Do you want the same kind of thing from wargames that you get from history books? Have you considered the various more free forms of wargaming, especially as you are thinking about solo games? The Solo Wargamers Association publish a newsletter with all sorts of interesting ideas: http://www.theminiaturespage.com/periodicals/lonewarr.html http://www.theminiaturespage.com/ref/clubs/clubgl.html#swa

However some things which might be more suitable for what you have in mind are possibly some sort of Free Kriegspiel (German for 'making it up as you go along') based approach, a Paddy Griffiths style 'Muggergame' where you simply look at the situation and decide what is the most likely thing to happen in a particular situation, running the game as an interactive narrative or possibly the more structured approach of Chris Engles Matrix Games where the basic rule mechanisms are trivially simple but the complexity of real life is generated by the use of 'arguments' to drive the game along.

These types of games are described in more detail in the War-games Developments Handbook on the WD homepage, along with appropriate links: http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~warden/#The%20Conference%20Of%20Wargamers

Of the three types I've most experience with Matrix games & we've had great fun with these, running entire campaigns or entire wars with a few players in an evening, shoving a few figures around and producing outcomes which do not seem entirely unrealistic yet without the constraints of complex formal sets of rules. It is worth having a look at the sections on SCRUD (Simple Combat Resolution Using Dice) as a quick way of handling combat generically.

I play quite a few games with 6mm figures (easy to 'paint', just spray the base colour on and give a quick drybrush in a highlight colour) on 'tables' which are bits of paper with the relevant terrain features drawn on in felt pen. I did Waterloo, Busaco, Fuentes de Onoro, Salamanca, The Mesopotamian Campaign, the Arnhem Campaign & 56th Panzer Corps drive on Dvina that way. The biggest of these was the map for Mansteins adventure, some 20" wide and 5' long, the rest of them are on flip chart paper or smaller. I'm doing a map for Operation Crusader at the moment and it is about 2'6" x 3', regimental bases, 1"=5km. Essentially all of these are boardgames played with toys, some of them use area movement, but most of them don't.

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com