Friday Frivolity: Favorite strategy games

After my post on wargaming as my go-to hobby, I began musing on my favorite wargames/strategy games from over the years.  I don't have a massive collection, but it's not a bad little collection, especially when added to the overall number of games we have.  I have played others, but rarely. I was never one to hang around hobby stores and play endlessly in that environment.  Most of my games have been with friends in the day or family, primarily the boys.  In that I was blessed.  I would never say they all enjoyed such strategy games to the same degree, but they seemed to enjoy them enough.  And often it was the time together, more than the outcome, that was the best part of it all.  Such is life I suppose.

Anyway, below are some of the games I've come to favor over the years.  This isn't to say others not on this list are throwaway.  And it doesn't include anything but strategy and wargames proper.  At least as I define it. Thus no poker or Cataan or Monopoly. Those are for other posts.  This is simply those strategy games that I especially like, either because of the quality of the game, or because they bring something to my love of history and strategy games. 

Stratego - Stratego?  Yes, Stratego.  This is here because it was the first 'strategy game' I ever played.  The son of a friend and coworker of my dad's owned the game.  Once when we were at their house while our parents played euchre, he pulled this off the shelf.  I couldn't have been more than six or seven.  I remember being instantly taken by the game.  I don't think I learned it well, and most likely lost.  Likewise I didn't see it again for many years.  But that was the first such game I ever played, and it planted a seed that only grew with time.  

RISK - Who didn't learn where Kamchatka was from playing this?  I visited a cousin's house when I was in middle school, and they had the most recent release of RISK, which actually played on television commercials.  Unlike every other edition, the playing pieces were molded in the form of Roman numerals.  There was one, three, five and ten army pieces.  The three is unique, as most editions only have the options for one, five and ten armies.  Something about that caught my imagination and I obsessed about getting that edition of RISK until I finally did.  Eventually I taught several friends how to play the game, and we would play it off and on over the years, even into college.  For my more socially conscience sports jock friends, this was just enough strategy game without flirting too closely with the deepest, darkest side of wargaming subculture that might cramp their style.  

Now perhaps in a universe with the Almighty, there is no such thing as luck.  If so, then the dice I roll have an incorrigible knack for never being what I need.  That's why for those who play me in RISK, I'm known for amassing about 30 to 1 odds in my favor before anything happens.  Oh, fun fact about me.  Never attack me and insist it's merely part of some big strategy when we've made an agreement not to.  I will spend the rest of the game making sure no matter who wins, it won't be you.  Something my best friend found out once in college when we were playing this with a group of friends back for Christmas break. 

Empires in Arms - What some call the single best wargame ever.  It covers the military part of the Napoleonic Era from 1805 until 1815.  Turns represent a single month.  It pulls together the two tricks of any successful historical strategy game.  It has enough historical flavor and reference points that you are always aware of the historical period in question.  Yet it allows for enough open ended play that doesn't railroad things toward their historical end.  True, by the end, most of the players of this game will have to unite against France unless they want the French player to win.  It's set up that way.  But just who does so, and what the outcome will be, is still up for grabs.  The game balances a grand strategic with tactical considerations in a way seldom matched.  There is enough 'non-fighting' considerations, such as national morale and home front economics, to add flavor.  And each turn has a diplomacy phase.  Unlike many games with a diplomatic factor, there are actual game options you can choose that must be adhered to, or game penalties are incurred.  If there is a flaw, it is the same one for any game that lasts more than a couple hours: how to get everyone together for extended periods of time.  I was blessed by the boys enjoying these games to one extent or another.  I wish we would have dusted this off earlier, but then only the two oldest could have played.  It is a game that needs at least four, if not five, players to really work. But we had fun with it during its run.  That, perhaps, is the most important thing of all. 

Civilization - Not the computer game series, but the board game that started it all.  Released in the early 1980s, it was a generic board game loosely referencing ancient civilizations.  There is combat, but it's not a war game by any stretch.  It has the civilization cards and the trade goods that become the main source of victory points needed to win.  I bought the expansion, but never played it.  My wife is no big fan of your strategic war game, hence I decided to have four sons to satisfy the requirements.  But she does like Civilization.  We've played it several times over the years.  As family fun goes, this has always been a reliable option. 

Republic of Rome - I bought this bad boy before I got married.  I liked the fact that it was high on the solitaire ability. Not a few such wargames are made for solitaire play, for obvious reasons.  At that time I had moved to Florida and didn't know many people, much less people to play strategy games.  Shortly afterwards I met my future wife and it sat on the shelf for about, oh, twenty five years.  Then my third oldest son - our boardgame guru - glanced at it and decided it was time.  At first it lived up to its high difficulty rating.  But in a strange twist, once we 'got it', it was as easy as pi.  And it gets it, the feel of the period in question.  That's not always easy, and we've had more than one game over the years that missed the mark of evoking the theme in a way the game should have.  With Republic, it all works, though ours is an old version with many millions of tiny pieces that need about a good dining room table to fit.  Like most such games, the more players the better, especially due to some of the bartering and backstabbing elements that would have to be in any Roman themed game.  

Squad/Panzer Leader  - We use as supplement with World in Flames.  Squad/Panzer Leader is the ultimate tactical level game.  There are also miniature games of the same scale.  I played one once when there was a game convention at OSU.  It was the first and only time I did that, since I led my tank platoon into an ambush and discovered the others there must have bet their mortgages on the game's outcome.  Nonetheless, in the boardgame format, these two are WWII (again) at the squad/platoon level.  It's like Flames of War, but without the models.  On the whole, I prefer my games on a bigger scale than the house to house tactical.  But when that itch needs scratched, these two work nicely.  For our third eldest's most recent birthday, I found a couple extensions of these using British and Japanese scenarios.  That way we can break from World in Flames, and dive into a particular scenario on the tactical level when the action of World in Flames allows.  

Battles of Waterloo - This is the first time I delved into an actual tactical game, apart from Panzer Leader.  Until then, most of my games were on the grand strategic level.  I had never purchased a game that sought to reenact an actual historical battle.  As the plural suggests, the game encompasses more than the famous battle of June 18, 1815.  It includes the battles and encounters the previous days that led up to that fateful conflict.  Waterloo is so studied and so analyzed that any game attempting to reproduce that legendary clash of arms will have its critics.  At some point, you pick a game and dive in and enjoy, remembering that no game, like no movie or book, can reproduce history exactly or without dispute.  I find this, with its scale, emphasis on orders of battle and unit specifics, along with some of the optional rules that unpack the details a little more, is the game to go with.  

Struggle of Nations - Quite frankly the most difficult game I've ever learned. In fact, one of the most difficult things I've ever learned, period.  And I studied Alfred Whitehead in graduate school.  It isn't the same  problem as World in Flames.  With WiF, much of the confusion comes from poorly written and edited rules that are all over the place mixed with thirty years of patchwork releases and revisions.  As I've said, with WiF you have to read about a half dozen sections from two or three instruction manuals to figure out what most rules books could put in a single paragraph.  SoN isn't convoluted, though the instructions themselves are in pros, which adds to the difficulty.  Instead of breaking things down in sections, or bullet points, or outline form, it writes them out like a novel, only breaking down certain terms or concepts on rare occasion.  Only when there is a sparse illustration does it break from that, and then you take a breath and rejoice.   The game itself is difficult, and plays to the old wargame stereotype of needing your average MIT grad student to make sense of the endless charts, graphs, cross-references, equations and variables that go into a single decision.  Unlike many such wargames, the emphasis here is on logistics, and keeping the armies fed and supplied.  Believe it or not.  Yes there is combat, but the bulk of the gameplay is about communications, transportation and supplying the vast forces that clashed at Leipzig in 1814.  

1776 - I find wargames based on the American Revolution are a mixed bag. I don't know why.  I think on one hand, the Revolution covered a large swath of geography.  On the other hand, unlike the titanic clashes in Europe during the Napoleonic Era, the battles in our War for Independence were rather small affairs.  Whereas a battle here, such as the Battle of Saratoga, might have 20,000 combatants total (and it was one of the major battles), the Battle of Austerlitz would have 170,000 combatants total.  Maybe it's trying to cover all of the colonies where such small numbers are concerned.  I don't know.  I just know the game 1776 comes about as close as any I tried over the years when it comes to striking that balance.  It literally has everything from Georgia to Canada covered, beyond the Appalachians, and including naval forces and foreign intervention.  The playing pieces display the relatively small numbers involved, and it plays out how vast the distances were in this new land.  All in all, a good mix that is worth the relatively easy play.

Flames of War  - My one foray into the world of miniature models wargaming.  Truth be told, such a hobby is tough for me.  I have what medical folks call 'essential tremors.'  That is, my hands shake.  For no apparent reason.  If I concentrate on them, or am relaxed and sitting down at the telly, they're fine.  But let me take my mind off of them and focus on something else, and they start shaking.  My dad had the same thing.  That's why when I used be a minister, I never walked about with a Bible in my hand.  Folks would be able to see it shaking and figure it was some nervous thing.  So I usually stood by the pulpit, leaned on it with an elbow or such, and just talked.  My congregations often called them my 'chats' rather than my sermons.  So try as I might, painting little figures that are half the size of a thimble is a tough call.  Nonetheless, I think in the end I did OK.  My second oldest son is better.  But when our economic fortunes hit the skids, sadly the hobby came to an end.  It wasn't cheap after all, and the ongoing paints and supplies just weren't warranted.  We still have several boxes unopened. 

As wargames go, this was a very 'intro' level.  It was generic, basic and painted with one broad brushstroke the complexities of such a tactical level game.  It went so far as to have artillery on the same board with the infantry and armored units (artillery, by that time, was a zillion miles away firing according to coordinates given by those spotters along the front).  Nonetheless, there was a method to its madness.  The producers of the game once said to imagine the game board (itself built of modelling terrain and buildings) as a computer game map.  You click on a certain part of the map, and suddenly you have a new screen zoomed in on the action happening.  This time an infantry platoon.  That next time the artillery batteries.   That's what this was.  The map was the general campaign or battle.  Then each little encounter between the units was supposed to represent something larger, even if each model was one-for-one scale (an infantry unit with five figures meant five soldiers, not representative of one platoon or such).  Given the heavy complexity such miniature wargaming can bring to the table, such a watered down approach wasn't bad.  Especially for the kiddos.  

Diplomacy - Perhaps calling this a strategy game is stretching it, but I think there is strategic thinking involved.  Truth be told, this is a game we've played as a family, but in that context it has its limits.  At the end of the day you need to be ruthless, cunning, and not afraid to stab each other in the back to get ahead.  When it comes down to it, with one exception, most of us just can't bring ourselves to do that.  Therefore the game starts strong, and then more or less bogs down when we can't do anything without stepping on each other's toes. Nonetheless, when you can play in mixed company, this is one of the purest of thinking games out there.  No luck.  No dice.  Pure thinking and diplomacy.  In the early days of the Internet, a Presbyterian pastor friend of mine organized a Diplomacy by Email game.  It had the total number of players, with him as the coordinator.  I came in second at the end. In fact, I was next to last until the final turn.  As he said in the game's summation, I must have pulled some historic level of diplomatic maneuvering to leap that far ahead (he won, it should be noted).  But then, that's what makes Diplomacy fun.   

This Hallowed Ground:  Part of a game series set in the Civil War, this particular installment features the Battle of Gettysburg.  This is one of only two American Civil War games I have.  The other was an early buy, The Civil War, by an old company called Victory Games, a subsidiary of Avalon Hill.  Most of my friends and classmates from back in the day who were history majors got into the subject through the Civil War.  That was their passion, and whatever interest they had in other historical eras grew from the Civil War.  For me, as I've said many times, it was WW2.  Truth be told, the Civil War never interested me that much, beyond the monstrous impact the war had on America.  Perhaps because by the time I came along, efforts were already under way to draw out only the negative from that period, and downplay or erase any positive.  I dunno.  It just wasn't a big topic for me.  Then a few years ago I asked Donald McClarey over at The American Catholic, to suggest a few 'Civil War for Dummies' level books to get my feet wet.  At that time, I decided to purchase this as well, since in some cases you can find quite a lot of good scholarship in the game notes of these products.  I'm not enough of a CW historian to judge this game's historical merits.  I do enjoy studying orders of battle, and I found a couple of the counters were wrong.  That sort of thing does bug me.  But it's Gettysburg on a regimental level, no easy feat.  As far as I can tell, at least in terms of playability, it didn't do bad, and was a boost for me learning about the battle.  As far as wargames go, that's not a bad combo. 

Axis and Allies - I've written about this before as well.  At least as part of our favorite games.  There are literally dozens of variations on this, and we've bought most of them over the years.  Happily, we bought the two anniversary editions when they were released.  They are now out of print and, like most out of print things, will cost a hefty price tag if you want them today.  In terms of playability, you don't get much better.  True, it isn't going to get into the nitty-gritty of World War II history beyond the generic.  But if the Second World War is something you've only heard about in news stories about internment camps, then you could come away with at least a little more knowledge of the conflict.  And as is the case with any such game, that's not bad. 

World in Flames - The game I waited my life to play.  I've written on this before, and likely will again.  It's technically my third oldest son's game.  He saw an old version of it online some years ago.  I tried to get a copy of an original print from back in the 80s, but just couldn't find one.  At least one for less than about 400.00, and then with no guarantee everything was there.  So we went all out for his 21st Birthday and got the latest versions, and everything ever published with it.  I already have written on this, and will likely do more.  If any of these games deserve the title 'hobby' in and of themselves, it's this monstrosity.