[HN Gopher] Harpoon V
___________________________________________________________________
Harpoon V
Author : luu
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-01-19 02:49 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| willvarfar wrote:
| No idea how this old Forbes article turns up on HN now, but I
| recognise that author! His own blog is kinda interesting
| http://www.hisutton.com/Covert_Shores_Articles.html and full of
| excellent illustrations, explanations and cutaways.
|
| (am a regular reader)
| germinalphrase wrote:
| My assumption is that war games like this are generally complex
| and would be difficult for the non-boardgame player to just jump
| into.
|
| Arm I wrong about this? Is there a satisfying option in the genre
| that could be played by - say - a clever 12 year old?
| mcguire wrote:
| Harpoon (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/300724/harpoon-v-
| modern-...) isn't necessarily the most complex of the games,
| but it's not the least complex either.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamecategory/1008/nautical/li...
| is a list of the modern naval games on BGG. Unfortunately, I
| didn't see anything that I recognize as a good game
| (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2073/sixth-fleet-
| modern-... is popular, with the recent resurgence of late-Cold
| War games) and is not excessively complex.
|
| If you go back to WWII, there are more options (and many more
| games). I'll just make one suggestion:
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3670/battlewagon (A print-
| n-play edition is available from WargameVault.) (It's moistened
| Star Fleet Battles, if you know that game.)
|
| Note: if you're talking about wargames in general, the sky's
| kinda the limit. How about another suggestion:
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6544/battle-moscow, which
| is old, but intended to be an introductory game, is freely
| available (https://grognard.com/bfm/game.html), and has a
| really spiffy online verion (https://oberlabs.com/b4m/).
| ghaff wrote:
| This is one of my favorite threads about a board wargame
| ever: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/371289/1914-jim-
| dunnigans-g...
|
| "This game should have been produced 55 years earlier and the
| General Staffs of the major combatants forced to play it at
| least 12 times before actually going to war. They may have
| been too old to begin a war at that point."
| protomyth wrote:
| I think Harpoon can be done by a clever 12 year old. Its not
| Squad Leader after all. Its more a carefully walk through the
| steps type thing.
| megameter wrote:
| I still have a copy of _Totaler Krieg!_ My brother and I tried
| to play it once, in the 90 's. We did not finish setup before
| dinner, and decided to give up and relinquish the table. It's
| classified as being in the middle of the spectrum of
| difficulty. Despite that failure, I don't regret the
| experience. It produced a tangible connection between the
| computer wargames I had been playing and the history behind
| those.
|
| It's a different kind of way to think about play, and it helps
| to imagine you're back in 1970 and computers are a thing only
| really available for Serious Projects, and working through a
| simulation with maps and minatures and calculation tables is
| the next best thing. Spending most of the day setting up the
| board made sense. A 12-year-old could do it, but Fortnite is
| more immediately gratifying.
|
| Part of what killed wargaming as a major tabletop genre is that
| computers are better at being simulators of the "noisy"
| elements of warfare. On some level, you know that ranking a
| unit with "attack" and "defense" ratings is going to be
| bullshit. If you make up more numbers and add more tables and
| put more rules in the game - which is what the complex end of
| wargames did - that doesn't make it better, but if you take an
| approach where physical reality is referred to as often as
| possible(which you can do in real-time on a computer), you can
| make a claim to accuracy emerging from that.
|
| What tabletop has done since then is to get better at being a
| more immediate experience and to convey things in broad strokes
| of abstraction, instead of setting up dozens of units and
| running calculations of troop morale and weather.
| stefanpie wrote:
| I am trying to figure out how these work because this seems
| interesting to me. My understanding is that the "game books" tell
| you the rules and the scenarios. But how do you play the games:
| software, on a table like board games?
| simonh wrote:
| You play it on a table with miniatures or markers, or even on a
| big sheet of graph paper. You can even play it on a whiteboard.
| The rulebook gives various stats for your assets (ships,
| planes, missiles and weapon systems), and you roll dice for
| things like sensor detection (radar, sonar, etc), scoring hits
| and damage to the target. There might be modifiers to various
| dice roles for weather, countermeasures, equipment and troop
| quality, etc.
|
| I played an early version a few times in the 80s, and read The
| Hunt for Red October the year it came out. Funnily enough I
| watched the movie last week, it really holds up.
| mcguire wrote:
| See Miniature Wargaming
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_wargaming).
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| Who needs Harpoon when there's Command? (One needs to be retired
| to play both, but I digress)
| evgen wrote:
| I play Harpoon as a palate cleanser between runs of The
| Campaign for North Africa... I do agree with the article
| though, the tabletop boardgame was somehow more satisfying than
| the computer version of same.
| simonh wrote:
| You might like DEFCON.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/
| mcguire wrote:
| " _...between runs of The Campaign for North Africa..._ "
|
| I'm not sure whether that is a boast or a cry for help. :-)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Africa
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north-
| afri...
| evgen wrote:
| Very tongue in cheek.... but I have a copy of the rules
| that I will pull out every time I move house and scan
| through before putting back into the big box of old games I
| almost never look at. I cannot believe how much time I
| spent on Squad Leader in my youth -- not even ASL, the
| original four box sets. Squad Leader, Starfleet Battles,
| and AD&D; it is amazing how much of a summer in the mid to
| late 80s could be occupied by those three and a group of
| geeks ready to play all day long in someone's basement.
| mezentius wrote:
| I immediately thought of Command -- it's a very deep rabbit
| hole to go down, and the sine qua non if you're into this
| stuff. But if you are not (1) a defense analyst or (2) a
| retiree you will be horrified to discover how much time you can
| sink into reading things like "Fleet Tactics and Coastal
| Combat," or "NATO Defense Expenditures 1970-1990."
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076160/Command_Modern_Op...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-19 23:02 UTC)