I'm an experienced wargamer, so anytime I'm reading military history (which is my main hobby), I'll finish a battle/campaign narrative and then say to myself, "I wonder what that was really like. I'd sure love to wargame it!"

What I want at that moment is to be able to drag a coffee table over in front of my chair, quickly lay out some terrain features to approximate the map in my book, set out game pieces (miniatures, tiles, or whatever) to approximate the starting OOBs, and commence a wargamey refight of the battle.

Or better yet, if I have a predesigned scenario that covers the battle I've just read about, I'd set up the game according to the scenario card (and save myself the trouble and inaccuracy of designing on the fly).

But once my little wargame is under way, I want to be gaining some real hands-on experience with historical weapons systems, troop quality, formations, and so forth. I don't want it to be a fast-playing, just-for-fun game, because that'd defeat my purpose. What I want is to enhance my reading with a bit of (usually solo) wargaming. So there has to be something substantial and realistic about the game. At minimum, march rates and combat effectiveness have to be historically accurate. The more realism, the better (I have no problem with complex rules). But command-control and fog-of-war are not so important to me, since I'm dealing with a historian's overview anyhow.

The whole point is, this game would be an adjunct to my military-history hobby, not the kind of social event or solo entertainment that most games are. It needs to be fairly compact and quick to set up, playable in an afternoon, but also as realistic as possible.

The reason I'm inquiring in a miniatures newsgroup is just that in my experience, board wargames are always either too busy or too narrow in scope. I'm not willing to learn a new set of rules every time I want to fight a different battle. Nor do I want to painstakingly set up hundreds of unit-counters and play all weekend long.

Computer wargames usually seem to have the same problem. The closest things to what I'm looking for are Age of Rifles (SSI) and Medieval 2 (iSi), though the latter is the wrong period. When I first bought AoR, I thought it was the bee's knees--but after a while I found myself playing only the smallest scenarios (e.g., Podol) and shying away from the bigger ones. Again, too many units to painstakingly push around every turn. And besides that, I just don't like computers. When I'm home enjoying leisure time, I'd rather do it away from these electronic boxes.

The size and pace of DBA is just about right--but it's the wrong period and rather simplistic. I do like the small playing surface, though, and the 12-element-per-side limit.

Battle Cry is the right size also, and it's the right period. I also prefer the hex-grid map to the open tabletop. Unfortunately, BC is so terribly unrealistic that my imagination doesn't quite stretch far enough to accept it.

Anyhow, thanks for the suggestions. There's probably nothing out there that quite suits my purposes, but I thought I'd at least write this clarifying note to explain what it is I'm after.

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