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.
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