Packing List

Next weekend, I embark on the first of two (?) lengthy research trips: About seven weeks along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to Natchez to Vicksburg to Little Rock (which is, granted, not on the River), and thence to St. Louis for the holidays. This is the longest research trip I've taken yet, by a couple of weeks, so packing is an interesting proposition.

Clothes, for instance, are trickier. Baton Rouge will get up into the 80s (30 C) while I'm there, but when I leave St. Louis it'll be in the 20s (-5 C), so I need a few different layers.

The other trick, of course, is staying sane while being alone on the road for almost two months. I'll be fairly busy, even when I'm not in the archives; I need to be categorizing all of what I find so I can get to it when I start writing. I also have a writing project I need to work on--on games on the Civil War--so that'll take up some time.

But there will be some time off. I'm casting an eye over the bookshelves and the game shelves, trying to figure out what to bring along. "Small" is the order of the day, of course, along with solo-able. I picked up Space Hulk: Death Angel on the recommendation of a great many people, and it's certainly a small enough package. Combat Commander is a natural; I'm also looking at Ancient Battles Deluxe, which is climbing up the ladder for me.

I may have discussed it before, but maybe not. It's one of my beloved "toy box" games, with the ability to depict a great many battles in one package. It's a redesign of the old 3W Ancients, which is the second game I bought in Austin (Europa Universalis being the first, of all things). The new one is more complex--although you can use the old rules if you want. But while it's more complex, it's still simple enough; it's no GBoH, that's for sure. It's not a dissertation on ancient and medieval warfare...but then GBoH isn't, either. (I got into a long Facebook argument about this with Richard H. Berg...) But it's fun, and it has a small footprint, and the time investment isn't great--and it provides a whiff of verisimilitude.

I'm trying to decide whether to bring a chess set along. I feel chess fever in my bones again, which is never a good sign. Speaking of reissues and revisions, a new edition of my favorite chess book ever reached my doorstep the other day: The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It's more than the usual game collection; it's a kind of autobiography written by a kind of idiosyncratic player, David Bronstein. He's famous for almost being World Champion in 1951; he drew the match (meaning he didn't take the crown) under suspicious circumstances, and there's a certain bitterness that tinges the book. But it's almost a kind of endearing bitterness; it's a sign of a real, tangible personality, which is often lacking from these kinds of books. Anyway, it's gotten me thinking about the Game of Kings again.

But on the other hand, there's the new Master Play, with fourteen go games deeply (and amateur-friendly) annotated by Yuan Zhou, who is making a nice authorial career out of this sort of thing. His books make me feel like I understand the game a little bit better after I read them. I don't think I actually play any better, but I might be appreciating well-played games better. In an attempt to actually improve, I've invested in Winning Go: Successful Moves from the Opening to the Endgame. Of which I cannot speak much at the moment...

Of course, what all this means is that I'll pack up all my games, and all my books, and forget my laptop...or the five (six?) chargers and cords I need...

Getting Educated: Football Edition

Some thoughts as I slowly assemble my first "real" miniatures army...on which more soon. It's part of my program of finding small-footprint games to take along on my research trip.

Anyway, I'm a big sports guy. I'll watch darn near anything on TV or in person; it accounts for the vast majority of my TV time. My favorite three sports are baseball (obvious first place) and then hockey and college football (which flip-flop in my mind periodically). Baseball and hockey I know pretty well. I've played them, or games very like them, since I was nine. When I watch games on TV, I know what's happening and what all the terminology means.

Football's different. I never played, really, and while I watch football all day long on fall Saturdays I can only really relate to it aesthetically and tribally. I can't diagram plays, I don't know what a "veer" is, and really a lot of the intricacies of the game are beyond me.

TV doesn't help. There's a lot going on on a football field and there isn't much dead air to fill talking about them seriously. With baseball, there's a lot of time between pitches and at-bats to discuss what's happening, how strategy works, and so on. Sometimes they'll cut away from the action to describe some skill--what a "circle change" looks like; things like that. Football just doesn't have time.

(Neither does hockey, and more so, which is why it's hard to really get into unless you've played, I think. There's a lot going on that just looks like chaos to the uninitiated. Basketball is that way with me; I can only fully enjoy basketball if it's a team I care about (there are three of these) and I'm watching them in person. It's mostly tribal. Key fact: I never played a game of basketball in my life; just HORSE and other messing-around games.)

ANYway, I decided this season to educate myself about football. I'm kind of casting around. My first attempt (I declared myself one step above Football for Dummies) is Pat Kirwan's Take Your Eye off the Ball. It's endorsed by NFL.com, so you figure there's some sort of official Nihil Obstat/Imprimatur involved here. I certainly find it interesting reading; it goes through many of the steps of putting a team, game, and position player together, discussing the various skills involved and going through at least some X's and O's. I could probably stand some more hand-holding for particular plays and what they entail but I'm following along. Of course, the proof comes on the weekends, if I'm getting more out of the games than I was previously.

What's kind of interesting is his attitude towards the college game. The college game, in the NFL's eyes, exists to prepare players for the pros, and he goes into some detail about what the colleges do well and poorly--and wishes that they'd push more running backs out the door so their NFL careers can start a year earlier. I'm still a tiny bit of an idealist when it comes to college football, partly since I'm watching the student-athlete/instructor interaction at close range. The football players I've taught have been pretty good students, honestly--partly because we're lucky to have Joe Paterno who has built a strong organizational culture of taking class seriously. (This is honestly kind of rare, sadly.) So I like to pretend that college football can and should be about the "college" part, and can do so while preserving some pretty good football.

Of course, there's no reason for the NFL to give a damn, other than some sort of weird altruism.

I've begun having fun, though; it'll be good if I can intellectually connect with the third of my top three sports.

News and Views

Greetings from my desk at Penn State. Sitting before me, and on top of the, um, upper top of the desk, are perched all but one of the commercially-published games on the whole Civil War to appear in English. (I also have one in French, and missing one in Japanese.) I'm working on ways to compare these things. Do I focus on particular design issues--how to integrate emancipation, the draft, etc--or the trend towards the "academic" in these things--having a patina of seriousness? I want to talk about everything, but I only have twenty pages...

At the California University of Pennsylvania--not to be confused with the Indiana University of Pennsylvania--there's a class on Military History being taught by Paul Crawford, a medievalist. It's of interest because of its attempt to integrate games in the syllabus. Games present kind of a problem for the professor, at least one of a largish class. (An eight-person seminar is no sweat; two teams and away you go.) The rules have to be easy enough for them to be grasped by a kind of cross-section of undergraduate humanity...who are not famous for reading things carefully for class. The big problem, though, is that they take up a lot of time. With all the hoo-hah associated with new gamers learning a new game, you have to figure on three hours for even a "short" game by our standards. That's two movies' worth, and every hour you spend on the game is an hour you can't lecture. I want to use games in my own teaching, so I'm following this class closely; I'm going to see if I can head out to see the class in action some day. My hunch is that "Military History" is too broad of a topic; it's just too much time spent on games (three of them--Commands and Colors: Ancients, Crusader Rex, and Conflict of Heroes 1). It seems like it'd work better with a class on the Civil War--you wouldn't lose as much context.

I mentioned that Paul Crawford is a medievalist. This is relevant, since a large percentage of professor-gamers are medievalists, I've found. The two most prominent professors are Warren Treadgold (noted Byzantinist) and Tom Madden (noted, and controversial, Crusades scholar)...both at St. Louis University. I suppose you might add me; I have more medievalist DNA than anything else. A student here is a medievalist gamer. There's enough people for a panel, honestly; I'm going to see if I can get the band together for next year's Society for Military History conference.

The collection has been creeping up towards the cap. I have room for three more games, then they need to get sold off to bring new ones in. I'm pretty sure I can keep to this regimen, since I recollect vividly how miserable it got to have 1200 of the things rather than a "mere" 300. The thing I'm torn about is how, if at all, to count the games I have just for this or that academic purpose. Of these two dozen games in front of me, I own one because I enjoy playing it. Another one is there because of cherished childhood associations. I might, I guess, keep one or two more? But probably not. The rest of these are getting sold as soon as I don't need them anymore...especially since some of these are among the worst games ever made. One or two I might have to just pillage and pitch, they're so unsellable (they're worth less than the cost of shipping). My hunch is to not count the ones I won't play, but I worry that that might become a crutch for full-scale cheating.

That, or I worry too much.

I should mention, too, that I'll have a new blogging outlet starting up sometime in October. Penn State's history department is starting a blog on Civil War matters; it's mostly just about relevant news stories...except for me, talking about games on the Civil War.

I'm not exactly sure how it's going to develop just yet, but I'm grasping any opportunity to bring gaming to the attention of academia. I think gaming deserves comparable (not equal, but proportionate) attention as movies, novels, or--the closest connection--reenacting receive, which is a good healthy bit of attention. I think I can pull this off, with some carefully-aimed academic darts. If I get what I want--scholarly attention to the hobby--I'm curious how gamers are going to react. As of now, the ones I've heard from are enthusiastic...but I can essentially guarantee that the coverage of the hobby is not going to be uniformly positive.

The big challenge for an academic studying games is that they have to be at least vaguely versed in how these games actually work. They'd have to play a few games themselves to understand how games get put together, what you can and can't do, and so on. This is by no means an insuperable difficulty, but it requires more "inside knowledge" than studying books or movies. Anyway, I'm vastly curious how this could all play out.

Civil War Games: Foreign Intervention

So, the Confederacy felt that it's best shot at independence was--once it was obvious that it was getting into a big war--to get international recognition, and preferably some heavy-duty diplomatic intervention up to and including military aid, much like the colonist rebels got in the American War of Independence.

Both the USA and CSA expended considerable effort to achieve their desired outcomes. However, historians today generally believe that there was no way England and France (the only two powers that mattered) were going to throw their weight behind the Confederacy. Just none. There was too much else going on in Europe, they consumed too much USA wheat, they'd get the cotton just the same if the North won, etc etc etc.

Which leads to an interesting game problem: Assuming the historians are correct, should foreign intervention be possible in a good wargame on the Civil War?

I've always argued that it should. I've seen wargames as trying to recreate the mindset of the relevant historical actors (at least kind-of), and players should be induced to act based on the perceived reality of the time.

Yesterday I was showing my burgeoning collection of ACW games off to some non-gamer historian friends, and this was met with howls of derision. Intervention was impossible in reality, it should be impossible in the game, and if you make it possible in the game you're teaching falsehoods.

Nobody's studied this, and it'd be a pain in the butt for me to study it, but I have a feeling that there are serious disconnects between the way gamers approach history as it should exist in games, and how historians would approach it. It's reasonably well known that the two camps like different kinds of book; this takes it the other way.

Historians have long given helpful suggestions to movie makers--who have not read these suggestions--about how historical movies should be made. Civil War historians have recently taken to telling artists what to paint. Nobody (except me, a little) has told game designers how to design their games, likely because nobody cares.

Anyway, it'd be interesting to sit down with historians of the Civil War, describe the whole boardgame concept in a few sentences (I've gotten good at this), and see what they think of some of the major design challenges ACW game designers face--like foreign intervention. I'm too close; I'm too much of a gamer. (Even though I've played one ACW game once in the past eight years, and it was solitaire.) But I'm becoming curious about the gap between historians and games, just like in movies and art.

Thing I did not expect

I had no idea that taking a blog private, and then going public again, would jack up RSS as much as it does. The feed may never work right again...

Oddities in Civil War Games, Part 1 of n

As I mentioned earlier, I'm writing a book chapter/article on games covering the Civil War on the (grand) strategic level. One of the challenges is writing about games in such a way that they make sense to academic historians, most of whom haven't played "real" wargames in their lives. (Although some will have.) I also have to look at these games not as a gamer, but as an historian, and when you do that you look at different things. For instance, as an historian I don't care whether the games are fun, pretty, easily understood, balanced, or anything like that. I do care about the art on the cover, the name of the game, and what sorts of things the game covers--or not.

(It occurs to me that "balanced" needs an asterisk; I care about how likely it is that the North will win the war on the board, but not how likely it is that the Northern player will achieve the game's victory conditions.)

Anyway, I've been amassing a giant pile of Civil War games. Some of them have struck the historian bone in me one way or another. One example:

A House Divided: The Brothers [sic] War. At the beginning of the game, the single most powerful Union army is under the control of William Clarke Quantrill in Jefferson City, Missouri.

I mean, honestly. How does this happen? Quantrill had a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it career as a "Unionist" in Missouri, and at the height of his fame (as a Confederate) had a band of maybe five hundred men. There is just absolutely no way Quantrill commands the most powerful troops the Union has, and furthermore there is no way that said troops would be in Missouri and further-furthermore there's no way that the least-powerful single Union force on the map is the one McDowell has facing off against Beauregard and Johnson. I'm assured that the game is pretty decent but I'm going to have trouble convincing Actual Historians that this game was designed by grown-ups.

Interestingly, this is one of the huge pile of Research Material games that I might get to play. I'm curious how it works; it's designed as a 3-vs-3 team game, and has very simple rules. I'm just barely hopeful that I can con five people into playing this thing. One problem has been getting pieces. It doesn't come with counters or anything; you're supposed to use the pieces from the 1998 version of Risk. This version of Risk no longer exists in stores, and I had to pay $ to get pieces off eBay. Kind of annoying.

In other game-buying news

I've actually been buying a lot more games than I detailed below. They are, however, not really for fun. Assuming all goes well, I'm going to be writing a chapter for a book to be released in two or so years from a major academic press. The book is a collection of the "most innovative research" done in popular culture studies over the past decade. Go me! Anyway, I thought that paper was dead and gone, so I got rid of most of the "research material" for it. However, now that I need to expand that paper into a full-blown chapter, I need to get it all back.

The chapter is on how the Civil War is "remembered" in popular culture by board games. I'm focusing on games that cover the entire war, since trying to grasp the whole wooly beast in one chapter is essentially impossible. The basic narrative is that, since 1961, the number of people playing these games has gone steadily down, from hundreds of thousands of copies sold in mainstream stores, to smash hits of 4-5000 sold worldwide today. However, the consumers have become more educated and have begun to demand more "seriousness" from their games. You can see this in little ways. We have no idea who designed Battle-Cry, but you now typically see the name of the designer on the front of the box, like an author. You have lengthy defenses of design choices, bibliographies, and sometimes footnotes. Many games nowadays try to incorporate not-strictly-military events into the games, with mixed results. And so on.

Anyway, to write this thing up "for real" I was going to need a fairly complete collection of wargames on the Civil War, since it's harder than you think to grasp what's going on with scanned rulebooks. I started out with three; Blue vs Gray, VG's Civil War, and Victory Point's (obnoxiously named) Lost Cause. I also need to have some of the bad games. This is easily the most unfortunate aspect of the whole project, but we academics bleed for our art.

I've been lucky to find most of them cheap. I have now close to a complete collection of the games that reached something like a wide audience, or at least a wide audience of the wargame crowd. I may play none of them; I am curious to play Battle-Cry, so I want to try that, but the enormous War Between the States? No thanks. The horrific Eagle Games' American Civil War? Gah! (It has most curious emancipation and foreign recognition rules, though, so it'll get ink in the chapter.)

Hopefully there'll be a math trade for wargames around the time I'm through with this thing.

And I'll never need to write about them again...

---

PS: What's the most "influential" game of all? Battle-Cry, of course. If you ask almost any Civil War historian who was ten when Battle-Cry was on the market what his first great impetus towards ACW studies was, dollars to doughnuts it was Battle-Cry. Even though the game, as a depiction of the actual or plausible war, is completely ludicrous. I mean, it bears no relationship to the war whatsoever. When I was ten, I got the VG Civil War game; didn't do much to move me towards ACW studies, and I've never met anyone ca. my age who was particularly inspired by it or any other boardgame. Just a curiosity.

A Napoleon in search of his Waterloo

Hey!

So, under the new game-buying regime, I only buy games when I know they'll make it to the table, and fill niches that need filling, or replace games that are already there. I've been on a bit of a game-buying spree, by my "new" standards; I bought the latest set of airplanes for Wings of War (not a game in and of itself, and I love the stuff), completed my set of Dungeoneer (which all link up, so it's a quasi-game, and anyway I love Dungeoneer to death), got Settlers of America (a near-guaranteed "player")...and I wanted one of the new Napoleonics games that are coming out.

With wargames on battles, I like games that can do a lot of battles, rather than just one. "Toyboxes," I call them, where you can take out the parts and put them together every which way. The only games on a single battle I own are for my beloved Battles of the American Revolution series. (Just got Pensacola: Yes!) On the other hand, I own several toyboxes--Memoir 44, Commands and Colors: Ancients, Ancient Battles Deluxe, Hold the Line, Infernal Machines, Battle Cry, Trenchfoot, Cry Havoc...lots. As the ludic cognoscenti are aware, we are about to be awash in Napoleonic toyboxes. There are three currently out, and a fourth on the way. I don't have anything that does Napoleonic battles--I don't count Manoeuvre--and I do have an interest in them, so it seemed reasonable to make room on the shelf for one of them. ONE of them. None of this buy-all-four nonsense, even if I "swear" to trade off three. I know my weaknesses. So, it came time to check the market.

I was originally drawn to the "official" one, Commands and Colors: Napoleonics, coming to us from GMT. Here's the thing, though. Straight-up C&C does best for linear action, which is why (until Breakthrough) it shone brightest for Ancients (the height of linearity, as it were) and the beach assault scenarios for M44. There was no coherent way to do Gettysburg, although some insane person tried once, with eighteen boards or some nonsense like that. If you look at Napoleonic battles, they're pretty square, rather than rectangular. Lefts and rights are relative, if existing at all. It's not really built for C&C treatment, I don't think.

(You know what is? Musket-and-pike era combat. C&C: Thirty Years War? That'd be awesome, for me and the six other people who would get it.)

So I looked elsewhere. The prettiest game with the most grandiose name is The Battles of Napoleon: The Eagle and the Lion. (Sorry for not linking to these; it takes an extra thirty seconds each and TIME is MONEY when you're blogging for free.) It's also the biggest box, and the most expensive. $100 straight up, unless you buy it online like everyone else. Much like all its competitors, it focuses on the French against the English.

(Does this strike anyone else as a Marketing Fail? I mean, OK, we've all heard of Waterloo, but isn't someone out there interested in Borodino? Austerlitz? Can't somebody be different, and separate themselves from the pack?)

It is awful pretty. Here's the thing though. For your Ben Franklin (plus tax), you get a bunch of English, a bunch of French, and no Waterloo scenario. OK, sure, there are clashes within Waterloo, but not the actual near-run-thing itself. Also, poking around I found a PDF of the rules to download and discovered that at

forty-seven pages long

they exceed my current rules-length tolerances considerably. I decided that this was $100 safely spent elsewhere.

What helped Gio Games's Vive l'Empereur Deluxe is that it's the underdog, and I'm a sucker for that. But I'm also a sucker for games that don't use cheesy cardboard stand-up soldiers on plastic chips. I'm a connoisseur.

Which brings us to Worthington Games' entrant, Napoleon's War. This had a lot going for it. It seemed like it would bring us new scenarios and armies the fastest, for one thing, and would include the War of 1812. I don't see Nexus and FFG bothering with Bladensburg for Battles of Napoleon. It's also a system I trust for the period. I have Hold the Line and its predecessors, and I find that they work pretty smoothly, especially for asymmetric sides. Very few unbalanced scenarios, game-wise. The rules are fairly simple, I'm pretty familiar with them, so I say go for it.

And go for it I did.

I read the rules, they seem nifty, I set up Waterloo, and as I'm doing so the problems start to mount. These are small hexes, and packing five or six miniatures in there with a counter or two is a bit of a tight fit. But really, the problem is the overall size. Waterloo, when you stand back and look at it set up, is a small battle. And it shouldn't be small. It should be epic. It should have more than sixteen units a side, scrunched up in the middle of the map. It's a small physical space.

The beauty of C&C:Ancients and M44 is the almost operatic quality the games take on when you really get everything spread out, and you have elephants and archers and Panther tanks and cataphracted camels and Russian hordes and God knows what else going almost six feet wide, squaring off against each other in three dimensions and there's a real, serious tension before the first card is played, as the units' potential energy is straining, waiting to be released in a massive battle.

You don't really get that here.

And, for the first few games in the series, that's OK. I mean, the battles of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution just aren't very big battles. Germantown can be cozy. Waterloo needs to be big. Borodino needs to be big. Austerlitz needs to be big. Wavre can probably be a little smaller, along with most of the Spanish battles.

Let me be clear, too, that having played through this, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. These are good rules. It's a shame that the maps are one-offs; I'd prefer a blank map with tiles to strew over it. (But really I'd prefer bigger hexes; these things are just tiny.) I'm eagerly awaiting the next releases in the system...I just wish there was an Epic Napoleon's War to go along with the rest of it.