On Second Look

It’s been awhile since I did a gaming post. Part of the problem is that fall is my wargaming off-season. No particular reason, other than the flurry of activities this time of year pushes gaming off the agenda. I did have a wargamer friend in from Seattle two weeks ago and we broke out For The People II, Mark Hermann’s excellent strategic-level American Civil War card-driven game. Click here for a well-done review of the game. We didn’t have much time to play and actually spent more time looking at an online game he is playing.

Now by off-season, I mean no ftf play. During this time I usually leave one game setup for solitaire play. Aging’s effect on memory is actually helpful for solitairing card games. Once I play the Union turn, it may be a day or two before I play the Confederate turn, and by then I will have forgotten what cards are in the Union hand. Heck, sometimes I forget after 20 seconds. :p

One of the fringe benefits of owning wargames is that some have rather nice maps. Some wargamers take game maps with them on tours of historic battlefields. I like to use them to supplement reading. Take for example Shelby Foote’s famous The Civil War: A Narrative. This trilogy is an excellent read, but suffers from an annoying deficiency that many classic military histories have – lack of adequate maps. Now you can find excellent maps of ACW battlefields in single-volume books like The Conservation Fund’s The Civil War Battlefield Guide to use as a supplement to battle narratives, but to follow operational-level deployment and movement, something else is needed.

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