"Battles You've Grown Tired Of" Topic

Are there some historical battles which you've gamed so many times, you never want to see them again?

No. However, there some that I'm in no hurry to do again soon.

Well,not that I have gamed it all that often, but Waterloo seems to done to death

Battles You've Grown Tired Of

Whether the Ultramodern Board should be connected to wargaming.

Nope

I have grown tired of "Each side gets X points and then line up across from each other and go!" It is okay for the first game to learn rule mechanics but after that I want something interesting. Unfortunately it is tough to generate interesting games with equally pointed armies. Very rarely do scenarios actually generate a fight that is different than "line them up and go".

Just my $0.02 USD
Chris

Cellar Door for the win.

Yes

Pickets Charge
Charge of the Light Brigade
Roarke's Drift

Same game every time. Only the dice rolls are different.

Princeton ..American revolution..played it five times in a row,,the British can never ..and I mean never win.

Good point, Otto. I sometimes use them for calibration tests. (If Pickett wins, you rewrite--or discard--the ACW rules, for instance.) But I don't inflict them on other people.

Not games, but types. If you have no tactical options, once is probably too often, even if you win.

The other major type places the major decision out of the hands of the players. If the most important thing in the game is the reinforcement/activation roll, the weather roll or when some corporal blows the bridge, even if those really were the most important things historically--it's not a battle you want to fight.

But I've never played a game which was good once so often that I just wore it out. More often they weren't good once.

Pickett's Charge. It wasn't fun the first time.

Any WWI "over the top" scenario where the table is No Man's Land with trenches at either side.

+1 Spooner6, but I'll expand that to include any table lined edge-to-edge with units that have only one maneuver possible: forward, toward the enemy unit across the table.

All that aside, nearly any historical or even plausible scenario where the players have decisions and choices is worth playing multiple times. Even with the same rules, the results are often different. I've run the Jutland BC opening a few times now, and it's never been the same game twice.

- Ix

The Bulge

No, not really …

Phil

Oddly enough, I never get tired of the Wyoming Massacre.
The terrain remains the same, the troops and their gradings remain the same, and the rules remain the same.
But in the five times I have run it using TSATF, the results have varied wildly.

One might think, "You see one Wyoming Massacre, you see them all!"
But that is not the case.

The Alamo, Thermopylae, Custer's Last Stand, any "game" where the outcome is a foregone conclusion and it only matters whether you do better than historic. One and done for those.

I've never re-played foregone conclusion battles.

Qautre-Bras, always a great game!

Nope.

I wouldn't replay once a scenario that would make me bored the second time. When designing scenarios, I either rework or throw out ones that don't have a significant tactical challenge that can be replayed enjoyably.

That doesn't rule out "last stands". It just means that the victory conditions aren't based solely on attrition … then again, I don't write a lot of victory conditions that are based solely on attrition.

Thermopylae is a great example, the Persians had the attrition victory and wiped up the Spartans, but the Spartans won the military victory. The interesting tactical issues are things like … Can the Spartans hold out long enough to deter the Persians? Can the Persians push through faster? Can the Persians pull an outflank or defeat the peltasts quickly? Can the Persians route the regular troops sooner? Can the Spartans actually win attrition or route the Persians? As in history, the important thing was not that the elite Spartans all (?) died, but the political and military effect in the aftermath.

I enjoy studying the Swedish phase of TYW – buthave a hard time gaming it. Foot in center cav on flanks. What next?

This cold I'm having …

"What do you want for dinner?"

Any Battle of the Bulge game. Overwhelming power vs. Speedbump. "If the defenders have someone alive on turn X they win" never felt like a win to me.

I've never played a Pickett's Charge game that was fun.

Willing to be convinced otherwise, but it's the least interesting part of Gettysburg so of course, we gravitate towards that one.

anything in the last two years of WW2- could do with a rest. When the guys at the club decided to run a latewar campaign for FOW it was fine…the second near identical campaign was ok…by the time your fighting DDay/market garden for the 6th time in 2 years its worn thin, and Im glad the next one is Tunisia…

One way a massed charge can be interesting is it it's a single attack among many in a larger game. Frontal assault is a valid tactical option, so if a player decides to attempt one, the resulting contest of maneuvers and tactical decisions to work it out could be fun to play out. Pickett's Charge was a multi-division action, so in a multi-day, multi-corps ACW game of the entire battle of Gettysburg it would only be a single offensive action.

- Ix