"“Hardest” rules set you’ve enjoyed?" Topic

I believe it was called "Modern War in Miniature" by Korns.

Back in 1990-ish, we played a game of Air Superiority that recreated the Gulf of Libya incident, when two Navy Tomcats shot down a couple Libyan fighters. The cool part was that my best friend's uncle was one of the Tomcat pilots on reserve. He didn't get to fire any missiles, but he was ready! His plane is now displayed outside the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle.

That is too cool, Jav!

SeeKrieg IV
SPIs Victory in the West system
SPIs Terrible Swift Sword system
Bridge. I enjoyed it, but was mediocre at best. Never got past Goren bidding.

Either Star Fleet Battles (with plotted movement, of course), ASL, or Mustangs & Messerschmitts.

WRG 7th

I generally find all table top wargames complex because of unit movement. Non grid movement / maneuver gets complicated fast due to all sorts of situations, such as when only a portion of a unit is in terrain. Too many fractions come into play.

Most complicated, but also most satisfying board game I play is Twilight Struggle. Could not wrap my head around the rules on first reading. It took me awhile to figure out that the game is about managing bad choices.

Could not wrap my head around the rules on first reading. It took me awhile to figure out that the game is about managing bad choices.

I don't need to play it. I've been first-person role-playing that my whole life.

Wolfhag

😂. LOL

With TwilightStruggle I find that I'm rather magnanimous in victory, but I'm a very poor loser. When I lose I almost throw my iPad against the wall or want to break it in half against my knee. The game can really drive you insane.

USAFpilot,
I've heard so many good things about the game from friends I'll have to get around to playing it someday. I worked at one of those three-letter intel agencies during the Cold War (raw intel gathering, not smart enough to be an analyst or in crypto) so I should be able to relate to it. I like games with deception, skullduggery, and bluffing. I have just been avoiding card-activated games.

Wolfhag

I prefer hand building to card activation.
To my mind, it's interesting choices rather vs random frustration.
Battlefield commanders may well be coping with problems right left and centre as they try and direct chaos but I don't particularly like seeing that exposed so obviously directly to the player.

I like Fields of Glory Napoleonic. Its somewhat slow at points given how long the QRS is!

Warhammer was very complicated. There are loads of edge cases, special interpretations and holes.
Special abilities, magic and magic items often interact.

May I also add the first edition of Hordes of the Things? HOTT was written in such a sloppy manner with loads of local colloquialisms that it was well-nigh unreadable to anyone not from Cambridge, England.

Field Of Glory Ancients. I'd gone through the "learning the rules phase" and the "playing the rules phase"…was just moving into the "playing the game phase" when my regular opponent went naaaahhh…had enough of this headache stuff lets try Basic Impetus. It was a very good call.

Challenger is a nightmare of a complex game system, but once you get the hang of it fun. The problem was learning the rules.

Corps Commander was possible the next hardest rules, that was a nightmare to learn but by golly it was detailed.

War Games Rules, 3000 BC to 1485 AD (7th edition version 7.5)by Wargames Research Group. These were tabletop historical miniatures rules for the period indicated. Detailed, complex and nuanced, playing them was unbelievably mentally taxing and more grueling than any wargame I played before or since but I considered those rules the best table-top simulation for big-battle historical ancient/medieval miniature wargames extant at that time (late 1980's to early 1990's), and I loved them. By the end of a two-day four-round WRG7 ancients competitive tournament weekend playing opponents who would make a school of piranha self-conscious you were more absolutely mentally fatigued and wrung-out than after a week of college final exams but you knew you had WARGAMED. The WRG ancients rules also taught me how to PROPERLY read and accurately decipher Barkerese. Mercifully replaced by the DBx revolution, the pre-DBx WRG ancients editions remain a source of fond memories and nostalgia.

I second "Follow Me"

WWII skirmish rules. Man to man with 6 seconds turns and both infantry and armor are well represented.

link

My dear Col Dumford
The "Modern War in Miniature" in its game form is SUTC (Small Unit Tactical Combat) which I Have played and umpired and reworked since I was introduced to it some fifty years ago. Zuparko did that (see the Curry book on the pioneers of wargaming) As with all wargames, it was a "work in progress" (these works in progress followed the sloppy design and publication style of Jim Dunnigan) and SUTC left off small things like rules and statistics for trucks, horses, booby traps, land mines, wire, non player character's actions and reactions, fire effects against buildings and foilage, digging in, axes and shovels against terrain, to name a few.
And the charts were never robust, that is, they lacked certain essentials such as observing or searching for trip wire or mines, observer's or firers or targets movements and position(you would have to see the original charts and rules much of which is in the Curry book)
As this is a double blind umpired game with almost no information, where fate and chance have full sway(well, I usually take one of the potential players aside and have him be a "witness" an aide to me, the umpire, so that the losers usual cry of "cheated!" dies on his lips after the witness/aide validates the game results) the level of uncertainty, resulting in some unusual behavior on the players part is not what is found in your normal game.
The players do not even get to roll the dice.
But I do give them copies of the rules and charts, a whole lot of good that does for them, as they cannot use the charts or rules.
The players do not get any scenario information other than what the umpire tells them. They most certainly do not have the scenario info for the other side.
As they do get to ask the umpire questions about their situation, it becomes my job as umpire not to give them any extra info, which devolves into another game of pumping the umpire.
And so, I have had games in which one side hides and will not show himself as he thinks "Mr Rico, there's a million of them!

You made me smile Kilroy44. I vividly recollect playing the predecessors to WRG7. One snarky remark related to those early Barker versions still lingers in my memory –

"Side A moves; argument ensues."

I also remember the wonderfulness of deciphering Phil Barker's elaborate edifices of successive cascading inter-related subordinate clauses.

B