We describe our hobby as being about wargames, but how often is it that we end up playing games with no war In them? I was just looking at my collection of board games and found that a quarter of them are either non military economic games (or are military games with strong economic parts to them). obviously these games have a great appeal. The games most often played at my old game club over the last year (after Star Fleet Battles -- which also has a strong economic element to it) were Civilization and Empire Builder (a rail road game). City building, trade and cultural development characterize Civilization. While Empire Builder has the players laying out a rail system and carrying freight. Both of these games have competition, but very little straight up warfare. They seem to hold Interest by thrusting the players into the intricacies of business decisions. Good managers win, poor ones lose. If a player is looking for a test of his manhood, a cut throat business game might be Just the thing. The challenging part about business games is that it is much more difficult to figure out all the variables before hand. If one plays one of the many Battle of the Bulge games, it is possible eventually to find out "the best" move to make on turn five or ten. Moving and shooting lose their thrill. The early Avalon Hill games show this progression. Tactics II and Blitzkrieg are move and shoot games. Then they came out with Third Reich, which added in a simple economic game to the move shoot game. I fell under the spell of Third Reich's approach to economics in games. It seems as though a lot of people do. one gains economic points by conquering other countries. These points can then be spent on the vital commodity -- GUNS! Star Fleet Battles, and other non matrix run campaign games center their campaign rules on such economic rules. But they are flawed, by ever increasing amounts of paper work which strangle the referee. Third Reich's economic model seems to be based on the idea of Gross National Product (GNP). This lumps all production of a country together and measures it (assigns a value to it) based on how much it sold for in the market. Since money is money, this model leads players to believe that resource points from Bulgaria are just as good as resources from Spain. This isn't really the case. I for one would not want to go to war in a tank made in 1939 Bulgaria, while Spain has Barcelona where the Hispano-Sussa car works were churning out cars and airplane engines despite the recent civil war! Money isn't anything without the capital in place to transform it into "useful" items. Now, this is not to say that Bulgarian wheat is less nutritious than French wheat, but it is likely to be harder to access than the GNP model suggests. The Civil Way/War of Independence going on in "Yugoslavia" at this moment show Just how volatile the Balkans are. one wonders just how much Bulgarian wheat made it to Germany during WWII and whither it was really worth the effort? Rumanian oil, on the other hand, was vital and did play a major role in the war effort. The Germans hooked into an existing industrial structure rather than an amorphous GNP. As I said, I was captivated by this model of this military/ economic game for a long time. It lead me nowhere. I really enjoyed making up new factors to measure, and more points to keep track of. Then the head ache would always come just as the game was caught in its own inconsistencies. The plan fact Is that simpler economic games seem to work better at "simulating" what actual businesses do than do complex games. Complex games simulate what economists do -- but how many of us want to do that? Civilization and Empire Builder seem to escape that GNP trap by not trying to tell the player exactly what he should do. Instead they let the player discover for himself what the "best" strategy is. Brian Mosteller creamed me in Empire Builder consistently (and by nearly the same margin each time) by not following a strategy. He just looked at what the game put in front of him and made decisions based on that. My guess is that that is the type of thinking that business games used in colleges are supposed to teach rather than the rigid one answer approach some games push. Consider this ... GNP games say that a country becomes more powerful and is "stronger" if it conquers more territory. But the British Empire was at its strongest in the 1830s -- years before its maximum territorial size. In fact territorial control in Egypt and later Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq did more to dilute British influence on the local peoples rather than strengthen it. So the GNP model is off, just ask Napoleon the next time you see him how much GNP he expected to gain by invading Russia! Maybe that last question is one of the important reasons why people like to play trade games. We like to figure them out. I have a three volume set of books by Ferdinand Braudel on capitalism and material wealth from 1400 to 1800 which tries to do the same thing to history. It is fascinating reading. A must for any proto economic game writers out there. The lesson I got from Braudel is to set general rules on procedure and let the players do the rest. Parker Brothers puts out a game that does just this. It's called "Pit". It's about commodity trading (ala the futures market in Chicago). The players are dealt all the cards of the deck. Each card has a commodity on it. One wants to corner the market on one commodity. This is done by trading cards in sets of one, two, three, or whatever. Players hold up cards and shout "Two, two, two!" trying to catch the attention of another player trying to trade two cards. When some one gets all of one commodity (or if using a regular deck of cards one suit) he calls out "I corner the market on ..." The game is fast a furious, there are nor set trading procedures and no points or factors to consider until the shouting is done. Civilization's trading system is very similar and likely a copy of Pit's Interesting chaotic approach. There are definite business skills involved in economic games. I once played monopoly with an MBA. It was like riding with Custer at Little Big Horn! He made decisions so fast and with such ease that I was defeated before even landing on his property. Social Workers are turtles in a car race next to MBAs. But I know what to do with a Schizophrenic! I am hopeful that if I keep playing business games that I might someday develop a little business sense. Back to Experimental Games Group # 21 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1992 by Chris Engle 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