Though I’ve spent my career to this point focusing on PC and videogames, I’ve got a small, treasured collection of board games that I never get to play, mainly because I don’t know anyone geeky enough near me to play them. These aren’t your typical kids board games; games such as Monopoly don’t rely on skill as they do on luck. Instead, these are much more sophisticated affairs.
Perhaps the rarest of my collection are three Avalon Hill “bookshelf games.” If wargaming had a golden age, it was the 60s to the late 80s, and Avalon Hill was the best. It made strategy games such as Civilization (not to be confused with Sid Meier’s PC game, which took inspiration from the board game) and wargames that focused on pretty much every conflict, including the Civil War, World War II, and hypothetical Cold War clashes. I suppose if I ever became tremendously wealthy I would make it an effort to assemble as complete a collection of Avalon Hill games as possible, but for now I only have three, all of them in mint condition. First, there’s MBT, which is about a NATO/Warsaw Pact conflict in Germany. It’s a tactical level game, and incredibly complex. How complex? Well, it’s the kind of game where to determine whether one of your units actually hit an enemy unit requires dice rolls and referring to several tables. And once you determine you’ve hit it, then you have to refer to other tables to determine what sort of damage you’ve done. By the way, you’re also factoring unit facing, hit location, and what type of ammo you used. The rulebook alone would scare off most people.
The second Avalon Hill game I own is IDF, which was a follow-up to MBT but with a focus on the Israeli Defense Force. Again, very complex game, and the only real differences are desert terrain tiles as well as Israeli and Arab equipment and weapons systems. Finally, there’s Tac Air (“The Game of Modern Air-Land Battles in Germany”). Tac Air is more of an operational level wargame. It was designed in the early 80s, when the Army, coming off the trauma of Vietnam, developed a whole new warfighting doctrine designed to take advantage of technology. While Air-Land Battle never got used against the Red Army, it got its full debut in Desert Storm. The idea is to “stretch” the battlefield, using deep strikes, airpower, Special Forces, and more to hammer and harass the enemy. This game models that.
I like collecting these Avalon Hill games because they’re relics to a fading era. There’s something very cool and old school about them. It’s interesting how designers distilled and abstracted ideas into fun models. At the same time, these models are surprisingly accurate. I remember reading that in the days immediately after Iraq invaded Kuwait back in 1990, Army officers used commercial wargames to play out Iraq’s possible next moves. Then again, it was the Prussian military in the 19th Century that gave birth to “modern” wargaming. Wargames let you study warfare without the bloodshed, as the best wargames model concepts such as logistics, attrition, and the fog of war. (Interestingly enough, the rules for the original Prussian Kriegspiel are still available today; these are the same rules used to train the Prussian military staff in Bismarck’s victorious wars.)
Board games are incredibly popular in Germany, and there’s no shortage of brilliant designers at work there. Though I suppose in America the most prominent board game company is Fantasy Flight Games. You’ve probably seen its games at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble; that Lord of the Rings board game you’ve seen is by Fantasy Flight. The company also works with George R.R. Martin and has made an excellent board game based on A Song of Ice and Fire. Each player controls a major house and there’s a lot of maneuvering as alliances are made and broken, and you can never quite trust your friends. In other words, it’s just like the books.
I’ve got the core game, which is all you need, but it turned out to be so popular Fantasy Flight made two expansions (naturally titled A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords), which I also own. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get a full game going, because you really should have at least five players to allow for the maximum amount of skulduggery and betrayal. It’s also a beautiful game, with a giant board of Westeros, along with plenty of unit counters and cards.
Finally, there’s another Fantasy Flight board game based on an existing franchise: Battlestar Galactica. BSG is another game that captures a sense of paranoia, as you can never be quite sure which of your fellow players are human and which are Cylon sleeper agents. I first saw the board game at PAX last year, where the prototypes were being shown off for the first time, and I ordered it immediately. Unfortunately, this is another case where you really need a full complement of players to get the most out of the experience, and I’ve never had that. But BSG is popular enough I could probably hunt down some fans, somewhere.
So, for now, all seven of these games sit on my shelves. One day, perhaps.
