Growing up with PC games, I was always fascinated by wargames as a genre. It seemed like its own little world, largely disjoint from the rest of PC gaming, like

Growing up with PC games, I was always fascinated by wargames as a genre. It seemed like its own little world, largely disjoint from the rest of PC gaming, likely owing to its genesis in tabletop gaming. My understanding is that pretty much from the dawn of the personal computer era, wargamers were already looking at ways to automate and adjucate all the dice-rolling and table lookups that were in many ways inherent in the genre. There's a fantastic strategy gaming podcast, Three Moves Ahead, which had an episode on a game that's considered to be a classic of the "wargame that successfully automates the tabletop experience" subgenre, and it's an interesting listen, if you're into strategy games: https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/korsun-pocket https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/korsun-pocket I've started dabbling in the genre a bit over the past decade - tabletop and computerized - and what really intrigues me is, broadly speaking, there's been a pivot away from complexity in the past few decades, particularly in the tabletop space. If you think of a wargame as a sort of playable model of a conflict, you can look at the gameplay mechanics as a tool for abstracting away or illuminating and emphasizing what people believe are important factors in a battle/war/etc. There's a significant current of thought in modern wargame design circles that believes the old-school rivet-counting complexity you see in the article missed the forest for the trees. So, you instead see games that in clever and elegant ways evoke specific aspects of various conflicts in relatively simple-to-grasp games. On the table-top side, there are quite a few games that have moved to a sort of card-driven model where you play from a hand of hidden cards. In particular, you have things like Twilight Struggle which evokes a specific sense of uncertainty, paranoia, and tension that's quite impressive, especially as the DEFCON counter seems to inexorably creep towards 1. On the PC side, Unity of Command uses a very elegant model of supply chains to evoke how maneuver warfare worked on the Eastern Front in WWII. It's striking how well a collection of rules that can be summarized on a single page manages to result in deep strikes and encirclements of large groups like those you see in military history books. Unity of Command is interesting in that it is a game you could in principle play as a tabletop game - it's just that while the supply chain model is extremely easy to grasp and visualize, it'd be an enormous pain to track manually (Well, that, and you'd miss out on the deviously nasty opponent AI). If you're at all curious about the genre, it's worth a look.