Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Re-Fighting History: WWII, Boardgames, and War in the East

Georgetown University Wargaming Society (Washington DC) offers a regular series of webinars on different facets of wargaming, military history, wargame design, and assorted other topics.  The quality of the presentations and topics run the gamut of my interest level and attention span.  Tuesday's offering looks especially inviting to me with a focus on the War in the East in WWII.  With the cover of the boardgame Drang Nach Osten! (DNO later reimplemented by Fire in the Eastin the event announcement, will GDW/GRD's Europa series of boardgames be included for discussion?  Perhaps Dr. Best will identify the WWII boardgame(s) that meet the military simulation threshold on value-added as effective simulation tools.  Perhaps none reach this threshold.  Can this discussion and evaluation of WWII boardgames as a simulation value be generalized to other periods and other games?  What about extending to miniature Wargaming?  I look forward to seeing what topics are in store and discovering if any boardgames meet this threshold. 
Description
Jeremy Best will challenge the efficacy of military boardgames as accurate representations of historical conflict.  In his webinar, Dr. Jeremy Best will present early conclusions from his research into the history of military boardgames, the memory of World War II, and the limitations of military simulations for understanding war. The first modern military boardgames emerged in the late 1950s and from the very beginning the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union took center stage. Hundreds of games, thousands of scenarios have been produced – all of them claiming and aspiring to authentically recreate historical conditions. Part of the appeal of these games was that in re-fighting the battles, campaigns, even entire war players could rewrite that history. For all their efforts at accurate simulation, these games often fail as history. In the webinar, Dr. Best will discuss the ways in which games represent the Eastern Front, the blindspots of these representations, and the possible consequences of such inaccuracies. More generally, these insights lead to certain questions about the efficacy of wargames in general for understanding warfare.
 
Bio  
Jeremy Best is an associate professor of modern Europe at Iowa State University with a specific interest in the cultural history of Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current research project is a manuscript in development tentatively titled “Toy Soldiering: West German Rearmament, the Holocaust, and the United States” on the history of tabletop wargaming, Holocaust memory, and the perpetuation of the Clean Wehrmacht Myth in America and West Germany. Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire, his first book, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. That book won the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Prize in 2021, was named one of “Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, Intercultural Theology, and World Christianity for 2021” by the International Bulletin of Mission Research, and named to the shortlist for the 2022 Waterloo Center for German Studies Book Prize. In addition to his academic work, Professor Best has worked as a public-facing historian publishing in The Washington Post, The History News Network, and Perspectives on History.
If interested but cannot make this event, GU Wargaming Society content is usually published to YouTube following the event.

43 comments:

  1. Interesting stuff there Jon - I would imagine one of "the limitations of military simulations for understanding war" is that you don't have bullets and shells coming at you whilst trying to decide what your next move should be!
    I would be interested to see what "the possible consequences of such inaccuracies" with Ostfront boardgames were identified as being?

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    1. DNO is an operational combat model so flying bullets and shells are below the players visceral experience. If anything of note surfaces from the presentation, I may report back on any relevant findings.

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  2. There is always tension if one is wanting to simultaneously rewrite and simulate. It could be interesting to get his take on things and hear what he considers to be the blindspots. Will keep an eye out in case you decide to write up a summary, Jonathan!

    Cheers,
    Aaron

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    1. Aaron, if something grabs my attention and is worth highlighting, I will report back.

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  3. Be interesting to hear what your thoughts on this are, if you deem it worthy of a post!
    Best Iain

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  4. Well, I haven't thought about the Europa series for a looong time. Hope the webinar is a good one and I might try to catch it on YT

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    1. I still have my stack of Europa games. While I have not played any of the titles in decades, I pull them down from the shelf occasionally.

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  5. Interesting, looking forward to hearing what you think of the presentation.

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  6. Long ago gave up on gaming as any kind of truly accurate simulation but I’d be very interested on what the chap thinks is missing from our hobbies previous attempts to make it such. Well worth another post when you find out.

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    1. I remain firmly in the camp that wargames provide a useful tool for discovery and insight. If anything comes from this presentation, I am likely to share my thoughts.

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  7. Very good to see that military history is still being taught at our schools, albeit by a wargaming group. At least they're allowed to do it.

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    1. These webinars are not quite teaching military history. These webinars have a focus on wargaming and wargame design.

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  8. DNO for credit? Painting as therapy? I kept all the Europa maps heels. Those games were unplayablib

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    1. Joe, when I went to university many, many years ago, I took a class which used wargames as a teaching device. Which game was the focus? SPI's Next War. Painting is therapy!

      Some Europa games were unplayable due to the stacking limits. Hard to move a large stack without creating the domino effect and spoiling everything. A good sneeze would do it too. Some of the series are very playable. I still pull Narvik off the shelf to study from time-to-time. Western Desert, Torch, Marita Merkur fall into this category too.

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  9. DNO for credit? Would figure painting be in the Fine Arts?8

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    1. Painting as fine arts? Not the way I paint!

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    2. Model making and painting was part of my degree at art college, so I think it counts!
      Best Iain

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  10. Well ….. the military play wargames and think tanks do simulations and the military gifted us Kriegspiel …. Just saying and being Devil’s Advocate :-)

    I have never really looked at wargames at being anything more than heavily themed games and that’s enough for me.

    There are many (many) wargame titles and they cover a range of simulation value, from beer & Pretzels to ‘this is serious and real!’

    Then you have many (many) gamers of different, shall we say natures and period knowledge. I have played Blenheim, in which my opponent used the cavalry like 1940 panzers! Firstly he didn’t get the militaristic aspect and was just enjoying a ‘game’ and secondly, the rules allowed the game to be played like that. He thought it a good game, I hated it!

    So I think there are too many variables, too many loose cannons, to even start to construct an argument for or against wargame accuracy, but as a general point of view, it would be fair to see them in the first instance as games and in the second instance …. Well, as games :-)

    But I am sure we generally want games to be good representations of their subject and most of the time, believe they are. I doubt the good professor is likely to impact on that too much.

    Some time ago, I ran a play by e-mail game and players were fed information on a) what they could see (4 hexes) and b) what info flowed into their HQ. That made me realise just how weak most of our games are on the fog of war aspect of things.

    In a typical boardgame, a player sees the other sides reinforcements enter the board, even though they may be fifty miles away and behind two mountain ranges.

    I’m not sure how many gamers will actually care either way as to whether an argument for realism / accuracy stands or falls. I’m certain Napoleon is going to win my next Waterloo game. :-)

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    1. Thanks, Norm! I expected to see a response from you on this topic. I was not disappointed!

      You say,
      "I have never really looked at wargames at being anything more than heavily themed games and that’s enough for me."

      Really?

      I recall replays of Red Typhoon and Blitzkrieg to Moscow 2 where you benchmarked progress against the historical results as each game progressed. In one, you even augmented the game by following along in a book on the history of the campaign comparing games' progress against the historical progress. Tiger v T-34 Tests and replays of OST seem more simulation than "heavily themed games." Perhaps I am wrong?

      You may be correct that arguing whether wargames offer "accurate" depictions of topic may be pointless.

      As Napoleon, I plan to win at Waterloo next time too!

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    2. I should have said very, very, very heavily themed :-) but themed non-the-less.

      Once the D6 is rolled a scenario starts it’s own journey, after 100 D6 are rolled, what the designer wants from the scenario and what actually happens, may be poles apart ….. or not! 🙂

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    3. As you know, one of the things I like to do is bring a small slice of action from the the boardgame to the tabletop. For me, this slice of action has a certain validity to it, more-so than a throw down scenario.

      Falling from the available outcomes in the boardgame, it doesn’t feel so contrived and because it has ‘actually happened’ and I have ‘experienced’ its creation, it feels the more real for that. In that regard, the wargame may or may not be giving me accuracy, but it is certainly delivering something else, that we would probably describe as narrative and so I wonder, whether for me, it is that strength of narrative that is ‘enough’ for me, rather than accuracy.

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    4. The historical battle begins as a singular event (or decision or shot fired) too just as the rolling of single die in a game. History shows us only one of possibly many outcomes. Games do the same. We string together a series of events to produce both a narrative and an outcome. As you say, we may end up in a similar place to the historical outcome or not. Sometimes, it is the journey that is more interesting than the destination.

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    5. I do enjoy your drilling down to explore a 'slice of the action' scenarios.

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  11. I remember playing a few games such as SPI's Cobra and Ney versus Wellington which didn't feel much like a simulation as such, but certainly gave me a better insight and appreciation into their subject matters. Reading accounts are all well and good, but playing a game on the subject helps bring it to life and cements it in the memory. I find three-dimensional wargames are the next level up again, if the terrain and unit representations are not overly abstracted. I'll forever have Rivoli etched in my mind whereas reading about it and trying to follow a map just wouldn't have the same effect.

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    1. Wargames can provide much more insight than reading a book or studying a map. As you say, wargames can bring the situation to life.

      The Rivoli game from several years ago was really great fun for me. I am pleased that you still have fond memories of that experience. Perhaps I should tackle something similar again? I wonder if I could recruit enough players and on which battle to focus?

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    2. Count me in again if you do Jonathan.

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  12. Played DNO back in the day (with Untenscheiden addition plus the Norway/Finland maps): Oh, the memories! As far as the webinar, I read the description and it seems a strawman (to me)--the operative term in any commercial wargame is "game."

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    1. Ed, we are products of similar age and interests. I did not play DNO but played the campaign using FITE and SE.

      Straw man argument? If you place emphasis on “game” in wargame, you are correct.

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  13. Many interesting comments already! Like others, I look forward to seeing what interesting takeways there might be from this that you think are worth sharing. I await your thoughts:).

    The games we play, whether board one or with figures, are quite far removed from the ones my friend has been involved with at the Staff College in the UK. Chatting with him about them over the years, they are rather detailed, as of course they need to be and probably not ones we would want to play. So for him a game should be fun, but with a good grounding in historical accuracy, with correct period tactics being rewarded etc. After all we want to enjoy ourselves for those few precious hours when we ge to play with our toys.

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    1. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate your comments. Not only may our games be far removed from Staff College work but far removed from actual warfare. If our games can instill a flavor of combat operations, easily, then I am satisfied.

      I am working on my takeaways from this presentation. Hopefully, some will find it worth the effort...

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  14. A bit late to the party with nothing to add really apart from echoing SteveJ's pals comments, has something along the lines of what I would have posted but a lot less eloquently.

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    1. PS. I will still be interested in your thoughts on the webinar of course.

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    2. Phil! You are not late to this party at all! I only made this post yesterday.

      I am collecting my thoughts on this presentation and topic.

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  15. Reposted from George (http://musingswargameslife.blogspot.com/) who is having difficulty posting to this blog. George, I appreciate your perseverance!

    "I don't think my tabletop battles are simulations of history, they are games based on history, which wargamer would enjoy being told that a whole enemy corps has just turned up on your flank, your tanks cannot advance due to no fuel and a myriad other real details which would affect his enjoyment of the game, as I said before the Germans simply could not win against the Soviets.

    Also perceptions change, the whole Eastern Front for instance is constantly being revised, the 'if only H.... had left us alone' nonsense has been thoroughly discredited. I notice the old 'real tactics' mentioned, tactics are born of the time, in the case of wargames tactics are born from the rules and will not have much in common with reality if those tactics do not result in a successful game. Adaption in other words."

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    1. Thank you, George! Perceptions (and sometimes facts) do change. It will be very interesting to see your thoughts on either Dr. Best's presentation or my summarization of the event.

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  16. Just to point out George isn't the only one having difficulties. I posted a reply yesterday which seems to have disappeared.

    Anthony Clipsom

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    1. Strange. In George’s case, he could not post at all. If you successfully posted only to see it disappear, I usually find the missing comment in SPAM. No such evidence of that.

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  17. Historical Wargaming/boardgaming is pretty much an exercise in armchair general'ing. Which is good, because the alternative of actually being in command of brigades and divisions and corps is far more stressful and frankly frightening.

    Hope you are able to post your opinions on the presentation.

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