Featuring 30 Years’ War, Road to Moscow, Redline:Korea, Chechnya, Indo-Pakastani War, and a host of strangely-mapped DG stuff. He can be seen at almost any convention, dressed from top to bottom in black. He’s one of the few, truly professional wargame designers in the hobby, a designer whose opinion is often sought after at military conclaves. He’s also the Rodney Dangerfield of wargaming in that, regardless of what he does or how well he does something, few gamers seem to notice. He is, of course, Joe Miranda. He is, perhaps, the only reason that “S&T” hasn’t disappeared beneath the waves, and he’s the most vocal proponent of “hearts-and-minds” wargaming. He’s also infamous for producing some of the strangest and least felicitous gaming maps since Kevin Zucker was let loose on Stalingrad and Saudi Arabia some years back. Whatever he is, Joe M is prolific; all the games listed above appeared during the past year, an output only bettered by Rob Markham, when Rob was under the misapprehension that 3W was actually going to pay him. Joe’s games are held together by at least one strong thread, and that is that war is not just a bunch of guys slugging it out. War is also political, and winning a war usually means gaining control of factors other than military ones. So, what has stopped Miranda from becoming a mainstream, popular designer? A quintessential Joe M game is Thirty Years’ War for S&T, one of Joe’s two main outlets (the other being GameFix magazine). Right off the bat, one can see this is a Joe M Special. It’s not just the large number of politically oriented charts and tables, such as Diplomatic Conflict and Reichstag Tables, it’s the map itself, an almost quintessential Miranda view of the world that, with its ridiculous coastal distortions is uglier than a Jack Elam Look-Alike Contest. This sort of hateful relationship with geography afflicts most of Miranda’s productions, from the idiocies of Empires at War, to drab, third-worldliness of Redline:Korea (and its sister game, Chechnya), all the way to his cartographic magnum dopus, the Greco-esque stigmatism that masquerades as Ptolemaic insight for his Roman-era operational quad (Trajan, et al.). Joe, however, seems to do his utmost to fill his games with large dollops of flavor, as no one could ever say anything he does is bland. His most commonplace effort of recent years is the S&T Indo-Pakastani War which, our war correspondent, Jack Polonka, points out is a relatively standard, straight-forward game which, because it is a fairly conventional conflict, seems to lack much of the political chrome Miranda usually uses, something, Jack guesses, that may be ascribable to the fact that the system appears to have been laying around, literally, for almost a decade. Ironically, it is also the most mainstream visually of the recent Miranda oeuvre, looking nothing like his other games. Joe also seems to favor modern topics, for the most part, probably because modern wars come with such easily discernible hearts-and-minds baggage. His Crisis 2000 was, according to Scott Johnson, a fun, fast-paced little game on a future civil war which included such as videotaped atrocities, vigilantes, cyberpunks, and assorted other modern icons. So why doesn’t anyway play it? It could be that many are repelled by the rather cheesy production values it received from GameFix, or it could be that all of its chrome is, like the metal itself, shiny but sterile. Joe puts a lot of us most considerable intellect into his works, but far too little of his soul. Two of his other GameFix specials, Redline: Korea and Chechnya, cover areas that Joe seems most interested in: potential hotspots. Both games’ eminent accessibility are given rather short shrift by sloppy presentation. As Davin McHenry points out, Chechnya isn’t much to be looked at. In fact the map colors are so “subtle” that even this 22 year old with perfect vision had difficulty with the terrain. Neither modern nor art are terms he would use to describe the rules for Chechnya, though. GameFix’s sloppy editing and layout are abundant. The two column layout is a wonderful idea gone hideously wrong. Courtesy of bad editing, the example and charts have been scattered throughout the rules, usually ending up just about as far away from the passage as is possible. The layout was so bad that the entire Russian operations display was left out! Accessibility of system quickly turns into inscrutability. This is too bad, as both games, based on the same system, seem to be rather fun. The system’s beauty is in it’s simple structure linked with subtle victory conditions. The sequence is your standard Igo-Hugo move-and-shoot fare. Joe Miranda has thrown a little chrome here and there but the system plays clean and simple. As Davin McHenry points out, Joe has again done a great job at incorporating the socio-political elements of the conflict without clumsy interference on the players strategies. These have always been Joe M’s forté. Coherent combat systems are not, as can be gleaned from a few plays of such as the 30 and 7 Years’ War games, both with battle mechanics straight out of the X Files. That - and other weirdness - kills off ‘7’, but, thankfully, not ‘30, which is a lot of fun. True, because the Ottomans are not in the game (yet), the Hapsburgs can focus all their rather deep pockets on rolling over France in about 2 years, but it takes a few turns to spot that, and, by then, a lot of other good stuff has happened. TYW works because Joe ran most of the chrome through a very fine meat grinder, making it all easy to swallow (if a bit hard on the arteries). Everything, in terms of system, is accessible and players know what they have to do, in terms of mechanics, rather quickly. This leaves lots of room for decision-making, and there is lots of that here. This is Miranda at his best, allowing … no, forcing the player to make “game” decisions, and lots of them, based on a nicely intertwined set of factors: economic, political and military considerations are never separable or clear-cut. And the outcome of these decisions is always in doubt, especially as the game seems to play in real time. Even as we grimaced at the map and shrugged our collective shoulders at some of the combat mechanics, we had fun with this. The same cannot be said for an earlier Joe M effort, Road to Moscow, covering the campaigns of Sweden’s Charles XII against Russia’s Peter the Great. While the map is rather more anchored to reality, possibly because it has little terrain and was done by Mark Simonitch, RtM suffers from the fact that this, unlike other Joe works, is simply not an interesting game situation. So what have we got here with wargaming’s Rodney Dangerfield? What we have is a creative, fecund designer, often ill-served by publishers both graphically and system-wise, if alone for failing to provide him with the developers who would give his games the coherent maps and battle systems they so badly need. We do, though, recommend giving his games a look, giving Joe a bit more respect, and giving him some clothes of a different color for Xmas. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. II # 20 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com