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.
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