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Sunday, November 25, 2007

Games and Reality

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

I got into "boardgaming" as soon as I could. My introduction to the existence of these games was a neighbor of a friend of mine who had two games, Tactics II and Waterloo, by Avalon Hill. I can say that my introduction was not pleasant (I was very young, not even a teenager yet, and my opponent was in his mid to late teens). I was quite soundly thrashed in the three games I got to play (one game of the first, two games of the latter). But I went on from there to get as many games as I could (Afrika Korps, Blitzkrieg, 1914, U-boat, Jutland, Luftwaffe, Stalingrad, and others just from Avalon Hill, my first game from Strategy and Tactics Magazine after I discovered it was Winter War, and I collected quite a few of their games as well.

But as the saying goes, the best revenge is served cold.

Many years later I met the man who had introduced me to board games again. And we sat down to play Avalon Hill's Gettysburg (the original version).

I was much older, wiser, and experienced by then, so much so that my opponent resigned in the middle of the game. Sadly, as noted, the game was not real life, and I had beaten him not by "superior tactics" but by "playing a game". I did not try to fight his Confederate forces, but retreated before them, letting him occupy Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill and most of Cemetery Ridge. Because as I retreated, his forces were more spread out, and mine became increasingly concentrated. When my artillery reserve arrived, there was no choice for him but to also retreat to mass his own forces. With the whole Army of the Potomac on the field, and already flanking Cemetery and Seminary ridges, there was no good defensive position on the map that the Army of Northern Virgina could take up, and any attempt to attack would simply allow the Army of the Potomac to overlap his flanks and roll up his line.

As a game, it was a victory. In games, you can do things that a real world force could never do (I once had a friend who tried, in a game of Luftwaffe, to redeploy the entire Allied Air Forces to the Russian Front by launching all of the Allied Bombers and fighters from Italy. Let's not discuss how it would have been possible for the Allies to supply all those aircraft, much less how they would have managed to sneak all of them from England to Italy in 1943 without the Germans noticing.

You can learn a lot about how and why battles are fought from a game, but always remember that it is a game, and games often simplify very complex issues for the sake of playability.