I suspect, most of my purchases could be best described as picking at a scab
No the games are generally speaking all good designs.
But my recent purchase of computer World in Flames, along with those awesome books, has forced me to go and re look at numerous board games I own, or in some cases simply look at a lot of web sites that sell board game wargames as a result of needing to ask myself, 'is this game worth this much really?' (in the case of 160 bucks for CWiF).
It turns out, most of today's epic wargames can run you quite a lot of cash. My old fav A3R in its A World at War guise now, is 175 bucks. Good grief, it sure never cost me that much in the 80s. A full set of WiF can go up to 300 bucks! not that 300 bucks is going to impress anyone that owns ASL. Hah! 300 bucks, wimp
But I have been confronting a lot recently the feeling, that so much of what I love of wargaming, simply doesn't exist in computer wargaming.
For starters, in a board game, you sit down, master the rules manual first, or nothing happens. There is no AI so if you want to play it you either play it solo, or you find another human. The game likely will see no patches or updates for 5 years, so what you see in the box is what you will be playing.
Not all wargames are massive mapped monstrosities. Most of my best games sit on a typical dining table just fine. Those that are not mounted, can be with almost no real effort. And it costs little if anything to laminate a map if you are concerned about it sitting flat and surviving use. It takes little thinking to device methods to store most wargames, as it is only a few of the truly epic ones that are space demons.
I find myself, increasingly wondering, not whether I can turn a board game into a computer version, but, rather, can I take a computer wargame, and convert it into a board game version. And this is not entirely stupid. I have the Civilization board game, and while it is a beast to sort out the counters on the first use, and needs a few minutes to set up to use, it's likely the best non wargame I have ever seen. It being originally a computer game, has not stopped it from being an awesome board game.
As such, I have taken to pondering, how many of my computer wargames, are actually board games waiting to happen?
I'd need to print out the map, which often is fixed and non changing.
I'd need to print out the counters, and while my set might not be 100% up to the usual industry standard, there are lots of easy solutions actually.
I'd then need to dig into the guts of the game, and decide on a 'manual' that described what anything did, why it did it the way it did it.
But essentially speaking, all you get with a computer wargame, is often a fancy interface, that you might not really need if you had a nicely written manual that was well enough read and understood.
