"For Fighting or For Fun — A Brief History of War Gaming" Topic
5 Posts
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Tango01 | 12 Sep 2016 3:07 p.m. PST |
"By the end of the Cold War, American military planners had contingencies and plans for just about every conceivable crisis – Latin American counterinsurgencies, confrontations on the Korean Peninsula, a full out Warsaw Pact onslaught against NATO. But on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi tanks surprised the world and rolled into the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Kuwait, decision makers in the Pentagon had virtually no plans on the shelf for the defeating the world's fourth largest army. Out of desperation, someone in the American military nerve-centre reached for a copy of a hobby store military board game entitled Gulf Strike. Designed in the late 1980s by a subsidiary of the commercial war game company Avalon Hill, Gulf Strike allowed civilian hobbyists to battle through a series of hypothetical wars involving the U.S., Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran on a hexagonal-grid map of the Gulf region. According to a 1994 Military History article on war games by Peter Perla, before lunch on the day of the invasion, the Pentagon had the game's designer, Mark Herman, on the phone. By mid afternoon, he was on the military's payroll. And by day's end, Herman and a group of senior officers had already successfully played out a shorthand version of what in five months would go down in history as Operation Desert Storm. While planning out one of the largest military operations in a generation using a tabletop board game conjures up all sorts of unlikely images of generals rolling dice and marching toy soldiers around a map, professional strategists have been doing just that very thing for nearly 200 years…" More here link Amicalement Armand |
peterx | 12 Sep 2016 5:52 p.m. PST |
Interesting, I had not seen this before. Thanks for sharing! |
arthur1815 | 13 Sep 2016 3:20 a.m. PST |
Nothing very new here, and it complely ignores the development of the toy soldier recreational game after HG Wells by Featherstone, Scruby, Grant, Barker &c. |
Dynaman8789 | 13 Sep 2016 5:39 a.m. PST |
In what amounts to just a handful of paragraphs that gives a very brief overview of board wargaming (which a good number of those on here tells me is a separate hobby not to be confused with miniature gaming in any way) I don't see not mentioning any miniatures after Wells as a problem. It skips a number of board wargaming items as well. |
Tango01 | 13 Sep 2016 10:32 a.m. PST |
Glad you enjoyed it my friend. Amicalement Armand |
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