The other day I saw a comment that made me chuckle. Someone was discussing an upcoming wargame of the paper kind and mentioned that it had over 1200 counters, and so, “you know it’s going to be good.”

Ah yes, the secret of wargame design is now out! Throw 3,000 counters in with Candyland and you’ll have the next Third Reich apparently.

The “bigger is better” attitude is rather prevalent in the wargame community though, and has always been. It seems like the more trees you can kill with your game the more your game must be a serious simulation on whatever the particular conflict being gamed. More maps! More counters! Thicker rulebooks! Buckets of dice!

Balderdash!

What folks seem to forget is that when dealing with a game that is based on actual history, the ultimate test of its worth is not that it includes a two hundred page rule book but that it actually models, you know, actual history. To give an example I’ll use the decidely un-wargame Axis and Allies: Europe.

Axis and Allies: Europe is not a game that anyone is going to confuse with War in Europe, and in fact, this is why it is precisely an excellent example of why excess does not equal better. A simple mainstream game, with little in the way of familiar wargame mechanics, examining how it doesn’t compare with a conventional wargame would take too much time. Instead, let’s just consider some facts as to what it does do:

Germany cannot win the war by invading the United States or England (you have to be a really, really bad player to let England fall to a German invasion), the key is Russia. Just like in real life.

Russia, while it can do all right by itself, really needs Allied aid to survive and reach a point that it can beat the Germans back. Just like in real life. (It is often forgotten just how much the Western Allies helped materially.  As one example by the end of the war nearly 75% of Red Army trucks were American made).

Germany, once faced with a two-front battle, will succumb. Just like in real life.

Basically, while the mechanics of Axis and Allies: Europe are not what grognards dream about the fact of the matter is that it still manages to replicate history.

Now, the purpose of this is not to say that we’ve been deceived all these years, burn your monster games! No, the purpose is to simply point out that a massive component count does not automatically equal a great game. Likewise, it does not mean that smaller games are less worthy of your attention.

Say there’s a game on the Eastern Front that uses six pages of rules, a hundred counters, and a single map. Then there’s another game on the Eastern Front that uses eighty pages of rules, includes thousands of counters because it’s company based, and the maps could cover the floor of the local sports arena. One game takes an afternoon to play, another takes longer than the real war. Ultimately both mimic history. Is the smaller one really less important, or not as good?

Too often designers will create a dozen rules when one rule is all that’s necessary, under the belief that the more bloated something is, the more “realistic”. All it usually means is that your game ends up sitting on a shelf while other, playable games are played.

Big games can be fun. Just remember, how the game plays is much more important than what comes with the game.

-Scott