Since my last post on the subject, I’ve been to CarcaSean a couple more times now, including a special Sunday session with a bunch of members. In all, my wife have tried the following games: Carcassonne, Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers, Settlers of Catan, Power Grid and Ticket to Ride. These aren’t exactly the Big Box games I’ve always wondered about but they’re not a bad start.
My wife’s favourite so far is Power Grid which is the most complex of these games by far. I don’t like it very much as I found it to be basically an extended exercise in arithmetic and it has too many maintenance aspects that you can easily forget to do or do wrongly (refilling resources, discarding power plant cards etc.) Judging from the game’s FAQ on BoardGameGeek, it seems we got a fair amount of stuff wrong too, but doesn’t improve my impression of it about being too fiddly and full of special, conditional exceptions in its rules. My own favourite at this point is Settlers of Catan. It’s stream-lined and elegant but still leaves plenty of room for strategy.
On a vaguely related note, the topic of wargames and their history popped up the other day on QT3 and the name of the father of wargames was someone that I knew, but completely didn’t expect. If we discount purely abstract games like go and chess, it seems that the inventor of what we can recognizably call wargames today is none other than H.G. Wells, he of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds fame.
In 1913 Wells wrote a book he called by its full title Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books in which he describes a complete set of rules for making a game out of toy soldiers. The book is now out of copyright so it is available for reading online here. It’s a rather simple game by modern standards and doesn’t even involve dice or anything similar to simulate chance. Rather when two units meet each other on the field, they’re presumed to be equally skilled and therefore eliminate one another. The really cute part is that artillery pieces on the battlefield are represented by little spring-loaded toy cannons that actually fire a dart-like projectile. Thus any toy soldiers that are knocked down by the projectile is assumed to have been killed by artillery fire.
Of course everything that Wells used was basically hand-crafted and would be impossibly expensive in our time. Even the landscaping elements he used to create his battlefields looked amazingly nice as the many photos included in the book show. Nowadays, most of us have to make do with cheap plastic and cardboard.
