earn the approval and ey of then give all of that to a referee and let them use those resources to create unique scenarios for each of you to deal with maybe two players meet at an oil refinery owned by an off-world Trading Company now one player secretly offers to pay the offworld trading company for the oil while the other player plans to just take it by force the offro trading company takes the deal and sends in Mercenaries to help the player that they made a deal with now that other player is going to get bodied by the combined Force sure that fight itself was unfair but the point isn't about making each fight fair it's about making the whole game unique fun and interesting you know for a fact that the player that got beaten in that last fight will now be thinking really hard about how to get that kind of advantage next time that's the kind of gaming that really excites me gets My Imagination Running it's the kind of War gaming that I'm most interested interested in going forward now I still think that there's a place in the world for match play it really is great for one-off pickup games especially with people you don't know but I think that this sort of play should be seen by the community as a nice beer and Pretzel's way to play the game and certainly not the main way to play or something anybody should be obsessing over my main argument here is that we as a community should be putting way more Collective time and energy into ways to play the game that we all agree are more fun and way less into metas and tournaments thanks so much for watching and thank you to my patrons for supporting the content I'm bringing to you I'm Bend Hart and if you like this video subscribe and come back and catch the next one if you want to tell me about a narrative wargaming experience you've had I'd love to hear about it in the comments see you

Channel: Ben DeHart

Views: 91,417

Keywords: wargames, wargaming, tabletop games, warhammer, 40k, aos, age of sigmar, miniature war gaming, miniwargaming, play on tabletop, board games, games night, yogscast, hobby, minis, tabletop minions, invicta, kriegspiel, little wars, little wars tv, dicebreaker, solo wargaming

Id: 5SsdGA2k3jA

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024