Why Wargame?

Don't worry, this is not a diatribe on existential angst or desire to imitate a smoking French philosopher.

I missed Historicon.  This is all the more disappointing, as it was a mere hour down the road, but there were more important things to deal with, like a drooly now six month old who eats my clock and gives me an adequate excuse not to blog most days.

So I looked at some pictures and remembered my last big east coast gaming convention.  During one of the events I remember seeing a Roman vs. Roman battle, Phillipi I think.  It was pretty impressive, scenery was well done and the figures looked wonderful in 28mm.  Out of all the battles, that one stuck out, as the Cohorts, or Legions, or whatever the force divisions were for this particular rule set, were stacked on a 5'x6' table with no space in between them.

Is this wargaming:  lining up troops, moving them forward, and rolling dice.  One can write a software program to determine the result (not me mind you but someone).  That doesn't seem fun.  Lately I've been fascinated with Check Your 6!, the skirmish game, and DBA.  Why?  They give you decisions to make.  I look at a number of convention games I played, and few of them really give options.  You take your barbarian horde and charge the Roman wall-the table doesn't have room for a left or right-and what?

I have been reading a few documents of late.  There's not a lot of time, but between a doc on the Northern Crusade and anthology of award winning sci-fi, I've been reading about the Soviet Operational Art.  Why?  It's because it's not just about the battle there, it's about preparing to be in the battle at a much higher level that wargaming I see allows.  It's because I was thinking about  the Ulm Campaign as I read about it in the End of the Old Order.  This is a game where armies campaign , and with surprising little in the way of battle, the Austrian Army capitulated.

I've seen boardgames that capture the strategic, and wargames capture the tactical.  However, for you wargamers out there, when have you actually chosen the ground your soldiers fight on?  I think that is the game as much as the actual battle.  That is what gets my juices going, and that is what I'm trying to figure out. There are options I am exploring, and really Battlefinder has the best starting point when combined with a simple game system (read: DBA), with Too Fat Lardies' philosophy on blinds, but, I'm still figuring this out.

The fact is, though I am a fortunate man, I do not have a great wealth of space for gaming nor funds (wargaming library to the contrary).  What this means is me thinking back to that table, way back at the beginning of my monologuing, with Philipi.  It's about the scale.  I can put one 28mm figure on a 1"x1".  Or I could put a cavalry stand in the same space.  How?  This is the point of solution where I am certain someone is going to throw something at me.

Irregular Miniatures puts out a series of 2mm.  I've been looking at a number of 3mm figures, be it Jet Aircraft or Cold War formations.  I realize it's microscopic, and as the poor painter I am, this is just a space saving option to use something just one notch over counters.  For me, it's about the game, not the spectacle, so this will work for me, particularly as we consider what a 4'x3' table could bring, especially when the stands are 1" x 3/4" for infantry.

It's not ideal. No one is pretending that much.  But my fleet of Starblazers ships sits in drydock.  My 15mm Romans and Celts sit only basecoated.  I have either time or energy lately, and that, I hear, for fathers, is not unusual.  So I plan to start a project where an army costs roughly $7, and limit the focus to the 7th Century, with Sassanids, Barbarians Successor States, Byzantines, Arab Conquest, Bulgars, Avars, Khazars, Slavs and the rest tumble together in a mess worthy of gaming. Obviously from the list I'm not much on limiting.  It'll shake out, I'm sure.

Will it work?  I'll let you know. I order this weekend.

In the end, if I'm using 2mm Micro Wargaming to wage a war of maneuver as well as the battles as well, then I will be satisfied.  Even if it's just a bunch of glorified counters.