This is a guest post from a friend of a friend. It speaks to the relationship the world at large might have to our hobby as wargamers. We thought you might enjoy it… — Mitch

by Jerad Alexander

Davin has a problem. His advance on Poland is being gutted by the collective will of democratic Europe. His army of high-powered Russian and Belarus troops are being hammered by NATO air power across northeastern Poland and the Baltics. His casualties began to mount on the second week of his campaign—how many has it been? 5,000 dead and wounded? 7,000? Davin isn’t a military general. He hasn’t trained for any of this. He lives with his girlfriend Joanna in Chelsea. He collects soundtracks on LP and works as a webmaster. He’s not even Russian. He’s from
Fresno.

He stands next to his opponent, Justin, a graphic designer and co-owner of a design studio in Brooklyn. Today, though, he is also the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, or “SACEUR,” as it’s called in military circles—the top boss of NATO. He’s the modern Dwight D. Eisenhower. Together they play a wargame—a genre of board game that represents military conflicts—down in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, at a club called the Metropolitan Wargamers.

Justin points down at the map, at a small cardboard counter that’s meant to represent a U.S. Air Force fighter squadron. “Wanna roll detection on that one?” he asks.

“Sure,” Davin says.

They’re staring down at a pair of large wooden boards set side-by-side. On the left board, a paper map of the Baltic sea and surrounding countries sits under a plexiglass sheet. Along with the map rests a numbers tracker with countless cardboard counters that have a blizzard of names and markings—“VPs This Turn,” “Sub Threat Level,” “Russian Missile Points,” “Nuke Points”— along with counters that represent fighter jets and bombers, each with their own names and mathematical values that represent their combat capabilities.

On the right board, a map of northern Poland, including the border it shares with Kaliningrad, Lithuania, and Belarus, sits under its own plexiglass sheet. Warsaw rests near the center of the map along its southern edge. The map isn’t photo-realistic. It’s not even topographical. The terrain of northeastern Poland has been distilled into a basic color and icon set and blended to appear natural. The lakes near Gizycko are there, shaped as they are in real life and painted a light blue. Woods are made up by the clustering of trees icons. Roads are secondary, as defined by dashed brown lines; primary, which are solid brown lines; and highways, which are heavy red lines. Cities are arbitrary gray blots slashed with black lines. Towns are mustard-colored dots.

Superimposed over all the terrain is a hexagonal grid, and in many of the grids are little cardboard game pieces, called “counters,” that represent the combat units, headquarters, and supply systems of both armies. Right now, Justin is pointing at a blue counter placed next to a brown counter. The blue counter represents an American B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber. The brown counter represents a military formation of the Russian 20th Guards Army.

Davin rolls a red ten-sided die in a wooden octagonal tray with a green felt bottom. He looks at the number and does some quick math. Then he consults a chart, one of a dozen or so, and comes to a result.

“You’re through,” he says. “I don’t see you.” Another NATO air sortie has made it past the battered Russian radar.

Justin nods. He pushes his glasses up is nose. “Okay. I’m a six, and you’re in Flat Woods,” He says, referring to the numbers on the counter and the terrain on the map. He rolls a die and makes his own calculations, then consults a similar chart.

“X,” Justin says. And with that the unit from the 20th Guards loses half its people. About 2,000 soldiers, dead and wounded. More or less.

“That’s just rude,” Davin jokes.

---

The front door of the Metropolitan Wargamers, located on 5th Street in Park Slope, is an inkblot on the side of the concrete stoop where an old man smokes cigars on warm nights. Its big metal door has two industrial deadbolts. Once those are sprung and the door opened, it feels like stepping into what might feel like a bunker cut into the rocky shoreline of Malta during World War II —cinder-block walls, jagged rock, old flags and helmets and old, dusty cutouts of soldiers hang from hooks and browned nails drilled into the ragged white walls. There are shelves everywhere, lining nearly every wall. Each shelf is like a biography of historical or intellectual tastes and interests, all in orbit of the same thing—human conflict. Board games are the chief tell, but there are shelves of miniature solders, tanks, trucks, artillery pieces—all are called wargames. There are few books, but the ones that exist are anthologies and almanacs of soldiers and military equipment, or the orders of battle of famous armies, or deep-dive historical analyses of one turn of human violence or another.

The entire space serves the same relative purpose—playing games that simulate armed conflict. Each space has large tables for maps and counters, tables and charts, and covered by plexiglass for protection. There are a pair of large racks with removable plywood shelving used for storing board games that can take months to complete. They’re called “Baker’s Racks” and the shelves are rarely empty. Most of them are played regularly, but some have a layer of dust. No one seems to mind. For a club devoted to the recreation of war, there is very little conflict.

But that’s what its members, wargamers like Davin and Justin, do whenever they come down and bomb each other over Poland with cardboard counters.

---

Wargaming is, effectively, an extension of chess. Players move pieces on a board to force their opponent into an unwinnable position. But where chess represents loose, whimsical notions of force and strategy without little context outside of the game, wargaming is tethered directly to a representation of human history, or the prospect of conflict in the near future. It’s Risk, but far more detailed and defined. For instance, a game called Holland ’44 represents the Allied attempt to cross the Lower Rhine River in 1944 during World War II—Operation Market-Garden. In that game one player takes control of the Allied forces—namely British and American troops—and the other player takes the Axis side, and together they attempt to change history, or replicate it. In another game, Paths of Glory, two players fight World War I—one player the Entente (UK, France, the US, etc.), the other the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire), and attempt to change the landscape of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. In a third, a lion of a game called Advanced Squad Leader, which many die-hard players consider a “lifestyle game,” players can spend hours fighting battles all across World War II and Korea, moving squads of soldiers and individual tanks across a gamut of terrain maps and of dozens of nationalities.

According to Boardgamegeek.com, a sort of online encyclopedia of board games, there are roughly 15,000 items categorized as a wargame—be it an original game, or an expansion to an existing game. While the number is undoubtedly bloated, it demonstrates the scope of the hobby. Its modern iteration began in the late 1700s when Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, a German entomologist, developed a game called “Kriegspiel” designed to take chess to a level that better reflected the realities of real warfare, to delete the abstraction in chess, backgammon, or Go. It had a map with a grid superimposed over the top, and terrain features such as hills, rivers, forests, and towns. It came with game pieces that represented military organizations like cavalry troops, infantry regiments, and artillery batteries, and each player would attempt to beat the other through a rigid set of rules that defined when a unit could move, how far in each type of terrain, and when and how to shoot.

Wargaming took off in America after World War II and reached its peak in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, when computer gaming took a giant slice out of the industry with its promises of better graphics and gameplay. But the hobby held on, kept breathing by old men and die-hards who preferred rolling dice to clicking a mouse by themselves, and over time began to regain at least a piece of its lost ground as board gaming began to take hold with games like Settlers of Catan and as role playing games became mainstream.

---

But why would anyone wish to represent war with more detail?

“For me it’s about the history of it. I’ll read something from history then game it out to understand what was going on. There’s also the puzzle solving aspect. I look at [wargames] as big tactical puzzles or strategic puzzles,” Mitch Land, a wargamer and wargame designer, explains to me over the phone from his home outside St. Louis.

In fact, Mitch designed the game Justin and Davin are playing now, Next War: Poland, along a handful of others—Next War: Korea, Next War: Taiwan, Next War: India-Pakistan and a game that looks at a famous battle from the Vietnam War called Silver Bayonet.

Davin explained to me that he fell into the hobby as a teenager. Mitch says much the same: “I started with Axis and Allies; got it as a present,” he says, referring to a hugely popular board game representing World War II, arguably one of the few wargames that can be bought in a toy store or commercial book store. “In high school a friend had a World War II game. We would play that. Later we’d go to a book store, when they used to sell them, and I bought 2nd Fleet [a game, by Victory Games, that represents Cold War-era naval combat]. Then built up from there. I think most people start that way. A lot of people did it when they were young, took a break, and then came back into the hobby.”

But how did war become a game? In his book The Psychology of War, psychologist Lawrence LeShan divides the perception of war into two basic camps—the mythical perception and the sensory perception. The latter involves the physical representation of war: destruction, loss of human life, blood, the ugly bottom of human behavior. The former, however, in its most basic form, involves the storytelling of war—the heroes and villains, the characters of history: generals and admirals and field marshals and the common soldier. Naturally, wargaming lives in the mythical perceptions of war. In a certain sense, what Justin and Davin are effectively doing is recreating the contest of war as a mental exercise, a test of wills and a test against oneself—not unlike a physical test of the body, through a workout or challenge.

“At the base level, a wargame is about a contest between two people,” Mitch explains. “You want to win, you play to win. It’s a test of skill. It’s a test of your ability to understand the rules. You say ‘I just want to test myself.’”

War is often a considered a test—a test of will power, strength, prowess of one kind or another. There’s been enough in literature going as far back as Homer of humans, particularly young men, going off to war to challenge themselves. Wargaming is not much different, it’s just missing the blood and moral mess war presents. Instead of the physical and emotional, even moral test, wargaming distills conflict into an intellectual test. It’s war on the cheap.

“The narrative that gets generated in a long game is what interests me most,” Angela, a mid-30s architect and musician, explains to me. “I don’t care that much about winning, though winning is nice. What I am interested in is how the game models history, or potential history, and how what I do reinforces or diverges from the historical narrative as the game develops.”

While there are no detailed demographics, the hobby is heavily dominated by men. In all the time I spent inside the Metropolitan Wargames, only a handful of women showed up to play games, and most of those games were of the more genial variety. Angela, however, is considered in club circles as a maven of “crunchy” wargames: games that are incredibly detailed, complex, and generally deemed excessive by the average beer-and-pretzel gamer. She explains she first became interested in the hobby when she was nine years old.

“The family took a trip to Gettysburg for a few days and did a self-guided driving/walking tour,” she says. “I was primed to be interested in the historical aspect since my dad was a big history nut, including military history. I distinctly remember the creepy feeling of walking through Devil’s Den and imagining the combat that took place there.

“A few weeks later, my sister and I had tagged along with my dad when he went up to the local hobby shop, which had a rack of games near the front. We saw a box with “Gettysburg” on the side and pointed it out to my Dad, who bought it. My sister and I had both played chess with my father, so I guess we were thinking this was the next step in a way that had something to do with the recent trip. It was the ’79 Avalon Hill Gettysburg. My sister and I duked it out with the basic game for a while. She got bored eventually since she didn’t have a high enough win percentage, but I kept tinkering with it solo, including the advanced game.

“I guess what set the hook was two things: It was totally open-ended problem solving, unlike ‘family’ board games, and it had a direct relationship with interesting pieces of history.”

Even among men, however, Metropolitan Wargamers is a rarity in the hobby. Outside New York players struggle to find opponents that live near them. With the hobby so eclectic when compared to “family” games, players are scattered across the world like a sad diaspora. In a Facebook group titled “Wargamer’s Opponents Wanted” a map shows players reaching out as far as Brazil, Hanoi, Singapore, Sicily, and all across Europe and North America, but not quite enough to fill a table in any one spot. It’s so much of a problem that methods of playing wargames online have surfaced to fill the void. Direct scans of the games are typically released by the major wargame publishers, such as GMT Games, and are playable through free, open software called VASSAL, which derived from Virtual Advanced Squad Leader (VASL), the game the software was originally developed for. With VASSAL, players can play their games over long distances by sending their turns between them over email or by simply playing live while communicating over the phone or through Skype or Discord.

Some players, however, including Davin, generally balk at the idea of playing their games on a computer, which is fine if there are opponents nearby and time. Many of those in the hobby, however, will simply play the games solo. It’s become such a common refrain that some game designers have begun developing rules for solo play. A whole family of games, in fact, known as the “COIN games” in that they represent counter-insurgency conflicts throughout history, such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and even the American Revolution, have a loosely scripted artificial intelligence flowcharts the player can use to give him an opponent in the absence of a human player. But even without them, there are plenty of wargamers closeted off in dens, “man caves,” and basements reenacting their own war stories on a map with little cardboard pieces scattered across them.

But that’s not the problem at the Metropolitan Wargamers, which has roughly 40 or so members, who pay $40 a month for the pleasure, another $20 if they want shelf space. Every Friday night a large gaggle clogs the back room of the club with cigar smoke and cries of victory. Then every other Saturday players six or seven players gather around a large table and beat their way through a recreation of the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. On odd days a couple players might gather to proselytize their way through the Reformation, or some deep, esoteric operation on the East Front of World War II. Then Thursday, Davin and Justin will gather as Justin grinds down Davin’s air force over beers, helping each other work through the rules, laughing at losses, remaining humble about wins. Who wins is relatively irrelevant; the story of war matters more. People like peace, but not always. Nevertheless, if you listen to the exhaust fan at the back of the room, you can almost hear Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds griping in the wind: “You don’t gotta’ be Stonewall Jackson to know you don’t want to fight in a basement.”

— Jerad Alexander