Chapter 21: Beyond Hex and Counter

I prefer simple hex-and-counter games. I have for as long as I have been designing them. I came to wargaming in my mid-twenties through John Tiller’s PC games, not through a childhood spent punching counters out of SPI flats, and by the time I discovered the physical hobby I had already internalized the grammar of hex-based operational gaming through hundreds of hours on a screen. Breaking out a copy of Soldiers or Battle for Germany will always be more enjoyable to me than spending hours learning a new system, no matter how good the new system is. This is stubbornness on my part, and I am comfortable admitting it. The ritual of the hex grid, the CRT, the counter tray, the movement phase, these are the mechanics I adopted and the ones I return to when I sit down to play or design.

But the hobby has moved past me in certain respects, and I have come to respect that movement even if I do not always participate in it. Wargame design is pushing harder toward new frontiers than at any point in its history. Designers like Fred Serval and Mark Herman seem to produce new ideas on a monthly basis. Amabel Holland and Volko Ruhnke have built entire design philosophies that challenge the conventions I learned on. New designers arrive with fresh systems at a rate that was not possible before the internet collapsed the distance between an idea and a prototype. The tools are better. The audience is more open. The space for experimentation has never been wider.

Traditional hex-and-counter wargames will retain their audience. The success of publishers like VUCA Simulations proves this. Their production quality is exceptional, their game designs are sharp, and they demonstrate that the traditional format can be executed at a level that competes with anything on the market. I have never owned one of their games, but I have seen enough of them to know that the craft is beyond well done. The format is not dying. It is being joined by alternatives that expand what a wargame can be without replacing what it already is.

New Formats and Hybrid Designs

Block games, dice games, trick-taking wargames, card-driven games that borrow from euro design, resource management systems layered onto historical simulations. A decade ago I would have been skeptical that any of these could produce a satisfying wargame. I have played enough of them now to know I was wrong. The combination of euro-style mechanical elegance with wargame-style historical grounding has produced games that I would not have thought possible, and designers who are comfortable working in both traditions are producing work that neither tradition could have generated alone.

I do not design in these hybrid spaces often. My instincts pull me back to hex-and-counter, and my design language is rooted in SPI’s grammar. But I respect and accept that there are more ideas to be had in combining systems with wargames than I previously assumed. The designers doing this work are expanding the vocabulary of the hobby, and the games they produce reach players who would never have picked up a traditional hex-and-counter title.

Digital Tools and Prototyping

VASSAL is an essential tool for prototyping in this industry. It allows designers to build functional digital prototypes, test remotely with playtesters across the world, and iterate on designs without printing a single component. Most published wargames have VASSAL modules, and many designers use VASSAL as their primary development environment before physical components exist.

VASSAL has a learning curve, though, and there is room for a determined developer to build something better. Rally the Troops proves it is possible. A cleaner, more intuitive prototyping tool aimed at wargame designers would fill a gap that VASSAL occupies by default rather than by excellence. The functionality is there. The user experience could be improved.

Tabletop Simulator serves a similar function with a different approach. It provides a 3D physics sandbox where you can place components, flip counters, and roll dice in a virtual space that mimics a physical table. For playtesting and remote play, it works fine. It lacks the automation that VASSAL provides (automatic rules enforcement, scripted procedures), but the trade-off is a more tactile experience that some players prefer.

Browser-based prototypes are another option, and one I have explored with my current design. A game built as a web application can be played by anyone with a browser, requires no installation, and can incorporate automation, visual feedback, and data logging that physical prototypes cannot. The development cost is higher, but for a designer comfortable with digital tools or willing to collaborate with a developer, the results can be impressive.

Wargames Beyond Entertainment

As discussed in Chapter 1, wargames have served military training since the Prussian Kriegsspiel of the early nineteenth century. That tradition continues today. The most instructive modern example might be Millennium Challenge 2002, a joint forces exercise run by the United States military to test new operational concepts. Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper commanded the opposing force, playing the role of an unnamed Middle Eastern military commander. Van Riper used unconventional tactics: motorcycle couriers instead of radio communications to avoid electronic surveillance, swarm attacks with small boats against naval vessels, cruise missiles launched from civilian aircraft. In the simulation, his forces sank a carrier battle group and inflicted casualties that would have killed approximately twenty thousand service members in a real engagement. The exercise controllers reset the game, restricted Van Riper’s tactics, and scripted the outcome to ensure the US force succeeded. Van Riper stepped down as commander of the opposing force in protest.

The episode captures wargaming in professional contexts at its best and worst. A wargame can expose assumptions, reveal vulnerabilities, and generate outcomes that the participants did not anticipate. Van Riper’s swarm tactics exposed a genuine vulnerability in naval force protection doctrine. The danger is that the people commissioning the wargame may not want their assumptions exposed, and the institutional pressure to produce a predetermined outcome can override the exercise’s analytical purpose. A wargame that cannot produce an uncomfortable result is not a wargame. It is a briefing with dice.

Beyond military applications, wargames serve educational institutions, corporations, and government agencies as tools for teaching decision-making under constraint. Matrix games are a good example of how wargames can be purpose-built for organizational use. A matrix game requires little more than a scenario, a set of structured arguments, and an umpire to adjudicate results, much like a classic Kriegsspiel. Players propose actions, justify them with arguments, and the umpire assesses the likelihood of success. The format is flexible enough to model anything from a military campaign to a corporate crisis to a diplomatic negotiation.

The critical thinking that wargames develop is context-driven. You are not solving a puzzle with a single correct answer. You are making decisions with incomplete information, managing competing priorities, accepting risk, and living with consequences. The freedom a wargame gives you is the freedom to try anything within the rules of the simulation, but that freedom is also the freedom to fail. You learn from the failure because the simulation shows you why your decisions produced the outcome they did. A lecture cannot produce that feedback loop. A game where your choices had consequences you can trace does it in two hours.

The best way to learn about the future is to study the past, and simulations like wargames serve that purpose for organizations ranging from defense ministries to business schools. The growing interest from defense institutions in commercial wargame design reflects a recognition that hobbyist designers, working with historical data and iterating through playtesting, sometimes produce simulations that are more rigorous and more honest than purpose-built institutional exercises. A game designed to sell to an audience of informed hobbyists cannot afford to produce ahistorical results. A game designed to validate an institutional conclusion can.

Case Study: Veridian Contraption

Most of my published games are hex-and-counter operational simulations. Sedan 1940, 1916, Rostov ‘41. The catalog runs on hexes, CRTs, and movement points. Veridian Contraption is not a tabletop game at all.

It is an autonomous emergent world-simulation that runs inside a terminal. There is no board and there are no counters. The interface is a colored ASCII map on the left and a scrolling narrative log on the right. Settlements register as text blocks, trade routes advance by coordinate, and the log chronicles the world in dense, register-shifting prose. The simulation runs whether I am active or idle. Civilizations rise, fracture, and reorganize while the program sits in the background, and returning to it means reading the consequences of a system that did not pause for the designer.

Underneath the presentation, the operational grammar remains intact. Combat still resolves on a combat results table. Settlements raise levies, cavalry, and artillery. Towns construct walls and defend behind them in sieges. Foreign powers approach from off the map in fixed tiers: rumor, then sighting, then arrival. When they land, they invade, negotiate, or break apart. The mechanics of traditional wargaming run underneath a procedural system rather than across a printed map.

None of this resembles hex-and-counter. There is no board to maneuver on, no cardboard stack, no terrain chart to consult, and, deliberately, no rendered graphics. I chose the terminal because the subject demanded it. The subject is a living world that must be mechanically deep before it is allowed to be visually coherent. Graphics are a resource sink. Every hour spent making a settlement look like a settlement is an hour not spent on the logic that makes the settlement behave. The terminal removes that temptation and forces the entire development budget into the simulation. A prettier Veridian Contraption would have been a mechanically shallower one.

This is the argument of the chapter extended past the hex grid. The format should serve the subject. When the subject is a fight for a river crossing, hexes and a CRT are the correct instruments, and I reach for them without hesitation. When the subject is a single besieged city, I reach for dice pools and resource tracks. When the subject is a whole world that requires systemic depth before visual polish, I reach for a terminal and pour everything into the simulation. The medium is a tool, not a constraint.