A long running debate in wargaming has been around the topic of historical accuracy, complexity, realism and playability. How you interpret these terms is pretty important and there seems to be a great communication gap at times between the various views. My view is that historical authenticity revolves around capturing the key features of a battle or campaign, which is not necessarily the same thing as being detailed or complex. I’ve never subscribed to the theory that you can only achieve historical accuracy by complex rules. Decision in France and Legend Begins still rank to my mind as great examples of this, simple rules that captured the flavour of the campaigns in a highly playable fashion. Now I’ll have to add France 1940 to that list. One of my concerns about Command magazine is that they seem at times to adopt an approach whereby the focus must be on ‘playability’. As a result they simplify games to the point where they become a meaningless counter shuffling exercise and you no longer have any sense of the history. Their version of Sealion was an example that springs to mind. I wanted to fight a game about a campaign to invade Britain, one that may require the Germans to take risks with their invasions. They produced one that accepted the invasion as a fait accompli and basically reduced the potential for naval conflict to the occasional dice roll. Similarly Blitzkrieg 1940 was bland and never captured the feeling of a crushing German onslaught against a disorganised France. Odds and ends Other Vae Victis games recently have been a mixed bag. Tried a few turns of Leuthen but it did not really strike me as a very interesting game. Too much of a dull slogging match for my taste. Marengo is a lot better and the Jours de Gloire system works reasonably well. Bull Run to Appomatox left me wondering if they had ever actually playtested the game. Set it up and tried a few moves solitaire. On the first turn the Confederates in Memphis moved north and took the virtually defenceless Cairo, things simply got worse from there and after about three turns I abandoned it. The casualty levels were excessive to say the least but really the whole combat system is flawed. I thought about trying the ten sided dice approach but dropped it on the grounds that if they got that part of the game so horribly wrong what was the rest of it like. Played several games of Rus. It is a good fun game but a bit too long. Despite pushing the pace of play along, the last game still took us about six hours to get to about turn 13 when we had to pack it in. Like Britannia it has the problems of a fixed sequence of movement of groups and known victory conditions. On a long-term basis that kind of thing gets to be a problem. However my view was that for the price you could get half a dozen games out of it before everyone gets to familiar with it. Interestingly several players I know have each been trying the General Quarters naval wargaming rules recently. Had several games of this as a result. An interesting system and I quite enjoyed it. A bit simplistic compared to some but it is believable and playable. Back to Perfidious Albion #104 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. 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