Editorial: HARD EUROS

Written By Eric
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Back in Episode 7 of the Podcase, High Lonesome, I talked about Joel Toppen's Comanchería: The Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire (GMT, 2016). During the episode, I had some trepidation when describing Comanchería as a wargame. Not only does the term feel objectively misleading—this is a game about a people and a time in history rather than any single armed conflict, it will also drive away a lot of gamers who would probably otherwise enjoy this fascinating, nuanced, and highly challenging game.

In general, if a gamer who's been around the block sees the red GMT logo on a box, it comes with the understanding that the game in question is a wargame (we can argue about Twilight Struggle or Dominant Species later). In general, that word is a deal-breaker for a lot of people. I've talked to Kathleen a lot about wargames, not only because I really like them, but because she really doesn't.

But why?

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A dislike for war-themed games is an obvious answer as to why someone may not like wargames. While I agree that, yes, this is true (more on that later), for Kathleen, much of her dislike of wargames instead comes from an honest preference against conflict-driven games, in general. She is just as likely to dislike The Last Hundred Yards as she is Eclipse, HeroQuest, or Kemet. It's less about the theme and more about the head-to-head fighting. More than once she has put it simply: Give me a dry strategic euro to dig my teeth into. Makes perfect sense to me.

If I had to guess, it's probably a mix of things, but predominately the inaccessibility of wargames and their theme. So let's look at these.

As the hobby grows, more gamers are open to heavy games. Rodney Smith of the ever-accessible Watch It Played has an episode covering Vital Lacerda's beefy The Gallerist, clocking in at 4.28 on BGG's weight scale, while Gaia Project, the reimplentation of Terra Mystica with a weight rating of 4.38, sits at #8 overall in BGG's rankings. In fact, two of the current top 3 games on BGG, Gloomhaven and Brass: Birmingham clock in at just under 4.0 on the weight scale.

[as an aside, I fully acknowledge that the weight rating and overall ranking are heavily subjective and biased, but in general, I'm using them to prove popularity rather than as some sort of objective metric]

My point is that heavy games are popular.

Okay, what about theme? Memoir '44 (2004) and Undaunted: Normandy (2019)/North Africa (2020) have proven that wargames are indeed marketable products. Undaunted: Normandy was a smash when it was first released, and it was out of stock for months as it was reprinted. By July 2020, one year after its release, it had already seen its third printing. It also received favorable reviews from popular outlets The Dice Tower and Shut Up and Sit Down. Memoir '44 is a giant in the hobby, still a favorite after 17 years and 30+ expansions. But why is Memoir the only mainstream successful Commands and Colors game? Its simplicity? Its toy factor? Richard Borg has 10+ iterations of this same system, but none has approached Memoir's popularity in the hobby at large.

There are certainly going to be people who don't like the theme of war. This is true, but if you were to make a Venn diagram of people who like heavy games and people who like conflict-driven Ameritrash games, I'd argue that the number of these people who would overlap with players who like wargames would be disproportionately small.

So, again... why?

Well, wargames are hard to get into, at times very hard to get into. While this niche of the hobby is friendly and helpful, it's still a niche, and tabletop gaming influencers (myriad bloggers and YouTubers) don't give much facetime to wargames unless the game is a hit (lookin' at you, Undaunted). For the record, these games are covered in the hobby. The Players' Aid and Marco Arnaudo are some of the few reviewers who put in time reviewing and covering wargames—although special props to Liz Davidson for covering wargames on a channel like the Dice Tower. Within the hobby itself, designers David Thompson, Cole Wehrle, and Amabel Holland are making huge inroads in terms of muddying the once clear distinction between wargames and non-wargames while still making interesting games that people are drawn to playing.

All right, so... why are wargames not more widely played? Wargames’ unapproachability isn’t solely based on complexity. Most wargames are ugly and come from small publishers (ie they are both expensive and hard to get). Their rulebooks are dense and written more like technical manuals, making them even harder to learn, and you won’t find nearly as many helpful How To Play videos covering “real” wargames (we’ll come back to that “real”). Many wargames cover obscure historical topics that aren't sexy like so many Ameritrash games. If you’re wondering, it seems Swords + Wizards > World War I Attritional Trench Warfare. And in all fairness and honesty, wargame components, when compared to your average run-of-the-mill euro, are awful.

I'm not going to lie; this is all true. Each of these complaints is perfectly valid and has about 50 examples you can use to prove the point. But let’s keep reading for another minute.

Okay, so let's say you're not interested in WAR as a theme. As it turns out, many of these games are not actually about war. The prototypical example of a wargame to many non-wargamers, Twilight Struggle, isn't about a war; Twilight Struggle is about a cold war, meaning it might not even be a wargame (this is a hotly contested topic, btw, so if this feels like trivial semantics, it's a hill some gamers would die on—like many trivial semantic arguments). Lovers of the game would argue that Twilight Struggle is one of the most satisfying strategic games ever designed. It was #1 on BGG's rankings for years, and there's a reason for that. It's good. It's really good. But Twilight Struggle suffers from some of the same pitfalls listed above. Once you overcome them, however, you will find a stellar game.

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Cole Wehrle's Root set the world on fire when it was released in in 2018, and eight expansions in, it hasn't slowed for a second. As I write this, Wehrle's wargame-infused John Company 2nd Edition has successfully funded on Kickstarter, just as his Pax Pamir 2nd Edition did in 2018. So, is Root a wargame? Well... Root is a basically a wargame, despite the cute art and ahistorical content. Root is a restructured and simplified version of something called a COIN game, originated by publisher GMT, albeit with added euro elements bolted to all sides of it. Briefly, COIN is a well-loved family of games revolving around COunter INsurgency, essentially asymmetric factions competing for the same limited geographic space, with some factions representing the government at-large, while others the titular insurgents. There are now over 10 games in the COIN series, covering topics ranging from Arthurian England and Gandhi to the War in Afghanistan and even a Martian Revolution. Then why did I describe Root as “basically” a wargame? Because some wargamers would object to this. More on this below.

COIN games, and Root by extension, have done something remarkable: they’ve taken a wargame chassis and built a eurogame onto it. Or maybe it’s the other way around? Functionally, we now have a host of games to choose from that play like heavy euros but are rife with conflict. To save time, I’m calling these games Hard Euros to delineate from simply heavy games. They’re heavy, too, of course, but hard because they want you to be mean. In these euros, conflict is an integral part of the game.

A quick Google search will find a surprisingly heated argument as to whether or not Root is a “real” wargame. Trying to understand what a wargame is defined as, you’ll essentially find vague definitions about a historically-based, conflict-driven game that has non-deterministic conflict resolution. By this rigid definition, Root is not a wargame, although neither is Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare, a sci-fi implementation of the previously mentioned Command & Colors system—a wargame system. But the COIN games are, of course, right? Even Volume XIII: Red Dust Rebellion? The one that takes place on… Mars?

Ultimately, Root or Red Dust Rebellion are not that unusual as examples. In the past few years, the definitions that once stood wargames and euros so staunchly separate are being worn down. My hope—and perhaps Pax Pamir 2nd edition was proof of this—is that these genre mashups will lead more people to wargames. John Company 2nd edition, which as I mentioned earlier, has raised more than $630,000 of it’s $50,000 goal, and John Company is arguably denser and heavier than Pax Pamir. Wehrle’s own rules teach of John Company 2nd edition on YouTube is over 90 minutes long.

If you think at the end of the day much of this is semantics, I agree. Much of this is semantics. Why bother to name something that isn’t asking to be named? Why bother to extoll the virtues of a tiny niche in an already small niche hobby? What does it matter what you define a wargame as? The short answer is that I think wargames have a lot to offer this hobby as it grows, and I want to find a way to bring more people to them. If that translates to euphemism so as to not scare away gamers at large, I’m fine with it. Not only do these games provide deep, meaningful, and satisfying strategic experiences, but they are also historically instructive. Beyond broad, sweeping, and often incorrect assumptions, I understood very little about the history of North Korea, the Mexican Revolution, the Comanche Nation, Cuban revolutionaries, or the French and Algerian war of independence before I played some of these hard euros. If calling a game a hard euro rather than a wargame makes even one more person pick it up and try it, it’s worth it.

And in regard to theme, it should go without saying that we have a massive problem with cultural appropriation within the hobby. Nigh countless euros are made each year that cavalierly slap a culture on the box to impart some Exotic Other theme without doing any actual work to understand the people, their culture, or what on earth it has to do with a resource conversion/points salad euro. The comments and controversy surrounding Daniele Tascini this past year should underscore this majorly. Compared to board games at large, wargames and hard euros put in the time. Most rulebooks include citations, historical notes explaining cards or mechanics, and further reading to expand your new and growing knowledge base.

Historical conflict, strife, war, and cultural upheavals are incredibly complex issues, and should not be approached lightly. With wargames and hard euros, we find a subset of games that actually understands this.

IMPORTANT NOT-TO-BE-OVERLOOKED ENDNOTE: This article does not serve as a testament to games like this being above or without criticism in regard to cultural representation or appropriation. While a designer like Joel Toppen or Kevin McPartland should absolutely be commended for doing extensive research in the design and production of games bringing much needed informative and respectful attention to the culture and history of underrepresented peoples, there is a very real need within the hobby for games about underrepresented peoples that are designed and produced by said underrepresented people. As an example, a game like Comanchería should not be taken as a replacement for games about Indigenous people designed by Indigenous people.

With this in mind, please check out the Zenobia Award, an organization established solely to bring more diverse designers into the hobby. And in case you missed it, this award is supported almost exclusively by publishers known for releasing wargames.

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In addition to the games mentioned throughout this article, here are a few others to pique your interest:

Eric
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