I'm not much for computer games, never have been -- they move too fast. You can't savor the scenetry, as it were, and rather than offering any intellectual challenge, most seem to be fairly simple reflex-testers, taxing my all-too-feeble hand-eye coordination and reaction time. At least, that's been my view of them, formed years ago, accurate or not, and I suspect the view of many die-hard boardies. But since I just acquired a fancy, bells'n'whistles multimedia pentium (233 Mhz, 64 MB RAM, and a 6 gigabyte hard-drive -- who knew we could ever want that much space? It's like having an attic the size of Alaska), I felt as though I ought to try to use it for something besides writing snide comments on newsgroups and amusing the one-handed typists of the world. The local Egghead store happened to be having its firesale, so I picked up these two VMagic creations, Alexander and Hannibal' based on the classic GBOH boardgames of Messrs. Berg & Herman. Even at full price they'd have cost about a dollar an hour to date, and I still haven't tired of them, though I find them somewhat less entrancing than at first. Not only did I enjoy myself, I was introduced to topics I might not otherwise have chosen to game, and learned some things that had eluded me when presented in other media. I think this series might be that Holy Grail of boardgamers: useful tool in snagging a few recruits to the dice'ntcardboard world. I had also nearly always preferred strategic games to tactical ones, and aside from a few runs at TAHGC's Hannibal and only attempt at a GBOH board module (the Men In Black must have zapped me afterwards, because all I remember is lots and lots of tiresome recordkeeping & consulting tables), had little~to-no gaming expenence with ancients. I can't compare these computer creations directly to their cardboard equivalents, because I never had the patience to wade all the way through those, but from a general boardie perspective, there are gratifications & gripes to this new-fangled way og gaming. Gratifications (1) You can get started playing much faster. With a computer game it is possible to just put the disk in the dnve and dive in head-first. Of course, in doing so, I was clobbered by the AI. I'm a tactical idiot, and it took me several battles where I threw away Alexander's crack troops because I didn't have the hang of ancientcombined arms before I pulled out the book. Went back to the same battles and cleaned the machine's clock. Ratcheted up the difficulty all the way. That kept me amused and on the edge of victory/disaster for awhile longer, but eventually even that was not much of a challenge. Which leads to.... (2) You can find opponents on the net (any computer capable of running these programs almost certainly comes with a decent modem so no need to coordinate schedules with one of the 2 or 3 other surviving boardgamers in your hometown. Actually, you don't even need to get on the net; you can also connect directly to any other computer with a modem). In any case, since enthusiasts for these games say this is one of the best features, that you are not limited by just playing against the AI, I figured I'd simulate netplay by roping a neighborhood 10-year-old in to play against me on my computer. I had fought pitched battles as Alex against the computer at Pelium several times, always coming within a hair's breadth of winning on points, but always losing and suffering terrible casualties. This was after I had been doing very well in the other battles, so I was mystified. Finally I resorted to looking in the book again and realized the alternate victory conditions: retreat 50 total quality points (unit strengths), plus Alexander, across the river Apsos. Running away seemed a hell of a way to 'win' a battle. but after all there was a campaign to consider... I consulted my ancients expert, Carl Gruber. 'What did Alexander do at Pelium?' 'He ran away,' he said. So I tried it: using one or two skirmisher units to harass the opposition, I positioned the other troops to look as if they were advancing on enemy lines, while in fact they were merely hightailing it across the Apsos, with Alex bringing up the rear. It worked well enough against the AI, but I wondered if a live opponent would fall for it. Within 2 minutes with the neighbor kid I had my answer. He said 'Hey! you're running away!' whereupon he massed his troops on the few hexes at which the river could be crossed, and slaughtered my men. No doubt the same thing would have happened on the net. (3) The graphics, though not state of the art, are fun, and really make the tactics come alive. Because of the effect of graphics, as well as the ease of jumping in without reading a lot of rules, with these games you may be able to get gamers to branch outside their usual specialty, or recruit new gamers. Part of why I never got into tactics is that I have less direct experience with arms than many gamers who started out as 10-year-old boys fascinated by hardware, who may have studied military history in far greater detail than 1, or served in the military. To me the tools of war were unreal. When I saw the relative reach of the Macedonian sarissa, the comprehensive size ot the hypaspist's shield, and the way that frontal, flank and rear attacks with the weapons of the day worked, ancient tactics suddenly became more interesting to me. I might well find myself picking up a boardgame of this type, where before I would probably wouldn't have. The neighbor kid's favorite visual in Alexander was the way the casualties at Issus floated down river when killed while crossing. He also loved how the elephants in Hannibal made Roman roadkill by stomping on the centurions; I was charmed by the wild ulutations of the Celts, their wacky Purina Checkerboard-n-limegreen outfits and Don King hair (though the music, entertaining at first, began to drive me nuts; luckily there is a preferences setting to turn it off). He asked his mom to buy both CDs and will probably get Caesar, too. Considenng that he is of the generation raised on those shoot-em-up computer games, I thought it promising that he didn't seem to mind the relatively primitive graphics and siower pace of these games. I'm going to pull out a board game next time he comes over and see if I can get him hooked. (4) Miscellany: You can save games mid-play, and don't have to worry about cats, kids or significant others mucking about with them. You can also fit gaming into much shorter bits of free time than if you had to set up and tear down each session. You don't have to do all that tiresome recordkeeping yourself; the computer does it all for you. You can turn the hexes off, which can help you see the battle as a gestalt instead of a bunch of discrete chunks... and then turn them back on when you become too disoriented. Each battle takes far less time than when you do all that manually. I finished Alex's campaign in a one-day session and didn't even feel sleep-deprived. Gripes (1) Though seeing the battles makes the events immediate & vivid, the computer delivers a more removed expenence. You can play without delving very deeply into the whys -- just line up, do battle, move on, occasionally using the 'remove dead unite' commend to clean up. The computer does all the battle-resolution for you, inside the black box, and, though the book includes the CRT tables, you don't see the results of the 'dicethrow' mechanism, just the effects. You're never really sure if you won because of good dice or because of your brilliant command decisions, and when you lose you don't know if you should blame the dice or if you're just missing something. This is still an unsatisfying aspect of computer games in general and these in particular. Inclusion of the CRTs in the book is one step toward letting us 'see backstage,' but the invisible dice bother me more and more as I continue to play. (2) The visual display is limited in ways that maps on tables are not. The screen is overcrowded, what with the pop-up battle resolution window, the running battle commentary window (which runs the commentary way too fast), and the map overview that is on too small a scale to be really helpful and so large it covers up a significant ponion of the battlefield. There are 3 zoom levels you can set. The closest zoom is automatically selected for shock combat, and you can only see one small combat when that happens, even if you have given orders for units in another area to engage at the same time. The furthest out view gives a good scale of overview -- you can usually see 1/3 to 1/2 the battlefield this way, and with one or two mouseclicks scroll around to see the rest -- but it becomes difficult to identify the troops at this scale, so I tended to select the middle distance most of the time. None of these would be problems in a boardgame. (3) Though you have the option of net play, the social element of face-to-face gaming is lost. Of course, this could be said of solitairing board games, or even PBM/PBEM, which is the actual treatment most boardgames get these days... but for those who value this social element highly, netgaming is not going to satisfy them, and while my neighbor kid had fun, it is not really much of a social interaction to trade places sitting at a computer, either. We were in the same room, and had some conversation, but it was... different. (4) It's not an issue for me, but I've heard boardgamers say they like pushing cardboard around more than clicking a mouse. It feels more... real. I could speculate about whether this correlates with a preference for visual or tactile stimuli in other pursuits. but I'm running out of room... Overall Alexander was my favorite of the two. I wasn't previously familiar with Alexandrian history, so it was a learning adventure which inspired me to do more reading and perhaps gaming in that topic. I had studied the Rome/Carthage period and played H:RvC, but despite that familiarity with the subject matter just couldn't get as attached to this one (goofy graphics aside). Hannibal and Alexander play similarly, and there are supposedly some technological advances in Hannibal as a computer program that I'm not enough of a technophile to understand. Hannibal adds a free placement mode that allows 'what-if' scenarios for the alternative history buffs, which I guess could be fun, but I wasn't inspired to do much with it. As a game I thought it less interesting, but that might be a function of subject matter. In Hannibal, I found it a big yawn to play the Romans, as the flexible Alexandrian system became a lockstep machine. I never quite mastered how to win for Carthage, but I could see the kid had a blast. Both are fun. easy, convenient... a nice diversion for a dedicated boardgamer for when he's short on time, space, and local opponents, but I doubt they'll extinguish the impulse to spread paper and cardboard on a tabletop in those hardy souls in which it still lives. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #28 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com