I still have a copy of Totaler Krieg! My brother and I tried to play it once, in the 90's. We did not finish setup before dinner, and decided to give up and rel

I still have a copy of Totaler Krieg! My brother and I tried to play it once, in the 90's. We did not finish setup before dinner, and decided to give up and relinquish the table. It's classified as being in the middle of the spectrum of difficulty. Despite that failure, I don't regret the experience. It produced a tangible connection between the computer wargames I had been playing and the history behind those. It's a different kind of way to think about play, and it helps to imagine you're back in 1970 and computers are a thing only really available for Serious Projects, and working through a simulation with maps and minatures and calculation tables is the next best thing. Spending most of the day setting up the board made sense. A 12-year-old could do it, but Fortnite is more immediately gratifying. Part of what killed wargaming as a major tabletop genre is that computers are better at being simulators of the "noisy" elements of warfare. On some level, you know that ranking a unit with "attack" and "defense" ratings is going to be bullshit. If you make up more numbers and add more tables and put more rules in the game - which is what the complex end of wargames did - that doesn't make it better, but if you take an approach where physical reality is referred to as often as possible(which you can do in real-time on a computer), you can make a claim to accuracy emerging from that. What tabletop has done since then is to get better at being a more immediate experience and to convey things in broad strokes of abstraction, instead of setting up dozens of units and running calculations of troop morale and weather.