Scale essentially refers to the size of the units you would be pushing around on a map, which also implies the level of detail you will encounter. At one end of the spectrum you have grand strategic, where each piece represents an entire army or corps (18,000 to 30,000 men), each hex covers many miles, and one turn may represent two or three months of time. At the other end of the spectrum you have tactical where one game piece might represent a squad of ten men or a single leader, one hex might only span 50 yards, and one turn might represent a minute or two of time.

Of course, scale varies with era because historically the basic unit of maneuver kept getting smaller as time went on (thanks largely to the increasing effectiveness of individual soldiers armed with long firearms). So for instance, in a tactical Napol-eonics game you'd be pushing around battalions and squadrons, but in a tactical WW2 game you'd be pushing around squads and individual tanks.

A rough guide for WW2 might look like this:

• Skirmish: units are individual men, vehicles, and weapons (Ex: Sniper?)
• Tactical: units are squads, individual vehicles and weapons (Ex: Squad Leader)
• Grand tactical: units are platoons and companies (Ex: Panzer Blitz)
• Operational: units are battalions and regiments (Ex: The Longest Day, Panzergruppe Guderian)
• Strategic: units are divisions and corps (Ex: France 1940, D-Day, Stalingrad)
• Grand strategic: units are corps and armies (Ex: Third Reich, Hitler's War)

I saw numerous people mention GMT games and after visiting their website I must say all the games look very well put together. The "Great Battles of History" series looks particularly intriguing. Would a particular game from this company be a good place to start my "wargaming career" off with? If so, what game do all you GMT fans recommend? It doesn't necessarily have to be from the "Great Battles of History" series, just looking for something to start off with.

I would strongly recommend GLORY as a place to start if you want to try a GMT game. It is a grand tactical American Civil War game designed specifically for newcomers to the wargaming hobby. It is easy to get into, but not simplistic by any means. Meaty enough to be interesting without being large and time-consuming like many of GMT's other more advanced games.

The Great Battles of History games are mostly tactical ancients games (though other periods have been covered here and there), and are a bit more advanced. I'd tackle them only after you've given games like GLORY and BRANDYWINE a try and absorbed them thoroughly.

GMT does not have a single core system, no, but they do have a number of game series, each with its own core set of mechanics shared by the games within each series. Their largest such series is probably their Great Battles of History series.

Rules Complexity in Starting Games

What about rules complexity? I think that should be your first consideration. I'm talking about complexity in terms of mechanics - not the complexity of the situation being gamed. For example (everyone's favorite example), Chess is a difficult game to learn how to play well. But the mechanics of chess are extremely simple. You can learn or teach the game to someone in 5 minutes. It's the classic German/Euro game in that regard - simple and elegant mechanics but with deep strategic play. And nice bits too.

Do you want "wargames" that you can teach yourself how to play by reading the rulebook through one time and sit down to play the game in say 4 hours at most? If so you may want to stay away from most of what GMT and similar companies have to offer as their games are more like what I would call "serious" wargames. There are shades of variance here, but if I broke it down into two categories, there would be the "serious war-games" and the "simpler historical games"...

Serious Wargames

Rules tend to be complex or very complex and not easy to learn (strategies not always obvious either). After 2 or 3 playings (or more) you may still not understand the game completely. With these game you tend to study the rule book. Literally hundreds of playing pieces - which are usually cardboard counters. These games can take 20 hours (sometimes less, sometimes much more), to play - obviously more than one sitting often times. Playing surfaces are not usually mounted (just thick paper). Not generally considered luck-driven. Although there is much die rolling (in some), this is against a combat table which gives results depending on the skill you use in setting up the situation. And with a sufficient number of die rolls (lots of little battles going on all the time), these tend to even out statistically. The historical situation is sometimes scripted, using a lot of mechanics or special rules which force players to achieve a historical outcome. Sometimes there is literally no consideration given to making a balanced game that either side could win. Often referred to as conflict simulations (consims). Often good for giving you historical insight into the subject matter - that's the intent anyway - but often can give misleading historical insight depending on the quality of research or game's mechanics. Of course any game is an abstraction and sometimes they forgo the historical accuracy to give you a more evenly matched game. This group of games contains a large proportion of two player games, although multi-player situations are becoming more common.

Obviously these are generalizations and there are games at the lower end of the scale (complexity wise) in this group - including from GMT - that can be gotten into more easily. But in general, the point is that in this category of games, there is some "growing into" to be done.

http://www.consimworld.com (note ConsimWorld's discussion boards have branched out to include a lot of other types of games now - not just consims.)
http://www.AvalanchePress.com/index.php
http://www.multimanpublishing.com/index1.php
http://www.columbiagames.com/index2.html (I think Columbia's block games might be considered the bridge between this category and the simpler games described below.)

It might also be worth it to look into some OOP games from AH (pre-hasbro) in what was called the Smithsonian series. These were basically "consimy" games boiled down to the simplest possible form - very short rules. Might be good for starting in that category. From what I've read, try Gettysburg and Battle of the Bulge (and maybe D-Day). Be sure to get the Smithsonian versions.