From: bsrae@warwick.ac.uk (Dave Lockwood)
Subject: Quality of recent pre-gunpowder boardgames
Organization: University of Warwick Business School, Ph.D. Group
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 11:38:10 GMT

I've been playing board and figure wargames for nearly twenty years now, and
in that time I've certainly seen some ups and downs in the hobby. Recently
there has been a major spurt in the number of games dealing with pregunpowder
subjects, as opposed to the traditional surfeit of Napoleonic and WWII games.

Examples:

  Hannibal, Trajan, Men-at-Arms (S&T) 
  Royalists and Roundheads I,II,II, Crossbows and Cannon (3W Quad Games)
  Four Battles of the Ancient World (? Quad game)
  Great Battles of Alexander, SPQR, and many derivatives
    and forthcoming games (GMT games)
  Seige of Jerusalem(AH)

However, while the production values (read: pretty pictures on the counters)
are higher than those I grew accustomed to in the last SPI-driven games explosionten years ago, I have to say that the playability, play balance, and sense of 
relation to the reality being simulated, is with some honourable exceptions 
appalling. From the list above,

  Men-at-Arms, R&R etc, FBAW, 

are simply worthless piles of paper and cardboard. There is at least some
evidence to my mind that their release timing is a hasty piggy-back on 
the success of the GBoA system, which at least works, provided you don't
mind wading through the most illiterate and incoherent piece of rules drafting
I've come across in a long time. (The next time I read "X may *never* ..."
followed by "Exception ... Exception .. Exception" I will personally fly over
and stuff the text down Rich Berg's throat, while explaining to him the value
of a complete and ordered sequence of play and the worthlessness of designer's
in-jokes or dubious historical commentary as a means of delineating sections)

FBaW simply copies the old SPI standard 
rules verbatim to a period which they never worked for (and since TSR own
the rights to those rules and are known to employ sharp lawyers, perhaps the
"designers" will get what they deserve?)

R&R has been dismissed as a simulation by posters to this and other bulletin
boards; it's an exercise in dice rolling gone mad by someone who doesn't 
understand enough basic statistics to know how to amalgamate unneeded 
die-rolls, while Men-at-Arms is a particular tragedy since it has Jim
Dunnigans' name on it, which would normally be a guarantee of 
good mechanical order at least.

Some of the other games are fairly respectable (although the map designer for
Hannibal should have been replaced by a five year old with thick crayons), but 
the one's I've picked out seem to me not "of merchantable quality", and well
worth flaming. I'd be interested in other people's opinions of these games -
I'll summarise email or votes for/against if I get them. I'd be especially
interested if any of their designers would care to defend them publically, or
in the email addresses or other BB haunts that they use so that I can take
the fight to them.

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... a poor tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Dave Lockwood - {bsrae@{xpress.wbs,csv},lockwo.d@wbs}.warwick.ac.uk 
Newsgroups: rec.games.board