It is asked why ancients players emphasize tournament play between anachronistic armies; while other periods focus more on historical battles. Proposing an answer, Dan Dionne writes: Because restricting oneself to historical confrontations limits one's gaming severely. Plenty of people were always willing to build the primary armies (Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal), but what about the secondaries? So folks, naturally, started putting Caesar up against Alexander. Thus the tournament approach.

Most rules sets encouraged this development. WRG's classic "1000 point army" was aimed squarely at tournament play, with an avowed goal of giving any army a chance against any other. It was also a very useful concept for gamers, who could thus design and field an army that would be reasonably competitive. Another key reason for the development is that the size of the armies fielded never mandated multiple commanders on a side. One-on-one has always been the norm.

The downsides are now well known--a "shopping list" approach to army composition, accent on the gimmickry of a particular rules set (anyone remember the awesome triple-armed legionary?), deemphasis on research and player knowledge, and, most important to my mind, development of a tournament mindset instead of the collegiality that characterizes the rest of the hobby. (Yes, I'm disenchanted.)

The current design trend toward "simple and fun" reinforces the tournament approach. The best exception is Ancient Empires, which provides exhaustive research on specified historical confrontations and, with up to 1,000 figures on a side, requires multiple players and an extended game. Piquet is another exception, in that factors outside the players' control have a very high impact. It's interesting that Arty Conliffe designed an anti-tournament game (Tactica) that only allowed historical confrontations, but has now come out with Armati, which I consider the best tournament game around. Sorry to keep rambling on.