[HN Gopher] The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in...
___________________________________________________________________
The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now
(2021)
Author : cl42
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-06-29 21:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nodicenoglory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nodicenoglory.com)
| jonplackett wrote:
| Think we killed it :(
| erikgahner wrote:
| Sure looks like it. Here is an archived version:
| https://archive.is/c4XbV
| te wrote:
| > "The turns do not take very long at all and teams of players
| can get in 2-3 turns in a normal work day."
|
| Game does sound very cool, but lol, author has different game-
| playing expectations than I do.
| Arrath wrote:
| Yeah for real. So much for "one more turn" syndrome ala
| Civilization
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It's not uncommon for 4X to be Played By E-Mail (or any other
| way to transfer save files these days), in which case 1 turn
| per day is a common agreement.
|
| P.S.: The most recent thread for MP Civ4 on the biggest Civ
| forums is literally this :
|
| https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-returning-
| players...
|
| > Please note this is a long term commitment of multiple
| months requiring you to play a turn every day. We all realize
| life happens and when it does we just ask you post and ask
| for an extension.
| Arrath wrote:
| Oh I know, I've observed more day-by-day War In the Pacific
| Let's Play's than I care to admit.
| rendaw wrote:
| Is that one player per day, or all players complete 1 turn
| in a day? If the latter, how does that work with player
| turns needing to be made serially?
| the_af wrote:
| Some PBEM games, like the venerable VGA Planets, had all
| players complete their turns and then play those
| simulatenously by the host program, resulting in the next
| universe state.
|
| There are rules within the game engine to disambiguate in
| which order some interactions resolve. If I remember
| correctly, the classic boardgame Diplomacy plays the same
| way (all orders are simultaneously, with some precedence
| rules for conflicts).
| dhosek wrote:
| Is that "in a normal work day" as in playing the game as their
| normal work day, or playing the game while they do their normal
| work over the course of the day?
| the_af wrote:
| A work day of military people using this wargame as a
| simulation tool for analysis.
| the_af wrote:
| It's not a game and it's not supposed to be fun. It's a
| military simulation, a tool for military people. 2-3 turns in
| one day may be entirely within reasonable range for military
| analysis.
|
| You cannot buy it in a store. You need to work for the DoD to
| have access to it.
| ycombinete wrote:
| In war games the terms "turn" and "round" are inverted from how
| board gamers usually use them.
| bane wrote:
| I have a friend who is _very_ into these types of games, having
| dedicated about 1200 sq ft of their home to them. The commercial
| ones are usually centered on specific historic battles, and often
| follow a sort of "script" where things happen at specific turns
| e.g. the introduction of new units or weather conditions, that
| sort of thing.
|
| They seemed interesting, and I came away with two main
| observations:
|
| 1 - A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take
| days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a
| major time commitment during which you must leave the game out
| and setup for an extended period of time.
|
| 2 - My first thought when encountering these was "why aren't they
| just using a computer?". But I quickly learned that the ability
| to spread out a map, that might be many square meters, and see
| everything happening on it at once, without having to slide a
| monitor's viewport around (or zoom in and out) has a number of
| massive advantages -- and (at the time I was looking at this)
| there's really no display technology today that can replicate
| this.
|
| I feel like both of these observations have changed significantly
| with the advent of cheap, high-resolution, networked AR/VR
| headsets. I don't think I'd want to wear one entirely for the
| length of time a game might take, but we're much closer now to
| having truly digital versions of this that eliminate many of the
| downsides.
| MrMember wrote:
| >A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take
| days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a
| major time commitment during which you must leave the game out
| and setup for an extended period of time.
|
| The Campaign for North Africa is probably the most extreme
| example of this.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Afric...
|
| A "proper" game requires 10 players and an estimated 1500
| hours.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a
| single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the
| author.
|
| Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.
| irrational wrote:
| Well, there is the recording of Sheldon on the Big Bang
| Theory.
| livrem wrote:
| That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and
| there are those that claim to have played it one or more
| times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play
| with a group that can get together regularly, but that is
| not different from running a RPG campaign.
|
| Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using
| (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to
| download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:
| The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame
| forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up
| a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more
| likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather
| around a huge table IRL?).
|
| (Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement",
| between the wargaming community and wargame publishers,
| when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is
| expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not
| supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free
| without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts
| to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not
| abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep
| allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how
| copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more
| mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it
| is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and
| possibly only because the tradition started last century
| before there was big money in selling digital versions of
| boardgames.)
| michaelt wrote:
| _> You need a big table to leave it set up and play with
| a group that can get together regularly, but that is not
| different from running a RPG campaign._
|
| I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500
| hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000
| hours in the course of a year.
|
| And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's
| not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour
| session every evening for 4 years.
|
| Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the
| mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without
| completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.
| livrem wrote:
| That is the modern (well, DnD 3E and later, so this
| century?) style of RPG campaign, with pre-packaged
| bundles of adventures to play in series, designed to last
| some specific time and then it ends. The traditional
| oldschool form of RPG campaign, still the way many groups
| play, and definitely the most common form last century
| (even if there were a few pre-packaged campaign modules
| for AD&D as well) is to create a group of characters and
| just keep playing adventure after adventure, more or less
| connected, replacing characters as they died off or
| players got bored with their current characters, but not
| really having a well-defined end, probably just fizzling
| out in the end as players drop off or the group decide to
| start a new campaign.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/20/us/dungeons-and-
| dragons-l...
|
| (A bit extreme maybe, but I heard of shorter campaigns,
| but still lasting for at least a decade of regular play.)
|
| And I think you underestimate how dedicated some people
| can be to playing games like CNA. It is a big game, but
| it is not absurdly long compared to other big board
| wargames.
|
| Here is a BGG thread from 2010 (well before CNA became a
| mainstream meme?):
| https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/580214/
|
| Note how the thread starts out "25 years after playing my
| last game of CNA".
|
| So called "monster wargames" was a trend around 1980,
| toward the sudden end of the era of board wargames being
| almost-mainstream. I do not know if CNA was the biggest
| of all, but I think not. It was part of starting the
| trend, but later games were probably bigger and longer.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/42904/the-biggest-of-
| the-...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That's a common issue in 4X games (in a much less extreme
| form of course), doesn't mean they aren't games, or even
| bad games.
|
| P.S.: related :
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/
|
| > [...]
|
| > Because getting seven friends together in the same room
| for the all-day affair that was a complete game of
| _Diplomacy_ was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today,
| inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post;
| the first example of this breed would seem to date from
| 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of
| Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a
| relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-
| post games with new themes which shared some commonalities
| of approach with Calhamer's magnum opus.
|
| > Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-
| by-post game called _Xeno_ , whose concept sounds very
| familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started
| with a cluster of five planets -- a tiny toehold in a
| sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized.
|
| > [...]
|
| > In practice, _Xeno_ played out at a pace to which the
| word "glacial" hardly does justice. The game didn't really
| get started until September of 1967, and by a year after
| that just three turns had been completed. I don't know
| whether a single full game of it was ever finished.
| Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small
| community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post
| enthusiasts. The first similar game, called _Galaxy_ and
| run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before
| _Xeno_ had processed its third turn.
|
| > [...]
| the_af wrote:
| Agreed, but do most 4X games even have an endgame? Many
| sandbox games are endless by design, and the intersection
| of sandbox & 4X seems to be pretty big.
|
| I think it's different to CfNA in that this game
| simulates an actual campaign with clear goals, but that
| endgame cannot be reached in a reasonable time by any
| owner of this piece of cardboard. I'd say that's bad game
| design...
| 9dev wrote:
| The masochist in me wants to build a program to simulate the
| game and see how fast a computer can do it...
| User23 wrote:
| > But I quickly learned that the ability to spread out a map,
| that might be many square meters, and see everything happening
| on it at once, without having to slide a monitor's viewport
| around (or zoom in and out) has a number of massive advantages
| -- and (at the time I was looking at this) there's really no
| display technology today that can replicate this.
|
| This is why I'd love a wall size monitor.
| chaostheory wrote:
| You can do the same for much cheaper with a VR headset. A
| popular use for them is to simulate a movie theater or giant
| computer monitors for flat gaming.
| ekianjo wrote:
| a VR headset is hardly a replacement for an actual monitor
| especially for long periods of time
| Suppafly wrote:
| >a VR headset is hardly a replacement for an actual
| monitor especially for long periods of time
|
| Except whenever a "is VR worth it?" post comes up here,
| half the comments are people claiming that's what they
| use them for.
| the_af wrote:
| I had a conversation with someone from work who uses VR
| to work exclusively (meaning, he doesn't use a normal
| monitor or keyboard for work) and it turns out his setup
| is really different from what I imagined.
|
| He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus (I forgot
| which though). His chair is weird and positioned weird.
| He uses a counterweight in his headset. And so on.
|
| Not for me, in other words.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus
|
| Well, duh, would you use one of the cheapest laptops
| available for work ? (Unless for dogfooding purposes.)
| the_af wrote:
| Well, some people do claim one use of the Oculus is this.
| I remain skeptical that most consumer-grade VR headsets
| are useful for real work.
|
| (As an aside, in my work experience of more than 2
| decades, almost every workplace provided me entry level
| laptops/computers. Only relatively recently have they
| started handing out MacBooks or similar equipment. You
| can do work with entry level laptops in a way you
| absolutely cannot with entry level VR headsets).
| chaostheory wrote:
| Have you actually tried it?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| The key bits of the battles would still always be on the
| corner of the map.
| defsectec wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that these days the more modern military
| wargames done by legitimate organizations, that aren't physical
| simulations (a.k.a. laser tag for grownups), do use computers
| and have integrations with full-size flight sims and data
| analysis tools.
|
| I play game called _Command: Modern Operation_ ^1 which can
| barely be a called a game, but rather a military command
| simulation at the operational level masquerading as one for
| civilian mil-sim nerds such as myself to toy around with.
|
| There is a "Pro" version^2 with all sorts of data-analysis and
| integration with other equipment/software that, according to
| their website, used by a surprisingly long list of military
| organizations. In practice, I have no idea how much it actually
| is used as I don't work in the defense industry.
|
| I'm sure there are other tools out there like this, but this is
| the only one I've used before. If you like these kind of things
| I highly recommend it. It's the kind of game that comes with a
| 400pg ebook if that's your kinda thing. Personally, it tickles
| my autism just right.
|
| [1]: https://command.matrixgames.com/?page_id=5002 [2]:
| https://command.matrixgames.com/?page_id=3822
| DocTomoe wrote:
| You would be wrong about that - boardgames-like wargaming is
| used by militaries all over the world, including the US.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0okOrVaLCA
| livrem wrote:
| Played some Harpoon, the older series that Command: Modern
| Operations came from (long story:
| https://retroviator.com/harpoon/).
|
| Then I got hooked on Rule the Waves recently. Matrix games
| publishes the latest game in that series as well (from last
| year): https://www.matrixgames.com/game/rule-the-waves-3
|
| It is a game mostly about staring at a spreadsheet, showing
| all the ships in your (usually early 20th century) fleet and
| their most important data, plus the current budget for your
| navy. There is ship-design and fighting (2D) real-time
| battles as well, but mostly staring at a spreadsheet.
| itsdavesanders wrote:
| I worked with a Navy Vet in the 1990s that would play
| Harpoon and reported that it was pretty much just like
| sitting in the sub looking at his displays. I don't know
| how true that was, but I remember them marketing it as
| something that the Navy used in training.
|
| I loaded it up once and decided that I really wasn't into
| games I had to study for.
| maxglute wrote:
| I think modern war also truncates decision making, things
| happen fast, you need computers to crunch the numbers and
| update battle field realities.
| wrp wrote:
| Within the wargaming community, keeping these games non-
| computerized is a deliberate choice. The main intent of manual
| gaming is to maintain awareness of all the variables you are
| manipulating. Another benefit to manual gaming is the ability
| of non-programmers to easily tweak the system. A good
| exposition of the manual approach to wargaming is Philip
| Sabin's _Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation
| Games_ (2012).
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| The military has a long history of using war games for training,
| going all the way back to Kriegspiel [1]. At least one history
| book [2], has been written about the topic. However it is rare
| that these military training games make it outside of their
| domain and become available to the general public. A rare
| exception may be the games designed by Volko Ruhnke [3], who
| designed games for training the CIA (though these may not be war
| games per se, but rather games about complex geopolitical
| situations). Mr. Rhunke's experience led him to become a highly
| successful commercial game designer.
|
| [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel
|
| [2]. The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and
| Hobbyists by Peter P. Perla (Author), R. Dawn Sollars
| (Illustrator)
|
| [3]. https://spyscape.com/article/meet-the-cia-spy-who-creates-
| wa...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Can't upvote this hard enough. I'm fascinated by large scale
| games of this kind and have a loose acquaintance with some
| people who run them, but it's a very tiny industry that's
| almost exclusively based around DC for obvious reasons.
| rareitem wrote:
| Are they online games or real life games (e.g. board games)?
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| I think it is a safe bet that they are mostly computer
| games by now, though there is a long history of using board
| games for training. That said, there was Freedom of
| Information Act request to uncover some of the games Mr.
| Rhunke developed for the CIA and they turned out to be
| physical board games.
| cl42 wrote:
| If you're curious, here's a 165-page Taiwan war game run
| across multiple scenarios and events:
| https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-
| wargamin...
| pfdietz wrote:
| The Naval War College famously engaged in wargames in the
| interwar years. They were invaluable preparation.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/United-States-Naval-College-Wargame/d...
| livrem wrote:
| I have quite a few books on this topic. Perla's was probably
| the first that I read and it is good, but to anyone interested
| in the topic I would first recommend Jon Peterson's "Playing at
| the World" ("A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic
| Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games"). It's a book
| about how D&D came to be and covers many topics, but the
| section on wargames is very well researched and detailed (and I
| enjoyed the rest of the book as well).
|
| My second recommendation is CG Lewin's "War Games and their
| History". It is a bit lighter on the history of military
| professional games, even if there is a chapter or two on that,
| but the chapters on non-professional wargames are amazing. The
| author has a personal collection of games going back to the
| 19th century and the book is full of photos and descriptions of
| obscure games that I really enjoyed reading about and that I
| never found in any other source. It covers games up to around
| 1950, so it does not get into any of the more well-known modern
| history of wargames (starting with Avalon Hill in the 1950's).
| fbdab103 wrote:
| The "Wrens" was a division of women Navy sailors who played WW2
| war games to identify how German UBoats were so successful.
| Played many scenarios, and replayed events after attacks to
| understand German tactics. Would get called in to game out live
| events as they were happening to decide upon the next day's
| strategy. Arguably led to enormous increases in British naval
| effectiveness.
|
| One little writeup I could find on it:
| https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/real-li...
| . Little blurb from the page: The Game, as it
| was to become known, took over the top floor of the building,
| which came to look like a cross between a school gym and a
| child's nursery. The floor was covered in linoleum and divided
| into painted sectors. On this make-believe ocean, the Wrens
| moved miniature convoys - model merchant ships and their
| battleship chaperones - according to directions given by the
| officers taking part in the exercise. But while the Wrens were
| permitted a bird's eye view of the play area, the naval
| captains were allowed only occasional peeks through holes in
| canvas booths, arranged at the side of the playing field,
| positioned to recreate the limitations of visibility at sea.
| ...During the post-mortem that followed each game, all of the
| players would be treated to a bird's eye view of the battle.
| The officers could at last see the tracks of the U-boats drawn
| on the floor in green chalk, set against the movements of their
| own ships drawn in white, and learn from the umpires whether or
| not they had managed to sink any submarines. Often, the
| officers would realise that they had made numerous dreadful
| mistakes during the Game, which might have resulted in the loss
| of their ships in earnest combat.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Even simultaneous turn based strategy games take hours. I cannot
| imagine the time commitment for non-computer managed strategy
| games. I also don't understand the point unless it's mostly about
| face to face interaction.
| cl42 wrote:
| I believe in this case that's very much the goal -- less about
| who wins, and more about the options/tactics debated to inform
| actual military battle prep.
| ranger207 wrote:
| It's about the face-to-face decision making and teambuilding.
| The lack of a computer is also somewhat of a bonus as it forces
| players to be intentional about processes, because in battle
| the computer probably won't be able to handle every process
| that comes up and so experience doing it by hand is useful
| chaostheory wrote:
| I hope that they at the very least use a computer to
| calculate the outcomes of a battle.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I hope that they at the very least use a computer to
| calculate the outcomes of a battle.
|
| From the article:
|
| _The real core mechanic is how dice are used in the game.
| The dice act as an instant adjudicator and the system uses
| different sizes of dice that can be adjusted during game
| play._
|
| The map and counters also encode a lot of rapidly
| accessible state information. Using a computer would
| require all of this state info to be maintained in the
| computer, which would be a very different game, probably
| without the person to person interactions that make the
| game what it is.
| livrem wrote:
| Back when I had more free time I played in some really long
| non-computer games like that. It was great to have a group that
| got together 1-2 evenings per week, played for a few hours to
| complete one or a few turns.
|
| The alternative is to get together and play for a long day or
| weekend, but many games are much too long for that. I played
| one earlier this month with six other players (in two teams).
| We started in the morning and played til late in the evening,
| but we did not get halfway through the game. It was enough to
| see what side was likely to win. That is the usual outcome in
| my experience.
|
| More common these days is to use a tool like VASSAL
| (https://vassalengine.org/) to play those games online.
| kkukshtel wrote:
| For anyone looking to dip their toes into Wargaming, I encourage
| you to look at GMT Game's output. They have a ton of games like
| this of varying levels of complexity. The best way to get started
| is to try to find a game around a theme you're interested in.
| These games are all (largely) in stores:
|
| https://www.gmtgames.com/
| the_af wrote:
| It may not be immediately obvious, but these are not "games" in
| the hobbyist sense of the word (though I suppose hobbyists may
| get interested, though access to this one in particular seems to
| be restricted to the military) but "simulations" for teaching and
| training.
|
| They are not supposed to be "fun". They are supposed to be
| analysis tools. Their goal is different to a wargame for
| hobbyists, where "playability" is usually a greater factor than
| the simulation of real war concerns.
|
| That's why it's OK that in a single day you can get one or two
| turns done. It's not a game, people who attend these exercises
| are doing work-related stuff.
|
| That's why it's also "not in stores".
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Multiple turns per day is faster than your typical 3+ players
| 4X PBEM game, here a recent example for Civilization :
|
| https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=11199...
| the_af wrote:
| True. I forgot PBEM!
|
| I used to PBEM an old, VBasic-coded 4X game called VGA
| Planets. We usually did 1 turn per _week_!
|
| (VGA Planets was a terrible game for all sorts of reasons.
| But we still managed to have fun)
| tmountain wrote:
| Might not qualify, but a few years back, my team started playing
| diplomacy online. I had never played a game involving so much
| back channel negotiation, double crossing, and strategy. It had a
| funny effect on water cooler conversations because folks that I
| had a great relationship with would approach me with a noticeable
| air of disappointment as a result of some of my less than
| honorable decision making. I highly recommend this game to anyone
| with a group of friends looking for a turn based war game
| spanning many days.
| Giorgi wrote:
| That looks like civilization but as a board game.
| anan474 wrote:
| Can't open the page as of now, suspiciously look like just got
| attacked (they use wp). For anyone interested here the archive
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240630013513/https://nodicenog...
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