I think my friends who were raised by television in to nineteen eighties may be more likely to listen to a video than they are to me actually talking to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhD6JQ3whxc
On Saturdays some childhood friends of mine meet to play games online. We aren’t in person. That’s partly due to the lockdown, and partly due to the fact that many of us are now or will soon be living far away. So a lot falls on a single person to coordinate, learn the rules of a game, teach the rules of the game to those of us who don’t know them, referee the game while we play, and follow up later on any rules we might have had a question or confusion about. It’s a lot of work as expressed in the quote and video above.
The chief source of this misery is complexity.
The game of chess is a familiar analogue to the games we play. It is the oldest and most consistently played board game in the history of humanity. You can find endless resources online that teach chess. The rules can be printed on a single piece of paper. I found a really nice .pdf document that had excellent headings, diagrams of the rules, and some useful strategies and tactics. It came to five pages.
Back when we were younger my favorite game like chess was De Bellis Antiquitatis. Many elements appear in both games. There are opposing players, a board area, armies on either side made up of smaller elements, which take turns attacking each other, and leaving the game area when they are defeated, etc. The rules we used back then have been revised, but I still have an old .pdf which weighs in at twenty three pages.
Decades later and one of the many games we play online on Saturdays is called Warmaster. All the same ideas and elements appear. We’re nothing if not fascinating with little historical or fantasy battles between Greek psiloi and Elf archers. The original publisher has longed since stopped supporting the game. Now a thriving online community exists where you can find the rules, army lists, and lots of support. The rules come to one hundred and fourteen pages.
If we were all able to play together, in person, we’d likely play a more modern, published, supported, mainstream game. Something like Warhammer 40K would be my preference. This game has been continuously revised for decades and the rules have been honed to near perfection. At least they’re perfect now, until the next revision comes out in a few years. The latest rule book I have is from the previous revision, and it comes in at two hundred and eighty pages. With a modern published game like this though, the basic rules are just the start. Each army has its own separate rule book you must also buy. These army books add about one hundred pages or so, per player. That’s five hundred pages.
The progression looks something like this… 5… 23… 114… 500.
You don’t need to know anything at all about table top wargaming to see why organizing people to play these games would be increasingly frustrating and time consuming.
John DeHope 