Why Eurogamers Need to Take Another Look at Wargames

A while back I learned that my old FLGS has essentially stopped selling wargames. I found this surprising since the store's weekly board gaming event has grown quite a bit in attendance since I left the area, so I assumed that there would have been more interest in wargames, rather than less.

It turns out that it was only myself and a couple of other guys who bought most of the wargames, and all of us stopped doing so for various reasons. The people attending the store's weekly board game night are more interested in eurogames, and have little or no interest in wargames. The shame is that wargame designers have been taking a lot of lessons from eurogame designers, and there are a lot of designs coming out from wargame companies that might appeal more to the eurogamer.

There are still plenty of traditional two player hex and counter wargames coming out, but there are a lot of other types of wargames being produced as well. In fact, the number one game on BoardGameGeek.com as I write this is Twilight Struggle, a wargame from GMT Games! Also in the top 25 is another GMT Game: Dominant Species.

Memoir '44 and the other games in the Commands & Colors line are also wargames, although the most well known in the series have not been published by wargame companies. Most eurogamers seem to think that these games are the exception to the rule, and in the past they would have been correct, but that's increasingly no longer the case.

Twilight Struggle is arguably the best example of a type of wargame known as "card driven". Card driven wargames rely on the play of cards to drive the game, either in addition to or in place of the more traditional roll of the dice. This allows for both more control on the part of the player and more variation in the types of things that can occur in the game. It's been a very successful mechanic and there are several good games out there that use it, many of which don't even get a second glance from most eurogamers.

Part of the problem is that they are all two player games, and many eurogamers play in groups rather than pairs. Wargame designers have only recently started putting out more games that cater to this, but there have been a few such designs in the past as well. One older design that has recently found a new home at Dan Versen Games is the Down In Flames card game. This game features WWII aerial combat and can accommodate up to six players out of the box. The publisher also sells additional decks of cards to allow for even bigger games without having to buy the whole game again. I've found that most gamers willing to give this one a try end up liking it.

More recent designs have come from Clash of Arms games. Their "War Is Hell" series of card games allow for two to four players to refight famous battles in a reasonable time frame. I haven't actually played any of them yet, but have a copy of their Fires of Midway game that uses the system, and am looking forward to giving it a try.

Another reason that many eurogamers don't give wargames a try is the length of time it takes to play the game. Eurogamers generally want a game that at most takes a couple of hours to play. Traditionally, many wargames take several hours, usually lasting over multiple sessions to complete, but most of the games I've mentioned in this post come in at 90 minutes or less. The biggest exception is Twilight Struggle which comes in at three hours, which I've found to be the outside limit for the average game night.

One area where wargames haven't caught up to eurogames yet is quality of production. Dollar for dollar, your average eurogame is going to have higher production value than your average wargame. Most wargames still have cardstock or even paper boards, and cardboard chits that you have to punch out of a sheet, leaving little dangly bits on the corners. The original printings of Twilight Struggle were like this, and it was only the most recent printing that had a mounted board and more attractive counters. Despite this, most wargames cost as much or more than their eurogame counterparts. This is largely due to economies of scale where eurogames sell many more copies than do wargames.

Even this is starting to change though, especially for those games that wargame companies think can do well with eurogamers. I already mentioned Twilight Struggle being reprinted with higher quality components, and there are other games receiving similar treatment.

All of this means that if you are interested in the more complex eurogames, you may want to take another look at some of the games being published by wargame companies.

Card Driven Games

I've found myself playing a lot of card driven games lately. These are games that combine more traditional wargame mechanics with the use of a deck of special cards. In order to perform an action you have to play a card from your hand. That card is generally either used to provide a number of action points you can use to do things with, or generate a special event listed on the card.

The result is that you always have far more options than you can take advantage of. The player that can maintain his or her focus will be the one most likely to succeed. In order to do this they need to be able to identify real opportunities while at the same time avoid wasting their efforts on distractions. It also creates a very nice tension between acting and reacting. You have to react to the cards you're dealt, while at the same time trying to maintain the initiative over your opponent.

Among the card driven games that I either own or have played are Twilight Struggle, 1960: The Making of a President, Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, Paths of Glory, and Shifting Sands. I've been paying particular attention to the two most complicated of those games: Paths of Glory and Shifting Sands.

These games can all trace their lineage back to We The People, which is generally acknowledged as the first card driven wargame. I divide card driven games into two major types that I'm tempted to call single deck games and dual deck games, but the real difference between the two types isn't in the number of decks there are. The real difference is where an event that is favorable to the inactive player can be triggered even if played by the active player. So far the only games like this that I've played have been single deck games, but Hannibal is not like that and also uses only a single shared event deck, so the single/dual deck description is not completely accurate.




The games that have the ability to trigger events favorable to the inactive player are Twilight Struggle and 1960. The advantage to this mechanic is that there's an extra layer of strategy and decision making involved as to whether and when to play certain cards that could benefit your opponent. The disadvantage is that it adds to the luck factor in that if you draw a hand full of cards that benefit your opponent, you can really be screwed. In theory, since you drew a lot of cards that benefit your opponent, there should be more cards in the deck that benefit you, and your opponent should have a greater chance of drawing them. In practice, this doesn't seem to always balance out over the course of a game.

I'll admit that I may change my mind as I play these games more, but for now I'm liking the other card driven games better, where getting a bad hand isn't as big of a deal. They have the additional advantage of giving you more options which forces you to make more difficult decisions. When half your cards have events that only benefit your opponent, it's really easy to decide not to play those events. When all your cards could be played as either events or action points, then you have some tough decisions as to what mix to play.


Unfortunately, two of the three games I have played that don't allow triggering of the inactive player's events are very difficult for new players to learn. These games are Paths of Glory and Shifting Sands. These are both very good games, and they share a common core system that is not that difficult to learn, but they also both have a large number of exceptions to the core rules that serve to add both balance and historical accuracy to the games. The drawback to this is that it's very easy to forget or overlook some of these exceptions, and when you do it can really shift the odds in favor of one player or another.

Fortunately, since the core system for both games seems about 90% the same, it's a lot easier to learn one after you've learned the other. Having tried both now, I'd recommend starting with Shifting Sands as it's a smaller game overall with slightly fewer special rules. In either case, be sure and check out some of the play aids available for the games on BoardGameGeek.