favorite wargames?

I'm not a wargamer. The closest thing to a wargame I've played is Axis & Allies, that was years ago, the old edition. I liked it back then, and had some fun playing it. There are interesting mechanics, but there were some balance issues, some of which, I believe, have been fixed in the new edition.

However, my main gripe was the turn structure. If you played a game with 5 players you had to wait for like half an hour before it was your turn again. That's something that I do not find acceptable these days. I think it would have been easy to fix by breaking up player's turns in smaller chunks, but alas, they didn't go that route in the new edition.

I also played Wallenstein once, but I think it's a bit too far fetched to call that a wargame, as combat is only a relatively minor aspect of the game, and it's pretty simple, though the cube tower is enormously cool.

Okay, this is really old-school, but there's a great war game called "CLS". CLS is short for "Column, Line, and Square", the (primary) military formations during the Napoleanic wars.

The game itself was (I believe) created back in the early 70s and is now in the public domain. You have to get your own miniatures to play, and it takes between 2 and 6 hours to play a full game, but it really is a lot of fun.

The coolest thing is the simultaneous action. At the start of each "turn", everyone writes their orders. Once all orders are written, you start moving the figs according to the orders written. There are rules (of course) to help you resolve how the units interact when they come within gunshot or melee range of each other.

That's probably my favorite wargame, and it inspired the simultaneous movement that occurs in Ice Lake.

However, if you're not going to play that, go pick up Richard Borg's Memoir '44. It's a lot of fun and gives you a good feel for the history involved as well.

We actually looked at publishing a wargame last year. A local gamer had devised a system that was very simple and elegant. Sadly, he wanted 50% of the retail cost. Ah well.

- Pat Matthews
Live Oak Games
www.liveoakgames.com

How many orders you can write is an interesting design point. If you give players too many it can really bog them down and send them into Analysis Paralysis. If you give them too few, it feels like you're just taking turns.

In CLS, certain armies get more "commands" than others. It's typically between 1 and 4. In Ice Lake, I let players write as many "orders" as they like - but they have to follow all of them. That's a great solution, but it only works on something light and limited.

Two seems like a good number, depending on the complexity of the actions allowed, and whether you allow opportunistic fire.

It's no fun, for example, to write "change to column" and "advance", if you aren't allowed to actually attack once you get where you're going.

What genre is your war game?

My favorite war games is "bells of war".

The scale of the map make the strategic manuver interesting. The basic rules are not too much complex.

The disadvantage is that first, it takes time. Second, since it is a WW2 simulation, it is always the same story with the same map. So there is a lower replay value.

I’m don't think it counts as a true wargame, However, I used to really enjoy playing Battletech. Constructing giant mechs and then battling them was very cool. I also really liked playing Warzone. A very streamlined, fast moving system skirmish level combat.

I'm not a fan of "true" wargames. But I enjoy some of the more "euro-like" games. My favorite is A Game of Thrones; I also play Memoir '44, Wallenstein, and Twilight Imperium 3. With the exception of Memoir '44, which focuses on tactics on single battlefields, these games include elements such as economy, supply and resource management, and politics. In Wallenstein and TI3, these non-tactical elements outweigh the tactical. For example in TI3 it's possible (though unusual) to play and win without ever fighting a battle, garnering points instead by climbing the tech tree, managing trade, and annexing uncontested planets.

A Game of Thrones includes heavy amounts of tactical battle along with the other elements. Battles and tactics are greatly abstracted, and (I suspect) wouldn't satisfy the cravings of the bazillions-of-infantry-chits crowd. But one featur of AGOT that I really like is the simultaneous placement of orders. All players give orders to their armies simultaneously, by placing face-down order tokens next to each army. When all have been placed, all the order tokens are turned face-up; only then can you see what orders others have placed. After that, the orders are executed serially in a sequence that I won't bother to detail here. It's a very tense game!