In the world of war games, Volko Ruhnke has become a hero | Hacker News Reader

In the world of war games, Volko Ruhnke has become a hero

washingtonpost.com

144 pointsmcu22 comments

Labyrinth is indeed brilliant. The best wargames recreate history and suck you in. Twilight Struggle is another excellent example. But that's also the highest level of complexity I'll tolerate. Friends of mine enjoy the super detailed a rule for everything games but I think those are better left for the digital realm...just too fiddly for my taste.

I'm an avid gamer (>150 games in my collection) but I only own three war games. Twilight Struggle, Napoleon's Triumph and Maria. I'd recommend all of them :)

Andean Abyss is on my to buy list.

Edit: Link to BGG, wargames only: http://boardgamegeek.com/wargames/browse/boardgame

I'm not a war gamer (Steam is my favourite game these days) but I've played Maria and it is brilliant. I wish it could play within 90 minutes though.

Those of you who played Twilight Struggle might also know of a similar game called "1960: The Making of the President". First time I played that I was Kennedy and beat my opponent (Nixon). By one seat. Absolutely exciting!

A fantastic "1960: The Making of the President" video review http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/v/review-1960-the-mak...

We had a tradition of playing 1960 on election night. Great game, and complex enough to play it as 2v2. With running mates.

Sadly 1960 is out of print and pain to try and get a copy of.

btw, Twilight Struggle is #1 game on Board Game Geek's overall game ranking (not just wargames):

http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

I found the COIN games (or at least Andean Abyss and Cuba Libre) to be both easier and less Risk-esque than Twilight Struggle. They're not complicated like hex-and-counter wargames, and instead of having a million rules exceptions to maintain historicity, all of the history is in the cards, leaving the board and player options to be more clean, orthogonal and euro-esque.

The design certainly sounds elegant and intriguing. I'm going to have to buy one. I used to be an avid wargamer, but my tolerance for convoluted rules has been sapped (ASL was the end for me).

Napoleon's Triumph is a brilliant, but mind-bending design. Take a look at Guns of Gettysburg by the same guy. Also brilliant, and feels more intuitive. Longer, though, if you play out all three days. At least the board is smaller. :)

Twilight Struggle has a great period feel, although some of the mechanics are a bit clunky (realignments seem mostly unused, and yet the map is made for them). Haven't tried the COIN series (Labyrinth et al); the design seems really solid, although people should probably note the slant in the "politics" of the game. But that shouldn't bother too much even if you disagree on the emphasis, since gaming is all about what-if's anyways.

Awesome to see this on a big site like WaPo. Labyrinth is a great game and I'm looking forward to playing A Distant Plain.

Also if you want tons more info and pics, the best place to go is here: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/127518/a-distant-plain

We covered "A Distant Plain" on Shut Up & Sit Down last month: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-distant-pla...

Interesting though HG Wells arguably produced the first "wargame" with little wars published in 1913. And even in the USA Fletcher Pratt and Jack Scruby predate Tactics

Will defiantly have to see if I can get a copy as i am sure my war-gaming club woudl enjoy it.

It's a bottomless pit - prior to HG Wells were the various kriegsspiels, though of course they weren't games in the entertainment sense - but very much forerunners of Ruhnke's philosophy of learning through games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)

In my experience, for a lot of people who are into them, the term "wargame" implicitly means old-school Avalon Hill-style hex-and-counter board wargames. The same people would just refer to miniatures games like Little Wars as "miniatures games", but out of convenience rather than ignorance.

Pedantically, they should be calling them "board wargames" and "miniatures wargames", but the terminology somehow got simplified to "wargames" and "miniatures games". Mechanically the two genres can be very similar though, if not identical.

Actually at least in the UK its the inverse "wargame" tends to be applied to games with figures the AH type of game would be lumped in as a board game.

What is interesting about volko is that he was the the deputy head for terrorism in the middle east for the CIA during the bush era. The CIA claimed it was a time when they were pushed unwillingly into providing bad analysis and shonky evidence to support the neocons worldview. So when in 2010 volko designs a game where muslim states that are not pro american are necessarily pro-terrorist, a key part of the justification for the attack on Iraq - its pretty clear that there were resonably senior CIA analysts who were hard core neocons and remain so.

This is a fascinating article. The ethos here reminds me of the work of Dan Bunten ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danielle_Bunten_Berry ), in the sense of combining entertainment with solid messages about reality. It's disappointing the market for such things doesn't seem to be bigger or the legacy from that strand in modern video games would be much stronger.

Its an OK piece of journalism. He's a popular designer and its a popular game. Not the best or the most popular and there wasn't much discussion about the lively ecosystem other than some company 30 years ago went out of business, which is like claiming computers are dying because Atari stopped making the 800 about three decades ago. Its a fairly healthy marketplace.

According to boardgamegeek the avalon hill "up front" is more anticipated or whatever than this. I like the solitaire wargames and I'm really looking forward to Nimitz (which incidentally beat Distant Plain in the "anticipated" rankings for solitaire). I'm waiting to hear about the solitaire rules in Distant Plains before playing it.

The internet is whats driving modern tabletop wargaming, first excellent desktop publishing tools, second excellent printing-over-the-internet and third the community rallys around places like boardgamegeek, probably not so much WashPost.

One interesting thing about cardboard games, of which I have quite a few indeed (like, almost everything DVG has ever made, along with many other games) is the costs aren't flinched at very much because they last a long time. I have very little use for the first Bioshock game I bought many years ago for like $30, but the copy of DVG's Napoleon (probably long out of print) around the same time for about a hundred bucks is still perfectly playable. Given the cruddy weather I may do some gaming tonight...

Before someone pipes up about "putting these old fashioned things on a computer" there's already VASSAL although I don't like it because its so low res. By low res, imagine professional printing at 600 DPI across an eight foot wide dinner table, thats like, what 60000 pixels across, and there are no 60K pixel tablets available the size of a kitchen table anyway. So, no, online or on a tablet has little artistic appeal to me for playing. On the other hand I lurk BGG and other websites to learn, its hardly a technophobic hobby by any means.

One interesting social media type effect is the designer might not be able to financially swing certain addons or feelies in the game, but the community will host them anyway online for printing at home. So if you always thought "Alexander" was supposed to be a card game instead of a counter game, there's a printable set of cards available at BGG to replace the random counters. I have a set and I agree Alexander should have been a card game not counter game. I'm sure you'll be totally shocked to hear that designers / distributors who support / tolerate their communities tend to be dramatically more financially successful than the cease and desist crowd. Another socially shared board game characteristic is print at home helpers. Flow charts, place mats, that kind of "artwork" that can't be economically shipped with the games but you can print at home if you want. Checklists, AARs, flowcharts, sometimes mods or alternatives...

Its a fun hobby which I greatly enjoy.

Board gaming / war gaming is already pretty well successfully startup'd and social media'd and could provide a good role model / map for other industries to do "stuff" online. If you're in another industry and you don't have a BGG work alike in your industry, well, you should, so some startup should hop to it and make some dough.

>there wasn't much discussion about the lively ecosystem other than some company 30 years ago went out of business, which is like claiming computers are dying because Atari stopped making the 800 about three decades ago. Its a fairly healthy marketplace.

More like claiming that the sales of wargames are way down from a peak around 1980, when two million were sold. Sales of wargames are few orders of magnitude lower than this today, and that's an interesting point to mention in an article about a particular designer of wargames.

I wonder what he thinks of Campaign for North Africa: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for...

It's 8-10 players with a playtime of about 60000 hours. Yes, sixty thousand hours. That's twice the length of the actual conflict. The amount of detail is insane...

It's 60,000 minutes, or 1,000 hours or about 42 days. Still impressive, just not 7 years.

I just bought "A Distant Plain" and while it is more complex and fiddly (too many tiny counters on the board, the rules could be clearer) than say "Twilight Struggle" the design is very nice and the game is well worth playing.

Just in case any one is on the verge of buying :)

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