The Wargame that Wasn't, Lines of Departure 21

Copyright 2014, 2023 Thomas P. Kratman

A combination of the recent Gamergate brouhaha[1], coupled with the last column, reminded me of something I’d rather forgotten about.  I’ll tell you about it now.

In my garage, even as I write, are a couple of rather well made plywood boxes with sliding tops.  Inside those boxes are two complete small unit wargames of my own design.  I confess; I am still rather proud of them on a few grounds. One is that I got the Training Aids Services Center (TASC[2] on Fort Clayton, Panama, to shut down their woodworking shop for about 6 weeks to make the boxes and some of the things contained therein.  Another was getting color printing done at TASC at a time, 1983, when it practically took an act of Congress to get anything color printed.  (This was back in the stone knives and bearskin days, pre-Bill Gates, when even word processors were rather new.  Yes, you can find descriptions of those dark days in various ancient history texts.)

That was all clever local politicking, to be sure – politics as “the art of the possible” - but the design still appeals to me in various ways, for a simple non-computerized game.  One way was that it had a simple and effective way to account for man loads, equipment, and ammunition via five or six (no, I’m not going to go dig them out from under the crap piled on them to do an inventory; settle for “five or six”) pigeon-hole boards with type of equipment or ammunition along one side and the individual carrying them along the top.  The player, typically a squad leader or platoon leader, allocated the loads and put a red chit in the appropriate box for a given one of his “soldiers” up to the maximum weight allocation.  The maps were fairly standard wargame hexagonal grid maps that fit together in various ways to give a fair variety for the problems.  The rules were just a few pages long, and simple enough not to overtask the dumbest squad leader in Company B-3^rd Battalion, 5^th Infantry, who was my benchmark and guide for simplicity in game design.  Once I had rules he could understand, I tried them out on a Hispanic staff sergeant, who was much brighter but whose English was much iffier.  With that, I thought, and still think, I had rules success.