"Why is fantasy so popular?" Topic

I can think of two reasons:

1. An endless variety of troop types

I mean, you can never stop adding to them. WW2 (the next most popular miniatures genre) has a decent variety but the differences between one medium tank and the next aren't that spectacular and there are only so many kinds of medium tank.

2. A consensus on the rules

This isn't just because GW pushed Warhammer hard and pretty much toppled other fantasy rulesets off the shelf. It's because the characteristics of the various races in fantasy are entirely made up, so it's possible to come to a consensus on what those races can do. I can't say your melee factors for dwarves are "wrong." Ancients wargaming is the polar opposite. The historical record on how armies in Antiquity worked is fairly sparse and obtuse, but it is sufficiently clear to form theories from. So everyone has his ideas which he implements in his ruleset. Hence an ever-growing plethora of rulesets and the absence of any big Ancients movement with a common gaming system one can easily jump into.

In the UK there are a tiny number of retail outlets that stock historical ranges, virtually none that have any sort of comprehensive stock. The vast majority of retail cover fantasy games of one sort or another.

High streets may be loosing their grip on consumer spending but they still have the impact on consumer engagement.

In the UK historical wargaming was mostly a mail order business model right from the start and too diverse by period, scale etc. to ever be really viable at a retail level.

Some companies following the GW model have successfully improved the situation for certain genre, periods & scales and a wider variety of figures suitable for historical wargaming are now available in retail outlets but still only small compared to fantasy.

Hi Tony. I punted Tiny Tin Troops on my blog. See the comments.

too diverse by period, scale etc. to ever be really viable at a retail level

So diversity but not too much diversity?
(any socio-political connotations are entirely coincidental )

You have to love history and most young people don't. If you don't love history then historical gaming is no better or different than fantasy or Sci-Fi.

When a new game store opens up here, they usually ask our club what historical figures to stock. We tell them don't stock any. We already have what we need and should we need any figures, it is usually very specific and not worth stocking up on them. We order online.

A consensus on the rules

This is a very interesting point. When I first took up the hobby around twenty years ago ancients was dominated by DBA and Warhammer Ancient Battles. Now I don't think that's the case?

You have to love history and most young people don't.

I think young people would love history if they were taught it. You don't like what you don't know, and these days there is a growing contempt for the past built on ignorance.

Young people don't have formed preferences of their own – they absorb what their milieu offers them and that eventually becomes what they like, especially if they can't compare it to anything else. It's about bandwagons, shiny brass fittings and all.

When I first took up the hobby around twenty years ago ancients was dominated by DBA and Warhammer Ancient Battles. Now I don't think that's the case?

Absolutely. Too many rulesets.

Historicals can be intimating to start. What rules, period, and scale should I pick. What if I do it "wrong" and some grey beard gives me crap for it. Its a lot to unpack if you are on the outside looking in.

For most fantasy games, the rules and the figures are tightly connected. Its easy to walk into a store an pick up a box of Dwarves for game X. You know what the rules are, the scale is set, and the unit is correct for the setting.

It's really just as simple that a lot of gamers like the idea of mass combat (i.e., Ancients/Medieval) and many fantasy books as well as the Lord of the Rings movies just reinforce that popularity. What they don't like, however, is having to buy multiple Osprey books, build units from lists for different periods of history, then try to figure out which of the 100 sets of Ancients/Medieval rules are right for them.

Warhammer Fantasy and other games like Conquest make it easy with their boxed sets, plus if your area is like mine where there are at least half a dozen shops to play, the armies aren't painted anyway.

I was once asked by the owner of a model shop (mostly railway), whether she should stock Historical wargames figures. My answer was that she would almost certainly stock the wrong items, if she stocked 15mm Imperial Romans then the customer would want 28mm Republican Romans, etc., etc.. I suggested Warhammer as more likely to sell !

And I am an historical wargamer with (almost) no fantasy figures.

Have you considered the possibility that "fantasy" is simply a lot more popular, and as a result "fantasy" content is far more widely produced and widely consumed that that "history" stuff is everyday culture ?

It would be strange if wargaming did not reflect this… as it is exactly what real people out there in the real world are more interested in…

I would argue that fantasy, at least in the current environment, has a much broader appeal. I can speak to my experience this weekend at Little Wars. There were plenty of women players that I saw at the show, which is mostly historically focused, but includes sci fi and fantasy events.

I ran three historically based events, two of which were based on battles featuring Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians. I advertised it as such and made it clearly friendly to women.

I had no women in my first session and then only 1 woman in my second game and 1 woman in my third game (which did not feature Aethelflaed). I ran an attractive table with good looking minis, but it was clearly historical.

Looking around, I noticed that the women were playing the great looking Wizard of Oz game that was running a few tables down, the Gummy Bear/ Candy wars that was kiddy corner to my table, and various other fantasy titles scattered around.

I've been observing this over the years and it is perplexing on one level. But then I have my own wife as a sample. She is probably more learned in history than the average person, but frankly she'd rather eat her own arm than play a historical game, though she has no issue playing a fantasy game.

Drilling into it with her, and drawing wider observations-

Not that many folks are into history. Everyone here likely is (I am a history fanatic, so love historical games). The average person was educated in a system that treated history and reinforced it as dull rote memorization without context. History for me is the story of us all. It is great stories of people who lived before us. I was lucky to have a few influential teachers who taught history as amazing stories (and many who taught it as a slough).

Fantasy typically has clear cut good guys and bad guys with no overt cross over to history. Many casual players I know are uncomfortable with the reality of playing games where real people live and died, but have no issue if it is purely 'make believe.' They might laugh playing an undead army who will literally kill every many woman and child they face, but have a very uneasy feeling playing a game where a real world army might do the same.

Pirates have become so fantasy in our collective minds and reinforced in silly movies that people don't think twice about joining a pirate game, but be completely turned off by a similar period naval battle.

Few casual players will play German or Nazi forces in a World War II game, but most historical gamers I know don't even bat an eyelash at it as they know it is history and don't associate playing the Nazi side with being a Nazi. For casual gamers, playing the Nazi side makes them feel too close to being associated with the Nazis themselves.

Fantasy, however, allows people to 'role play' a bit, even if it is a traditional miniatures or war game.

Finally, I think people get scared off by us history fanatics at the table. We tend to geek out talking about the history around a battle or situation, and sometimes argue over the nuances. To the casual player this is terrifying. If you know nothing about 4th century Roman warfare and see a bunch of guys who are obsessed with it around the table, you are going to be intimidated, especially if you are a casual history fan.

I know from my wife's experience if she blunders a unit of dark elves into an ambush and they get wiped out, it is not great, but far less fear inducing than if she accidentally does the same thing with an historical force in front of a table of history fanatics. The fear of looking stupid to her is palpable and why she refuses to play historical games. I don't think she's unusual in that regard.

Fantasy just doesn't cause that same level of angst amongst the casual player.

So honestly, we have to be real with ourselves as historical players, and probably check our instinct to go all 'Well Actually' and get hostile in our disagreements over historical facts. That's scary to new and casual players. In this way, we can be our own worst enemies.

GW does a first-rate job of drawing kids in, and after a time it becomes self-perpetuating: a beginner plays what his friends play. It's also much easier to create a simple, well-balanced game if you don't have pesky reality intruding, and you can keep up with cultural trends.

Also worth noting that fantasy and science fiction, being distorted versions of ancients and moderns, make intuitive sense to young minds trained on movies and TV. Big men on horseback, tanks and men hiding in woods with missile weapons make sense to them. It's horse and musket--men in bright uniforms in formations shooting at each other--which must be "stupid." It would take historical knowledge to correct this, and they're not getting any.

The public wants what the public gets (Paul Weller, Going underground))

martin

The Lord of the Rings.
The Hobbit.
Game of Thrones.
Star Wars (it's fantasy. It just has spaceships.)

Heard of ‘em, have you? Well, so has everybody else.

Now name a historical epic war movie that everybody has heard of. And I mean everybody, not just history nerds and military buffs.

And there's your answer as to why fantasy gaming is more popular than historical gaming— a bigger pool of potential gamers, by an order of magnitude or more.

Most people don't go through life seeking to informed about things that happened before they were born, but they do seek constant entertainment. That which is entertaining therefore wins out.

I began wargaming with Squad Leader. It was ridiculously complex… Even after we advanced through the early, rules-teaching scenarios, we kept looking back at the first scenarios to make certain we were following the 'basic' rules correctly! We never got away from the early scenarios' rules, we just could not keep track of all of it.

Later, in my adult years, I played Command & Decision III, a WW II game, amongst other historical rules sets. My group of gamers were mostly self-described, "Rivet Counters," knowing which month, and year (most knew the date, even), when any given improvements were made to each and every tank, airplane, cannon, etc.

I found their expert knowledge very intimidating. They were walking Jane's Encyclopedias of military knowledge. They frequently commented on how the rules did not accurately reflect the abilities of several weapons, regarding range, lethality, etc. This, too, was intimidating, making me feel like I should not be at the table playing…

With pseudo-fantasy mass battles games, or even Sci-Fi games, weaponry and equipment is generally much simpler, and the concept of a, "Rivet Counter," simply does not exist. The intimidation factor is much lower, unless the game involves a Tolkien master historian who can quote every page of, The Silmarillion!

If it is any consequence, it is not easy to recruit RPG gamers to fantasy mass battles games, either. In the beginning of RPG's, wargamers found a new genre, a new way of playing their games, based on individual people. It is more common to find mass battles gamers who also play RPG's, than it is to find RPG'ers who enjoy playing fantasy mass battles games. It seems to me that there is a Check Valve between fantasy mass battles games, and RPG games: interest only flows in one direction… Cheers!

There is also frequently a lower figure count required for a lot of fantasy games, and no one complains or looks at you funny when you bring unpainted miniatures to the table. You can also spray paint your orcs brown, green, yellow or purple and no one can say that you are wrong.

This sort of discourse leaves me weeping, wailing and gnashing my teeth at the hopeless decay of civilization.

I was always leery of fantasy games as they seemed prone to people making their own mind up about the races involved and how 'good' they were.
I love Oathmark as it is obviously based on Tolkien's Middle Earth, and therefore has clearly defined 'rules' dictating what can be used, and how good they are.

to be fair they are two different things. It would be like comparing chocolate and caviar. One is the height of taste and sophistication and the other is caviar

seriously though. They appeal in different ways. Fantasy is exactly that…make believe, anything can happen, certain rules dont apply etc
historical is just grounded in more determined or set characteristics and physicalities

another (albeit finer grained) analogy would be to compare a non fiction historical book on the Dark Ages period of Britain with a fictional or at least quasi-historical book penned about the derring do of King Arthur.

Marketing, old chums, marketing – and not even intentionally – compare how many movies/games/books/shows have fantasy as at theme versus history – every 12 year old knows what a hobbit and an orc is, but see how many know a hussar from a dragoon – - -

There's one glimmer of hope on the horizon – a faintly-discernable growth in the desire for accuracy – "fact checking" applied to escapism. In an age where readily accessible information doubles roughly every year, people can more easily get to the bottom of things if they want to. People (well, some people) are skeptical of what the establishment tells them and try, to some extent, to get at the truth themselves. I'm hoping this translates into a desire for a more accurate presentation of pre-gunpowder warfare on the tabletop.

Also, fantasy as an entertainment trope is rather dying the death. This is especially true of the superhero subcategory, where the last few superhero movies have bombed badly. The LOTR trilogy was the apex of classic fantasy, but that was 20 years ago. ROP, which was supposed to trump LOTR, bombed as badly as the latest superhero movie. Methinks the popular imagination is casting around for something new. Crossing fingers it finds history.

once you have normalised escapism….its time to head back to reality

I would have said that a lot of impetus came from fantasy and sword and sorcery books and films, but as suggested above, maybe thats on the wane now.Frightening to realise LOTR was 20 years ago.

SF however still going strong.

Be careful what you wish for. Ridley Scott found history.

ROP (Rings of Power) flopped because it was absolute garbage, not because it was fantasy or based on Middle-Earth. Don't confuse a lack of quality in a single product with a lack of interest in the genre that product comes from.

Is there a consensus on the rules?

GW has cornered a big market – but there are a lot of people out there playing other games as well.

Fantasy as a wargaming genre has a cousin in role playing, and thus a large pool of potential cross-over converts (including, gasp, some women).

Many fantasy rules have a low fig count which breaks down a key barrier to entry for historicals – the cost, effort and time to build a set of play pieces.

And the marketing power of GW is significant – I have seen adds for their stuff on TV.

ROP (Rings of Power) flopped because it was absolute garbage, not because it was fantasy or based on Middle-Earth. Don't confuse a lack of quality in a single product with a lack of interest in the genre that product comes from.

Fair enough, but my hope is that the absolute garbage churned out by Hollywood these days is causing it to lose its stranglehold over popular tastes in escapism. People get fed up with fantasy because Hollywood has turned it into a woke sinkhole. That leaves them mentally free to give history a look, maybe.

Excellent points Sgt Slag. Historical gaming attracts social misfits who want to argue about how the rules don't reflect reality or why your paint job is inaccurate. They, being socially inept, are unaware their complaints ruin the experience for the rest of the group.

Excellent points Sgt Slag. Historical gaming attracts social misfits who want to argue about how the rules don't reflect reality or why your paint job is inaccurate. They, being socially inept, are unaware their complaints ruin the experience for the rest of the group.

My experience is that a few Ancients gamers might be like that (me for example*) but most are decent chaps out for a bit of fun.

*I tend to get heavy going about how battlelines never wheeled in Antiquity or the Mediaeval era or ever so what's this wheeling nonsense about?

For years the biggest / most famous fantasy campaign going was Hyboria, which was run by The Society of Ancients….

For years the biggest / most famous fantasy campaign going was Hyboria, which was run by The Society of Ancients….

The Golden Age. Great was the Empire in its day….

ahhhhh… the Society of Ancients. Fine fellows

(runs and hides)

The Venerable Elders of the Society nod their agéd heads and remember….

I do occasionally wonder what would have happened if the SOA membership hadn't narrowly decided not to cover fantasy anymore.

WRG Ancients 4th Edition (I think) had a Fantasy supplement – "Dragon, flying elephant fitted with Greek Fire dispenser" and there was a flurry of LOTR and Conan (I think) related articles in Slingshot for a while. But there was a fear I think that it would undermine the seriousness of Ancients Wargaming (where, naturally, Ancient Britons regularly faced off against the Byzantine Empire in tournament games….)

Had the vote gone the other way – and as I recall it was a very narrow margin – would The SOA have led the way on RPGs and Fantasy gaming? Maybe, Maybe not. But for a long time WRG Ancients were the nearest thing to a universally accepted rule set anywhere in the Wargaming hobby. So, maybe.

The SoA is a bit like Ford. Once, everyone bought Model Ts, then one day everyone didn't. If you get in first you corner the market for a while, but once the market takes off competition springs up like weeds and the monopoly is over. To quote Ah Big Yaws: Laugh's larkatt.

True – RPGs eventually outgrew the fanzine/Dragon/White Dwarf culture and Fantasy wargaming would have probably gone the same way.

For a while the SFSFW were a bit of a spur to the development of new fantasy and SF wargaming systems, but now the proliferation of "boutique" games seems to have a momentum all its own.

Great topic Bolingar (lots of nuggets here)

This one for instance -

"Methinks the popular imagination is casting around for something new. Crossing fingers it finds history."

Hmmmm – perhaps, only if that effort comes packaged now in an easy [electronic] delivery system, whereas history has always resided in old, crusty books.

I just think fantasy grabs young minds. I started out 40 years ago with D&D, then found an old White Dwarf and that was mindblowing. I got into historical gaming reading Sharpe or watching Civil War westerns. My teenage boys love LOTR's and have played the odd Punic War game with me but it is more to humor me than any interest. They are not interested in history as at school it was boring and all about everyday life of the near past rather than battles and empires and bloody thirsty kings etc…

I think history is seen as being "hard". You've got to learn stuff.
With fantasy. You buy your rules and maybe your race book. Done. And with gw you can go to a shop and someone puts a game on for you, teaches you the rules.

I think you can be interested in history but prefer a fantasy game. I am thinking of a historical game I like, where you may have to apply some knowledge to know how to set up your force and some of the specific choices in it. I may like to read a history book, but that doesn't mean I want to know who carried what version of what weapon in what squad in what year. That also means that if I get it wrong, I don't mind. :)

My point is that sometimes people complain about folks not liking history, when they may just not be interested in some lower level details of military specifics.

andy

A couple of stray comments:
1) Bad movies are just bad movies. Rings of Power and The Marvels won't sink fantasy or superhero gaming any more than the Ridley Scott Napoleon will sink Napoleonics. When the movies become formulaic and easily subject to satire, that may be different. But remember the good old stuff is readily available.
2) Maybe worth remembering that if the Great Wargaming Survey is to be believed, there are more people playing non-GW fantasy than playing fantasy, and more people playing ancients, medieval and dark ages than play fantasy. GW is strong but not invincible. Historical miniatures are losing ground, but we're not being swept from the field in rout.

Give us a good movie or so, a few books and a turn of the tide in teaching, and we may rally even yet.

And that's my optimism for 2024.

For the record, the historical gamers I played with, have normal social skills. They are just really interested in history, and I am not that into it.

To be honest, I may be a bit over the top on fantasy races, knowing more than some players about the races we deploy. With fantasy, though, that is not easy to achieve, outside of being a Silmarillion historian. LOL! Fantasy is made up stuff, so there is no real depth to it, to learn.

One of the advantages to fantasy is the fact that there is not this precision depth of knowledge possible, so it is nearly impossible to intimidate others with encyclopedic knowledge and expertise on the races, weaponry, history, etc. Everybody has the right to create their own ideas, and "normal values," for each and every fantasy race. It's all made-up stuff! It might be one way in your fantasy realm, but things work differently in my fantasy realm…

There is nothing wrong with being a historical expert/Rivet Counter. It is just that such persons can be intimidating to others who gather around the table to enjoy a fun, challenging game with friends -- people who just want to roll dice, and give others a ribbing, and a challenge at the tabletop. Cheers!

Consider that many famous historical battles are actually quite poor as scenarios for a game— superior generalship, after all, is based on logistics and maneuvering on a strategic level so that one can seize as many decisive advantages as possible before the first blow is struck. So you wind up with battles which were essentially already won before they began, and thus become the same when you set them up on your tabletop. On top of that, in history many battles really just came down to one side's leadership behaving in an unbelievably stupid manner (Hannibal won many of his early battles because the Roman generals were complete idiots). Smarter generals would not have deployed in the manner the originals did— but ancient scenario rules often force the original deployment and dictate that ancient stupidity must be followed by players who simply aren't that dumb.

Fantasy and Science Fiction, however, allow for "balanced" scenarios where strategic deployment can be equal for all players, leaving the tactical situation entirely up to player decision rather than historical fiat. Whereas a "balanced" historical game is either forced to use unsatisfactory "points objectives" or becomes essentially a fantasy itself, the forces in question having never encountered each other in the manner and positions chosen.

Which doesn't mean the F/SF can't be plagued by "scripted" battles— seriously, there is no way for the Rebels to win the Battle of Hoth at the start of The Empire Strikes Back (and it's boring battle because of this), or for The Lord of the Ring's Battle at the Black Gate to end in victory for Aragorn without the dual deus ex machina of the arrival of the eagles and the destruction of the One Ring. Otherwise, that battle should be a tactical slaughter as Tolkien drew it up.

Plot armor is a thing in both fiction and history. And it makes for a lousy game.

Consider that many famous historical battles are actually quite poor as scenarios for a game— superior generalship, after all, is based on logistics and maneuvering on a strategic level so that one can seize as many decisive advantages as possible before the first blow is struck. So you wind up with battles which were essentially already won before they began, and thus become the same when you set them up on your tabletop. On top of that, in history many battles really just came down to one side's leadership behaving in an unbelievably stupid manner (Hannibal won many of his early battles because the Roman generals were complete idiots). Smarter generals would not have deployed in the manner the originals did— but ancient scenario rules often force the original deployment and dictate that ancient stupidity must be followed by players who simply aren't that dumb.

Very much agree. The most 'historically accurate' Ancients wargame is one that is part of a campaign, where the players have a chance to choose a battlefield on a map rather than have terrain features fall out of the sky at the roll of a die. The subsequent battle is won or lost thanks to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the armies plus the players' generalship, in which nothing bizarre intervenes to squiff the progress of the battle or the final outcome.

A replay of an historical battle only works as a simulation, i.e. you tweak the abilities of the troop types to produce the same result with the same tactical decisions. Which of course is no use as a wargame but can be handy for fine-tuning your armies' historicity for real wargame battles.

One thing we haven't considered is the popular imagination that – thanks to movie CGI and PC games – has gone for over-the-top world building that is simpler and less subtle than historical realism. Bright colours, plenty of spice, no nuance.

Keep in mind also that film— any film— is all about visual spectacle, even if the "spectacle" is of soldiers sitting in grime and eating from open tins of less than appetizing food. A film seeks to provoke an emotional response from the viewer in every scene. And that's whether the filmmaker wants your to feel patriotic, repulsed, or even specifically indifferent (at least towards figures in the scene).

So if you have a filmmaker who is trying to create a rah-rah action blockbuster (as a fantasy or SF film is often expected to be), then you get a different set of spectacle presentation than a filmmaker who is trying to make a commentary about war, violence, bigotry, or even positive self-sacrifice… it really doesn't matter, because that film is going to be very different in tone, particularly towards the process of war. In the former, we cheer the slaughter; in the latter, we condemn the inhumanity of it all.

Thus, the blockbuster action film promotes gaming, because it makes the experience fun to watch and creates an expectation that a game could produce the same or similar experiences of fun. "I liked imagining I was there— you mean I could actually do that with a game? Cool!"

The gritty realism film, on the other hand, seeks to make us appalled, and is not fun, nor does it make a similar experience in a game seem fun or possibly even morally acceptable (depending on the sensibilities of the filmmaker or the viewer). "How DARE you ‘play' at war!"

And some movies are in the middle (and are often therefore the best). We can appreciate the sacrifices as well as the ingenuity, bravery, comradeship and cleverness, and seek to pursue these as our link to "fun" without losing respect for the human impact.
"It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it."— Robert E. Lee (according to Porter Alexander)

Keep in mind also that film— any film— is all about visual spectacle, even if the "spectacle" is of soldiers sitting in grime and eating from open tins of less than appetizing food. A film seeks to provoke an emotional response from the viewer in every scene. And that's whether the filmmaker wants your to feel patriotic, repulsed, or even specifically indifferent (at least towards figures in the scene).

So if you have a filmmaker who is trying to create a rah-rah action blockbuster (as a fantasy or SF film is often expected to be), then you get a different set of spectacle presentation than a filmmaker who is trying to make a commentary about war, violence, bigotry, or even positive self-sacrifice… it really doesn't matter, because that film is going to be very different in tone, particularly towards the process of war. In the former, we cheer the slaughter; in the latter, we condemn the inhumanity of it all.

Thus, the blockbuster action film promotes gaming, because it makes the experience fun to watch and creates an expectation that a game could produce the same or similar experiences of fun. "I liked imagining I was there— you mean I could actually do that with a game? Cool!"

The gritty realism film, on the other hand, seeks to make us appalled, and is not fun, nor does it make a similar experience in a game seem fun or possibly even morally acceptable (depending on the sensibilities of the filmmaker or the viewer). "How DARE you ‘play' at war!"

And some movies are in the middle (and are often therefore the best). We can appreciate the sacrifices as well as the ingenuity, bravery, comradeship and cleverness, and seek to pursue these as our link to "fun" without losing respect for the human impact.
"It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it."— Robert E. Lee (according to Porter Alexander)

I have a sneaking suspicion that everybody who watches a war movie or documentary loves the gore and horror – "how dreadful!….what happens next?" – and they wouldn't be in the least adverse to wargaming the topic if wargaming is their bent.

Movie visuals are important, but they aren't just about spectacle. There are quieter and more intelligent movies where plot and characterisation matter more, though the movies can also be exquisite visual compositions – the Poirot movies for example, or historical movies like Barry Lyndon. My gripe is that contemporary movies rely on "noisy" visuals: lots of action, fighting, things blowing up, shaky cam – and intelligent plot and characters be damned. Oh yes, and more over-the-top emoting. It's actually ruining the movie industry. It does however translate better to fantasy than historical gaming.

Bolingar, you're expressing sentiments many of us have.

Back on gaming, I found an old fantasy title that I've enjoyed putting on recently. It's easy to introduce to new, younger gamers, and because it has good visuals too, can attract interest like a well-prepared historical scenario can.

I think mixing it up (the genres), might draw on the best from both worlds, and that the visual quality and fidelity of a gaming presentation can still resonate with any age group, whether it's a fantasy game, or a heavy-historical one.

Movies, special effects, splash, fast-action……YES, all most apparent!

(to be frank, I still see wargame tables that look like something put on back in the '70s……..that's not promoting history anew, just someone's dated hobby)