So, I've begun toying with the idea of turning the Soviet Dawn/Israeli Independence system into an American Civil War game. Instead of one point of convergence, though, I'm thinking three: One for Virginia, one for the West, one for the Trans-Mississippi. Once the CSA loses Virginia and one of the others, it's out of the game. There'd also be a track for the political viability of the CSA, which would represent a combination of internal dissent and foreign recognition.
I ran that by one of the folks in the office, who objected--as there was essentially no way that England or France would ever recognize the Confederacy, because [of numerous reasons extraneous to this post]. I agreed that there was no way it could happen in real life--but it had to be in the game, as it is in most Civil War games.
See, both the USA and CSA thought it was a serious possibility, one which they spent considerable energy either discouraging or encouraging. If a game designer is to create the illusion of history, he or she must find some way for the players to fritter away energy and resources on sidling up to European heads of government. The result: Making it possible for the CSA to get material help from Europe.
There's another possibility, of course: Simply not having European recognition enter the game at all--or making it so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. Battle Cry of Freedom (the "forgotten" Civil War game) has the various events all happen--Mason and Slidell, the Trent Affair, the works--and they affect the sides in military terms (which seems kind of odd to me).
I prefer my option, obviously. It has kindred rules in other games. Ted Raicer wanted players of Paths of Glory to be historically paranoid about supply issues, so he made the rules draconian: Any out-of-supply unit is immediately destroyed. He granted (as I recall) that this wasn't what would have automatically happened in 14-18, but he wanted the players to be supremely supply-conscious.
It's not really something we can do in history books, at least the nonfiction variety. Tension is harder to create, but of course not impossible. The secret, like a good mystery novel, is to keep the reader from mentally skipping to the end of the book. When I read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example, I would occasionally find myself in real anticipation to find out what would come next--although I naturally already knew. Sadly, few academics write nearly as well as Shirer. (Hell, few nonacademics write nearly as well as Shirer.)
In my neck of the woods, the best I've found has been William Shea and Earl Hess's Pea Ridge, which receives my very warmest recommendation. Watch the chaos of the Pea Ridge campaign as it unfolds! I described it once as the blind leading the blind, fighting the blind. And it was one of the major battles of the war...
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