"How do you Wargame a Legend?" Topic

"When you sit down to wargame a well-documented period like World War II or the Napoleonic Wars, you can lean on endless reference material. Uniforms, battlefield maps, after-action reports—they're all out there, ready to be turned into tabletop scenarios. But when you step back further into history, into the shadowy world of the Late Bronze Age, the picture gets much hazier. And that haziness is exactly what makes the Trojan War such a fascinating challenge for miniature wargamers."

BigLee's 'Miniature Adventures'

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Armand

The fallacy is right there in the beginning of the material.

WWII, Napoleonic Wars compared to one ancient poem.

There are tons of ancient battles where we have lots of information.

But lots of information, even for recent battles, doesn't mean we have lots of consistent information that is useful for writing a wargame scenario.

The problem with gaming the Trojan War is not the lack of information, but the lack of details about the battle.

Some Late Bronze Age events may actually be better constrained for particular purposes than a much later obscure battle. Archaeology, inscriptions, administrative records, geography, material remains, and comparative evidence can give you quite a lot of confidence about some things.

Conversely, there are WWII engagements where we know the broad outcome and have ingoing detailed OOB but have remarkably poor knowledge of what individual units actually knew, when they knew it, and why they made particular decisions—which is precisely the stuff a wargame needs.

Playing a GASLIGHT scenario that I called "Rescue Demi Moore". It was VERY loosely based on Last of the Mohicans.
Standard "units" of 8 figures, with each figure's stat line at 3.
Hawkeye, Uncas and Chingachgook were one unit of 3, with stats of 5.
Herself was financing the movie, with all units … lusting after her. Our lads, though, had honorable intent. 🙄
Take it from there.

As for The Iliad and the Odyssey, settle on rules. Give the Heroes better stats, but difficult heroic tasks. My favorite example is Diomedes in Book 5 of the Odyssey.
To put it bluntly, if you've gone to the effort of buying and painting the figures, you already have a pretty good idea why you did it.

Oh, and Flashman always survives, albeit dishonorably in a way that nobody notices.

A further complication is that the story known today as the Illiad was composed perhaps 500-odd years after the actual fall of Troy. It's unlikely that the poem accurately describes bronze age combat that took place a half-millenia earlier. So, indeed, we are recreating the era of the poem rather then bronze-age warfare. That can only be done through artifacts and images of the time.