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Comment by SetTheorist | Hacker News Reader

Chu shogi and Tenjiku shogi are other larger (not so ridiculously large) variants of shogi that are quite playable and enjoyable.

Also, people do play crazy games these days, look up "monster wargames". For example "Advanced European Theater of Operations" has 2200 pieces played on 2 poster-sized maps...

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Yeah, my first thought was that this is the 16th century version of The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43. Probably only played a few dozen times in the history of the world.

I don't know what the Japanese word for Grognard is, but whomever played this qualifies.

How do these games work? sounds like they're, by definition, balanced by obscurity. If they're so vast, they can't possibly have good coverage of good design.

Players tend to think of them less as a game and more as a giant simulation. There may be rules that are overpowered or underpowered but in a simulation so large they don't move the needle that much on the final outcome.

That sounds hard to believe. I would think effects compound, not cancel out.

Sounds fun though. I enjoy playing new boardgames on steam against friends without having read the rules. In an electronic game, you can't make illegal moves, so you're on even footing, clueless, but still playing in some approximation of correctly.

Somehow I don't think I could do that for this one, electronic or otherwise.

There is a sort of metagame aspect to this. If Hitler had ditched the occult and superweapon projects and focused on winter coats and boots for his soldiers trapped Russia what would have happened? Then you wargame it out.

You'll never get anywhere on a real grognard game without spending hours poring over the rules first. The complexity is inherent to the system. Many of the better ones will try to compartmentalize it however, so you can start play on a relatively simple ruleset and only dive into the complex stuff when pieces interact.

Are you telling me there's a war game where I, as Hitler, can choose to triple my investments into superweapons and the occult, and see what happens?

Often, modern ones have rules designed around simulation, often using simplified versions of the empirically-derived rules used in actual military table exercises or operations analysis. Balance is typically done in victory conditions, though some also use the players to provide balance; e.g., Empires in Arms, IIRC, has players bid victory points for starting countries, so to the extent that a country is otherwise favored by imbalance, there's a minigame around that.

These large games are often horribly unbalanced, yes. But you don't really play them to determine who's the more skilled player, you play for the experience. And even conventional games are often balanced by obscurity - Shadows over Camelot was recently "broken" (a reliable winning strategy was found), but plenty of people had fun playing it. An exploitable strategy was found in Caverna, but I still enjoy playing it with my family. A game like MTG even leans into that - every time new cards come out the game changes, and adapting to that is part of the game.

Holy crap, you aren't kidding: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/15866/campaign-north-africa-...

Also, thanks for adding Grognard to my vocabulary lol

> For example "Advanced European Theater of Operations" has 2200 pieces played on 2 poster-sized maps...

And can be linked to Advanced Pacific Theater of Operations for those who think it is too small of a game on its own.

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