Hypothesis

I’m having a hard time seeing how a company whose rules were so unclear (the reference is to AH’s Gunslinger -ed) could ever have risen to the stature that AH once held.

Background

Well, they were the first to market with serious board wargames (I think they predated the Milton Bradley games, but couldn’t swear to it), and lots of the old games had essentially the same rules: Tactics II, Blitzkrieg, Guadalcanal, Waterloo and Stalingrad had very little difference between them. All used the same CRT, movement and combat rules, with a couple of little twists to make each game a bit different. If you knew how to play one, you knew how to play a lot of them. Heck, even the counters were all light blue and pink (frou-frou pink, according to Redmond Simonsen -ed).

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I was so fond of 1914 ... the counters were different.

On the urban legend front, I have heard many times that AH did very well because of the game Outdoor Survival. Not because of the game itself, but because the board got bought so that early D&Ders could have outdoor adventures. I have no idea if it’s true, but it made a good story. By the way, obscure wargame rules are nothing new. I have a copy of a book called Strategos, the American Game of War published in 1880, and dealing with how to recreate a Civil War battle on a tabletop. The text of the rules is 173 pages, plus a second volume of charts and player aids. In the preface, the authors claimed that the earlier German game of Kriegspiel, from 1825, was approximately as complicated, with one original volume of rules, and two volumes of later supplements.

Discussion

Just a few thoughts from an old AH fan:

1. Gunslinger is certainly atypical. Not a good representation of AH in general. However, the complexity of the rules is about 4 or 5 on AH’s scale of 1 to 10. If I remember correctly, Gunslinger does suffer from poorly written and organized rules — the worst case of that being the game Firepower. If you want to see a case of well-written AH rules, get a copy of Hitler’s War. Alright. Though for the record, Twixt and Acquire had well written, albeit very simple, rules. I’m glad to hear it wasn’t always this bad.

2. When Gunslinger came out, it hit most of us as just a change of pace from the standard AH fare, namely wargames. I, for one, wouldn’t have dreamed that games like Gunslinger and Civilization would ever really catch on as worthwhile games in their own right. They were just novelties, for times when the thought of setting up The Longest Day was just too much.

3. Those who bought AH games generally knew there’d be a learning curve to deal with. Lots of new people probably took one look at the rules and were shocked, and put the game away without ever playing it. But we old-timers knew what we were getting ourselves into; and there was a certain satisfaction in finally knowing the rules well enough to play a game. For many of us, just playtesting AH games solitaire (or with a friend) to get the hang of the rules was what the gaming hobby was all about.

Oh, I don’t care if there’s a learning curve. I’d say that most all games have one. Twixt especially. When I got Twixt, I played it ten times in a week. Each game, I got exponentially better, and by the end of the week, I was infinitely better than on game one. But when there’s a learning curve that’s not in the strategy, but in just being able to understand the rules, then something’s wrong.

4. Some AH fans, me for instance, were gullible enough to believe that all those rules had to be there, just so. Because the game was designed as a scientifically correct model of its subject; and if it weren’t so complex, it wouldn’t be true-to-life.

5. The goal of many game designers for AH and SPI was to accurately simulate some real-life subject, to give players a real insight into it. This worked more gracefully at a strategic level, where the game covered a whole war or campaign. There, the designer could abstract certain features in order to highlight others and make a point about how things worked. But when these designers attempted to deal with man-to-man scenarios (as in Gunslinger, Sniper and Firepower), they confronted an overwhelming number of details and variables. They made brave attempts to accurately simulate the subject anyway; but their efforts were watered down by the developers and publishers, who knew the game had to eventually sell to John Q. Public.

As much as I disagree with this design philosophy, its certainly a valid one. The realism in Gunslinger’s rules wasn’t what turned me off (though my own action movie simulation will be much less realistic, but I can justify that because the subject matter isn’t exactly realistic either), it was the absolute lack of logical organization. It seems as though they took each and every rule and just listed them all arbitrarily. After a few reads of the rulebook, you get the idea anyway, but I guess I’m just used to rulebooks that seemed to have things in a good order, and wouldn’t mention things before those things were introduced.

6. AH had a long history of duality. On one hand they produced wargames — games meant mainly to simulate battles and campaigns in as realistic a way as possible, no matter how complicated, as long as the game was playable. On the other hand, they produced leisure-time games — games for the family to enjoy. To get a real sense of what AH was, you have to see both faces of AH; and you have to realize that the wargaming face was the serious side (though not always the most popular or lucrative). A war gamer like me would never have wasted his time on a stupid AH title like Baseball Strategy or The Stock Market Game (I did consider buying Shakespeare once ... but I didn’t). And a just-for-fun social gamer would have done much better to turn to Parker Brothers or some other company than to tackle the likes of Anzio or Blitzkrieg. Gunslinger sort of straddled the line: it came out of the serious, wargaming side, but it was aimed more at the light, social-gaming side. Unfortunately it was too complicated for social gamers, and too much a silly novelty for many wargamers.

True. Acquire, Facts in Five, and Twixt are all some games that I like, but none are the AH that people seem to miss (because that AH is still around, I guess). As far as I know, AH is better off in Hasbro’s hands. At least they can present a game in an attractive and clear manner. Maybe, if selling games to social gamers is the point.

I did say as far as I’m concerned, and I am a social gamer, so I guess that is the point. I can see where the serious war gamers miss AH, but really, I think problems are more sentimental anyway. I’d guess that GMT and Avalanche are producing better new wargames than any of AH’s new wargame titles that came out in their last five to 10 years. It seems that most of the wargames that everyone loved from AH were the oldies anyway, so reissues are the only things suffering. Am I right?

But back in the heyday of AH, I always hoped the consciousness of gamers everywhere was evolving to the point where by now they’d all be wargaming nerds. If you were one, you wouldn’t be complaining that Gunslinger has clunky, complicated rules; you’d be complaining that the .58 Henry is more accurate in the game than it was in real life. Or you’d be proposing a rule where a character has to be specially rated to fanfire the Colt .45. That sort of thing.

Summary

There was a time when realism meant more than playability. Some AH games (e.g., 1914, Anzio, and Gettysburg ’77) didn’t have to be playable at all; they just had to be accurate to the last detail. Then, from about the mid-70s to about the mid-80s, there was a big debate over realism versus playability. And after a while everybody got tired of arguing, so they sort of agreed that it’d be nice to have both. Really, though, playability won out. As is evidenced by the demise of SPI, the later AH titles, and by the games-as-toys that Hasbro seems to be putting out now.

I’d say the realism versus playability debate is still active. I think playability won out because people play games whether they’re simulations or not. I mean, these are games, aren’t they? Maybe its because I’ve been weaned (if one could say that) on German games, but I think that if playability really did win over simulation value, then the right side did win, though I think there’s room for both types of games as long as players will buy them.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Hasbro’s reworkings of AH titles are toys; maybe their kids’ favorite movie license of the month games, but AH’s stuff is still more than toys. Wait, you never said AH. Never mind.

Synopsis

Is Gunslinger a simple simulation game or a complex family game? Is Certs™ a breath mint or a candy mint? Does an ointment work better than a suppository? In the final analysis, the answer is probably as personal as which board games one likes to play or collect or accumulate. Clearly, one subset of gamers is oriented strictly to family games and another to board wargames.

The intriguing question is: is there a subset of gamers who have no specific preference and indulge in both types of games equally? The subsidiary question: what percentage does this third subset represent? Anecdotal evidence suggests that the answer is complex ... most board wargamers I know enjoy playing any game, and may even collect both types of games, to a varying degree; but most family game players do not play board wargames. Comments?