"Which Period Is Hardest to Wargame Well?" Topic

Miniature wargaming covers the enormous range of historical periods, from ancient warfare right through to modern conflicts. I doubt there's a period or conflict that is not covered.

Some periods seem easier to translate into a satisfying tabletop game than others.

Which historical period do you think is hardest to wargame well? NB "hard" – I'm not suggesting impossible. You lot can be quite ingenious.

Is it because of the command structure, the scale of the battles, the technology involved, or simply the difficulty of representing what really happened?

For example, some people argue that the command systems of the Napoleonic Wars are difficult to represent convincingly, with large armies operating through layers of orders, initiative and imperfect communication. I fight some pretty big battles but I've cut the 'Divisional" level out ie I only use brigades & Corps.

Others point to the English Civil War, where the interaction of pike, shot and cavalry — and the sometimes unpredictable behaviour of cavalry — can be tricky to model in a satisfying way. How often do you get to the "Push of Pike"? Mine are necessary as a decorative deterrent but don't often seem to get to grips.

Ancient warfare can also be challenging, since battles in periods like Ancient warfare often involved large formations pushing and manoeuvring over long periods – something that can be difficult to translate into engaging tabletop mechanics. 'Field of Glory', anyone?

At the other end of the spectrum, some gamers suggest that Modern warfare may actually be the hardest of all. With long-range weapons, sensors, dispersed units, and heavy reliance on communications and combined arms, much of what determines success happens beyond what a tabletop battle can easily show.

I'm interested in which periods people feel are the most difficult to represent convincingly on the tabletop — and what the particular challenge is.

And of course, if you think your favourite period is actually one of the easiest to wargame, I'd be interested to hear why, as well.

Sci-fi. Because it's all made up and never been really tested. Of course that means that you can do whatever you want. Star Wars "fighter" planes? Seriously? Use any Great War biplane rules.
Of course, being all made up might make it easier, so who knows? 🤷

WWII to present. Compressed ranges for skirmish make it unrealistic and for larger fights logistics are what matter and aren't well modeled.

Modern, definitely. Any realistic ground scale and levels of technology and dominance of machines and computers makes it all either pointlessly dull and awful (realism) or wild fantasy (game-centric) to me.

Sci fi and fantasy are in competition for easiest genres to wargame. You can create a good gaming system with as many cool quirks and innovative mechanics as you like, and then just make up a story to rationalize it.

I have several nominations for hardest:

The Anglo-Dutch naval wars. Most of the major battles have 80+ ships per side, and often over 100. That's just too many individual objects to move around, let alone paint and base and rig. If you go with small enough miniatures to avoid all the crafting, you can fit a whole battle on a real life table, but you lose most of the visual appeal of the period. If you go with rules abstract enough to move and shoot that many ships in a reasonable amount of gaming time, or worse, use a ratio (e.g. 1 model represents 5 real ships), you lose most of the flavor of the combat. The difference in force between the biggest ships and the standard ships was completely out of all reasonable proportion, yet somehow the vast majority of every fleet survived to run away, which makes it really hard to figure out how to conduct combat in wargaming terms.

Modern naval conflict. Ships don't even see each other anymore. There is literally no point in putting the miniatures on the table. It is possible to make great games for modern naval combat, just not with miniatures.

Modern jet combat. (By which I mean, the age of supersonic jets and guided missiles.) Launching missiles to blow up radar blips you never see doesn't make for a fun gaming experience. Jet combat is pretty much about mission management, which in a game is more like accounting with a chance of death. I think the only way to make jet fighters fun without flying real ones is to play computer flight sims.

Submarine combat. Submarine combat is all about not being detected, which negates the reasons for models. All the decisions are secret, so there's no shared experience at the gaming table. Another genre best left to computer sims.

WWII carrier battles. Too many planes and ships, and the air battles were huge and sprawling and chaotic. This is another setting in which detection means death, so if you aren't playing a double-blind game of scouts searching wide regions of blank ocean and turning in error-filled scouting reports, you aren't getting any sense of the tension; but double blind detection games are long and boring and full of paperwork. If you get through all that (or skip it) and play the part where a cloud of planes attacks a carrier group, you have to have a lot of abstraction to get through gaming 100+ planes fighting in 3D space above dozens of maneuvering ships, and abstraction robs the experience of the details that make reading about the battles exciting. Did your dive bombers jink and dodge between interceptors and flak, suffering casualties as they dropped out of the sky on individual diving runs, missing with 5 bombs in a row but causing a few leaks with near misses, then finally getting a direct hit with one bomb, setting off a chain reaction of burning fuel and munitions below decks, causing the port side engine room to shut down as it filled with smoke, slowing the ship enough for a lone torpedo plane get the lucky hit that finished her off? Or did you just move a stand of little plane models next to a ship model and roll a 6?

Sieges. Siegecraft is drawn out, boring, and mostly about digging and waiting. The assaults can be really exciting games, but the fascinating accounts of move and countermove and supply and disease is very difficult to make interesting in a wargame. Not to mention all the special terrain pieces you have to make, transport, and store.

I'm sure I could think of more. I just have to look over my wish list…

- Ix

You can distort scales, so that one figure represents fifty men and one building a village, but there comes a point where you lose all connection to what you're trying to represent. When a plane or ship shoots a missile at an adversary a medium-size country away, what's the point of even putting the attacker and target on the same table? Manoeuvre is about dodging missiles, not changing your position relative to the enemy.

This could easily be a Poll.

Fighter air combat 1914-2026

martin

Plains Indians wars.

cavcrazy- you're suggesting asymmetrical warfare is hard?

Anything I've read too much about. I see the detail of what's going on and can't think how to translate it into a game.

Post 1900 tactical combat, due to the prevalence of extreme fog of war and psychological factors influencing combat outcomes.

Once you are pushing battalions around it just becomes a question of numbers. Less so at lower levels.

I do play tactical games on the empty battlefield, but I'm well aware they are games.

I am with the modern warfare theme – empty battlefields, complex logistics, whether on the land, air or sea – a second consideration would be guerilla warfare as while skirmish games are certainly do-able if you want grand tactical/strategic the time frame can boggle the mind

The Spanish Civil War! Very difficult to give the war a feel of other than a mix of WWI/II. The political parties and varied training levels are hard to model.

Yellow Admiral +1

If it's modern, supersonic/hypersonic there is no point whatsoever in putting models on a table. Ditto modern naval warfare and also submarine warfare.
"Nothing to see here, folks. Literally."

Skirmishing horsemen with bows/javelins for Ancient/Medieval battles. These units want to avoid combat, and are usually a harassing force rather than a damaging force. If too weak, they have little value and get caught/destroyed by heavy cav. If too strong, they are an uncatchable shooting machine. And the table is always too small for how they worked in history.

Ancient (not Classical) warfare because we simply don't know enough about the realities.

Ochoin, I'm suggesting that playing a game where one side historically was never an army is hard to play. Indians as a fighting force were not actually commanded by anyone, it is the ultimate skirmish fight where if you were to game it as historically possible, every Indian would be gamed by an actual person. I love gaming Plains Indians, but every ruleset is designed to keep the Indians acting as a unified force. they circle, fall back, rush forward…..Not very realistic.
I understand there are exceptions to the rule, Little Bighorn and the Rosebud battle, but anything after that, all your games will be flawed at best.
I'm always on the lookout for a good ruleset for Plains Indians, I have even tried writing my own rules…..but that would be a topic of "What rules have you written were terrible"!

cavcrazy- you're suggesting asymmetrical warfare is hard?

"Asymmetrical" in that either side has different victory conditions.
You CAN have running battles. "Empire of the Summer Moon" is full of them.
But you have to factor in such factors as Comanche holding 5 arrows in their bow hand, and can fire them all before the first hits its target.
But then the Texas Rangers MIGHT have two Colt .36 five shooters, and several spare cylinders in their pockets. (Courtesy of the bankrupt Texas Navy, by the way. 🙄)
I defy anyone to make rules for that, without arguing all night with The Club.
And of course, factoring in the volatility of leader casualties on either side.

This ain't the Seven Years War, or Napoleon's Adventures in Southeast Northern Lithuania.

Plains Indian Wars is a good one.

Also, modern navy is really hard.

Also, modern warfare. So much technology and so much being done by long range.

Some really interesting suggestions here – and quite a few votes for modern warfare in its various forms.

The "empty battlefield" problem , with its long-range sensors, missiles, and dispersed forces mean that much of the real action is happening far beyond what we can easily represent on a tabletop. At some point the models risk becoming symbolic rather than part of the actual combat.

The Plains Indian Wars point is also fascinating. When one side isn't really operating as a formal army – more as a collection of individuals or small bands acting independently – it raises the question of how you represent that without simply forcing them into a conventional command structure for the sake of the rules. Huge skirmish games (an oxymoron, of course)?

Another tricky one might be irregular or guerrilla warfare in general. A lot of the real dynamics involve intelligence, politics, local support, and logistics rather than straightforward battlefield encounters. Those elements are important historically but quite hard to translate into a tabletop game.

And Ran The Cid's point about skirmishing horse archers is a good one too – historically elusive and difficult to catch but on a tabletop the space is usually too small to reproduce that behaviour properly.

It makes me wonder whether some of the hardest periods to wargame are the ones where the decisive factors are not actually happening on the visible battlefield.

I'm curious if others agree – or if anyone thinks there's a period that is surprisingly easy to game well.

Drones?

I was recently gifted a book called Wargaming Waterloo. The author asserts, among other things, that if you somehow prevent the French player from preparing for the inevitable arrival of the Prussians, then it isn't Waterloo.

Great answers. I'd be curious to hear what is thought to be an "easy" period to game

Agree with Martin Rapier, post 1900, too many things should be hidden, ammunition should have a say. Still does play occasionnally but understanding that it is more fantasy.

on the other hand it comes down to the rules, space and what you want to see represented and the level of abstraction to bring proper results without making the thing unbelievable.
Often, do not try to go into the intrecacies of small level tactics if you want to have a fast enough game, plus the number of minis (which geves the ground scale, which give the possible size of engagement) do not allow a proper representation. Then many thing can still be done.

Also one thing that does not work well is submarines.

BrockLanders – to respond to your question.

I'd actually suggest Ancients might be one of the easier periods to translate into a satisfying tabletop game.

At the battlefield level the essential elements are fairly clear and visible: formed infantry, cavalry, missile troops, manoeuvre, and morale. The decisive moments usually happen on the battlefield itself rather than through long-range weapons, sensors or complex logistics happening far away from the table.

You can also represent large battles quite comfortably with a reasonable number of units. A legion, phalanx, or warband can be treated as a single manoeuvre element, which makes it possible to fight big engagements without the game becoming unmanageable.

Of course the irony is that some of the earlier Ancient periods are also hard because we simply don't know enough about how they really fought — Bronze Age chariots for example. But from a pure tabletop design perspective, the period lends itself very naturally to wargaming.

I think bronze age chariots need a lot more experimental archaeology to settle how they were really used. Same for manipular Roman legions. We just need to get several thousand volunteers kitted out in the period-appropriate panoplies…

I read through this thread so far, and all I can think is that everyone is wrong. 😄

I've played most of these periods, and/but with very simple rules. I'm reminded of the time SPI published a modern naval game (6th Fleet???) using "Napoleon at Borodino" rules. It was widely ridiculed as "typical SPI arrogance". Personally, I believe that vegetative self medication was involved. 🙄 No proof. Just a "feeling".
You CAN play everything with simple rules. But are they an accurate (I hate this word…) SIMULATION?
Would tarting up your simple game with disgusting "simulation" garbage spoil an otherwise fun night out?
I can play Comanche vs Texas Rangers with a simple TSATF adaptation, but it would ignore the factoids I suggested above. Further complicating that is the fact that the Rangers' tactics were not universally used. They were even abandoned to go back to flintlock muskets and pistols. 🤷 I don't know why, but how to "simulate" that?

I would also hold that a "realistic" sci-fi game is an oxymoron. We have never had battles in space, so we have nothing to base any rules on. So, why not use Check Your 6, or a WWI biplane game and call an X-wing a SPAD XIII?

As for fantasy… Same thing.

So, you can game any period with simple rules. Or you can tart it up with "simulation" nonsense, and get too bogged down in detail that is probably irrelevant. Like rolling a die when walking down stairs to see if you trip and fall. Using a D6, you have a 16-2/3 chance of falling. Then roll for broken bones…

While I agree about the reasons for "modern" (post 1880?) warfare being difficult, think the real difficulty is with periods/battles/campaigns where's there's few references/studies available. For example, how exactly did the troops fight at Towton, Mortimer's Cross, St Albans, etc? How many ranks did they form? Close order/loose order? There's hints, but most of what we know is extrapolated from Continental warfare. The same for much of the Dark Ages. For all we know Saga may be an accurate simulation of Dark Ages Welsh battles.

As I read Dal's post (and others) there are really (at least) two questions here. One is unsolvable in that we don't have enough information to know what we're trying to represent (note I didn't say simulate, on purpose). It might be easy to do if we knew what we were trying to do. On the other hand, say the modern era, we have a pretty good handle (maybe not the newest, shiniest classified) on what we are trying to represent, but putting a plausible representation on a traditional table top wargame is difficult. (Jets, submarines, modern naval in general)

The "empty battlefield" problem , with its long-range sensors, missiles, and dispersed forces mean that much of the real action is happening far beyond what we can easily represent on a tabletop. At some point the models risk becoming symbolic rather than part of the actual combat.

This has been a thing for a looonnnggg time for Modern Naval, since the release of Harpoon 1e in 1981, and released in 1987. My fellow gamers and I had a decent selection of 1/3000 and 1/2400 modern warships and aircraft from NavWar, Skytrex, etc. While we would occasionally play on someone's driveway or backyard patio, we typically ended up playing on two tables in someone's house. Each table had a side's fleet, and we would move ships at a relative rate to each other (formations, etc). The distance between tables was open ocean and figured in both kilometers/miles and flight times.

So for a missile barrage or air strike, we would place markers on the edge of other team's fleet table with a count down marker in terms of turns/distance, and then advance them towards targets once they got there. Airstrikes sometimes had a side table where dogfights could take place.

Worked out well. We also tried double blind with some acting as referees while fleet tables were in other room and all we had to go on was intel reports based on sensors that would give us bearing, distance, likely ships and formations and the occastional polaroid camera snap of their fleet as "satellite intel."

Always enjoyable!