Games - Tactical wargames

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	Games - Tactical wargames

Tactical wargames are wargames in which units range from individual vehicles and squads to platoons or companies, and are rated based on types and ranges of individual weaponry. The games are designed so that a knowledge of military tactics will facilitate good gameplay. Tactical wargames offer more of a challenge to the designer, as fewer variables or characteristics inherent in the units being simulated are directly quantifiable. Modern commercial board wargaming stayed away from tactical subjects for many years, though once the initial attempts were made to address the subject, it has remained a favourite topic among wargamers. Perhaps the most successful board wargaming system ever designed, Advanced Squad Leader, is set at the tactical level.

Tactical wargames have also made the jump to PC games.

Tactical Board Wargames

History

The genesis of tactical board wargaming goes back to 1969. Up until that time, wargaming - which in the modern, recreational form only dated back to 1958 - tended to concentrate on operational and strategic subjects.

Tactical Game 3 was introduced by Strategy & Tactics Magazine as a platoon/company level game focusing on tactics on the Eastern Front. In 1970, that game's designer, the legendary James F. Dunnigan, sold the rights to the game to Avalon Hill, who quickly released PanzerBlitz
. This was the start of the so-called "Second Generation" of wargaming. PanzerBlitz eventually sold 250,000 copies, though it was not without critics (including Dunnigan himself).

In the early 1970s, several tactical games made their way onto the expanding wargaming market, including Grunt
(1971) featuring platoon-level warfare in Vietnam and Combat Command: Platoon-Company Combat, France, 1944 (1972) billed as a western front sequel to PanzerBlitz, and Soldiers (1972) about World War I, all by Dunnigan/SPI. Dunnigan then crossed another boundary and became the first publisher to release a game on the then-ongoing Cold War, called Red Star/White Star: Tactical Combat in Western Europe in the 1970s. While the game was successful, Dunnigan was disappointed with it, citing difficulties in realistically portraying tactical combat in a tabletop board game.

Dunnigan tried to take tactical games into a new direction in 1973 with KampfPanzer and Desert War, which featured simultaneous movement, expanding on an optional rule for PanzerBlitz. Unfortunately, the quest for greater realism was having a price in complexity and "bookkeeping", or recording of moves on paper. Nonetheless, other tactical games on a man to man level were released with simultaneous movement, with Sniper!
being released by SPI in 1973, Patrol
!: Man to Man Combat in the 20th Century and Tank!: Armored Combat in the 20th Century both in 1974. That same year, Avalon Hill released PanzerLeader: The Game of Tactical Warfare on the Western Front 1944-45.

The problems with true tactical (company/battalion level) games were all too apparent. According to Lorrin Bird, writing in Special Issue #2 of Campaign Magazine:

The major disappointment with the three major Avalon Hill games (Panzer Leader, PanzerBlitz and Arab-Israeli Wars) was the obvious sequential nature of the whole situation. A shoots, A moves. B shoots, B moves. With a little opportunity fire thrown in. In situations like the Battle of Kursk in Panzer Blitz confronting the enemy meant possible extinction. The hardest part to accept was the situation where three German tanks block a pass and cannot be seen by the T-34s on their combat phase. On the Russian move they move up to the Mark IVs and have to stop. The T-34 move might have taken only a two-hex advance (500 metres) and then they idle their engines for the next 5 minutes. On the next German move, the Mark IVs cleverly dart away, in and out of cover and take position again. The T-34s...move a few hexes, stop and idle, awaiting the German movement which frees up the next few hexes for them. Another funny situation is where a Tiger unit sits in the open and a Sherman comes out of nowhere and ends up adjacent to the Germans. With ideal conditions, the Tiger can decimate the Shermans in no time flat without any "defensive" fire by the M-4s at all, and then move off....While Panzer Blitz, Panzer Leader and Arab-Israeli Wars are wonderful games, and demand a high degree of tactical ability to play, victory can be obtained in a manner very often that runs contrary to reason and a player's intelligence...

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