"Worst Historical Wargame Rules (Round 1)" Topic

The Napoleon rulebook was amazing – great photos – but never did get the hang of playing the rules

I'm not a fan of DBA. I find it fiddly and poorly edited. But obviously I'm an outlier in the community. And then, I have limited experience with other rules— I found Warmaster/WMA and that satisfied my quest. So "worst" is a matter of interpretation, not a truism.

Most of these I never played. I like some of the ones on this list.

Have to a agree with Parzival, I suspect that this is have the reason new rules are constantly being cooked up.

Tractics. For two plus decades it killed any interest I had in WWII ground combat.

While I remember the Newbury sets the only option I'm familiar with is DBA.

Just so happens I detest DBA :-)

Seekrieg. Played once, maybe twice. I downloaded an older copy, available for free, off of the Internet. Tried to read them, but it was beyond college level reading.

Fellow gamer spent 10 minutes calculating his chance to hit, with a torpedo, using trigonometry calculations: Sine, Cosine, Tangent, etc. In the end, he had a 7% chance to successfully hit his target -- rolled two d10's and rolled >50. He enjoyed the exercise. I found it… Sigh-worthy.

I play games for fun, not to apply heavy math to determine I have <10% chance to hit. I could have fudged that I have a 10% chance to hit, rolled 1d10, missed, and moved on, within 30 seconds. Calculating Trigonometry to determine my to hit chance, is beyond the pale. YMMV. Cheers!

I agree with Sgt Slag, Seekrieg is an unplayable set of rules.
I had the opportunity to play Seekrieg at Historicon a few years ago with Richard Sartore running the game. In four hours we played four turns and the game was miserable.

Sgt Slag, my mileage does vary.

Our local group has had some great Seekrieg game. Typically we play 15-20 turns in a 3-4 hour afternoon session. We are fortunate to have a superb gamesmaster (Marc, I am thinking of you) who is thoroughly familiar with the sequence of tables and flow of the game.

I love the game. As a one-time designer of naval surface combatants in a previous job, I like the game because it does the best job I have seen of capturing the essence of WW II-era naval surface combat.

Rick

Glad to hear it, Florida Tory! Seekrieg is a monumental work by the designer. I am relieved to hear his efforts were not in vain. Cheers!

this kind of list is about what games some people dont like. Not which games are good or bad or accurate etc…

"Broadsword, Buccaneer, and Blunderbuss" (Pirate Rules by Old Glory)…

Completely unplayable not to the difficulty of the rules but to the sections that are completely missing from the rules book…

Among many of the problems were:

1: The author of the book knew what he was writing about but seemed to not understand the concept that the reader may need or want definitions of some of the terms he used.

2: Whole entire paragraphs of text missing from the book.

3: The wrong maps used in the scenarios.

4: Lack of proof reading and editing, thus horrible misspellings throughout.

TBH, it looked like
A: Either the author just cranked these out in a 2 day drunk and tossed them to the printer,
or
B: He dropped the rough draft onto the editors desk while the editor was at lunch, and the printer came by and saw them and thought it was the final for print, and took it,
or
C: He missed the deadline and the editor came screaming to him saying "We need it NOW!", and he just gave them what he had and editor said "Fine! RUN IT"

It's absolutely horrible and a perfect example of "How rules shouldn't be written and published".

Murphy,

Is the author Lawrence? If so that is his MO when writing rules. They are a total mess with information missing, in the wrong place and some things never explained.