From: bsrae@warwick.ac.uk (Dave Lockwood)
Subject: Poor pregunpowder games? - summary
Organization: University of Warwick Business School, Ph.D. Group
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 17:26:08 GMT

Some time ago, I posted a complaint about the quality of recent games I 
classified as "pre-gunpowder", such as "Four Battles of the Ancient World", 
and asked for comments. Since I received only four, I've taken the liberty of
adding a summary of some earlier postings on one of the games - they were on 
the already...

My summary of the responses (including my own remarks):

   Great battles of Alexander and it's derivatives are a good simulation
   Seige of Jerusalem is a good game
   Royalists and Roundheads is poor at best
   Men-at-Arms stinks
   Trajan is iffy

   Noone volunteered opinions on the others

But as a statistician I must caution you about the dangers of drawing
inferences from such small samples :-)

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From bsrae Mon Aug 17 12:38:22 BST 1992

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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From mattman@uxb.liv.ac.uk Wed Aug 19 11:00:05 1992

[...] Siege of Jerusalem [...] is an excellent game. Having gone through
3 siege games I have played it quite a bit.  Its great strength is the fact that
both sides can have fun attacking.  The romans have to.  The jews almost have to
in so much as it doesn't matter about their casulties ('cos they virtually all
come back early in the game).  Loads of fun without one side just sitting back
and taking the punishment as so often happens.  In GBoA who would want to play
the persians!

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From tajones@beagle.Colorado.EDU Mon Aug 17 18:19:33 1992

I'm currently looking for a good ancients system. Of those recent 
titles that you listed, I own only Men At Arms. I tried to play it 
when it came out, and didn't even finish one scenario before packing it 
up. As far as I was concerned, the rules had too many holes in them, 
and the mechanism for giving battle commands (moving lines of troops)
was too incomplete and inflexible.

I just purchased the issue of Moves (#68?) that contains both the copious
errata for MaA as well as rules for "Advanced MaA" (a sick concept). 
These rules add rules for troop pursuit and withdrawl that allows the 
leaders to attempt control of their own troops. Often, the units will
do what they please regardless. There are numerous other rules that may
save this game from the deep-freeze. Unfortunately, the maps are so 
appalling that I you wonder why they bothered.

I have heard some very good things about Great Battles of Alexander (GMT)--
or rather the system. The games themselves suffer from the fact that they
are not even fights, which is normally not a problem in this hobby, except
that the desinger/developer did not deign to include differential victory
conditions. I'm waiting for Berg's Review of Games' review of SPQR due
in his next newsletter. If you have any strong opinions on this system,
I'd like to hear them.

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From jhart@ugcs.caltech.edu Tue Aug 18 00:35:15 1992

I find Siege of Jerusalem to be a Very interesting game!
As I was already quite familiar with ASL, the change to SoJ was easy and
fun.  If you're not into Megagaming, this game will be TOO MUCH for you as
it requires 7 sittings of 3-10 hours apiece (luckily you can pick up the
pieces in between [a characteristic I LIKE A LOT]).  Thing flow well and 
seem to resolve in believable ways.
This is the first tactical ancients game I've played, so I don't know how
it compares, but it feels good to me.

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From cdcg9698@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu Tue Aug 18 00:23:04 1992

Hannibal is not a great game, but, then, it measures up to the rest of the
field of 2nd Punic War games :-).  I think I liked it better than Aulick
Council's game, certainly better than SimCan's version.  It had a TON of
flaws right off, but they put out a lot of errata for it.  I think that the
biggest problem in it right now is that fleeing from a battle is absolute
death.  One ought to be able to withdraw without being totally annihilated.

I got Trajan all set up before I was demoralized by how boring it looked,
and gave it up.  It has some interesting ideas, e.g. town control, tactical
battles, strategic chits, but I couldn't get excited about it.  By the way,
I think the idea of using a period map is absolutely ridiculous.  Sure,
Trajan may have THOUGHT the terrain looked like that, but that doesn't mean
that it actually DID.

I was disappointed to hear the bad comments on Men-at-Arms; it looked
interesting to me, and I was excited to see how it played.

I guess I don't really expect great simulations from games anymore.  The more
I learn about history, the more disappointed I am with the "simulation"
value of all games -- that includes WWII, they're a lot less realistic than
I thought.  I get games now more to see how one designer handles the period,
and I hope to get some interesting ideas out of it.

===============================================================================
Earlier postings on SPQR/GBoA
===============================================================================

From: silber@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Ami A. Silberman)
Newsgroups: rec.games.board
Subject: Re: SPQR / GREAT BATTLES OF ALEXANDER

ganderso@unlinfo.unl.edu (gary anderson) writes:

>For a long long time I've been waiting for the definitive tactical
>ancients game, the game that would be to the ancient world what
>Richard Berg's GBACW (TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD, etc.) is to the
>American civil war.

>I've been noticing GMT's recently-released SPQR and the mate-able
>GREAT BATTLES OF ALEXANDER (both designed and/or developed,
>interestingly enough, by Richard Berg).  

>Has anyone played these games?  What's your opinion?  

Great, fantastic. They are very good games. They are more complicated than
3Ws Cavaliers and Roundheads (they just came out with a crusades) and more
complicated that "Great Battles of the Ancient World".  They have a real
nice feel for the command and control problems.  I've played all the Alex'
scenarios and three of the five SPQR ones. 

[system description]

	I'd recommend picking up SPQR first. The counters are very pretty
(by Roger McGowan) and the scenarios are pretty balanced. Let's face it,
the ones in the Alexander game are, while not pushovers for the Macedonians,
much more fun as a Greek than as a Persian. Alexander and his boys can get
inside the Persian command cycle faster that you can shake a sarrisa.
	In addition to the two boxed games, they may still have available
the first suplement, which gives the big battle between Alexander and Porus
in India. Another supplement is due out covering two elephant battles,
one of them being Raphia. All in all, I heartily recommend this system.

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From: mst@vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at (Markus Stumptner)

[...] I've played GBOA, had high hopes for it, and was
severely disappointed (more below).  The game leans heavily on three
concepts: Troop Quality (i.e., how much pressure, losses or bad
terrain can a unit withstand before it falls apart), combined arms
(strong emphasis on capabilities of differently-equipped units), and
leaders.  On the whole, unit type interplay and the importance of
flanking comes out very well, and it does give you an impression of
how these battles worked historically.  The designer's notes
(including extensive annotated bibliography) have a quite
condescending tone, you can just feel the weight of two thousand years
of hindsight behind them.  Apart from that, they're excellent.

[...]

Summary: A great simulation, possibly fun in solitaire play, forget it
as a competitive game. 

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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